Rules of Murder (29 page)

There, just before the road turned toward Farthering St. John, was Rushford’s black sedan. Rushford himself was standing beside it, looking anxious as Min bent over the motor, evidently making some sort of repair.

“Leave this to me,” Drew said, and slipping his hand around the pistol in his pocket, he got out of the car. Madeline and Nick were right behind him.

M
iss Parker! Drew, my boy!” Rushford called. “What luck to see you here! It seems we’ve broken down and my fool of a driver hasn’t a clue what the matter is.”

Min did not look up from his work.

“Pity,” Drew said coolly. “Perhaps you’d better come back up to the house with us.”

“Oh, no, no,” Rushford told him. “I couldn’t possibly. My ship will sail without me if I don’t get along.”

Drew nodded. “Then perhaps you’d rather go to the police station. It’s on your way.”

“The police station?” Rushford laughed. “I don’t know what sort of prank you young people are up to now, but I haven’t time for it. I’ve got to move along or I’ll miss my ship. Look, I’ll show you my tickets.”

He reached for the coat that was laid across the back seat and patted it down, rummaging for something. Drew tightened his grip on the gun he held, certain it wasn’t sailing tickets Rushford was after.

“Are you looking for this, Mr. Rushford?”

Drew and Rushford both turned at the voice, the distinctly American voice Drew had heard on the telephone.

Rushford’s face went ghost white. “Min . . .”

The chauffeur held the obvious object of Rushford’s search: a little Remington derringer. And he held it pointed at Rushford.

“Min, you . . .” The old man wiped the sudden perspiration from his forehead. “You sound—”

“American?” Min asked with a wry smile. “I was born in Peking, but raised in Edmonton and then in Los Angeles. I went to college there. I didn’t think it would occur to you that I might sound like anything but a China boy fresh off the boat. After my father was convicted, my mother sent me to live with her sister’s family in Los Angeles. She wanted me to study, to be an American and know the language and not end up like my father.” He looked at Rushford. “At the mercy of those who could speak well.”

“I spoke for him,” the old man protested. “Look at the court records. He would have hanged otherwise.”

“And you would have let him if it had fit in with your plan. As it was, you needed to look concerned and, more than that, above suspicion.” Min made an exaggerated bow. “Kind benefactor no hang poor Chinee.”

“But you . . .” Rushford gulped, his frightened eyes darting from Min to the gun and then back again. “You wouldn’t really—”

Min clicked back the hammer.

“Steady on,” Drew said.

“You may have forgotten my father,” Min said, not looking away from his target, and suddenly his voice, his whole demeanor, changed. “Poor, worthless father that honorable Mr. Rushford save from gallows? And sad little Lan Jing, with her seventeen bones broken and her windpipe crushed?” His eyes
obsidian hard, he dropped the persona as quickly as he had put it on. “Let’s just say this is for them.”

“Min,” Drew warned.

“Oh, don’t worry. I won’t kill him. I just want to make sure he gets what’s coming to him. Sounds like it’s going to be a lot more than even I expected.”

Rushford sagged back against the car. “I don’t . . . I don’t know what all this is about. Certainly I keep that little gun for protection, but I was only going to show you my tickets. My word—”

“Where’s Clarke?” Drew snapped.

“Clarke? Clarke’s dead.”

“I talked to Mrs. Chapman. He wasn’t as of last night.”

“What do you mean? Clarke’s alive?”

“Looks like.”

Rushford’s mouth gradually closed. “Then it was Lincoln in the greenhouse, after all. And Parker and Clarke were behind everything from the beginning. Oh, my word.”

“I think you’d best come along,” Drew said, watching every nuance of the old man’s face. He looked so bewildered, so mild and guileless, that this was all hard to imagine yet.

“Whatever for?” Rushford asked. “I can’t help the police. I don’t know where Clarke is.”

“Perhaps not now, but you did.”

“Drew, my boy, you can’t possibly mean to think I’m somehow involved.”

“If it was Lincoln in the greenhouse, how did you manage to be the only one to see him afterward?”

“Where’s Clarke?” Nick demanded.

Rushford gaped again, his eyes watery, his lips trembling, and then his face changed. Looking as if he were fighting a laugh, he snatched the kit bag from the back seat of the car and tossed it into Nick’s arms.

Nick snorted. “Well, he’s not in there.”

“There have been stranger things.”

Rushford was almost chuckling now, and Drew didn’t much care for that. He kept his eyes on the old man.

“Open it, Nick,” Drew said.

Nick clicked open the latch and then held the bag at arm’s length, his face screwed up in disgust. “Ugh.”

“Open it,” Drew repeated.

Nick set the bag on the boot of the car and rummaged inside. “Something in oilcloth looks like. Something nasty.” He pulled back one layer of the covering and then another. Then he shoved it back onto the back seat, his face bloodless.

“What?” Madeline asked, trying to see over his shoulder.

Drew still didn’t look away from the old man. “What is it, Nick?”

“Clarke.” Nick swallowed audibly. “It’s Clarke.”

With a little smirk, Rushford winked at him. “You’ll find the rest of him in the pond behind your wood. Do apologize for me to your Mr. Peterson about his millstone. I didn’t want Clarke popping up before I was well on my way. Even with his hair dyed and his mustache gone, he would have been too easily recognized and my little charade would have been up. If things had gone as planned, I’d have had that bag into the sea the moment we reached deep water and my secret would have been safe.” Hearing the jingling bell of a police car, he glanced up the road toward Winchester. “Ah, that will be Chief Inspector Birdsong.”

“Well, Detective Farthering, your Mr. Dennison tells me you’ve found our murderer at last.” Birdsong peered at Rushford, still being covered by the gun in Min’s hand, and then at Min himself. “I’ll take that. We’ll see to him from here.”

Min handed him the gun. “Whatever you say.”

The chief inspector looked briefly startled by Min’s American accent. Turning to Drew, he asked, “You’re sure of your facts this time?”

Drew nodded toward the back seat of the car. “I think you’ll find all the evidence you need in that bag there. It’s Rushford’s.”

Madeline turned her face away, and Nick walked a few paces down the road, but Rushford merely looked on, smiling slightly, his eyes mild, as Birdsong and his sergeant looked into the bag. Afterward, the sergeant, white-faced, took the bag into custody and put it in the police car.

Birdsong peered at Mr. Rushford. “I take it this is your doing.”

“Oh, I don’t deny it, Inspector. I don’t deny it. May I smoke?”

Birdsong’s expression turned guarded. “Search the gentleman, Sergeant.”

“I assure you, I have nothing.” Rushford held his arms out from his sides as the sergeant patted down his pockets. “Min took my little popgun there. I haven’t anything else.”

“Nothing here, sir,” the sergeant said, stepping back from the man.

Rushford took out his cigarette case. “May I?”

Birdsong nodded. “Go ahead.”

“I suppose you’ll want details,” Rushford said as he lit up. “It was quite simple really. Lincoln and Clarke were both greedy and small-minded. It didn’t take much to get them to join me, separately of course. Just a promise of easy money and no chance of being caught.” He laughed. “I told them both the same plan. We were to make it look as if Lincoln had been killed and then make it known he’d embezzled everything from Farlinford. If he were dead, he couldn’t rightly be prosecuted, and he’d never be pursued. And with him being so obviously guilty, no one else would be pursued, either. Naturally, he had to be the one to
recommend Clarke for Parker’s new secretary once I had given old Vickers enough for an early and very quiet retirement.”

“You’re saying Vickers had a part in this, too?” Drew said.

“Oh, no. I merely told him Parker needed a younger man for the job, but was too kindhearted to force him into retirement. Vickers agreed to take the money and pretend it was all his own idea. That was for the rest of the plan.”

“And you persuaded Lincoln to be accomplice to his own murder,” Birdsong said. “Clever.”

“That was rather good, wasn’t it?” Rushford said. “But the best part was when I told him I would arrange for Clarke to go out to the greenhouse to be killed so there’d be a body we could claim as Lincoln’s. I said the gun would be waiting out there for him. And it’s funny, because it really was. Poor fellow, he hardly had a chance. He didn’t know I’d sent Clarke out there a quarter of an hour earlier to kill
him.
”

“How did he get the gun?” Birdsong asked.

“Oh, that was no problem. Lincoln took the key from Parker’s key ring the day before. Weaseled it in and out of his pocket, neat as you please, and Parker none the wiser. Lincoln always was a seamy little toad, hardly a step removed from any county-fair charlatan. I knew a bit of light-fingered work would come naturally to him. It was nothing for him to creep down to get the gun from the shed in the middle of the night after everyone at the house was in bed or too drunk to know what was happening. He hid it in the greenhouse just as I told him. Rather neat, I’d say.”

“And the ring?” Drew said.

“I told Clarke to take it from him before he was killed and then replace it afterwards to make it look as if Lincoln had staged his own death. Nice little touch, I thought, though it took the lot of you long enough to catch on to it.” He looked at the faces surrounding him as if he expected to be congratulated.

“Why did you kill Constance?” Drew asked, his eyes hard.

“Stupid Clarke. She wasn’t part of the plan at all, but she went running after Lincoln that night. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was to pay him the last of his blackmail and tell him there’d be no more. Anyway, she’d seen Lincoln going outside and meant to find him when she saw Clarke creeping in the back way. She didn’t know Lincoln was already dead. I suppose you and the lovely Miss Parker were still in the greenhouse then. Clarke said she’d mistaken him for Lincoln and, seeing he wasn’t, went back upstairs. Clarke knew she’d remember seeing him, and knew she’d remember it was after the fireworks. If she told the police later on, it would spoil the rest of the plan, you see? He said he went through the window into her room, meaning to strangle her or something, the fool didn’t know what, and he found her fast asleep. With all that Veronol in her, it was easy to just put a pillow over her face until she was gone. Barely a struggle, he said, and not a mark on her. That silly girl listening to the wireless in the other room never heard a thing.”

Drew felt Madeline’s hand slip into his, and it took him a moment to realize he hadn’t exhaled the whole time Rushford was speaking. He finally let the tightness in his lungs relax, and the air seeped soundlessly out of him. “And you killed Mason because he’d figured you out.”

Rushford sighed and took a drag on his cigarette. “I didn’t plan on that one, young man. I expected the police to blame him for anything they couldn’t properly put on Lincoln, of course, but he was always such a nice chap, I hated to see him killed.”

Tears filled Madeline’s eyes, and Drew pulled her closer to him.

“So you were the one who killed him, after all.”

“No, Drew, my boy. It was Clarke. He was searching the study when Mason asked me to come talk to him.”

“Searching? For what?”

Rushford smiled. “Parker had figured it out, as you say, and doubtless he would have had to be killed after that. A quiet suicide would have been most convincing. I could have arranged that. I didn’t like the stabbing. It was far too messy. Clarke was a fool.” Rushford chuckled to himself. “Of course, if he hadn’t been, I couldn’t so easily have gotten him to fall in with my plans, could I?”

Birdsong crossed his arms over his chest. “So it was always you. How many is it now? Five?”

“Six, actually, if you count the Chinese girl.”

Min muttered something under his breath. Not in English.

“Min’s cousin,” Drew said. “Yes, that must have been you, as well.”

“She was a pretty little thing. She’d come up to bring Min’s father his dinner from time to time, and I’d see her sometimes in the hallway. And all the while she taunted me with that delicate little body and those bewitching eyes modestly lowered, acting as if she didn’t know what she was doing. It’s been a long time, but I still remember.” He held out his hands, studying them. “She broke like fine porcelain. I suppose I half expected it.”

Min turned and stalked away, obviously needing to put some distance between himself and Rushford.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Madeline whispered, and Drew tightened his arm around her.

Birdsong cleared his throat. There wasn’t the slightest trace of emotion on his face. “Edwin Morris Rushford, I arrest you on the charges of embezzlement and theft, and for the murders of Arthur McCutcheon, David Lincoln, Constance Parker, Mason Parker, and Merton Clarke.”

Min quickly returned and gave the chief inspector a hard look.

Birdsong shook his head. “I can’t do anything about your
cousin, I’m afraid, Mr. Min. That will have to be dealt with by the police in Edmonton. It’s little consolation, I’m sure, and I’m sorry but they can’t hang a man more than once.”