Wings of Fire (12 page)

The closet was too dark for him to be sure that the end panels couldn’t be opened somehow, and he had to remove the middle and then the bottom shelf to run his hands over the wall.

Nothing.

He retrieved the bottom shelf to settle it back on the brackets that held it, and instead clipped the edge on the left-hand bracket. Part of the shelf broke off, and then something else tumbled down, ringing merrily as it bounced twice on the hard wood of the floor. A key? He got down on one knee to search for it, running his hand back and forth across the wood, and there was nothing. Frustrated, he moved back to the front of the closet and started again. It took him nearly five minutes to find it, where it had landed in a shoe.

A small locket, gold, the sort of thing little girls often wore. He took it over to the window, where the light was better. There were entwined initials on the outer face of the locket, and he made them out—MAM. Margaret Anne Marlowe? His fingers found the delicate catch and he opened the frame to two tiny portraits inside. They were in oil, lovely little miniatures of a man and a woman. After a moment he
recognized them. Rosamund and her first husband, Captain George Marlowe. Anne’s parents. An exquisite gift to a child on her birthday or at Christmas, to be worn when she was dressed up, with special care.

How had it come to be hidden among Olivia’s things? Or had Olivia simply inherited it when her sister died, and lost track of it over the years?

Rutledge went back to the closet and brought the shelves out again, then the boxes and the shoes. On hands and knees, then standing, he searched every inch of the walls and the floor.

Nothing. Except for the half inch sliver of wood that had been knocked off the bottom shelf by his clumsiness.

He picked up the shelf, looking to see where the chip had come from, and if he could put it back where it belonged.

It was the end of a longer strip of wood that had been set very carefully into the back edge of the heavy shelf. With his penknife he gently pried that out of its slot, and when he did, another object tumbled out of the space hollowed out behind.

He picked up that and the shelf, and carried them both to the windows.

The second object was a man’s gold pipe cleaner, smooth from long use, but the initials engraved in it were still legible. JSC. James Cheney, Nicholas’s father? He set that on the sill beside the locket.

Holding the shelf up to the light, he looked into the carved-out hollow. Someone had stuffed cotton deep inside it, and embedded within the soft fibers he could see bits and pieces of other articles. The sun caught them in its brightness, as if pointing to them. He winkled them out, slowly and gently.

First came a small boy’s cuff buttons, heavy gold and again with initials engraved on them. RHC. Richard Cheney? Behind them was a lovely little signet ring, that looked as if it had been crafted for a child. And carved deeply into the face of the ring was a coat of arms. Inside, engraved in the band itself, were the initials REMT. Rosamund Trevelyan. A gold crucifix came out easily, finely wrought, with the figure a little worn. From the letters on the reverse, it had belonged
to Brian FitzHugh. Finally, at the very back, a watch fob in the shape of a small boat, with the initials NMC. Nicholas.

The sunlight flashed across the raised sail as Rutledge laid it with the others he had spread out on the wooden windowsill, and in spite of the warmth that poured through the glass panes, he felt cold.

He knew exactly what these were.

He had seen dozens of collections like them, in the trenches in France. A button from the greatcoat of a German officer, goggles from a downed airman, stripes from the sleeves of corporals and sergeants, collar tabs from officers, a battered Prussian helmet, a pistol taken from a corpse, an empty ammo belt from a machine gunner’s nest, whatever a man fancied…

When his mind stubbornly refused to frame the words, Hamish did it for him.

“Trophies of the dead,” he said softly.

Small golden treasures, very personal and surely very precious, that marked each of Olivia Marlowe’s unwitting victims.

Rutledge forced himself to walk away from the things he’d found, and instead to go through the motions required of him.

He began with the olive wood desk on its graceful, delicate legs. In the several drawers he found stationery in various sizes, engraved, and matching envelopes, bottles of ink, scissors, a box of visiting cards with Rosamund’s name on them, a book of accounts for shops in London and in Borcombe, a leather notebook with stamps and addresses—none of them of special interest—and the usual clutter of pens and pencils. The only truly personal item was a wooden pen holder, hand carved, in the shape of a monster fish, the kind drawn on ancient maps at the edge of the known world, where they waited to swallow unwary ships. On the bottom, following the curve of a tiny scale, he found the initials NMC/OAM. From Nicholas to Olivia. Or to O. A. Manning?

The bottom drawer on the left side was empty.

The dressing table, the tall chest, the bureau, and the bedside table yielded more personal things, perfume and cosmetics, combs and brushes, odds and ends of jewelry, filmy lingerie, silk scarves and stockings, lacy handkerchiefs, and a prayer book, candles, and matches. Nothing out of the ordinary in any way, though sometimes intimate and daunting.

He knew, from what Rachel had told him, that the family had already taken away the things that made a room personal and individual—pictures and photographs and possessions
with a particular value that wouldn’t be put up for sale with the house. But perhaps out of respect for Stephen’s insistence, much of Olivia’s life still survived in this room.

Yet Olivia had been careful to leave nothing behind for either the police or her biographers that could be construed—or misconstrued—into the woman who’d lived in this room.

The items buried deep in the closet must have been there a very long time, and if no one had found them before now, the chances were that no one might have discovered them for years to come. When they would have no meaning to strangers living here…

He went back to the window and picked up each article, one at a time.

Six victims, if these were indeed trophies. Olivia’s sister, Anne. Her stepfather James Cheney. Her half brother Richard Cheney. Her stepfather Brian FitzHugh.

Her own mother, Rosamund Trevelyan.

And the man who’d spent his life in her service. Nicholas Cheney.

She’d been so sure of him, then, so sure that he would die with her. Or that she could send him into the darkness before her.

“Gentle God,” Rutledge whispered softly.

And after a moment, he found himself silently cursing Chief Superintendent Bowles for sending him here.

Drawing the drapes again and closing the door firmly behind him, Rutledge went down the passage, his mind still working with a policeman’s precision, his thoughts far from where his feet carried him. The tiny, betraying trophies had been safely returned to their hiding place, out of sight. But not out of his thoughts, burned with molten brightness into his very brain.

In Stephen’s room was the comfortable chaos of living. There was a cricket bat in the corner, a pair of riding boots by the closet door, suits and shirts and jackets hung haphazardly on the rod inside, books on the table under the window—they were mostly about golf and tennis, Ireland and horses—and ivory inlaid cuff links in the dish on the dressing
table, with a fish hook and a length of gut from a tennis racket beside them. But no boxes. No folders of personal papers, no literary failures or private letters or contracts. What Stephen kept here was the detritus of boyhood and the things one left in a country house visited fairly often.

In the interim between her death and his, Stephen might well have taken Olivia’s papers to his bank for safekeeping. But Rutledge went through the drawers again, found a routine letter from Stephen’s bank manager, and copied the address in his notebook.

As he was about to close the curtains, Hamish said, “When I was a laddie, Ma was a fierce one with broom and rag, nothing safe from her eyes when the fit to clean was on her. I’d hide what I cherished in the shed behind the straw, or above the rafters in the loft, after Pa died. She wasna’ as tall as my pa.”

Rutledge stopped, listening to what Hamish said. Stephen was a child from a large family. Nosy sisters and prying brothers. He might well have had a secret place of his own. But not in this room. He, Rutledge, had been damned thorough…

Or had he?

He glanced around the room again. He’d even had up the carpet, looked inside the grate, under the bed—

He knelt again by the bed. Nothing, only a thin coating of dust, sifting down gently since Mrs. Trepol’s last visit.

The frame. The slats that held the springs. Above that the mattress, sagging a little in the center. The bedclothes—

The slats? What could you hide on a slat? A key, perhaps…

He went under the bed, on his back, mindful of his coat and careful not to scrape his head on the springs as he used his arms on the side boards to propel himself. Claustrophobia caught at him, and he had to shut his eyes against the wave of terror that ran through him. He coughed hard, the dry dust sucked into his drier throat. The springs were all but pressing into his face, not as high as he’d first thought!

With eyes still shut tight, he forced his breathing back to
a normal rhythm. What you don’t see can’t fall in on you! he told himself sternly.

After a moment, searching with his memory rather than his eyes, he ran shaking fingers over the nearest slat, between the springs and the wood, barking his knuckles and collecting fine splinters. Nothing but more dust. There were five slats in all. He felt for the others, and began again, moving his shoulders and hips across the floor until he could reach each slat. Nothing. It was useless, he might as well give up. The last slat now—

Only the slight rustle of sound warned him in time, but the object still clipped his ear, falling, and he banged his head as he recoiled.

Slithering swiftly out from under the frame again, he turned and looked back. The springs were a good fifteen inches above the floor, not face high.

And a small book was lying, spine upward, in an inverted V on the floor. He reached for it, and managed to fish it out without going back under the bed again.

A prayer book, pages thin as rice paper, the tiny print old and ornately lettered, the cover worn black leather, the edges of the pages once gilded.

There was on the front cover an outline in raised leather, and Rutledge recognized it as the figure of St. Patrick, staff lifted to cast out the snakes.

On the flyleaf inside, in a spidery scrawl in fading ink, he read, “Presented to Patrick Samuel FitzHugh, on his first Communion, June, 1803. From his loving Sister Mary Joseph Claire.”

FitzHugh, not Trevelyan or Marlowe or Cheney. The FitzHughs had been Irish Catholic, the Trevelyans and Marlowes and Cheneys Church of England. This had been hidden, but not for reasons that had anything to do with murder. As a boy, had Stephen had Catholic leanings his family didn’t know about?

Rutledge thumbed through the fragile pages, eyes scanning the printed lines. In the back, where the pages were blank, someone had written out a family genealogy beginning with
the parents of Patrick Samuel, then his marriage and offspring. The ink and writing changed over the next generations, which followed in sad order. So many of them died in the Potato Famine and the nightmare years afterward that it was more a litany of death than of life. At the top of the last page Rutledge found Brian FitzHugh’s name, and Cormac’s, but neither Stephen nor Susannah were recorded here. Nor, apparently, any other secrets that mattered to an investigation into murder.

After a moment, Rutledge dropped the prayer book into the drawer of the table by the bed, unwilling to go back under it. Then he changed his mind, and put the book back where it had come from. Putting it back took less time than finding it in the first place, and he did it holding his breath this time.

Afterward he dusted off his trousers and jacket, then closed the curtains at the windows.

The house was already too dark to do more than a cursory search elsewhere. Most of the other bedrooms had already been stripped of clothing, closets and desks and chests empty, drawers already smelling musty. But Rutledge, mindful of the hollowed out shelf in Olivia’s room, checked each closet with infinite care.

There was nothing more to find, nothing that told him where Olivia had left her papers—not even whether they were still in the house. Susannah and her husband, Rachel and Stephen, with the help of Cormac, Mrs. Trepol, and the old woman Sadie, had spent days going through the house and cleaning room after room. He wasn’t surprised to find nothing out of the ordinary where they had worked.

He went back to study. But the desk by the window was as sterile as the one in Olivia’s bedroom. It was a wild goose chase—Stephen must have removed any papers left to him. Yet Rutledge had the feeling that a man hell-bent and determined to preserve his half sister’s fame as a poet would stubbornly resist taking them too far, just as he’d fought to keep Olivia’s room inviolate.

To which Hamish riposted, “What do you need the papers
for, when you’ve found yon golden trophies? Or are ye shutting out what they say?”

The sun was a red ball on the horizon when Rutledge walked out to the headland, its warmth lingering in the light wind that preceded the stillness of sunset. Behind him the windows of the Hall were ablaze, and the weather vane on the church tower as well.
Red sky at night…

He should have listened to Hamish and gone back to London on Saturday morning. He should have told Rachel this morning that there was no need to reopen the three deaths. Let sleeping murderers lie.

Now—now he was committed, the truth was something he had to uncover, for his own peace of mind. For the policeman in him who had to look at the good
and
the evil in human nature and live with its impact in his own soul.

What right had O. A. Manning to survive unscathed the nightmares of Olivia Marlowe? What right had she to be praised and revered as a creator of beauty, if she had been a woman without mercy or compassion?

Stephen FitzHugh had been left as Olivia’s literary executor. To decide which of her papers and her worksheets biographers and critics and readers might see. And now, through no fault of his own, he was dead, and neither Rachel nor Susannah seemed to be particularly interested in shouldering the responsibility. Cormac, by his own admission, was more likely to destroy any family skeletons than allow them to rattle. The O. A. Manning he might choose to show to the public would be Olivia Marlowe’s own public face, a quiet recluse who knew very little about the real world and yet had a wondrous insight into the human heart, a gift from God.

Or the devil. Depending on your knowledge of her.

Even if he, Rutledge, drove back to London in the morning, he would be the only person living who had proof that what Cormac suspected could be true.
His
burden to learn to live with. Not Cormac’s. Not Susannah’s. Not Rachel’s.

Damn Stephen FitzHugh for falling down those blasted stairs!

If he stayed in Cornwall, he’d have to find a way to get to the bottom of a string of murders committed by a woman already dead.

But that was just the problem.

Olivia Marlowe had been buried. It was O. A. Manning who was still alive—and possibly had no right to be.

And when he, Rutledge, found out the whole truth, what in hell would he do about it? Deliberately destroy the author of
Wings of Fire
? Bring down the beauty and the genius along with the cruelty and the lies?

“You’ve been executioner once,” Hamish warned him. “And you no’ have forgotten it. Will ye choose to do it again, then?”

Rutledge turned and walked back towards the house and the path to the village.

“If I have to,” he said bitterly.