Watchers Of Time Part 13

Rutledge answered silently, "They don't judge. They merely observe."

"Aye," Hamish said. "But a man with a guilty conscience wouldna' find it verra' comfortable, that stare. I wouldna' care for it mysel'!"

CHAPTER 12.

LORD SEDGWICK SHOWED HIMSELF TO BE a genial host. He possessed a wry sense of humor, which Rutledge enjoyed, and seldom put his views ahead of those of his guest even when he must have had far more insight into political matters, moving as he did in such vastly different circles.

Rutledge, under no illusions (policemen were not invited to dine with the gentry-indeed, they were seldom welcomed at the front door), took care not to overstep his role. All the same, the hour pa.s.sed very pleasantly. The luncheon itself was excellent, finis.h.i.+ng with a plate of cheeses.

The loneliness of the man under the polish of a t.i.tled and privileged life was apparent. Sedgwick's wife had been dead some years, for he spoke of her with an old regret rather than a recent bereavement. Her portrait as a young American bride now hung in the library, he said at one juncture, replacing "a remarkably hideous work of dead rabbits and quail hanging from a nail" that Ralph, the first Lord Sedgwick, had fancied. Ralph had gone shooting with the Prince of Wales in his day, and "bagged enough to show his aim was excellent, but was careful never to exceed his host's count. Quickest way to see yourself off the royal invitation list!"

Arthur, Sedgwick's elder son, had had a taste for racing cars before the War, and had even won a motorcycle race of some note, early on in his career. Sedgwick had traveled to France to watch him compete, and he spoke with wistful enthusiasm for the excitement. "It rained, often as not. I lived in terror that he'd spin out on a curve. Arthur had nerves of steel when he got behind the wheel, and a feeling for the road-and that made him one of the finest drivers I'd ever seen. His wife begged him to give it up, but of course he couldn't. She didn't understand that it was his life, speed and risk."

"Racing is a dangerous sport," Rutledge responded. "And few women are attracted to the prospect of being widowed young."

Sedgwick grunted. "She was the one who died young, before they'd been married five years. Arthur took it hard, of course, but I must admit I was not particularly fond of her. A pretty simpleton."

Edwin, the younger son, appeared to worry Sedgwick. "I see much of my father in him. Strange, isn't it, how a man's nature can jump a generation?" It seemed not to be a compliment. But then the grandfather had made a fortune in the City, and was not, perhaps, a rough diamond in his own son's eyes.

Sedgwick dwelt on none of this, but a word here and there told Rutledge more than perhaps his host had meant to reveal. It was often a failing of lonely men.

"It doesna' signify," Hamish pointed out, "if there's naught to hide."

Certainly in Sedgwick's case, that appeared to be true.

As the table was cleared, Sedgwick looked out beyond the terrace at the expanse of formal beds and cropped lawns, and sighed. "I've a mind to marry again, myself. If only to fill this garden with young voices and bring a spark of life to the house. d.a.m.ned silly thing to do, but I'm not by nature a man who prefers his own company. Have a wife, do you?"

"No. The War altered any plans I might have made."

"Never too late to start over." He regarded Rutledge for a moment. "It's odd, you know, but you remind me of Arthur. I don't know quite how to put my finger on it. It's there in the way you carry yourself and something in your voice."

"A holdover from the Army," Rutledge said.

"I suppose it must be. You'd like him. A good man. And a deeper thinker than the rest of us-he got that from his mother, not my side. I see it more and more often these days." There was a sudden flash of grief in Sedgwick's face, as if Arthur wasn't the man he'd been before the War, losing that edge that had made him a fast driver and a das.h.i.+ng figure to watch in a race. Wounds changed a man in more ways than the physically apparent damage. Nerve, for one thing, was easily worn down by constant pain.

There had been a man named Seelingham on the boat to France at the start of the War, Rutledge remembered- he tried to dredge up an image of the man's face, and finally brought back a tall, dark, broad-shouldered figure with a taste for books in German. "Never too late," he'd said, "to learn about the enemy. Best way to outwit them, in my view. Otherwise you're tilting in the dark . . ." He'd been a racer, too, but never spoke of his family. Fast boats were his preference. Later Rutledge had heard that Seelingham had lost both legs in a lorry accident near Paris, and was invalided home. He had shot himself a month later.

Was Sedgwick afraid that Arthur's wound would lead him to self-destruction because he, too, was shut off from what he loved doing?

Rutledge changed the subject. They spoke only once more of Father James's death, and that in a roundabout way.

"We've had good weather for the most part, this autumn," Sedgwick was saying as he pushed back his chair, favoring his gouty foot a little. "Edwin has been down a time or two, and one morning we went over to Osterley- it was the morning they found the priest's body, actually, although we didn't know it at the time. It had begun to clear, and we left the car up by Holy Trinity Church, then walked as far as Cley, where Evans met us again. We had a look at the dikes and the big windmill, ate our luncheon by the marshes, and came home ravenous. Couldn't do that today. b.l.o.o.d.y foot!"

Pa.s.sing through the drawing room later, Sedgwick paused to show Rutledge a watercolor of Osterley in its prime-"One of the Chastains had it painted. It's said to be by Constable, but there's no provenance." Rutledge also noticed a photograph sitting on the windowsill to his right: A man standing by the marshes, shotgun in the crook of his arm, and a setter at his feet looking up adoringly as if eager to run. If Sedgwick saw his straying glance, he made no comment. He didn't have to. Rutledge recognized the face and the dog. Edwin, the younger son, who kept a boat in Osterley's harbor . . .

A short time later he was on his way back to Osterley. The chauffeur had nothing to say, and Rutledge preferred his own thoughts.

Hamish, still mulling over the luncheon conversation, was busy in the back of his mind. Coming around again to the subject of Lord Sedgwick himself, Hamish said, "He's no' a man I'm comfortable with. He's verra' like Sergeant Mullins."

It was an odd comparison. Mullins had replaced Sergeant McIver, shot in the hip and invalided home. Both Sergeants had come up through the ranks, where the heavy attrition of the Battle of the Somme had given men seniority overnight, prepared for it or not. Mullins was a seasoned soldier, careful, gruff, and humorless. He had been a butcher by trade, and could determine at a glance whether a wound was likely to see a man relieved or just patched up at the nearest aid station and returned to the lines. Sentiment seldom played a role.

Lord Sedgwick had that same quality of practical reality that had carried Mullins through the War. He took his world in stride and dealt with it without sentiment.

And yet Rutledge had sensed something else in this man, a wistful desire to be the local squire, as the Chastains had been before him. But he was tainted by his father's roots, and villagers were often greater sn.o.bs than their betters. Money could buy some loyalties, but blue blood brought respect.

"That explains," Rutledge answered Hamish's line of thought, "why Sedgwick was eager to put up a reward for Father James's killer. The Chastains would probably have done the same."

Still, the Sedgwicks had, in two generations, gone from the streets of London to an inheritable t.i.tle and weekends at Sandringham with the royal entourage. The first Lord Sedgwick, Ralph, whose antecedents had probably been of questionable bloodlines, had had to settle for an American bride for his only son. But his grandsons, with any luck, would find themselves wed to daughters of the old aristocracy, and their their sons fully accepted as t.i.tled gentlemen with no lingering odor of trade about them. sons fully accepted as t.i.tled gentlemen with no lingering odor of trade about them.

Three generations, that was what it took to bridge the social gap. . . .

The future of the dynasty now rested on Arthur's shoulders, and his brother's.

Unless Lord Sedgwick was indeed considering a second- and far more advantageously connected-bride, to better their chances through a stepmother's connections.

It never hurt, in present royal circles, to have a very presentable wife.

Coming into Osterley again, Rutledge turned his thoughts to his own role here.

He was expected not to tread on Blevins's toes. The Inspector had already made that clear. But the more Rutledge learned about the people who lived in Osterley, the better he saw the dead priest-and was finding himself drawn into the theory that the man's life had some bearing on his death.

His fingers gently ma.s.saged the scar on his chest, stilling the dull ache.

Still, Walsh was the ideal solution to the b.l.o.o.d.y crime on Blevins's doorstep. He wasn't a local man-and from the start the Inspector hadn't wanted to discover that his killer was someone he knew. Walsh had a connection with the priest, one that didn't in any way reflect on Father James's memory: The bazaar was a public occasion. Finally, the motive appeared to be simple greed. No seduced wives in St. Anne's congregation, no abused choirboys, no dark secrets that would destroy the man and the office simultaneously.

A very convenient solution indeed. For everyone except Walsh, of course.

But Rutledge was learning that Blevins kneaded his evidence like a loaf of bread, forming it to his own satisfaction.

Whereas his London counterpart was more likely to gather the scattered parts of the human puzzle and look closely at them for bits of knowledge he could string together.

Hamish said, "You'd do better to go back to London, then! You willna' convince yon Inspector that he's made a mistake. And you'll be branded along with him if it all goes wrong!"

Rutledge answered, "Nothing less than a signed confession will serve."

He had meant it lightly, but realized all at once that he had unwittingly defined the course of his own inquiry.

At the door of the hotel, Rutledge thanked the chauffeur- and turned to find three local people staring with interest at the sight of a policeman alighting from Lord Sedgwick's motorcar.

The news would be all over Osterley in an hour.

Rutledge walked up Water Street to the police station. There was a constable on duty. He shook his head when asked for any news.

"The new cart was ordered well before the bazaar, half down then and two payments to follow, the last one on delivery, which was after after the murder. The Inspector is happy about that. But there's a scissors sharpener who's come to light. The man swears he was with Walsh the night the priest was killed." the murder. The Inspector is happy about that. But there's a scissors sharpener who's come to light. The man swears he was with Walsh the night the priest was killed."

"What's the likelihood that he's telling the truth?"

"Inspector Blevins has gone to speak to the man himself. The Inspector's not in the best of spirits, I can tell you!"

There was a man sitting on the edge of the quay when Rutledge came back to the hotel. Under his dangling feet a dozen or so ducks padded about in the muddy trickle of water, catching the bits of stale bread that were being thrown down to them. The man's concentration was intense as he fed them. The slump of his shoulders was familiar-Rutledge had seen him bent over a newspaper at a table in the back corner of The Pelican. A gray cat, curious about all the feathery activity, sat some ten feet away, watching the ducks. It seemed to ignore the man, as if he had no reality but was only a part of the quay.

Closer, Rutledge could see the strain on the haggard face, etched by the bright sunlight into deep and defensive lines. The dark hair was threaded with gray. It was an odd time of the afternoon to see a man sitting idle. . . .

Rutledge pa.s.sed him by, turning toward the hotel.

As he entered the lobby, Mrs. Barnett stuck her head out of the tiny cubicle that served as her office. She smiled and said, "Inspector? There's been a telephone message from London for you. Would you care to return it now?"

It was a message from Sergeant Wilkerson, and after nearly three quarters of an hour of searching for the man, Wilkerson was located and instructed to contact Rutledge again.

Wilkerson's rough voice came down the line with such a roar that Rutledge had to hold the receiver away from his ear. The Sergeant was of the school that believed that shouting compensated for any small insufficiencies in the telephone system.

"Chief Superintendent Bowles asked me to find you, sir. He wants you back in London as soon as may be."

"I'm involved with the investigation here-" Rutledge began defensively.

"Yes, sir, he knows that. But we've found a body. Whether she's connected with your murder or not, we can't say. But the Chief Superintendent wants you to have a look."

Rutledge felt cold. There was no clear reasoning behind his reaction. But he was afraid to ask the name, afraid he might already know what it was. He'd only just heard it himself.

Marianna Elizabeth Trent.

Another dead end . . .

Driving hard and fast, Rutledge reached London in the middle of the next morning. Stopping briefly at his flat to shave and change his clothes, he went in search of Sergeant Wilkerson at the Yard.

They had not worked together very often. Wilkerson was Inspector Joyce's man, and seldom free for other a.s.signments. Joyce, in his mid-fifties, was a plodding but thorough policeman with no expectation of advancement and no desire for any. He had said, often enough, that policework and not paperwork was his pleasure, and the higher one goes, the deeper the tonnage of paper.

Wilkerson greeted Rutledge with some surprise. "You must have driven all the night, sir. Would you care for a spot of tea brought up to your office?"

"I did." Hamish was all that had kept him awake on the road, after Colchester. And even Hamish had lost his edge on the outskirts of London. "Yes, send someone for tea, and then come upstairs."

The tea provided by the Yard was black and strong enough to cope with any man's drowsiness, coating the stomach with an unspeakable sludge that held the body upright for hours.

A few minutes later, Wilkerson stepped into Rutledge's office and took the chair by the door. He waited until the constable on his heels had delivered Rutledge's tea before beginning his report.

The Sergeant was as big as his voice, florid of face with thinning sandy hair and a double chin that overlapped the collar of his uniform, giving the impression he was on the brink of choking to death. A man who had come up through the ranks but bore no malice toward Rutledge, who had come from a very different background.

He began his report diffidently. "About this woman, sir. It was the usual thing. One of the boats on the river found her; can't say whether she went in by accident or design. Bloated but hadn't been there long enough for the fish to get at her. There were some bruises, but nothing to signify anything more than the tossing she'd taken in the water. The problem was identification."

Rutledge, swallowing his tea with a grimace, nodded. Identification of the corpse was the first order of police work.

"She had none on her-no letters or papers or the like-and she didn't match any of our missing persons records. We advertised more than a week for information. Then a woman who keeps a boardinghouse walked into a local station and reported that a lodger had skipped without paying her rent, and wanted her found. Right balmy old b.i.t.c.h, I'm told, arrogant and demanding. But the Sergeant on duty remembered the description of our la.s.s, and soon enough they had the landlady down at the morgue. She couldn't have identified the body-she only gave it a glance-but she did say the hair was right. We showed her the clothes the deceased was found in, but she wasn't what you'd call certain what the lodger was wearing the last time she'd gone out. Or whether she could have been provided a new wardrobe by any gentleman she had taken up with. But the landlady did fling another fit about not getting her money, which made Inspector Joyce suspect she must be fairly sure it was the missing woman."

Rutledge asked, before Wilkerson could put a name to the corpse, "Any trouble with her before? The landlady?"

"None, except for the occasional lodger who disappears with back rent owing. Then she's demanding the police earn their keep. She gets a cla.s.s of women who aren't steadily employed, if you take my meaning."

"Why did Chief Superintendent Bowles think the dead woman might be connected with the murder in Norfolk?"

"Stands to reason, doesn't it? The la.s.s worked as a s.h.i.+ll for an Italian bloke who-the landlady claims-died in the War. Then she spent the better part of the summer with a Strong Man's show, called himself Samson. Your man Walsh, it appears. Landlady remembers when he came to collect her, because of his size. They had a few words, did the landlady and this Iris Kenneth, on parting. But Mrs. Rollings took her back again when the Strong Man was tired of her!"

Iris Kenneth, then. With no connection to Father James . . .

After a visit to the morgue to look at the body and the woman's clothing, Rutledge went with Sergeant Wilkerson to the small boardinghouse on a run-down street where Londoners with thin pockets often took rooms. It was just off Eustace Road, where industry had crowded out anyone who could afford to move on. Mrs. Rollings was plump, with tightly curled black hair, a pinched mouth, and an air of long-suffering. When Wilkerson introduced Rutledge to her, she looked him up and down, then said, bristling, "It doesn't do my establishment any good to have a policeman at the door every other day! This is a respectable respectable house." house."

Rutledge smiled. "I'm sure it is." She thawed visibly as the smile touched his eyes. "We've come to ask if you still have Iris Kenneth's belongings."

"Lord love you, why should I have kept them? Didn't bring in much, I can tell you, not near enough to pay what I was owed. And I needed the room."

She looked up and down the street with the same suspicious air with which she'd regarded Rutledge, and then stepped back from the door. "Do come inside, before I have to explain to half the neighborhood why I'm entertaining the police again!"

They followed her into a musty entry, where a flight of worn stairs ran up into darkness. The windowless entry itself was nearly as dark, for the gla.s.s panes in the door didn't cast light beyond the first step, and the lamp was turned so low that it had long since given up trying to illuminate anything but the small circle of brightness on the gray ceiling and the first landing. Mrs. Rollings opened a door on her left, and led them into her sitting room.

It was surprisingly comfortable, if shabby. There were odds and ends of porcelain on the mantelpiece, including a demure shepherdess with a leering satyr at her shoulder. The juxtaposition of the pieces was nearly lewd. Rutledge wondered if it exemplified Mrs. Rollings's sense of humor or the tastes of her guests. Prints on the other two walls were of theatrical productions, one Sarah Bernhardt's Hamlet Hamlet and the other a popular act in the music halls some twenty years ago. Mrs. Rollings herself wore rouge that stood out like two fever spots under the powder, and her hair was dyed. The jeweled rings on her plump fingers were cheap paste, one of them large enough to have poison secreted in it. Rutledge's opinion was that it might have once been a prop in an Italian play. and the other a popular act in the music halls some twenty years ago. Mrs. Rollings herself wore rouge that stood out like two fever spots under the powder, and her hair was dyed. The jeweled rings on her plump fingers were cheap paste, one of them large enough to have poison secreted in it. Rutledge's opinion was that it might have once been a prop in an Italian play.

She offered them the horsehair settle, and the two men sat gingerly side by side on the stiff upholstery. It smelled of dust and old dog. She herself took a very pretty wing chair covered with a faded but handsome brocade. On the table at her elbow was a collection of sh.e.l.ls and a number of pottery jugs with the names of seaside towns painted on them. Where her guests had worked?

Hamish, his Covenanter soul offended by anything remotely smacking of the G.o.dless theatrical world Mrs. Rollings inhabited, declared, "She's no' going to give you an honest answer! It isna' in her nature."

"We'll see," Rutledge told him. Aloud he asked, "Did you like Miss Kenneth?"

"What has liking got to do with it?" She stared at him, genuinely surprised. "As long as my guests pay me on time and in full, I like them very well."

"Was she a clever girl?"

"She was pretty. She thought that would take her far. But not far enough if she ended up in the river." Mrs. Rollings leaned forward. "Now what was this about Iris's belongings?" There was an avaricious glint in her eyes.

"Do you know if she might have owned a pair of old shoes, a man's, with a worn heel and a tear in the sole?"

Mrs. Rollings's eyebrows rose almost to her hairline. "Old shoes shoes? Men's shoes shoes?"

"Yes. We'd like very much to know if she possessed such a pair." Realizing that the concept was totally foreign to his hostess, Rutledge added, "Perhaps from some role or other."

Wilkerson, stolid and silent, was looking around the room as if he expected to find something nasty hidden behind the wallpaper.

"Well, I should think not! She wasn't the kind of girl who played in farce-she didn't have the talent for it! It was more in her line to stand there looking respectable and drawing custom. She was quite lovely in green. You'd have thought her a lady, if she didn't open her mouth." Lovely was p.r.o.nounced as luuvley luuvley.

Wilkerson said, "Then you are telling us that no such shoes were found in her belongings?"

"None that I know of! And I was fairly careful in searching through them."

"Would another-er-guest have searched them before you did?" the Sergeant continued.