A Lonely Death (28 page)

And Constable Walker was relieved to see him.

“There’s no better news of Inspector Mickelson,” he told Rutledge, “but Inspector Norman has asked to set up the inquest without him. Now that Carl Hopkins has been released. Waiting for the inspector to recover doesn’t serve any purpose now.”

“Yes, all right. And send word by Constable Petty that Hartle’s body can be released. Perhaps we can tempt our murderer to attend the funeral service.”

He had said it wryly, but Constable Walker asked, “Do you think that’s likely?”

“That depends. Is there anyone in Eastfield who isn’t well known to you? A distant cousin come to visit? A mate from the war—someone we could have overlooked?”

“Nobody. I’ve been thinking about it. I’d recognize Tommy Summers if I saw him.”

“I doubt it.” Rutledge told him of the visit to Regina Summers’s cottage. “You’re remembering the child, not the man. He could be someone we see every day but never think twice about.”

“Constable Petty?” Walker asked with dry humor. “He’s a great help, I don’t doubt that, but the man gets on my nerves. Always creeping about. It’s as if he knows where he’s not wanted, and pops up there on purpose.”

“If there are no strangers, what about someone who has lived quietly here for the past year or less? A new worker at the brewery? A laborer on one of the farms? Someone at Kenton Chairs? Above suspicion, because he’s been accepted?”

“There’s the groundskeeper at the school,” Constable Walker said, suddenly galvanized. “I hadn’t thought about him.”

“What is his name? Where does he come from?”

“He called himself Ned Browning. Ex-soldier looking for work, never any trouble, kept himself to himself. I saw him once or twice in The Conqueror, but he wasn’t a drinking man, as far as I could tell. When I asked Mrs. Farrell-Smith how he was getting on, she told me he knew something about gardening and pruning, and did what he was told without complaint. Deferential, she said, knew his place. He was allowed to live in that tiny cottage behind the stables, where the coachman lived in the Misses Tates’ day.”

Rutledge could see another cottage, Old Well House, with its long beds of iris and other plantings. He had assumed that Regina was the gardener. Or had she just kept up the work that her brother had begun? He hadn’t thought to ask. Landscaping was landscaping, except to admire the results.

“What does he look like?”

Constable Walker said with a shrug, “Not as tall as you are, as I remember. Brown hair, shaggy, falling into his face. Looked like it had been trimmed with his own secateurs. Ordinary features. If he was on the street or at the pub, he’d wet it down and slick it back, making it appear much darker. Rarely looked you in the eye, but not hangdog. More like the life had been sucked out of him. I doubt I heard him speak a dozen words.”

“An ex-soldier? But not with the Eastfield Company?”

“No, from the north, I was told. My nephew wondered if he’d been shell-shocked, but I didn’t see any signs of that. You’d know, wouldn’t you?”

Rutledge felt a frisson of panic at the words
shell shock.
As if the constable could see in his own eyes the shame that haunted him.

He managed to say, “Where is he now? You used the past tense.”

“That’s the devil of it. He only stayed a few months and left in late winter, giving Mrs. Farrell-Smith the opportunity to hire someone else before spring. She said it was very considerate of him, and gave him an excellent reference.”

“That reference. Where was he going with it?”

“He said he had an offer from one of the large estates in Staffordshire. I didn’t know of any, but that’s neither here nor there.”

Staffordshire. Kenton had had trouble remembering where the elder Summers had taken up his new position. He had dithered between Staffordshire and Shropshire.

Another connection. They had been plain to see, if one had just known where to look.

Rutledge said, “There’s Moseley Old Hall at Bushby—Wolseley Hall at Colwich—Pillaton Hall near Penkridge. It’s possible. But is it likely?”

“We must speak to Mrs. Farrell-Smith, then.”

“There are two tasks I must see to first.”

He left directly for Hastings and The White Swans. When he got there, he learned that Sergeant Gibson had returned his telephone call as expected, but he had left no messages.

“And your guests, Mr. and Mrs. Pierce. Are they still here?”

“I’m afraid they left yesterday morning, unexpectedly. The housekeeper told me they were unhappy with their room.”

Unhappy with it—or had they learned of Rutledge’s intrusion? The maid could have said something.

Hamish was an angry buzz in the back of his mind.

“Never mind,” he said far more pleasantly than he felt. “Do you know where they were intending to travel next?”

“He left a message for anyone who asked after him. Mr. Pierce said he was intending to travel to Brighton.”

Rutledge thanked the clerk and went to the telephone closet, where he put in a call to the Yard.

Sergeant Gibson was away from his desk.

Rutledge rang off.

He went next to the police station. “Did you know,” he asked as he walked through to Inspector Norman’s office, “that Daniel Pierce was staying at The White Swans with his bride?”

“Was he, indeed. Well, I’ll be damned. Does his father know?”

“I doubt it. The happy couple never came to Eastfield. But that isn’t to say that Pierce didn’t come here to see them.”

“How is he connected with this business? I’d find it easy to believe that he had some part in it.”

“Evidence is slowly but inexorably pointing to one Thomas Summers. The problem is, he doesn’t appear to be in Sussex. And Pierce is. But in his case, there’s the question of motive. Why would Pierce turn to murder?”

“To rid himself of his brother,” Norman said unequivocally.

“Then why does he continue to kill?”

Norman shrugged. “The excitement. He couldn’t have expected that, could he? The hunt for victims—avoiding the police. He was a sapper, wasn’t he? That’s perilous work. A man can miss danger.”

It was possible. It was also possible that he’d come to his senses, finally, and walked away from temptation. “No word on Mickelson?”

“He appeared to be awake for a quarter of an hour this morning. The doctors sent the constable charged with keeping an eye on the sickroom to alert the local police, but by the time they reached the hospital, Mickelson had slipped into unconsciousness again. Damned incompetence, if you ask me.”

“I’m glad to hear there’s been some improvement.”

“Because you care about the man, or because whatever he can tell the police stands to clear your good name?”

“I’ll let you decide.” Rutledge hadn’t taken a chair. Now he turned to leave the room.

“What are we to do about this Summers person?”

“We must find him first. Constable Walker wonders if your man Petty could be Summers.”

Shutting the door behind him, he strode out of the building and to his motorcar. Even the five minutes he’d spent there had forcibly reminded him of his cell. If he never saw the police station again for the remainder of his life, it would still not wipe away the memory.

Back in Eastfield, he went to call on Tyrell Pierce.

“Do you bring me news?” he asked as his clerk showed Rutledge into his office.

“Not at present. I would like to ask you several questions. The first is about your son Anthony’s connection with Mrs. Farrell-Smith.”

“I had hoped he would look in that direction. I won’t lie to you. She comes from an excellent background, and she has money of her own, from her late husband’s estate. There was no fear she was after Anthony’s inheritance. And she’s very attractive. I could see that for myself. Pleasant, well educated, good company at dinner, a fine hostess. She would have been a very good match for Anthony.”

Hamish said, “He’s verra’ attracted to her himsel’.”

And it was true. Rutledge, considering him, realized that he was still young enough to marry again and have a second family. Rutledge wondered if Pierce knew anything about the shadow hanging over the late Farrell-Smith’s death. Probing, he asked, “What happened to her husband?”

“Yes, a pity he died so young. She told me privately that he drank too much. Anthony mentioned that he’d been at loose ends after he left school. Moody, his temper uncertain. He felt that Farrell-Smith had married before he really knew his own mind about what he was going to do with his life. But young men in love are often impulsive.”

Rutledge could see that Mrs. Farrell-Smith had cleverly sown seeds of doubt about her husband’s state of mind. If it came to Pierce’s ears that the man had killed himself, he would understand why.

He abruptly changed the subject. “Have you met Daniel’s wife?”

“Wife? Where did you hear that Daniel had married?”

“He was in Hastings, with his bride and her little dog.”

The elder Pierce’s face flushed with anger. “It’s not true. I can tell you it’s not
true
.”

“Why shouldn’t he wish to marry? The war is over, he wouldn’t be the first man to look for an anchor in his life.”

“Because the woman he has been in love with since he was sixteen is already married,” Pierce answered, goaded. “And I was glad of that, damn it. She wasn’t suitable, and I told him so. I thank God on my knees every night that her husband is still alive. And I pray that he stays amongst the living until whatever passion it is that my son feels for her has burned itself out.”

“Who is she?”

“Mrs. Winslow.”

Rutledge sat there and digested what he had just been told.

“Does she return his feelings?”

“She did when she was sixteen. But I put a stop to that. And a good thing too, because just before the war she chose to marry Winslow. I’m sure she’s regretted it every day since then. Martyrdom is best enjoyed briefly.”

A vicious remark, but then Peggy Winslow had threatened this man’s view of how his sons would prosper as he had prospered, climbing the social ladder with their looks, their charm, and their money. He’d seen Mrs. Farrell-Smith as eminently suitable for Anthony. He didn’t seem to know she preferred the younger brother.

“Where is he now, your son?”

“I don’t know. But that’s why he left Eastfield again so soon after coming home from France. He couldn’t bear to be in the same village with Winslow. He was afraid he’d do him a harm. And if you pass that on to anyone, even Constable Walker, I’ll tell the world you lied.”

That, Hamish was pointing out, explained why Pierce had been distraught when village men began dying. He’d been terrified that their deaths, even his own son’s, had been random, to make Winslow’s death, when it happened, seem part of a pattern that had nothing to do with the man’s wife.

Rutledge said tightly, “It’s not my intention to gossip. Unfortunately, I can’t walk away from potential evidence, however odd or unimportant it appears to be.”

“Did you see Mrs. Winslow’s cat?” Pierce asked.

“Cat? No, I’m afraid not. Should I have done?”

“He gave it to her. A tortoiseshell. Named the damned thing Arrow, after our firm, and told her that as long as she possessed Arrow, she had his heart in her hands. He’d found it as a kitten in a corner of the brewery wall one winter’s night. He had a soft spot for cats. I never could understand that. With any luck, Arrow has used up her nine lives and has gone on to whatever heaven God reserves for animals.”

Rutledge thanked him and was walking to the door when Pierce added, still fuming over Rutledge’s allegations about Daniel, “I know you’re lying to me. I can prove it. Daniel can’t be in contact with dogs. They make his eyes red, and he wheezes. And so you may tell Inspector Norman that this trick won’t wash.”

Standing in the doorway, Rutledge said, “I’m sorry?”

“We had him to specialists in London. Daniel. Dogs and chocolates. We were warned that either of them could kill him by choking off his air.”

Closing the door, Rutledge stood there, his mind flying.

If that hadn’t been Daniel Pierce and his bride with her dog Muffin, who the hell had it been?

20

R
utledge turned on his heel and knocked at the door behind him, opening it almost at once before Pierce could deny him entrance.

“Do you have a photograph of your son?” he asked the man behind the desk. “As recent as may be.”

Pierce said warily, “Not here. At my home. Why do you need a photograph? I have told you, Daniel isn’t a murderer.”

“To eliminate him finally from the queue of suspects.”

“I’ll bring it to the hotel later in the day, shall I?”

Rutledge had to be satisfied with that.

He asked the clerk, Starret, for the use of the brewery telephone. He thought at first that the man would refuse, for he looked toward Pierce’s office uncertainly.

It took some time to reach Gibson at the Yard, and his voice was testy.

“I’ve not found this Thomas Summers. The Army records show that he enlisted in Buildwas, Shropshire, he was wounded twice in France, he was demobilized in early 1919 because he was attached to the details reburying the dead. His current residence is still in Shropshire. They don’t have a more recent one.”

“I’ve been there,” Rutledge said, Hamish hammering in the back of his head to the point that he could hardly think. “He’s not there. What else?”

“I was at Somerset House, and after looking up Lieutenant Pierce’s marriage—there is no record of it—I took the liberty of looking up Corporal Summers’s records. I see his birth, right enough, there in Eastfield. He was married in Brighton three weeks ago to one Edna Stallings, spinster, from Bedford. He put down Shropshire again as his residence.”

Rutledge swore with feeling. He’d had the man within reach, and he’d lost him.

Hamish said, “He used another man’s name.”

And how had he convinced his bride to allow that?

My friends will track us down, they’ll stand on the terrace and serenade us. It will be shockingly embarrassing.
Everyone will stare.
Daniel is a good friend, he told me he doesn’t mind, as long as we don’t leave him to settle up.

She would laugh and find it exciting to be someone else.

She had a sweet face, she’d stared up at her husband adoringly in that wedding photograph. Was she the nurse he’d gone in search of?

“Did you by any chance look into Edna Stallings?”

“I did that, sir, when I discovered who her father was. Matthew Edgeworth Stallings. She’s a little younger than Summers, at a guess, and was a nurse in a clinic in Bedford during the last two years of the war, before going to live in Hertfordshire with an aunt until she came of age this past spring.”

Matthew Stallings, it seemed, had made his modest fortune in footwear, and the Army contract for boots had sealed it. He’d died of a stroke six months after the Armistice, leaving a large sum to the National Trust and another to a fund for war widows. The bulk of his estate went to his only child. His daughter, it appeared, was an heiress.

“Well done,” Rutledge told Sergeant Gibson. It was praise well earned. There was more he wished to say to Gibson, but not with half the brewery office staff listening with one ear.

Putting up the receiver, he thanked Starret and left the brewery.

Constable Walker was not in the police station when Rutledge stopped there. And so he drove on to Hastings with all the speed he could muster.

He caught Inspector Norman just as he was leaving his office and said, “There have been developments. I need to speak to you.”

“Not now,” Norman told him. “I’ve just been informed that Inspector Mickelson is showing signs of coming to his senses again. And I’m not letting this opportunity slip through my fingers, I can tell you. Your developments can wait.”

And he got into the motorcar waiting for him, one of his constables at the wheel.

Rutledge watched them pull out into the afternoon traffic, then returned to his own vehicle.

For the next six hours, he called at every hotel of any size between The White Swans and the town of Brighton.

And as he searched, he tried to think through this swiftly evolving situation.

So much was explained now. How Summers could afford to live at The Swans as Daniel Pierce. How he had been able to reach Eastfield and disappear at will. How in fact he had managed to learn the details of his victims’ lives, where he could find them when he was ready to kill them. And how he had been invisible, because the lowly school groundskeeper who kept to himself roused no interest in the village.

There was always a social hierarchy.

A groundskeeper at the school was in effect a laborer. The farmers and their wives, the tradesmen and their wives, would have nothing in common with him, and people like the brewer and Mr. Kenton, who felt they had risen above both classes, would hardly be aware of his existence, though they would know where he worked. It was that which gave him his place in the village, not his face or his qualities or his hopes and dreams. The rector would be kinder, the doctor would treat the man and whatever family he had, and the Mrs. Farrell-Smiths of this world would see that he was paid but barely know his name.

At each hotel he came to, Rutledge requested the list of guests, scanned them for any name that was familiar—Stallings, Summers, Pierce, Hartle, Jeffers, Roper, Ottley, Gooding, even his own—and each time drew a blank.

But of course Summers could have used his wife’s mother’s maiden name, or that of his sergeant in France, and Rutledge would have no way of connecting it with the man he was seeking.

Hamish said, “Go back to what ye know. It’s the only way.”

All right, then.

Summers had left a forwarding address of Brighton. But was he telling the truth? There were still men alive who went to school with him. He couldn’t have finished his work. Surely he wouldn’t have gone much farther than Brighton. He had too much invested already in his revenge.

Where then?

Rutledge thought about the case that Chief Inspector Cummins had never solved, and how misdirection had served a different purpose there. It had almost seemed that Cummins’s murderer had wanted to leave something behind, for the sake of his own conscience if not for the police.

But this Sussex killer had no conscience. If he had, he’d have stopped with William Jeffers’s death.

Rutledge looked up at the exotic lines of Brighton’s glory, the Prince Regent’s Pavilion, almost foreshadowing that his niece would one day be Empress of India.

Why would Summers leave such a message?

The most logical answer: to buy time.

To send Rutledge on a wild-goose chase in the wrong direction while he went in another.

Rutledge was already sprinting toward the hotel he’d just left, oblivious of the stares of strollers along the promenade, his mind keeping pace with his feet.

He’d been outfoxed, and it angered him. Hamish, pointing out his failure, was like a demon at his shoulder.

Could Summers still be in Hastings New Town, in another fine hotel? Or had he turned east instead of west? Or north? It was impossible to guess.

And what was the man telling his bride, how could he explain cutting their wedding journey short—or flying off in an entirely different direction?

Would he suggest that now his friends had caught up with them, they’d play a trick of their own?

Hamish said, “Ye ken, he left her alone at night. He used a false name at yon hotel. Would she no’ grow suspicious after a while?”

Rutledge felt a surge of apprehension.

Is that what had happened? Had there been unexpected difficulties over his behavior? What had prompted that marriage in the first place? Was it a love match—or was it the fact that Summers needed his new wife’s money? He hadn’t held a job in months, and The White Swans was one of the most elegant—and expensive—hotels along this stretch of seaside towns.

Rutledge reached the Regency Hotel and slowed his pace, striding into Reception and waiting impatiently as an elderly couple spoke to the woman behind the desk about the availability of rooms.

Yes, they had a telephone, the woman told him when the couple had left. For the use of their guests. “This is an urgent police matter,” he told her curtly, and reluctantly she pointed to a door just past the desk.

He put in a call to the Yard, silently cursing the delay as someone went in search of Sergeant Gibson. While he waited, Rutledge was already scanning the map of Sussex and of Kent in his head.

There was an isolated church, St. Mary’s, out in the marshes near Dymchurch. One could hide a body there. But of course in time it would be found, and if it was identified, then the police would begin to look for Summers.

That was true almost anywhere else. Corpses had a way of returning at the most inconvenient of times, whether left in marshes or the sea. Besides, if the man wanted his wife’s money, he’d have to keep her alive until he could persuade her to make a will in his favor.

But what if Summers had already worked out a contingency plan? Leave his work unfinished until the hue and cry had died down, disappear into France meanwhile, and return at a later date? The southern parts of France along the Mediterranean Sea had been untouched by war, though strongly affected by the state of the French economy in general. Still, it was warm, lovely, expensive, and increasingly popular. And his wife might find such a suggestion exceptionally attractive.

Dover, then, and the ferry across the Channel. And he, Rutledge, was already six hours too late.

If the Kent police could find Rutledge himself after he’d left Melinda Crawford’s house, they might be lucky enough to find Tommy Summers for him.

He told Sergeant Gibson what it was he wanted, and then went in search of his motorcar, several streets away.

The motor almost misfired as he turned the crank, and he had to start again. Once behind the wheel, he made a looping circle through the streets and drove as fast as he dared through the holidaymakers, heading east. Behind him the clouds were gathering and far out to sea, the wind had picked up. He could feel the cloying heat that presaged a storm.

The road ran along the coast for the most part, one seaside community after another, the congestion at its peak at this hour. The storm was catching him up as he drove, bits of paper and little swirls of dust marking its progress, and before very long, the sun was half hidden in the haze. Before he’d reached Hastings, the sky was dark, and the rumble of thunder followed him.

Hamish gave him no peace, seeming to gather strength with the storm.

He paused at Hastings just long enough to leave word with Inspector Norman, and then turned toward Eastfield.

The rain found him just before he got there, huge wind-driven pellets, and the lightning was fierce.

At the police station, Constable Walker listened to what he had to say, then handed him a framed photograph that Tyrell Pierce had left at The Fishermen’s Arms.

Rutledge looked at it, and damned the man. The sun was behind the subjects, and he could just recognize Anthony Pierce, smiling beneath his officer’s cap, one arm around his brother’s shoulders. Daniel’s face was harder to make out, and Rutledge had to be satisfied with his general build.

Pierce must have spent an hour or more searching through photographs to find one that was so useless.

He handed it to Walker. “I should have the man arrested for obstruction.”

And then he was gone again, driving through the pelting rain and the early darkness.

He stopped for petrol in one village, and to have a tire inspected in another, praying that the Dover police had found their man.

Hamish reminded him, “It’s no’ certain that he’s even there.”

Summers might as easily have chosen London or Southampton and taken ship anywhere. But France was closer, and the man knew the country. It made sense.

In the predawn hours when he reached the Dover police, the skies were clearing. The fishing fleet had put out to sea, their sails tiny dots on the horizon, and the first ferry to France was just pulling out.

But Dover had nothing for him.

The inspector he spoke with said, “You realize he could have sailed before you reached us.”

“Yes, yes, that’s very likely. I was hoping that we’d been in time.” He rubbed his face, hearing the scrape of beard on his chin. “All right, keep looking. I’ll be at the hotel. Did you reserve a room?”

“Yes. The Nancy Bell. It’s run by a retired policeman. We try to give him a little business now and again.”

Rutledge found it, a small inn at best, almost at the outskirts of town, but Sergeant Bell greeted him, took one look at him, and said, “Go up, then, top of the stairs, I’ll bring hot water and hotter tea.”

He was as good as his word. A bluff, graying man, his shoulders still broad and the line of his jaw firm, he carried the tray in one hand and a pitcher in the other, setting them down on the table. “You’ll want to sleep,” he told Rutledge. “If there’s word, they’ll send for you here.”

But after shaving and drinking his tea, Rutledge was restless, unable to settle, and he left The Nancy Bell and went out to walk.

Dover sat at the foot of chalk cliffs and was divided into two parts. Beneath the towering bulk of the castle was the port with the residential area south of it. The war had not dealt well with the town, for it had seen thousands of men and ships coming and going, expanding almost faster than the town could absorb the dramatically increasing population, and then the war had ended after four hard years, and Dover had had to shrink into itself again, finding the fit difficult.