The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction (59 page)

Dr Taylor had returned, and nodding over his shoulder to the hearse from Cambridge, he said, “If you’ve finished, I’ll take charge of the body.”

“Yes, go ahead. When will you have your report?”

“By tomorrow morning, I should think. It ought to be fairly straightforward. We have a clear idea of when Mrs Gravely left for market, and when she returned. And the wounds more or less speak for themselves. I don’t expect any surprises.”

Nor did Rutledge. But he said, “Have a care, all the same.”

Taylor said sharply, “I always do.”

Rutledge stepped aside, watching as the men collected Sir John’s body from the study and carried it out the door.

As he walked with them to the hearse, one of them said to him, “I was in the war. I’ll see he’s taken care of.” Rutledge nodded, standing in the cold wind until the hearse had turned and made its way back on to the road into Mumford.

As he swung around to go back inside, he saw Mrs Gravely at an upstairs window, a handkerchief to her mouth, tears running down her cheeks. Behind her stood the rector, a hand on her shoulder for comfort.

Rutledge was glad to shut the door against the wind, and rubbed his palms smartly together as he stood there thinking. Had the killer knocked, he wondered, and waited until Sir John had answered the summons, or had he come in through the unlocked door and made his way to the study?

Hamish said, “He knocked.”

“Why are you so certain?” Rutledge answered the voice in his head. It was always there – had been since July of 1916, when Corporal Hamish MacLeod was executed for refusing to carry out a direct order from a superior officer. The price, Rutledge knew, of MacLeod’s care of his men, shifting the burden of guilt from his own shoulders to Rutledge’s. It had not been easy that day to send weary, sleep-deprived soldiers over the top again and again and again, knowing they would not survive. But orders were orders, and, although numbed to the cost, as the battle of the Somme raged on, Rutledge had done what he could to shield them. It hadn’t been enough, he knew that, and Hamish knew it. And Hamish had broken first, willing to die himself rather than watch more men sacrificed. The machine-gun nest was impregnable, and every soldier in the line was all too aware of it. No amount of persuasion had shifted Hamish MacLeod from his determination not to lead another attack and, in the end, an example had had to be made.

And Rutledge, well aware that the young Scottish corporal would not see home again, had delivered the
coup de grace
to the dying man. But Hamish MacLeod did come back – in Rutledge’s battered mind: an angry and vengeful voice at first, and then with time, a relentless companion who yielded no quarter, sharing the days and nights, and silent only when Rutledge slept, although dreams often brought him awake again, into Hamish’s grip once more.

“Because the man was struck from behind. He wouldna’ have let a stranger get behind him.”

It was a very good point, and Rutledge agreed. A knock, then, and Sir John opened the door to someone he knew. They walked back into the study, and at some point the old dog was put out. Before or after Sir John had been attacked? There was no way of knowing. Yet.

He went into the study and began his search.

He saw the Bible at once, on the shelf just as the rector had told him. Opening it to the parchment pages between the old and new testaments, Rutledge scanned the record of family marriages, then turned the page to look through the listing of deaths.

There was the entry for Middleton’s first marriage and, in darker ink but the same hand years later, his second. Entries also of his wives’ deaths.

Althea Margaret Barnes Middleton, of cholera,
he read, with the date and
Calcutta, India
after it.

And then, in a hand that was shaking with grief,
Elizabeth Alice Mowbray Middleton
,
in childbirth.
Under that,
John Francis Mowbray Middleton, stillborn.

Putting the Bible back where he found it, Rutledge began to go through the desk drawers. Two of them held sheets of foolscap. He realized that Sir John had been writing his memoirs of the Great War. Glancing through the sheaf of pages, he saw that Middleton had just reached the Somme, in 1916. The next chapter was headed,
Bloodbath
. He quickly returned the stack to the drawers, then paused to consider the possibility that Sir John had been killed to stop him from finishing the manuscript. But if that was the case, why leave the pages here, to be found – and possibly completed – by someone else?

Hamish said, “Was it unfinished, or is part missing?”

“I can’t be sure.” He made a mental note to speak to Harris about the manuscript.

The rest of the desk held nothing of interest, and the bookshelves appeared to be just that – shelves of books the dead man had collected over a lifetime, with no apparent secrets among them.

He saw the small box on a reading table next to the bookshelves, and picked it up. It was very old, he thought, and inlaid with what appeared to be ivory and mother of pearl. Opening it, he looked inside. It was lined with worn silk, but otherwise empty.

As he was putting it back in place, a title in gilt lettering on the shelf by the table caught his eye, and he frowned.
A History of The Barnes Family.

That was the maiden name of Sir John’s first wife. He pulled the volume from the shelf and looked at the title page. There was an inscription on the opposite page:
To Althea, with much love, Papa.
The frontispiece was a painting of a house standing at the edge of what appeared to be a lake, Georgian and foursquare, with a terrace overlooking a narrow garden that ran down to a small boat-landing, jutting out into the water. Rutledge turned the book on its side to read the caption.

Trafalgar. Dartmouth, Devon.

He turned to the index, and looked for the name there. There were several references to the house as well as the battle. The house, he discovered on page 75, was built in Dartmouth in 1800, on the site of an earlier dwelling, and rechristened
Trafalgar
after the head of the family had served on HMS
Victory
, Nelson’s flagship on that fateful day. The water in front of the house was Dartmouth Harbour.

Going in search of the rector, Rutledge found him having tea with Mrs Gravely. Harris stood as Rutledge came into the kitchen, saying, “What is it?”

“Just a few more questions,” Rutledge said easily. “What do you know about Althea Middleton?”

“Very little,” Harris admitted. “Only what Sir John told me over the years.”

“Her family is from Dartmouth.”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, I told you she had lived near Torquay. Not surprising. Her father was a Navy man – like his father before him apparently – and probably his father’s father as well, for all I know.” He smiled wryly. “Sir John told me once that her father was appalled that she had fallen in love with an army officer. He had felt that nothing less than a Naval captain would suit.”

“One of her ancestors served aboard
Victory
.”

“Did he indeed! I don’t think Sir John ever mentioned that fact. Just that hers was a naval family and he’d enjoyed more than a few arguments with her father about sea power and the course of the Empire.”

“Sir John also appears to have been writing a history of the Great War.”

“He always said he was tempted to write about his experiences. I didn’t know he’d actually begun. It would have been worth reading, his view of the war.”

Mrs Gravely said, “A history? He liked to work of an evening, after his dinner. I wasn’t to disturb him then, he said. He was a great reader. I never gave it another thought on mornings when I found the study floor littered with his atlases and notes.”

Rutledge turned back to Harris. “Who lives in the Barnes house in Dartmouth now?”

“There’s a house? I had no idea. Let me see, there was something said once, about Althea Middleton having had a brother. But, as I remember, he was disinherited. And Barnes himself died whilst his daughter was in India.”

“Then it must have been his daughter who inherited the property, and it passed to Sir John at her death.” He would ask Sergeant Gibson at the Yard to look into the matter. “His solicitor is the same as mine,” Harris told him, and gave Rutledge directions to the firm in Mumford.

“Would you care for a cup of tea, Mr Rutledge?” Mrs Gravely asked. “I was just about to make a fresh pot.”

“Thank you, no,” he said. “Has anyone come to call on Sir John in the past few weeks?”

“Not since before Christmas,” she answered him. “And then it was a man who’d lost his foot in the war and had been given a wooden one in its place. I heard him come up the walk, because it made an odd sound. A thump it was, and then a lighter sound, as he put his cane down with the good foot. The old dog growled something fierce, and I had to hold on to his collar when I went to the door.”

A cane. The murder weapon hadn’t been found, the likelihood being that the killer had taken it away with him. A cane could have done the damage to Middleton’s head and face, if wielded with enough force.

“Do you remember his name?”

“He didn’t give it, sir. He said, ‘Tell Sir John it’s an old comrade in arms.’ And I did as he asked. Sir John went to see for himself, while I took the old dog into the kitchen with me.”

Was that why the dog had been put outside? Because he knew – and disliked – the killer?

Rutledge thanked her and went back to his search of the house. There was money in a wallet in the bedside table, but it had not been touched. Nor had the gold cuff-links in a box on the tall chest by the bedroom door. What had the killer been after, if not robbery?

Trafalgar? A property in Dartmouth?

The deed.

Rutledge left to find a telephone, and had to drive into Cambridge before he was successful. He put in a call to Sergeant Gibson at the Yard, and gave him a list of what he needed.

“I’m driving to Dartmouth,” he said. “I’ll find a telephone there as soon as I arrive.”

“To Dartmouth?” Gibson repeated doubtfully. “You know your own business best.”

“Let’s hope I do,” Rutledge replied. He left a message with the Cambridge police, and set out to skirt London to the southwest.

It was early on the third day that he arrived in Dartmouth, having spent two nights on the road after running short of petrol near Slough. Colourful houses spilled down the sides of the high ridge that overlooked the town and the water. Most of them were still dark at this hour. Across the harbour was the town of Kingswear, just as dark. He found a hotel on a quiet side street, a narrow building with three floors, its façade black and white half-timbering. The sleepy clerk, yawning prodigiously, gave him a room at the front of the hotel with a view of the harbour. He stood by the window for some time, looking down towards the quay and the dark water, dotted with boats silently riding the current.

The Dart River opened up here to form the harbour, and castles – ruins now – had once guarded the entrance to this safe haven. It was deep enough for ships, and wide enough for a ferry to convey passengers from one side to the other. Just whereabouts the house called Trafalgar was situated, he didn’t know. He hoped the hotel clerk might.

In the event, the man did not. “Before my time, I daresay. You could ask at the bookshop on the next corner,” he suggested later that morning. “Arthur Hillier is the person you want. Oldest man around. If there was a house by that name, he’ll know of it. But I doubt there is. You’ve come on a wild goose chase to my way of thinking.”

Rutledge found the bookstore just past the shoemaker’s shop. It possessed a broad front, the tall windows displaying books on every subject, but mostly about the sea and Dartmouth itself, including works on the wine trade with France and fishing the cod banks. A bell jingled as he opened the door, and an elderly man looked up, brushing a strand of white hair out of still-sharp blue eyes.

“Good morning, sir,” he said cheerfully. “Here to browse, or is there something in particular you’re looking for?”

“Information, if you please,” Rutledge replied. “I’m trying to locate a dwelling that was here some years ago.” He had brought with him the volume on the Barnes family history, and opened it to the frontispiece. “This house, in fact.”

Hillier pulled a pair of eyeglasses from his cardigan pocket and put them on. “Ah. Trafalgar. It isn’t called that any more. For a time it was a home for indigent naval officers and, after that, it was a clinic during the war. Now it’s more or less derelict. Sad really.”

“Do you know anything about the former owners?”

“Well, you do have the Barnes history, don’t you? But I knew the last of the family to live there. Not well, you understand. Fanciful name for the house. It was called that after an ancestor was wounded the same day Lord Nelson was killed. Quite the fashion to commemorate the battle with monuments and the like. Trafalgar Square in London was one of the last to do so; I expect they didn’t know what else to do with that great patch of emptiness. At any rate, the house was River’s End before that – just where the Dart opens into the harbour, you see.” He gestured to the door. “Come with me, and I’ll show you.”

Rutledge followed him out of the shop, towards the harbour. “There’s a boat,” Hillier was saying, “that will convey you to the mouth of the River Dart. Where it broadens into the harbour, you can just see the rooftops of Trafalgar over that stand of trees. They weren’t there in my day, those trees. You could see the gardens then. Quite a sight in the spring, I remember.”

He could see where Hillier was pointing, but the morning sun hadn’t yet reached that part of the harbour, and he had to take the man’s word for it that the house was behind the trees. But then he looked a little farther along. There, just visible over the treetops, was the line of a roof.

“The boatman is just there, at the foot of the water stairs. Jesse is his name. He’ll see you there and back without any trouble.”

“You said you knew the last of the family to live there. What do you remember about him?”