Charles Todd - Proof of Guilt

Rutledge was interested to see that their first efforts had brought up an old Army greatcoat. He squatted beside it, looking at the sleeve. It would have been easy for anyone seeing it to think a man had fallen in. Had Rawlings tossed the coat in for verisimilitude? Something to catch Rutledge’s eye when he arrived and make him believe that the summons had been real? After all, as Chambliss had said, no one had expected the storm’s fury, and Rawlings had had to find some way to draw his attention away from the figure lurking in the shadows, waiting for him.

Such careful planning was, Rutledge thought, more a hallmark of Diaz’s plotting than of Rawlings’s methods. And rather diabolical.

One of the constables shouted, and Rutledge turned to see the pale, dripping body coming up over the lip of the wall, heavy with water. One arm flopped, almost in a macabre greeting, and the men fell back.

But once laid out on the ground, the body was small and very dead, the face and hands scraped from their battering against the grating of the fish pass.

“Sure of your identification?” Chambliss asked, coming up to stand beside Rutledge.

“Yes. Robert Rawlings. Late of Surrey, the household of a man called Bennett and his wife. She collects men just out of prison. They serve as her staff.”

“Foolish business, that. You owe me, Rutledge. But from the look of you, you’ve already paid. Get that lump on your forehead seen to.”

“I will,” he replied. He hadn’t known it was there or even that it had happened until he’d taken a room at a hotel close by the police station, and realized why he had had to show his identification to the clerk before he was allowed to sign the register. His clothing damp, wrinkled, filthy, blood in his hair, he looked like anything but a representative of the Yard. “Can you see to the body? I want to go directly to the Bennett house before news of Rawlings’s death reaches them.”

Chambliss considered him. “If you’ll give me what I need to write my own report.”

“Done,” Rutledge answered.

He looked down at Rawlings’s body.

What role did you play last night? he silently asked the dead man. A surrogate for Diaz? You fought too hard, you went too far. What had I done to you to make you stand there waiting in that storm for me to come? It wasn’t for him that you wanted my blood. Why?

Hamish said, “He was tricked. As ye were tricked.”

Rutledge thanked Chambliss and his men, then walked away up through the trees to where his motorcar was waiting on the main road.

Half an hour later, he was well on his way to Surrey.

Chapter Twenty-four

Rutledge stopped briefly at a country hotel on the border with Sussex for lunch. He’d missed his dinner the night before, was up before breakfast this morning, and was very likely to miss his dinner again. He had made some effort before joining Chambliss at the lock to remedy his appearance, paying the desk clerk’s wife to press his coat and trousers. He was still well below the standards of a hotel. He smiled wryly when the waiter led him to the corner table nearest the service door to the kitchen.

On his way to the dining room, he’d discovered that the hotel possessed a telephone.

He put in a call to London while waiting for his meal to be brought to the table, and he caught Sergeant Gibson just coming on duty after a long night hunting for a murderer in Islington.

“I’ve run into a small problem concerning the drowning in Kent,” Rutledge told him. “There’s a link to Surrey, and I’m on my way there now.”

“I’ll pass along the word, sir. Meanwhile, there’s a message for you. Marked urgent. It’s from Mr. Belford. Came in last evening, late. If you remember, he lives on the street where the first body in the Gooding inquiry was found.”

Rutledge thanked him and put up the receiver. Still standing there in the small telephone closet, he considered going to London first to see what Belford had to say, but there was the time factor. The later he reached the Bennett household, the less likely he was to be there before news of Rawlings’s death preceded him.

Belford would have to wait. And it was possible that his information was already outdated.

Rutledge set out for Surrey as soon as he’d finished his meal. A watery sun was shining when he reached the village just before the Bennett house, but clouds had moved in before he turned in to the long drive through the park.

There was no immediate answer to his knock, and then one of the staff came to the door.

“Mrs. Bennett is resting,” Rutledge was told. “I doubt she’ll be receiving visitors before tomorrow.”

“It’s urgent.”

But he was adamant that Mrs. Bennett couldn’t be disturbed.

Rutledge left his motorcar halfway down the drive, out of sight of the house, and went in search of Afonso Diaz.

It was possible, just, that Diaz had gone to Kent with Rawlings, to keep him to his purpose. But Rutledge wasn’t convinced of that.

“Ye canna’ count on the men who work here to tell a policeman the truth about the ithers. It’s like the Army, they’ll no’ talk to an officer.”

That was very true. A brotherhood, and he was the outsider.

He went first to the place where the fire had been burning.

Diaz wasn’t there. Rutledge began a systematic search of his usual haunts: the gardens, the orchard, and finally the barn. They were all empty.

A time or two he suspected he was being watched from the house. The men there knew who he was, possibly even knew why he was there, but there was no way he could avoid being seeing from upper windows. Still, no one came out to challenge him.

Rutledge had left the park until last. Under the canopy of the trees, where sunlight dappled the ground, a now-aging collection of rhododendrons and azaleas had been planted. Exotic and very popular, their spring blooms gave an airy beauty to a woodland, and Jean had always admired that.

Walking quietly through them now, he kept watch for Diaz, remembering too well that pruning knife. It had a long reach, it could strike him before he saw it coming. But as he swept the area, moving steadily back toward where he’d left the motorcar, Rutledge had the strongest feeling that he was alone in this part of the park.

That changed suddenly, and he stopped walking to listen. The wood was silent. There wasn’t so much as the patter of rain on the leaves overhead. The mist was too light. And then he glimpsed the dark red of a man’s coat some forty feet away, and he knew he’d found his quarry.

The question was, had Diaz found him first?

Rutledge walked on, cutting the distance between them in half, then stopped.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he called.

The red coat took on the shape of a man as Diaz stepped out from behind a shrub.

“You seem to have nothing better to do than to haunt me,” he said levelly. “There’s a story, you know, about the voices of dead shepherds coming from the cliffs above the sea. In Madeira. You can hear them at night. I have done this. My father took me there as a boy. It’s a very high cliff, the highest on this side of the Atlantic, and seabirds nest there at night. It’s their voices that sound like the shepherds. I was quite frightened. Are you a dead shepherd?”

It was a long speech for Diaz.

“I might have been, at the Allington Lock. I’ve come to report to Mrs. Bennett that Bob Rawlings is dead. In my place.”

If this was news, Diaz showed no sign of it.

“A pity. He was very good on the two-man saw. Mrs. Bennett will be upset.”

“Why did he try to lure me there?”

“Who knows? I was not in his confidence. But his brother is missing. He has been for some time. I expect Bob heard me thinking aloud one evening. Wondering if you were the one who had consigned the body to a pauper’s grave.”