A Lonely Death (10 page)

Dr. Thompson stared at him. “Your murderer must be a little mad to do such a thing.”

“We don’t know,” Rutledge answered, “whether he’s mad or clever or just vengeful. Not yet.”

Thompson shook his head. “At a guess, there’s something buried so deep in him—whoever he is—that he uses unnecessary force to kill with the garrote. The wound in Hartle’s throat is obscenely deep. The sea washed away most of the blood, but it must have been a ghastly sight to begin with. And it’s personal satisfaction he’s after, your murderer, not simply the man’s death. He could accomplish that far more easily.”

A fascinating point. Rutledge looked at Thompson, reassessing this portly, backwater doctor who had such insight into a killer’s mind.

Thompson, who must have guessed what Rutledge was thinking, smiled grimly. “I was in the war myself. I know what men are capable of doing to each other. I have no illusions on that score. I also discovered that some of them enjoyed it. That may be what you’re facing here, someone who misses the thrill of stalking and killing. Someone who has discovered he can’t live without it. Blood lust, Inspector, isn’t something only the lower animals experience.”

8

I
t was nearly one o’clock. Rutledge and Walker went in search of lunch and found themselves in a small corner shop that catered to workingmen. It was situated on a street where buildings backed up to the shelving land. The lower portion of the room was mainly a counter filled with various cooked meats, cheeses, and an array of sandwiches. On the upper level, reached by a half dozen steps, were bare tables and chairs, set out in front of a bar that dispensed tea, coffee, and cider as well as beer and ale.

They ordered from the smiling young woman who came up to their table and presented a handwritten menu listing what was available.

She was just bringing their sandwiches and glasses of cider when the sun came out. The streets and rooftops began to steam as the air warmed, and the neighboring houses gleamed wetly, giving them a just-washed look. The young woman glanced over her shoulder and said, “There. And about time too.” Turning back to the two men and noting that one was a policeman with rain-darkened shoulders, she added, “Were you there on the headland when they brought that poor soul in?”

“Just caught in the downpour,” Rutledge answered for both of them.

“It’s brave they were, going out to the edge of the headland that way, and in such a storm. Bits crumble, and it’s easy to lose one’s footing and go over. Every summer someone ventures too near the edge and goes over. Never fails. You’d think they’d mind the signs that are put up each year, but they never do. And some of them let their children romp and play up there, as if it were the back garden and safe as houses. Last May it was a little boy flying a kite who fell. I hope this wasn’t a child. It’s a crime the way some parents haven’t the sense they were born with. Even the smugglers knew better!”

And she moved on to another table. Walker said, “There are smugglers’ caves all about Hastings. It was a lucrative enterprise when French goods were banned. And there’s some who say that it goes on still, when nobody is looking.” He bit off the end of his sandwich and added around it, “Do you think Dr. Thompson was right? About our murderer liking the feeling of killing?”

“It’s one other solution. It may even explain the discs—that in his mind these keep the war alive. But where did he come by these? That’s what I need to find out. Whether or not they have any particular significance.”

“Odd that Inspector Norman never mentioned the disc in Hartle’s mouth. Or had the doctor told him?”

“There hadn’t been time.” Rutledge finished his cider and beckoned to the woman who had waited on them. He paid the accounting and waited for Walker to retrieve his helmet and cape from the other chair.

“I’ve put it off as long as I can,” he was saying. “But there’s his sister to tell. She’ll be broken up about this. I doubt her husband will. They never got on together, he and Theo.”

Rutledge stopped on his way to the door. “Do you think he could have done this?”

“His legs are in braces. Poliomyelitis.”

As Walker cranked the motorcar, Rutledge looked out to sea. The heavy gray clouds were far out along the horizon now, making their way to France.

Ahead lay the duty he disliked the most. Breaking news to an anxious family. He could have left it to Walker, but that was not his way.

“How did anyone lure Hartle out onto the headland?” Walker asked as he joined Rutledge in the motorcar. “And after dark. Hartle was a canny man, he wouldn’t have gone there without a plausible reason.”

They drove in silence back to Eastfield, and Constable Walker pointed out where the dead man’s sister lived.

It was a simple bungalow in a street of similar houses, single story, squat roof, and a small garden behind.

Constable Walker broke the silence as they got out of the motorcar. “I’ve done this three times now. Pray God it’s the last.”

Together they went up the walk. A curtain twitched in the room to the left of the door.

Even as they reached for the knocker, a woman was opening the door to them, her face anxious, her fair brows drawn together in a frown of uncertainty.

“Constable Walker,” she said, her glance flicking to Rutledge’s face.

She was very unlike her brother, Rutledge noted. Smaller boned, fair hair where his was the color of wheat, her face softer and her eyes a pretty brown. Behind her, just visible in the shadows over her shoulder, was a man in a wheeled chair, his face pinched and sour.

“Mrs. Winslow, this is Inspector Rutledge from London—”

Her face crumpled. “It’s Theo, isn’t it? Oh, my God, I knew it—I knew it when he didn’t stop by last evening—”

“I’m afraid so, Mrs. Winslow. He was found early this morning in Hastings.”

She put her hands to her face and began to cry.

Behind her, her husband put out his hand, as if to offer comfort, and then dropped it.

Rutledge gently led her from the door and into a small sitting room, where he’d seen the curtain twitch earlier, settling her on the stiff horsehair sofa. The man in the invalid chair followed them into the room, saying, “What happened to him then? Tell me what happened?”

Rutledge turned slightly toward him and said, “In due course. Constable, perhaps Mr. Winslow will show you where you could make some tea. I think his wife will be grateful for it.”

At first he thought Walker would refuse, but then the constable realized that getting the husband out of the room was important at this stage. He turned to Winslow and said, “Where’s the kitchen, then?” as if in such a small house it would be hard to find.

Winslow cast a glance at his wife, then looked at Rutledge and saw that the suggestion was, in fact, a command that brooked no argument. He spun his invalid chair and with poor grace led the constable away.

Rutledge found a clean, dry handkerchief in an inner pocket and gave it to the weeping woman. She took it gratefully. He said, his voice pitched not to carry beyond this room, “Was your brother in the war?” It was an attempt to distract her from her immediate grief.

She nodded.

“With the rest of the Eastfield volunteers?”

A muffled yes came from behind the handkerchief. And then she raised her eyes to meet his gaze, a slow and awful truth dawning. “He—was he—like the others?”

“I’m sorry. Yes.”

“I thought—I thought perhaps there had been an accident on the road. He wasn’t feeling well, but he went to Hastings anyway yesterday, taking the van. The shipment of varnish from London hadn’t come. Mr. Kenton asked him to see if he could find a few tins to tide them over. He shouldn’t have been driving at all, but he wouldn’t tell Mr. Kenton that. I thought—I thought he might have taken his own life. Trying not to shame us.”

Her voice failed, and Rutledge found himself thinking of Rosemary Hume. Murder was sometimes not the worst news to reach a household.

“Why did you fear he might do himself a harm?” he asked, after giving her a moment to collect herself. In another room he could hear the rattle of cups and low voices as the two banished men talked quietly.

“His stomach. It hasn’t been the same. He was always one to like his food, but now he had to watch what he ate. No cheese or rich sauces, not even an occasional curry. Nothing with spices. And he did like his mulled cider of an evening when it was cold. He had to give it all up. Only the plainest of boiled meats and potatoes and vegetables. His favorite dish was parsnips roasted in goose drippings, but he couldn’t have it. Everything was tasteless, he said, and still his stomach would reject everything sometimes, and he’d be violently ill, you could hear him all over the house. Virgil said it kept
him
half nauseated as well, but I felt for Theo, and lay there in bed listening to him, and praying he wouldn’t begin those terrible dry heaves that went on for hours.”

“Your brother lived with you?”

“When he first came out of hospital. There was no one else. Mum and Dad were gone, and Mary and the baby died of the Spanish influenza before ever he was wounded. That must have broken his heart, but he never mentioned them when he came home. He went to the churchyard by himself, not even asking me to come and show him where they were. And as soon as he could, he went back to the farm and lived there alone. It wasn’t a working farm anymore, but it was our home. He felt comfortable with his memories. That’s what he said. Comfortable. As if he could talk to them somehow. Mum and Dad, Mary and the baby.”

“How was the relationship between your brother and your husband?”

“Not very good,” she told him with resignation in her voice. “Theo didn’t want me to marry Virgil, you see. He thought it was pity I felt, and not love.” She hesitated, and then asked, “Was it quick? How my brother died?” She waited, braced for his answer.

“Quickly enough,” Rutledge said. “You know about the other deaths?”

“Oh, yes, it’s all over Eastfield, that’s all anyone talks about. I expect they’ll be gossiping about poor Theo now. I feel guilty, I’ve done my share of the gossiping, and now I see it wasn’t right.”

“Did your brother have enemies? Did anything that happened in the war seem to worry him?”

“He never talked about the war. Not to me. He just came home, put away his uniform, and got on with his life. I asked him once if it was very bad, being wounded, and all he said was, it was the ticket out.”

“Was he closer to someone in particular? A friend in the Army, someone here in Eastfield?”

“There’s no one I know of who would harm Theo. Why should they? He was a good man, he never was any trouble growing up. He helped his father at Kenton’s and never complained. They liked him there. They did from the beginning . . .” Her voice trailed off as she stared into space, reliving another time and place. “I can’t see any point to killing him. I mean, there’s no money to speak of, although he was never in debt.”

“When he came back from France, was he on good terms with the men he’d served with? Did he have any problems with Anthony Pierce?”

“I don’t know. I mean, he never spoke of trouble. He never went looking for it, for that matter. They’d all changed—they didn’t sit about talking over what they’d done in the trenches. It was as if it hadn’t happened, in a way. But of course it had, hadn’t it?” She frowned. “Theo was given a medal. He must have been brave. But I don’t know what he did.”

It was something Rutledge had heard often enough since his own return to England. Censorship, of course, meant that letters home could say very little about where men were or what they were doing. And many of those at home in England had no means of knowing what war in the trenches—or on board ships for that matter—was really like. The images they had were often so far off the mark in many instances that no one would recognize in them the reality of France. He had spoken to a woman who had told him quite proudly that her dead son had had a good bed and clean sheets every night he was away from home. He’d told her so himself. Rutledge hadn’t disabused her of the notion—one her son had no doubt cultivated for her sake. And to her question about his own situation on the Somme, he had assured her that he too had slept well. He’d been rewarded by a smile and a nod, as if she had been happy for him. Of course many families had known the truth of the savagery their loved ones were caught up in, but even they had sometimes preferred lies.

Hamish said, “What we did was to die. For naught.”

Rutledge flinched.

Mrs. Winslow misconstrued it. “Should I have asked him about the fighting? Was it important?”

“No,” he answered her. “It doesn’t matter at all.”

And then Constable Walker came in carrying the tea tray, and Mrs. Winslow turned to it as if it were a lifeline. Her husband, following him into the room, looked quickly from Rutledge’s face to his wife’s, as if he could read in the air between them something of what had been said.

They took their leave shortly afterward, and Walker said harshly as the two men reached the motorcar, “I hope to God we find out who is committing these murders.”

Dropping Walker off at the police station, Rutledge changed into dry clothes, then went to find the rector of St. Mary’s Church.

The signboard at the gate into the churchyard gave the priest’s name as Ottley. As Rutledge was about to decide whether to try the rectory or the church first, he saw the man he was after just closing the rectory door and striding down the walk toward him.

“You’re the man from London,” the rector said, squinting at his face as Rutledge met him on the flagstone walk. He pulled out his spectacles for a better look. “Yes. Do you want me? I was on my way to see Mrs. Winslow, to offer what comfort I could. The constable left word to look in on her.”

“My name is Rutledge. Scotland Yard. I’d like five minutes of your time first. Is there somewhere we can speak privately?”

The rector gestured vaguely in the direction of a bench set under an apple tree growing between the church and the rectory, its gnarled, spreading branches offering good shade as the watery sun strengthened. “Will that do? My housekeeper is mopping floors. I doubt she’d care to have me tracking back inside.”

Rutledge led the way, and the vicar dusted the bench with a handkerchief before settling himself in one corner. Rutledge took the other.

“Sad circumstances we’re in,” the rector said with a sigh. “I can’t quite bring my mind around it, you know. Four murders! It’s unspeakable. I never dreamed of such a thing here in Eastfield.”