Wings of Fire Read online

  He couldn’t stop the next question. It came out more bluntly than he’d intended. Because, he knew, it disturbed him deeply. “Do you think; Olivia Marlowe could have murdered her half brother, then killed herself?”

  For an instant he thought she was going to faint, her face turned so white, and she took several gasping breaths, as if to steady herself. He reached out to catch her arm, but she shook him off.

  “You—is that what you feel in that room?”

  “No, it’s a policeman’s curiosity exploring the possibilities. After all, you sent for me to do that.”

  Color flooded back into her face, and she swallowed hard. “That was very cruel,” she said, voice low and husky. “I can’t picture, in my wildest fancies, any reason why Olivia would harm Nicholas. Or why he would harm her!”

  And yet the very question had struck a chord in her, one she’d shut out of her mind with all the strength of her will. Until he’d put it into words.

  5

  They walked back to the village together, in a silence that brooded between them like a summer’s storm, building and darkening, but not breaking. The shortcut through the copse was cool and dim after the sunlight.

  Hamish was rattling on about women, about the moodiness this one evoked, about his relief at leaving the house and grounds of Trevelyan Hall. Rutledge ignored him. He was still trying to deal with the concept of Olivia Marlowe as a killer, and damning Cormac FitzHugh for putting it into his head.

  No, it wasn’t Olivia Marlowe that disturbed him. He, Rutledge, knew very little about Olivia Marlowe. It was O. A. Manning he knew, and the poetry had touched his own spirit in the darkness of war. Standing before God, Rutledge would have sworn that O. A. Manning was not a murderer. Could not have been. And yet, Cormac FitzHugh had no reason to lie, no reason to twist the truth, no reason to know that Rutledge the man, not the police officer, had seen something fragile shatter as he spoke.

  As if she’d sensed something of the turmoil in Rutledge’s mind, Rachel touched his arm and stopped. “What is it? What’s bothering you?”

  “I don’t know,” he told her truthfully. “I think I’ve come to Cornwall on a useless errand.” Better London, and boredom, than this!

  “You’ve only been here one day,” she said gravely. “How can you know that? Or did the Yard send you here just to please Henry Ashford, a gesture that was never intended to dig very deeply into these deaths?”

  The old proverb—to let sleeping dogs lie—flitted through his mind. Instead, he said to her, out of nowhere, except that they were taking the shorter path to Borcombe, “Who is the old crone I met in the village this morning? She must be eighty, by the look of her. Stooped. But with extraordinarily clear eyes.” And a perverted sense of humor, if he was any judge.

  Rachel frowned. “Ah. You must mean Sadie. I’m not really sure what her last name is. She’s been here for so long that she’s just—Sadie. The old rector, Mr. Nelson, who’s gone now, said he thought she’d been a nurse in the Crimea, and it turned her mind. But she has a healer’s touch, it might be true enough. Midwife, confessor, horse doctor, comforter, prescriber of herbs. The villagers may go to her more often than to Dr. Hawkins.”

  “Witch?”

  She chuckled, a low husky laugh that was at odds with her personality as he’d come to know it. Sensual, almost, and yet full of an appreciation of the ridiculous. “I suppose she’s been called that too! No, if she’s a witch, it’s a white witch, not a black one. I’ve never heard of spells put on anyone or people dying under her care. Well, they die, yes, but of their ailments.”

  “No love potions?”

  “No, sadly not,” she said, a twist of pain in her voice that came out of nowhere. As if she sensed he’d heard it, she said, smiling, “I went to her once, begging a potion. I was madly in love, and I didn’t know how to handle it. I thought she might give me something to put in his soup or his breakfast porridge—we were too young for goblets of wine, but I grew up on the stories of Tristan and Isolde. I knew—thought I knew—that such potions worked. She was very gentle, but she told me that love couldn’t be bought.”

  He thought she was belittling herself and what had actually happened, but said nothing. It occurred to him to ask her about Anne, but it was not the time. Then she mentioned the name herself.

  “It was Anne who’d read the old Cornish legends to me. Her grandfather Trevelyan—Rosamund’s father—had compiled a collection of them, it was famous in its day, and there’s a letter in the house from Tennyson, telling him how much the book stirred his imagination while he was writing Idylls of the King. I could quote long passages from it by heart. Well, we all could. Nicholas, especially. You’d have thought, watching our theatricals, that he was the poet. He read so beautifully.”

  “Tell me about Anne.”

  “Anne? My goodness, there’s nothing to tell. Anne died when she was eight or nine. She was Olivia’s twin, and they were so much alike, to look at them, that you couldn’t believe it. But oddly enough they were quite different in natures. Anne was the sort of child who’d never met a stranger—she could cajole anyone into doing anything. Except Livia, of course! Stephen reminds—reminded—me of Anne, the same golden charm. Livia was, I don’t know, one of those people who lived in her imagination, and found it rich enough that she didn’t need other stimulation. She was quiet and thoughtful and very much her own woman, even in childhood.”

  “How did Anne die?”

  “She fell out of an apple tree in the old orchard. It isn’t there now, Rosamund had the orchard cut down, but it was beyond the back garden, sheltered by brick walls. We were all playing there, Nicholas and Olivia and Anne and I. And she reached too far for an apple, lost her balance, and came down on a root. I’d never seen a dead person before. I was terrified, out of my wits. I thought she was teasing, playing games with us.”

  “Was Cormac there?”

  Rachel frowned. “I don’t remember. He may have been. It was Nicholas I remember most, kneeling beside Anne, taking her hand, calling to her, crying because she wouldn’t answer him. And Olivia having trouble coming down from the tree. Because of her leg. This was before Nicholas had carved a brace, of course.”

  “Anne fell? No one pushed her?”

  She looked at him, surprised. “No, why should anyone push her? She was up in the tree, picking apples, and then she reached too far. We were all children, we would never have dreamed of such a thing!”

  But children killed. It was something that he’d learned in London, his first year at the Yard.

  They came out of the woods into a lane that joined the main street of the village, where houses clustered together under slate roofs that looked like quicksilver in the sun, lead in the rain. There were gardens behind every gate, crowded with vegetables and flaming with color.

  Rachel stopped, “I go this way—I’m staying with a friend on the outskirts.” She shaded her eyes again with her hand, and said, “You didn’t mean that—about going back to London? You’ll stay and see what you can find? I’ll never persuade Henry to appeal for help again.”

  He laughed. “Probably not.” Remembering the heat in London, the cramped little office, Bowles’ pretensions, and the squalid knifings that had somehow captured the imagination of the city, he found himself saying, “No, I’m not going back yet. I’ll be here for several more days.”

  She left, reassured, and he turned towards The Three Bells. But noticing the shingle on the front of the doctor’s surgery, he opened the garden gate and went through to knock at the door.

  A young woman with pretty strawberry blond hair opened the door and said, “Ah, you’re just in time, if you want to see the doctor. Five more minutes, and he’d have gone through to his luncheon.”

  “Mrs. Hawkins?” he asked, guessing.

  “Yes, and if you’ll just wait here a moment,” she answered, leading him into a small sitting room fitted out with bits and pieces of worn furnishings that had been relegated here from the rest of
the house, “I’ll tell him you’re here. The name, please?”

  Rutledge gave it to her, and she disappeared through the door beside him. A moment later she whisked back into the waiting room. “Dr. Hawkins will see you now.” She held the door wide, ready to shut it behind him.

  Rutledge went through into the tidy, surprisingly bright surgery. “Dr. Hawkins?” he said to the short, thickset man behind the desk. He was not as young as his wife, but not much beyond thirty-five, he thought.

  “Indeed, and what can I do for you this morning?” His eyes raked Rutledge, from crown to toe. Seeing more than Rutledge cared to have him see. “Having trouble sleeping, are you?”

  “No, I’m having no trouble at all, as it happens,” Rutledge said stiffly. “I’m Inspector Rutledge, from Scotland Yard—”

  “Oh, Lord, and what’s happened now!”

  “It isn’t what is happening now that concerns me. I’ve been asked to look into the deaths of three of your patients, Stephen FitzHugh, Olivia Marlowe, and Nicholas Cheney.”

  Hawkins stared at him, then threw his pen on the desk with such force that it bounced and nearly rolled off the edge. “Those deaths are history. Closed. The Inquest agreed with my first impressions and my considered opinion. An accident and a double suicide. Surely you’ve read the medical report?”

  “I have, and it’s very thorough. All the same, there are questions I must ask. And that you are required to answer.”

  “I know damned well what I’m required to do,” Hawkins said irritably. “And I’ve done it.” His eyes narrowed and he looked at Rutledge with sudden suspicion. “You aren’t planning to dig up the bodies, are you? That’s all I need right now!”

  “In what way?”

  “Look, I’ve been a good doctor here. I took over from my wife’s father, who’s nearly gaga now, war finished him, too much to do, too little energy to do it. I’ve built a decent practice, and I’m being considered for a partnership in Plymouth. I learned my craft in the war, doing things I’d never thought in school I’d be expected to do. Sew up the dying, send the living back to the Front, find a way to keep the shell-shock cases from being shot for cowardice—” he saw Rut-ledge flinch, and added with relish “—and even deliver forty-seven babies to refugees who had no place to sleep themselves, much less with infants to nurse! I’ve paid my dues, I’ve earned the right to move on to better things, and if my future partners get wind of the fact that three—three— of my cases are being exhumed, under Scotland Yard’s eager eye, I’ll be dead, stuck here forever. No chance at Plymouth, no hope of London in the end.”

  “The fact that Scotland Yard has an interest in these deaths in no way is a reflection on you—”

  “The hell it isn’t! For God’s sake, man, I filled out the death certificates! It has everything to do with me!”

  “Then you’re convinced that there’s nothing in either of the suicides or in the accident that could warrant further police interest?”

  “That’s exactly what I am! Convinced beyond any shadow of a doubt!”

  “It hasn’t occurred to you that something in the pasts of these three people might change the circumstances enough that what appeared to be suicide was actually murder and suicide? To use an instance I came across recently.”

  Hawkins threw up his hands. “Murder and suicide? You’ve been drinking, I can smell it on your breath. Enough to be having delusions?”

  “No, I’m as sober as you are,” Rutledge said, reining his temper in hard.

  “Not bloody likely, when you suggest such things as you did just now! I walked into that study and found two people on the couch. A man and a woman. Their hands were touching, his left and her right. In the other hand, each held a glass. There had been laudanum in the glasses, and it was on their lips and in their mouths and in their guts. Enough to kill both quickly, and several times over. Miss Marlowe had had poliomyelitis, and contrary to what people tell you, paralysis is not painless. She had been given laudanum by my father-in-law and by me, as needed. Until this spring she’d used it responsibly, no indications of addictions or abuse. But it’s as painless a death as you could wish for, if you have to go out. I can’t blame her for choosing it, and I saw no evidence that either one had forced drinking it on the other. No bruises about the mouth or tongue, none on the lips. Nothing else in their stomachs to arouse suspicion. Double suicide. That’s precisely what it was. No more, no less.”

  “Nothing in their stomachs to suggest that one might have secretly given an overdose to the other, before swallowing his or her own draught?”

  “It’s hard to introduce laudanum secretly into clear soup, spring lamb, roasted, vegetables and potatoes.”

  “People of their sort usually drank wine with meals, and coffee afterward.”

  “The state of digestion tells me that they lived for enough hours after their meal that it couldn’t have been in their wine or their coffee. I’d say they swallowed the laudanum some time after midnight. As if they’d sat up talking about it, and then decided to do it. Or possibly around dawn. They’d been dead for some time when Mrs. Trepol discovered them on Monday morning. Over twenty-four hours. Now my own meal is waiting, and if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and eat it. My advice to you is to return to London and do something useful there. There’s very little crime in a place like Borcombe. We haven’t needed the services of Scotland Yard in living memory, and I doubt if we will in the next twenty years!”

  Rutledge left the doctor’s office, thinking over what he’d been told that morning.

  Damn all, if you came right down to it!

  No crimes, no murderers, no reason for a seasoned Scotland Yard inspector to waste his time here.

  “But just what ye’re good for—nithing,” Hamish declared. “What if Warwickshire was only a bit of luck, and none of your doing? What if you failed there, and haven’t had the sense yet to see it? What if ye’re failing now, because you haven’t got the skills to tell whether there’s murder here or no? That house is haunted, man, and if you don’t find out why, ye’ll be defeated by your own fears!”

  After lunch at The Three Bells, Rutledge felt restless and uncertain. He told himself it had nothing to do with Hamish’s remarks, or the frustration he felt over where to turn next. Cormac FitzHugh had seemed to be so certain of his facts. Rachel Ashford was unsettled by the notion of murder being done, even though she’d called in the Yard herself. Hawkins was not cooperative, and the police in Borcombe had no reason to stir up the pot for murder, when their investigation had ended so creditably.

  He thought about it for several minutes, staring out his window towards the sea, then picked up his coat and went in search of the rectory. It stood four-square beside the church, gray stone with white trim at the windows and doors, but built more for long service than for beauty.

  The rector wasn’t in his office, but the housekeeper sent Rutledge around the back to where he was pottering about in his garden. It was a big garden, green and prosperous, with roses by the house and the scent of wall flowers coming from somewhere, sweet and elusive.

  The rector was middle-aged, a man more accustomed— from the look of him—to working in the ground than preaching from a pulpit. He straightened up when he saw Rutledge coming across the strip of lawn between the vegetables and the flowers. “Good afternoon,” he said, neither effusively nor coolly, but with the manner of a man who’d rather be about his own business just now than God’s.

  “Inspector Rutledge, from London,” he replied. “Mr. Smedley?”

  “Aye, that’s right,” the rector said with a sigh and put down his hoe.

  “No, keep working, if you like. I’d prefer to stay out here and talk than go inside.” The housekeeper, if he was any judge, had long ears. “It isn’t a matter for a priest so much as a question of information that I need.”

  “Well, then, if you don’t mind?” He picked up his hoe and began to chip at the weeds between rows of what appeared to be marigolds and asters next to a line o
f sweet peas.

  “I’m here because London has a few remaining questions about several deaths in May. At Trevelyan Hall.”

  The rector glanced at him with a smile. “So gossip was right this morning. And you’d hardly set foot in the place.”

  “Yes, but the questions I’m about to ask you aren’t for the ears of gossips. Good intentioned or ill. I want to know about the people who died. The woman and the two men. What they were like, how they lived, why they should die, so close together.”

  The rector’s back was to Rutledge now, as he turned to come down the other row. “Ah. Well, that’s a long story. Do you know much about the family?”

  “About the grandfather who owned the Hall. About the daughter who had three husbands and six children, only one of whom is still living. About the cousin. And about the stepson who lives in London and made his fortune. I could have learned all this from the shopkeepers and the housewives on their way to market. I need more. To satisfy London that all’s well.”

  “And why should London doubt that?”

  “The Home Office has been going through reports. They like to be thorough. Three deaths in one family in such a short time raises ... doubts?”

  “None of those here, I can tell you that much! I don’t know of any questions raised when Olivia and Nicholas were discovered, nor any gossip that’s flown about since. And in a village like this, it’s your surest sign that all’s well. As for the death of Stephen FitzHugh, the man fell in an empty house, all the members of his party outside and accounted for. Unless you believe in ghosts, I don’t suppose there’s much to be suspicious of in that.”

  “Strange that you should mention ghosts,” Rutledge said idly. “I’m told the Hall is haunted. And not by anything that can be exorcised by the church.”

  The rector straightened again and looked at him. “Who has told you these tales?”

  “A Scotsman, for one,” Rutledge answered.