Charles Todd - A Duty to the Dead

Simon turned to look at me. “Are you in love with this innocent man?”

I laughed. “Hardly.” The laugh faded. “But I see the injustice here, and I’m helpless to change it. And what about the dead girl? What does she deserve? Even her family abandoned her, in a way. She wasn’t the victim, she was the problem, to be swept under the carpet as quickly as possible.”

“You were ever taking pity on the halt and the lame and the lost.”

“I know. I’ve seen so much death, Simon. I’m glad I took up nursing-I’ve been able to do something about the war by saving the lives of wounded men-but there are things I’ll remember until I die, and memories that come in the dark, when I’m trying to sleep.”

He got out to crank the motor. “You should have been a son, Bess Crawford. It would have made life much easier for the rest of us.”

“No, it wouldn’t have done any such thing. You’d have been following me into battle to keep me safe.”

I TOLDP EREGRINEthat shifting Lady Parsons’s belief in her own judgment was going to be an uphill struggle. “And one I don’t think we’re likely to win.”

He got up and began to pace. “I don’t even know what I believe. Logic tells me I could have done it. Honesty says I probably killed her. The problem comes back to what I remember. And memories are difficult to refute.”

“That’s probably because you were drugged to keep you out of the way and manageable while in London. And it turned out to be a godsend, that you were acquiescent to whatever was asked of you.”

Stopping at the window, he lifted the edge of the white lace curtains that my flatmates and I had hung there, idly glancing out. And then his interest sharpened, and he stood there, watching something or someone in the street below.

After a moment, he said, “Come here, will you?”

I went to stand beside him, reaching to pull the curtain wider so that I could see the street. But he caught my hand, pulled me in front of him, and said, “No. Through this crack. Don’t disturb the curtain!”

I could feel him behind me, tense as a steel rod, and the hand on my shoulder was gripping it hard.

“I don’t see anything,” I said uneasily. “The street. The houses opposite, the carriages and motorcars and people-”

“There. At the house across the way. There’s a man loitering there. See, the one with the cane.”

The house he spoke of was closed up. The children had been taken to the country for safety from the zeppelin raids, staying with their grandparents for the duration of the war. Mrs. Venton was nursing burn victims at her sister’s country house near Winchester. Her husband was serving in the Navy, the gunnery officer on a cruiser.

I looked again at the man. He was moderately well dressed, but the cane he was carrying caught my eye. “That’s not a cane,” I said, intrigued. “Well, it is, if you like, but I recognize it. My grandfather had one-it’s a sword stick. A twist of the handle, and the blade slides out.”

“Your father has set someone to watch over you. What have you told him?”

“Nothing-truly, I haven’t betrayed you. I wouldn’t. Besides, the general view is that you must be dead.”

Just at that moment, Mrs. Hennessey came out of our house and crossed the street, her market basket on her arm. The man stepped out of the shelter of the Venton porch and tipped his hat to her.

I could see then that he was older than he looked, his head bald save for a ring of graying hair like a laurel wreath worn rather long. He looked more like a hopeful poet than he did a menace. And perhaps that was by design.

Mrs. Hennessey listened to him for a moment, then shook her head. He asked other questions, and she again told him no. After that he let her go, walked in the other direction from the one she took-and just as he was about to pass out of sight, he turned and came back again to the porch across from us.

I moved away from Peregrine and the window. “I’ll collect my coat and walk out. See what he does. Whether he follows me or stays where he is. We need buns for our tea, and the bakery is just in the next street. You’ve been there.”

“What if he stops you, as he stopped Mrs. Hennessey?”

I smiled as I pulled on my gloves and reached for the market basket we kept in the flat. “I’m forewarned, aren’t I?”

Peregrine was uneasy with my going. “I still don’t like this idea.”

“No, I want you to see that I had no part of this watcher, and that we’re both beginning to imagine things.”

Before he could argue, I was out the door and down the stairs.

This house had four floors, three of them let to people like my flatmates and me-in need of a base in London but seldom there to enjoy it.

I went down the stairs and out the door without looking in the direction of the watcher-if that is what he was. Instead, I walked briskly to the corner of our street, turning toward the small shops huddled together on the main road.

When I got to the corner, I risked a glance behind me, and to my surprise, no one was following me-and the watcher had vanished.

“Tsk. I’ve come out into the cold for nothing,” I said to myself. But I had come this far, and I went to the bakery to see what was available. We were all doing without the niceties by this time, and it depended entirely on what the baker had been able to find in the way of sugar and flour and eggs as to what was for sale. He put all his resources into bread, which everyone needed, and what was left over went into the tea cakes and buns and an occasional surprise, like the Sally Lunns on sale last week.

We weren’t as fortunate today. I bought bread and looked at the pathetically thin arrangement of sweets on trays that now dwarfed the selections and that used to be filled to overflowing with good things. There was a little white gingerbread left, and I bought two cakes of that for our tea.

Mr. Johnson, serving me, said, “You aren’t at the Front yet, Miss Crawford, nursing our lads? They must be heartsick without your sunny presence.”

He was a string bean of a man with thick white hair, black brows, and a pleasant disposition. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him in a foul mood.

“Alas, they must wait another week, Mr. Johnson. I’ve no word yet on where I’ll be sent.”

“If you see my grandson, God forbid he should be hurt, but if you do, tell him I send him my love.”

It was his greatest fear, that his grandson would die in the war. A fear that too many people shared.

“I promise,” I told him as he handed me my tidy little square of cakes. And then someone else was holding his attention, and I went out the door.

The man, when I approached the flat, was walking back up the street, toward me. But he stopped to watch a small boy trying to make a toy horse set on wheels crest the uneven cobbles of the street. I went on to our flat and opened the door.

Peregrine was standing there, his face a thundercloud.

“He came into the house,” Peregrine said before I’d even crossed the threshold. “I watched him cross the street, heard him climb the stairs, and he went to each door, listening and then trying the latch. I’d locked your door. But I could hear him fumbling with it.”

“Then he wasn’t sent by my father. My father knows which flat I occupy. He must be looking for someone else.”

“You saw Jonathan in Tonbridge. You saw Timothy in Owlhurst. You called on Lady Parsons, the rector, and the doctor. Someone set a watch on you.”

“No, I was circumspect. Except with the rector and Lady Parsons. I don’t see either of them running to Mrs. Graham, telling tales. I gave your brothers-and Dr. Philips-the impression that I was still concerned about Ted Booker’s unhappy death.”