A Bitter Truth (25 page)

“That’s an interesting theory.”

At first I thought Simon was being facetious, but when I glanced up at his face, I saw that he was in fact agreeing with me.

“Since we’re confessing, there’s the marble kitten as well.”

I
nspector Rother was expecting us. He said as we walked into the police station, “Thank you for coming so early. I’d like you to tell me again about finding the body of Lieutenant Hughes,” he said. “I know what’s in your statement, but perhaps you’ve forgot a detail.”

I didn’t think I had. But I repeated my account of our search for George, and how I’d come to follow Mrs. Ellis into the church and then down the overgrown path.

He listened, then asked me, “You heard nothing—rooks calling? Birds flying up?—to indicate that someone else was nearby, while you were searching for the Lieutenant?”

“No, the wood around us was quiet. Besides, I touched the Lieutenant’s hand. He had been killed some time before we found his body. Even accounting for the cold morning and the cold water in the stream.”

“You weren’t aware that there’s a shortcut from St. Mary’s Church to Vixen Hill?”

Surprised, I said, “No. I didn’t know that.”

“It isn’t suitable for motorcars, of course. But anyone from Vixen Hill could walk to Wych Gate and back again inside half an hour. Less, on horseback.” He drew a rough map on the sheet of paper in front of him, and I could see that he was right. The house was set to connect with the track from Hartfield, but if one knew the way, from the knot garden there was another, smaller track that cut cross-country. Had George taken it? Had his killer?

“We can turn it another way,” the Inspector went on, holding up his hand, ticking off the points on his fingers.

“Mrs. Roger Ellis is struck by someone, and has already run away once to London—the stationmaster and the woman who gave her a lift there have confirmed this. She returns home with a friend, and shortly afterward, her husband has words with the victim about a child he fathered while in France, and early the next morning, Mrs. Roger Ellis goes into Hartfield to speak to Davis Merrit. Afterward she packs her cases and prepares to leave again. According to the driver of the station carriage, she was very anxious not to miss that train. So much so that she was short with her mother-in-law. And with you. Was she expecting to meet Lieutenant Merrit at the station? After he’d killed George Hughes? Why didn’t she want you to go down that narrow path to the stream? Did she already know that a dead man lay at the end of it?”

“If she had intended to run away with Lieutenant Merrit, why had she asked me to accompany her to London?”

“For the sake of propriety, I should think,” he countered.

“I can’t think why Lydia Ellis would wish to kill George Hughes.”

“In the expectation that her husband would be blamed, and she would be free to remarry.”

“Yes, well, Davis Merrit should have thought of that before he handed Lieutenant Hughes’s watch to that man Willy.”

“I expect our friend Willy was supposed to tell the police that Roger Ellis had given him the watch.”

That was an interesting supposition. It was clear that the police
had
put the last five days to good use, coming up with the ramifications of finding Davis Merrit’s body.

Simon had put two and two together as well. “Are you saying that Merrit killed himself when everything went wrong?”

Distracted, I was thinking of the message in the umbrella.
Meet me . . .

Perhaps I’d been wrong. Perhaps it
had
been a last desperate attempt by the Lieutenant to reach Lydia. Only I found it instead, and then the Inspector was waiting in the churchyard when services ended. And Merrit had to leave quickly.

I nearly shook my head, answering my own question. I hadn’t been wrong. But who had sent it?

Inspector Rother was already replying to Simon. “It’s likely.”

All his conclusions had a ring of truth—but I knew Mrs. Ellis and Lydia and even Davis Merrit better than the Inspector could do. Why would Mrs. Ellis put her own son in jeopardy by killing George Hughes less than twelve hours from the time he’d confronted Roger in the drawing room? Wouldn’t she have been glad of the child, rather than angry? And Lydia was too impulsive to be included in any convoluted plot to make the police believe her husband had killed his friend. Even the little I’d seen and heard about Davis Merrit didn’t match the picture of an obsessed lover who killed himself when his plans went awry. But that left Roger himself, didn’t it?

I was trying to order my thoughts, to make certain that what I was about to say made sense.

“Inspector, I don’t think you’ve brought me here to speculate about the Ellis family’s motives for murder. I think what you really want to know is if you can clear them, and open the inquiry in an entirely different direction. For instance, in the direction of William Pryor—Willy.”

“There’s still Roger Ellis. Who could have killed both men, to rid himself of the erstwhile friend who knew too much about his affair in France and the blind man his wife had been seeing too much of in his absence.”

“But George had already told everyone about the affair. Captain Ellis had no right to be jealous, did he?”

He gave me a sour smile. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

“Was the body of Davis Merrit too decomposed for you to be completely satisfied that he’d killed himself?” Simon asked.

He looked up at Simon. “You have a most inconvenient mind,” he said. “I have a dead man with a spent bullet under his remains, his service revolver in what is left of his hand, but no marks on the skeleton to tell me where the bullet entered, and where it came out. I can find no one who has heard a single gunshot out on the heath. And there is some small indication that the man was throttled, but we can’t be certain of that because foxes and rooks were at the body.”

“And no way of knowing precisely when the Lieutenant died,” I added to the list.

“You and Captain Ellis left the Forest on the same day. Merrit must have been dead by then.”

And Mrs. Ellis was already on her way to the station to meet her returning son.

“So it isn’t Willy you’re looking at, but Roger Ellis,” I said. “You used us.”

He could hear the disgust in my voice, and answered coldly, “I have a murder case to solve, Sister Crawford, and my best suspect is dead. If he killed himself, all well and good, but if he did not, then our murderer has two deaths on his conscience.”

“If he has a conscience,” I replied. “Have you finished with me? Am I allowed to return to France? I’m needed there.”

“You are needed here as well. Would you be willing to return to Vixen Hill?”

“No,” Simon answered for me. “The Colonel would be furious if you put his daughter in harm’s way.”

“Besides which,” I added, “Roger Ellis may not want me there.” In spite of the time we had spent together in that little bistro in Rouen, he wouldn’t want me to tell Lydia he was also searching for Sophie.

“I think,” Inspector Rother said dryly, “the person who would most dislike having you there is the senior Mrs. Ellis.”

“Gran?” I repeated.

“Quite,” he answered. “She has been throwing sand in my eyes since the moment I arrived at Vixen Hill, busily protecting her grandson. And you see far too clearly for her comfort. I have just verified that myself.”

I remembered Lydia’s letter to me in France. Everyone had sent me Christmas wishes—except for Gran.

Chapter Fourteen

I
had no intention of returning to Vixen Hill. I didn’t want to spy for the police. What’s more, on our way back to Hartfield, I had all but promised Simon that I wouldn’t consider it.

But in the afternoon, Lydia Ellis came knocking at my door in The King’s Head, and when I answered, she said, “Mama Ellis was telling the truth. You are here.”

“Did you doubt her?”

“Roger swore you were still in France. That he’d run into you at one of the hospitals.”

That was close enough to the truth for his purposes.

“Yes, not surprisingly.”

I asked her to come in, and she did, looking around at my room with interest. “I’ve been to The King’s Head I don’t know how many times,” she said, “but I’ve never been in one of the rooms. It’s rather nice, isn’t it?”

For the polished wood of the floorboards was set off with a dark blue carpet and paler blue curtains accenting the chintz covering the chairs. Framed prints of hunting scenes hung on walls papered with morning glories. Nothing to compare with Vixen Hill, but quite comfortable.

“As you already know, Roger is back from France too,” she said, walking to the window to look out and then turning to face me. “He’s different, somehow. I don’t know what it is.”

“This time he hasn’t come home to watch his brother die,” I pointed out gently.

“Yes. But I’m wary, I don’t know if it’s a real difference or feigned. Or my wishful thinking.” She was pacing again, back and forth, back and forth.

“Are you asking me whether you should stay here with me for the duration of his leave?”

“Will you come back to Vixen Hill? Margaret has been asked to return as well, and she’s hoping the police will even summon Henry home from France. But they’ve dispensed with Eleanor and her brother. That’s odd, isn’t it?”

“The police have their own way of judging these matters,” I replied, unwilling to go farther.

“I expect they talked to her in Portsmouth, and don’t want us to know what was discussed.” She stopped by the door and touched a picture frame, straightening it. “The police asked me over and over again—even though I’d given them a statement, just as you’d done—about finding George’s body.” She toyed with another frame. “I thought they were convinced after he went missing that Davis Merrit had killed George. That was the conclusion of the inquest, for heaven’s sake. So why are they intending to look at Roger now? Because they are, aren’t they? Do you believe Roger is a murderer, Bess?”

There was fear in her eyes when finally she turned to face me. All I could do was shake my head. “I’m not the right person to ask,” I answered.

“I don’t want him to be guilty,” she said quietly. “I’ve had a lot of time to think after you left. Have you found that little girl?”

“I looked for her,” I countered. “Do you have any idea how many orphans there are in France?”

“I wonder what Roger would say, if he’d come home to find that you’d brought her with you.”

“Lydia, it’s not as simple as that. There are legal issues. She’s a citizen of France, because her mother was. Rules. Even if Roger wanted her, he would have to go through a solicitor, to find out what he was required to do. You and I would have no claim on her.”

“Yes, but I don’t see why that should stop you from looking for her.”

“No, of course not.”

She sighed. “You’d think, wouldn’t you, that everyone would be glad to find that she has a good home.”

“Lydia. You do realize that if George knew what he was saying, that this child is the image of Juliana, will you be comfortable bringing her into your home? Mrs. Ellis will see her dead daughter in yours, and so will Gran. And Roger, of course, if he survives the war.”

“I don’t care who she looks like. I’d be grateful to have her.”

But that was easy to say now. When she hadn’t seen Sophie, as I had.

“What would you say if Roger came home with her?” I asked, curious.

She laughed, but not in amusement. “He never will. You know that. He’s ashamed of what he did, and he won’t want a constant reminder underfoot. He couldn’t have loved her mother very much, could he, or he’d have moved heaven and earth to find her.”

I couldn’t judge whether that was a consolation to Lydia or if she was seeing the relationship between her husband and the French mother of his child as she would like it to be. Not love, but lust. She could live with lust. Or so she thought now.

Yet from what Roger had told me in Rouen, it hadn’t been either love or lust, but loneliness and fear and the knowledge that for this moment, at least, they were both alive. If Roger had spoken the truth, it was never an affair.

“You’ll keep trying all the same?”

“I’ll keep trying.” I’d seen Sophie. I knew I had to.

She nodded and turned from the fire. “I have Davis’s cat. I couldn’t bear to see it put out, and of course it couldn’t stay in the cottage. He had nowhere to go, did he? Merrit? And so he couldn’t have taken his cat.”

“What did Roger have to say about that?”

She smiled sadly. “He doesn’t know. I’ve put Bluebell in the room above the hall, and she seems quite happy there. No one goes to that room, except for me. I’m not haunted by Juliana, like the others.”

And yet she had been, by her own account, when she fled to London that first time.

“Will you come back with me?” she asked. “Please?”

“I don’t know that it’s wise, Lydia.”

“Please?”

“How did you get to Hartfield? On your bicycle?”

“I learned to drive,” she told me. “I never want to feel dependent on someone else again.”

“That was clever of you,” I told her sincerely. “Lydia, let me think about it. I don’t know just what I should do.”

“I’ll bring Mrs. Ellis back with me. To help convince you.”

And with that she was gone.

I sat there by the window, watching the street below.

I’d all but promised Simon. But if I were at Vixen Hill, I could better judge the situation there. And what to do about Sophie.

Would she be better off with the nuns after all? What would it do to a child to be brought up not as herself but as the child everyone had so tragically lost?

A
fter a while, I went to find Simon. He’d been out, he said, when I ran him to earth in the telephone closet.

“Have you learned anything about”—I remembered how public this telephone room was—“about our friends?”

“No news yet.”

He came out of the shallow closet and considered me.

“You look distinctly guilty.”

I laughed and pulled him around the corner to the small parlor. When we were out of hearing of the rest of the world, I said, “Lydia came to see me. She wants me to come back to Vixen Hill.”

“And you told her . . . ?”

“That I didn’t think it was wise. She is bringing Mrs. Ellis back to Hartfield, to tell me that I’m welcomed there.”

“And now you’re having second thoughts?”

I bit my lip, trying to think how to put my reasoning into words. But of course I knew that it would have been easier if my reasoning had been sound.

Simon waited patiently. Finally I said, “It’s the little girl. Sophie. I don’t quite know what should be done about her. If her father is taken up for murder, Lydia may marry again. Would she want Sophie then? And if Sophie is left with Mrs. Ellis and Gran, will she live out her life in Juliana’s shadow?” I shrugged. “That’s very muddled.”

“In the first place,” he answered, “the child isn’t your worry. If you let her into your heart, Bess, you’ll never have any peace.”

“But you haven’t seen her,” I told him. “And I have.”

“Which makes it all the harder. I know.” He sighed. “Kittens and puppies. And now someone else’s child. What are we to do with you?”

“At least I didn’t insist on rescuing Bluebell,” I retorted. Then I realized he didn’t know who Bluebell was. “Davis Merrit’s cat.”

He laughed in spite of himself, touching my face with his hand, then he said, serious once more, “Yes, all right. But there’s another problem. I just spoke to the Colonel. I’m needed in London straightaway. It will only be for twenty-four hours. At the most a day and a half. I can’t take you with me, Rother won’t allow it, I’m sure, and yet he’s in Wych Gate, not Hartfield. Much as I dislike saying it, you might be safer in Vixen Hill than staying here in the hotel alone. What’s more, I need the motorcar. If Rother wants to speak to you, he’ll have to come to you. I wish you had that little pistol I’d given you once before.”

“I couldn’t take it to France with me,” I reminded him.

Actually, I didn’t know whether I was pleased or not to be going to Vixen Hill. And I disliked losing Simon. Still, if my father had summoned him, even in these circumstances, it must be very important indeed.

“Yes, all right. I’ll go.”

His hand dropped to my shoulder. “Be careful, Bess. Promise me you’ll take every care.”

“I shall.”

With that he was gone, and I stood there in the parlor where I had waited once before with Lydia and listened for Simon’s footsteps as he returned with his valise and then strode out the door.

I
was in my room, still undecided about whether to pack or not, when there was a knock at the door. Expecting Lydia, I opened it, saying, “I’ve decided—”

But it was one of the hotel maids. She bobbed her head, then said, “There’s someone to see you in Reception, Miss. Could you please come down?”

Which sounded very much like Inspector Rother, commanding my presence.

“Yes, all right. Thank you.”

After she had gone, I stood there in my room and counted slowly to one hundred. It wouldn’t do to appear to be anxious.

But when I came down to Reception, there was no sign of Inspector Rother, and when I asked at the desk for my visitor, the woman smiled and said, “I believe he just stepped outside.”

I went to the door and opened it. To my surprise, Roger Ellis was standing there, not Inspector Rother, and even from the back I could tell that he was not in the best of moods. His shoulders were stiff with annoyance.

“Captain?” I said.

He turned. “We can’t talk here. The parlor.”

And so I found myself back in the small parlor facing an angry man.

I thought it was my fault that he was angry. For keeping him waiting, even for making it necessary for him to drive in to Hartfield to beg me to come to Vixen Hill—or perhaps even to tell me not to darken his door.

But I was wrong on all counts.

Shutting the door behind him, Roger Ellis said, “The police, damn them, are talking to my mother again. I thought this business had been settled, that it was Merrit who’d killed George and taken his watch to prove it.”

“I’d thought the same thing—” I began.

But he cut across my words, adding, “It would explain why they sent for you. You were there with her when George was found.”

“I’m not sure why Inspector Rother wished to speak to me. But yes, he asked me to go over the same ground.”

“If Merrit is dead, the case would be wide open again.”

“I suspect you’re right,” I said. “I don’t know whether or not I should tell you this, but Dr. Tilton and his wife informed the police about the exchange between you and George on that last evening. He’ll be wanting to speak to you next.”

Roger swore under his breath. “I sent you upstairs with George and the doctor to prevent just this sort of thing.”

“I’ve told you, George wouldn’t talk to him. It was what was said in the drawing room before he went up that Dr. Tilton and his wife reported to the police. It probably didn’t seem relevant to the police when Davis Merrit was under suspicion, but now—it must loom large.”

“And that will be all over Ashdown before very long. I told my mother we shouldn’t invite George. But he knew Alan, there was really no choice in the matter.”

“You don’t think the police suspect your mother?” I asked, putting it all together. “That makes no sense whatsoever.” Unless it was an effort to make her son confess.

“No, it doesn’t. But who knows which way the wind will blow before this is finished.” He hesitated. “Did you tell Lydia about Rouen? I need to know.”

“I didn’t think it was my place.”

“Thank you. I’d just as soon she didn’t know. Are you coming with me to Vixen Hill?”

“I—didn’t know how you would feel about that.”

“As long as you don’t tell her about the child, or what I said to you that night in France, there should be no problem.”

“Very well then. I haven’t begun my packing. Give me ten minutes, if you will?”

“There’s someone I want to talk to. I’ll be back. My motorcar is just outside.”

I had finished packing and went to the window to see if Captain Ellis had returned. Instead I saw him speaking to someone outside the greengrocer’s shop. And the other man was Willy. They were in earnest conversation as far as I could tell, and just then Willy broke it off and walked away.