Wings of Fire (13 page)

The next morning Rutledge sent a carefully worded message to London.

“Background material sparse but enlightening. No determination of crime possible at this time. Will take several more days, if presence not required in City.”

Nothing to alarm Bowles, nothing to prevent Rutledge from coming to any conclusion he chose. And he had a feeling his superior would not be anxious to see him in London straight away.

The Monday papers had been awash with news of another killing in the City. Bowles had been interviewed in depth about the Yard’s pursuit of the murderer, and talked fulsomely of modern forensic science and its role in tracking down the guilty party. Bowles leaned towards cold fact rather than intuition and a careful analysis of the killer’s reasons for acting
now
, against this
particular
victim, and in this
particular
place. Rutledge had found that scientists were not always the best witnesses in the box, and as often as not a good man for the defense could walk rings around them.

He looked at his own cold facts. That Cormac had seen Olivia shove her sister out of an apple tree. That Olivia hadn’t had the heart to dispose of her trophies of the dead, even in the face of her own death. That they were an admission of guilt in six possible murders, not just the two that Cormac
laid at Olivia’s door—indicating, perhaps, a cooler, more cunning skill as the child grew older.

But these facts, alone or together, were not sufficient proof of guilt in a courtroom. Cormac was young at the time, his own memory might have been at fault. A good barrister might point out that Olivia could have had those small articles in her possession for any number of reasons: she’d been given them, she’d taken them as a childhood prank, she’d won them in a wager. In themselves, without more evidence to lay out beside them, they couldn’t be viewed as the fruits of sin.

Her papers might hold a confession. However convoluted or concealed in verse. But poets and writers were allowed literary license. That too could prove to be more circumstantial than conclusive.

Who then among the living might give him the proof he needed? Who would make a dependable, incontrovertible witness in the box?

He set out to look for one.

Constable Dawlish, finishing his breakfast in his wife’s sunny kitchen, came out to the parlor to listen and found Rutledge’s line of questioning hard to follow.

So did Hamish, who was still contending that they’d both live to regret staying on in Cornwall, and was muttering ominously about Rutledge’s own stubbornness.

“You’re asking about Mr.
Nicholas
’ father?” Dawlish asked. “And Mr. Stephen’s father? That was well before my time in uniform, sir! But James Cheney shot himself in his own gun room, and everyone knew he’d been blaming himself for what happened to his son. He took it hard, and who’s to say whether the revolver went off by accident or of a purpose? Death by misadventure was the coroner’s verdict, and Mrs. Cheney, sick with grief, thanked him for it. Are you thinking that she or one of the children might have shot him?” Dawlish shook his head. “I’d as soon believe my own wife would take a gun to
my
head, as Mrs. Cheney! You didn’t know her, sir! And as for the children, they weren’t old enough, any of them, to do such mischief. Besides, no man in his right mind would have let a child so young handle
a gun, much less play about with a loaded one.”

“And Brian FitzHugh’s death?”

“His horse threw him down by the sea, and he hit his head, drowned in the surf before anyone back at the house knew what had happened. They had to put the horse down as well, caught his leg in the rocks and damaged it badly. Mr. Cormac cried over it like a baby, holding it in his arms until Wilkins could fetch a pistol and do the job. Miss Olivia stood there watching, staring at Mr. Cormac as if he’d run mad. But Mr. Cormac, he’d trained that horse himself, and it was the best three-year-old the stables had had in twelve years.”

“How do you know what Cormac and Olivia were doing?”

The constable’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Why, my father was a carpenter, sir, he was working in the stables at the time, rebuilding the stalls where they kept the mares waiting to foal. Mrs. Cheney had another wing put on for that.”

“Is your father still alive?”

“No, sir, he died in the first year of the war.”

A dead end. “Well, then, what was the story behind young Richard’s disappearance?”

“There’s a dozen ways a boy could die out on the moors. He wouldn’t be the first lad to come to grief there. Nor the last.”

“If he died on the moors, why was there no body found?”

“They looked, sir. They combed the rocks and the pools and the old mine shafts, they probed the quicksand, they put up flyers in all the towns around, they talked to the folk who live by the moors and to the gypsies who’d been camping near there in the month before. My father was in one of the search parties, and I went along with him. It was thorough.”

“I want you to send men out again. To search the same ground, to draw me a map of where you’ve looked and what you’ve seen. Anything—a button, a scrap of cloth, a bone. I want it all brought in, and the spot marked on the map. Then I’ll check it again myself.”

“Sir!” Dawlish protested, aghast. “These are farmers and fishermen hereabouts, with a livelihood to earn! Have you
any idea how many men it’ll take? And what a waste of time and energy that’ll be?”

“Time and energy don’t matter. Finding that boy’s body does.”

“And if after all our work, there’s none found?”

“Then I’ll know for a certainty that it can’t be found.”

Dawlish stared at the gaunt face, the intelligent, angry eyes. Humor the man from Scotland Yard, he’d been told. What he wants, let him have. As long as he returns to London as soon as possible, and with no cause to give a black eye to the local police in the matter of doing their duty.

With a sigh, he glanced at the napkin in his hand, then back to Rutledge. “I’ll see that it’s done, sir. You can leave it to me.” But privately he was thinking that Scotland Yard would have been better served by putting their man onto finding that bloody killer in London, instead of raising a stir in far off Cornwall, where there was no connection to any murders.

The morning sun quickly gave way to clouds and rain, slow and steady, that drove the inn’s keel players indoors to pass their time with skittles and long, rambling stories that seemed to lead nowhere except to wrangling over trifling details. For half an hour, Rutledge listened to them argue about which horse won the Derby in 1874 because someone swore old Mickelson had named his favorite dog after it. Even the innkeeper, Mr. Trask, couldn’t tell Rutledge who Mickelson was.

“Could be he were that actor. A troop played in Truro one winter, and my father spoke highly of them. One had a little dog’d do tricks. I doubt half of
them
remember, either, who Mickelson might be, though you could hang and quarter them before they’d admit to it. Waiting for someone, are you, sir?”

In fact he was waiting for Dr. Penrith, though he didn’t say so. Several women came in, asking for him too, but the retired doctor was not in his usual corner and it appeared he wouldn’t be.

In the end, Rutledge walked down to Dr. Hawkins’ surgery. When Mrs. Hawkins stuck her head out the door, trying
to keep the rain out of her hallway, Rutledge asked for her father instead of her husband. Surprised, she said, “He’s through by the fire, sir. His joints are bothering him fiercely in this wet. Will you come this way, please?”

She took him into the part of the house where the family lived, and down a passage to a small room at the back. The fire burned high, a rush of warmth suffocating Rutledge after his brisk walk through the rain. The wool in his coat began to steam gently, giving off a distinct odor of Harris sheep.

Mrs. Hawkins promised them tea shortly, and left them. Dr. Penrith, pleased to see anyone to fill his empty hours, profusely welcomed Rutledge and insisted that he take a chair close by the hearth. A small spaniel, resting her nose on her master’s foot, stared at him myopically as he came across the room, and thumped a tail on the hearth rug. Rutledge, feeling like a man unfairly condemned to walk in flames for a time, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, commiserated with his host on the afflictions of age, and then gently turned the conversation to the Trevelyan family.

Smiling, Dr. Penrith began to reminisce about Adrian Trevelyan, with whom he’d had a running battle over ancient Cornish legends as well as the Arthurian romances. With a chuckle he added, “Half the parish histories in England’ve been written by parish priests and doctors, but that old fool studied at Winchester and Cambridge, and thought himself a scholar. Pshaw! He wanted to track Arthur back to the Romans, but he’s a
West Country
hero, and nothing to do with the Romans!”

Rutledge could hear the fondness in his voice, and pictured the two men arguing over their port for the sheer joy of contradiction and controversy. In lonely lives, even the smallest battles gave great satisfaction.

“Lancelot came from France,” he pointed out, shifting in his chair as his knees turned to burned toast. Hamish, as always sensitive to Rutledge’s moods, grumbled about hellfire and damnation in the back of his mind.

“Aye, and wasn’t it just like a Frenchman to get around
Guinevere! There’d been no whispers of such goings-on until Frogs took up the tales!”

Rutledge stifled a laugh and used the opening to change the direction of the conversation. “What were the whispers about the Hall, and Adrian Trevelyan’s beautiful daughter?”

“None!” the doctor turned to retort angrily. “Like Caesar’s wife, Rosamund was always above reproach!”

“What happened to Richard Trevelyan?”

The old eyes clouded with pain. “Who can say? If the gypsies had taken him, you’d think he’d have come home when he could get away. But there’s been no boy ringing the doorbell to claim he’s Richard. And no man either.”

“Would Rosamund have believed them if they had come?”

“She was an intelligent woman. She tried to believe he’d been taken away—or run away and been lost, then found and not returned. It kept hope alive in her heart, and she told James the boy would turn up, wait and see! That he’d gone off to join the army, and some farmer or carter would be bringing him back soon enough, tired and hungry.”

“And Miss Olivia?”

Dr. Penrith frowned. “Now there was an odd thing, you know. Miss Olivia never cried. She went out with the searchers, riding a pony because of her bad leg, and was gone all that day and the next, until I met her on one of the roads and sent her home. I’ve never seen a child look so tired; I thought she’d made herself ill again. But she stared at me, then said, ‘Richard wanted a tombstone with an angel on it. He told me so. I want to buy one, just a small one, to remember him by. Can you tell me how much it will cost?’”

“How did you answer her?” Rutledge asked, intrigued.

“That they don’t put up tombstones until they have the body, and she said, quite seriously, ‘But that’s not true. There are markers in the churchyard for any man lost at sea.’ She had a raging fever by the time they got her home, and I heard no more about angels and tombstones.”

Rutledge found himself thinking of a poem in one of the earlier volumes. It began,

He tried to recall the last lines and failed.

But Hamish, the soft Scottish burr clear in his voice, provided them for him.

Olivia herself had known where Richard lay—find him there, and the case was made!

When tea was brought, Rutledge asked about James Cheney’s death, and Dr. Penrith shook his head sadly. “I couldn’t tell Rosamund how he died. And at least he’d had sense enough to put the barrel to his temple and not in his mouth, for all the world to know what he’d been about! But who can say whether it was accidental or not, whether the thought came to him suddenly and he hadn’t the will to turn it aside. One round was all he had put in the cylinder, and he used it. To end the pain. That was my guess.”

“Who was in the house that day?”

“They all were. Olivia. Nicholas. Rosamund. And Adrian, of course. FitzHugh was there, he’d brought over the new brood mares. It was Cormac came for me, pleading for me to make haste, to do something. But it was useless. I knew that as soon as I saw James’ body.”

“And you never thought of murder?”

“Good God! Self-murder is terrible enough! And who would want to kill James? He was a
kind
man, a good man. The house had seen enough grief already, who could possibly
want to add to Rosamund’s burdens? There’s no one alive that cruel!”

Agitated, he spilled his tea, and Rutledge knelt to mop it up with his napkin, his back to the scorching fire.

“What did Olivia have to say when she was told of James’ death?”

“I don’t remember,” Penrith said testily. “It was a long time ago, and I was not concerned with Olivia, I was worried about Rosamund, and her father. He never recovered his spirits after that, you could see it clear.”

The old eyes, fading into a milky gray, looked back into a past he didn’t want to remember. “I walked behind their coffins,” he said sadly. “Not because they’d been in my care. Not for Adrian’s sake. But because in that house I found something I’ve never felt since under any roof, not even my own. Laughter was there, and happiness. And most of all, a glory. Brian FitzHugh told me once that it was in the very stones of the Hall, that it had been handed down with the Trevelyan blood and the Trevelyan land. That’s romantic nonsense, an Irishman’s blarney. But I knew what it was, I knew from the very first day I set eyes on her. It was Rosamund…”