Death Devil's Bridge (19 page)

“I shall be glad to help in the investigation, Ned,” he offered, “with photographs, too, if you like.”

Laken nodded. “Shortly after daybreak, then, at Devil's Bridge. I think you know the spot.”

“I do,” Charles said. Devil's Hill was the steepest in the entire area. He would not have chanced driving a motorcar down its treacherous slope. But then, he knew the area. Albrecht could not have known that the road was so steep.

Laken clapped his hand on Jessup's shoulder. “Come along, then, Jessup. It's time we had a talk.” The two men left the room.

Albrecht groaned again, a horrible, bubbling sound, and Charles turned back to the table. He bent over the driver and caught a fleeting phrase.

“No accident,” Albrecht said in a guttural whisper. He was racked by a hard cough that shook his entire body. “Brake ... tampered...” He coughed again, and clutched at his chest with one hand. The other came up and Charles grasped it.

“You're saying that the brake failed because it had been tampered with?”

Albrecht's nod, if it was a nod, was barely perceptible. His eyes were closed, his breathing shallow, his lips blue. The only color in his face was the froth of bright red blood and sputum that bubbled from his lips.

“The hill is steep,” Charles said, and thought about the braking mechanism, a block of wood faced with leather, designed to rub against the turning tire. “Perhaps the brake simply could not hold the vehicle.”

With an enormous effort, Albrecht turned his head from side to side. “Brake slip ...” he said, and began to cough. “Left brake slippery...” He lifted his left hand, and Charles saw that the fingertips bore traces of a greasy substance.

Albrecht shuddered. Grasping Charles's hand, he half-raised himself, opened his eyes wide, and gasped out something unintelligible. Then, with a long, rattling groan, he fell back.

The doctor came hurrying into the room, carrying another lamp. Behind him was his nurse, with a cloth-covered tray. “You will probably want to leave, Charles,” he said, putting the lamp on the shelf above the examining table. “This will be a bloody business, and—”

“The bloody business is ended,” Charles said, and straightened. He placed Albrecht's hand on his chest and closed the man's eyes with his fingers. “He is dead.”

 

“I'm sorry, my dear,” Kate said simply. She rose from the sofa and poured Charles's favorite whisky, neat, as he liked it. As she returned to him, she touched his shoulder, loving the strong set of his jaw and the unruliness of his thick brown hair, and noticing the weariness around his eyes. It was after eleven, and the day had been very long and difficult-more for him than for her. He had endured a dangerous balloon flight which might have ended tragically, and had watched a man die. She had had only to manage Rolls's Peugeot, and dinner, and their guests.

Charles took the glass with a heavy sigh, leaned back in his leather chair and put his feet on the ottoman. “A sad thing,” he said, and sipped his whisky. “Gruesome, too. I admire Brax's coolness, Kate. How he can cut into a human body—” He shuddered. “I was not made for a surgeon.”

Kate sat on the ottoman and pulled Charles's boots off. “So he autopsied poor Herr Albrecht, then?”

“It seemed the prudential thing to do, especially since the body was already on the examining table. I also sent word to the coroner, mentioning that there might be some concern about the nature of this accident Harry is to meet us at the scene of the crash after daybreak.” He stretched his toes, and Kate took his stockinged feet into her lap. “Given the spot where it happened, there is very little that can be done tonight, except to guard the scene from intruders, of course. Ned has taken care of that.”

“And the cause of death?” Kate prompted gently, massaging his instep. This was the evening ritual she loved most: Charles in his chair, she rubbing his shoulders or his feet. Beryl Bardwell (modern woman that she was) might well sniff at the
wifeliness
of it, but Kate found it enormously satisfying—almost as satisfying as when, later, Charles returned the favor.

“The tiller snapped off in the impact and the shaft was thrust through his chest. One lung was punctured and had totally collapsed by the time he was found. It is nothing short of a miracle that he lasted as long as he did—nearly twelve hours.” Charles frowned. “He managed to get out a few words, with almost his last breath. He said it was no accident, Kate.”

Kate was startled. “Those were Dunstable's words too, Charles! ‘No accident,' he said, over and over again.” And she told him what had transpired in the drawing room between Dunstable and the others. “I wouldn't have been at all surprised if they hadn't ended by accusing one another of murder,” she said earnestly. “There is something going on here, Charles. This is not as straightfoward as it might seem.”

“It isn't straightforward at all,” Charles replied. “I have not yet seen the crash scene, but Ned suspects foul play. It was Young Jessup who discovered the wreckage, you see. I didn't get an opportunity to talk with Ned because it was urgent that I get what I could from Albrecht. But when I left the surgery, there was a light in the jail. Ned was still interrogating Jessup.”

Kate regarded him soberly. Jessup? Yes, she could see that logic. The young man had been loud in his claims, for a time, at least, that Bradford's Daimler was responsible for his father's death—the very same Daimler that now lay in the ravine beneath Devil's Bridge. If foul play were involved, it was logical to think of Jessup first. Perhaps he had only professed to accept the coroner's ruling of death by natural causes and had been waiting to exact revenge in a craftier, more cunning way, by arranging for the motorcar to be involved in an accident, in a spot where a crash was sure to end in serious injury or death for the driver. And that would not be hard to do, Kate thought, reflecting on her own wild ride in the Peugeot. If a pedestrian had stepped into her path, and she had swerved or tried to brake, the motorcar would certainly have tipped over and crashed. The crime would have been nearly perfect, for someone on foot would have left no evidence at the scene.

But as she massaged Charles's heels and began to sort through the myriad images of the evening, Kate could not escape the conviction that Jessup was not the only one who might harbor a guilty secret. To judge from their behavior, her guests—more than one of them—had been hiding something, some individual or shared knowledge. It might not have to do with the wreck of the Daimler, but then again it might.

And Albrecht's death wasn't the only mystery afoot. There was the assault on Dunstable, for instance. According to his report, two men had jumped on him in the alley, hit him over the head, and buried him in the dung heap. Or was that account a clever fabrication, contrived to explain an otherwise inexplicable absence? And there was that mysterious business of the grapnel's removal, which could so easily have resulted in two more deaths. If the balloonists had died, would those fatalities have been thought accidental?

Charles gave her a crooked smile. “And you, my love? How did you superintend that unruly crew through dinner?”

“Swiftly,” Kate said with a little laugh, putting her troublesome thoughts aside. “No one seemed to have much of an appetite, so I asked Mudd to see that the plates were removed and the next course brought as quickly as possible. We romped through dinner with very little conversation other than the snapping and snarling among the men. And then the ladies and I adjourned—gratefully, I must say—to take our coffee in the drawing room. That was the moment at which Lady Henrietta put in her startling appearance and—”

“What?” Charles sat bolt upright. “The Marsdens have come back?”

“Oh, yes,” Kate said emphatically and laughed again, but with hardly any humor. “I didn't say so straightaway? No, I suppose I was too engrossed in your news, Charles. Yes, the Marsdens are back, both of them, and Lady Henrietta came posthaste to fetch her daughter and her sister-in-law out of the devil's den. She was a bit put out,” Kate added. “Patsy and Penelope had brought the coach, so poor Lady Henrietta was reduced to the pony carriage.”

Kate smiled wryly as she recalled the scene: Lady Henrietta, red as a turkey, barging imperiously into the drawing room and demanding that her daughter leave immediately; Patsy, pale but far more composed in the face of her mother's wrath than Kate would have thought possible; and Penelope, dithering and blithering through a dozen apologies.

“Lady Henrietta also brought Charlie Rolls's portmanteau,” Kate added. “I gather that he is to be evicted from Marsden Manor and denied all association with Patsy. I swear, Charles. If the situation had not been so horrible, it would have been funny, and inspiring. Beryl Bardwell was absolutely enthralled.”

Charles scowled at her. “Don't you dare,” he said.

Kate sighed, remembering an occasion on which Beryl had used Lady Henrietta in her fiction and had nearly brought herself to grief thereby. “I suppose you're right,” she said, and wondered whether she should tell him about Beryl's little experiment with the crystal.

But Charles had something else on his mind. “I wonder what brought the Marsdens back so prematurely from their holiday,” he said. “Bradford gave me to understand that they were to remain in France for another few weeks, and then go on to Spain.”

“It was a telegram,” Kate said. “Someone telegraphed a warning that Patsy was misbehaving, and the intelligence compelled Lady Henrietta to pack and rush home, frothing at the mouth and trailing Lord Christopher behind her.”

“A telegram?” Charles looked aghast. “You're joking!”

“Exaggerating, perhaps,” Kate said lightly. “But there was a telegram, which apparently also mentioned that Bradford had gotten himself into a spot of trouble with his car—the Jessup business, I presume. Lady Henrietta hinted that Lord Christopher would be taking a very strict line with their son.” She tilted her head. “Can you guess who sent it?”

“The telegram?” Charles shook his head in bewilderment. “Of course not. Can you?”

“Why, it was Squire Thornton, of course,” Kate said decidedly. “I can't imagine anyone else with a stake in Patsy's affairs—nor anyone else who might have been mean-spirited enough to tattle. I certainly hope that Patsy has the spine to stand up to her mother where that marriage is concerned.”

“Oh, Kate, Kate,” Charles sighed. “The things you see and understand constantly amaze me.” He pulled her into the chair with him. “Kiss me, sweet, and take the taste of this wretched day out of my mouth.”

The kiss, and those that followed, were distracting, and for a time Kate forgot everything else. But later, lying beside Charles in their big bed, she could not stop turning the day's events over in her mind, and wondering where the truth lay.

Had Dunstable really been hit on the head and dumped in the dung heap? Such a thing would have been simple enough to counterfeit, with assistance—or even alone, if those who discovered him had been too startled to closely examine his bonds and gag. And the fatal motorcar crash: was it an accident, or something else? Was Jessup's discovery of the wreck merely an odd coincidence, or was the man somehow responsible for what had happened? And there was the near-tragedy of the grapnel. Whose hand had pulled it from its place on the gondola? Had it been Whipple, as everyone seemed to think, or someone else?

After what seemed hours, she fell into an uneasy sleep. But even sleep brought no relief, only troubled dreams through which she piloted Rolls's Peugeot down narrow lanes lined with blackthorn hedges, dodging cows and constables. Her arms were weary from wrestling with the tiller, her body ached from the jouncing, bouncing ride.

And then, on the dark edge between dreaming and waking, she found herself at the top of Devil's Hill, overlooking the River Stour. The vista was enrapturing. Dedham Vale lay below, the willow-lined river flowing placidly through emerald meadows that were dotted with fluffy sheep and black-and-white cows, a delicate, romantic landscape from a painting by Constable. But above the valley, as if swept along by a gale, flew the striped balloon, and in the wildly swinging gondola she saw Charles, signaling frantically to her that the grapnel was gone and they were about to attempt a landing.

“Come!” he cried, his voice faint in the distance. “Hurry, you'll be late! Come as fast as you can, and bring the grapnel!”

So Kate, thinking only of Charles's danger, released the brake, speeded up the engine, and started down Devil's Hill. But in her dream, suddenly turned into the most frightening nightmare of her life, she seemed to be driving down an impossible precipice. The fearsome angle of the descent turned her bones to jelly, and her heart began to pound in a rhythm that matched the motorcar's loud chug-chug. She gripped the tiller, braced her feet against the curving floorboard, and slowed the engine speed, hoping it would serve as a brake.

But the motorcar, snorting like a wild rhinoceros, began to gather speed, thundering down the hill until she was flying at the unthinkable speed of twenty miles an hour, the top-heavy vehicle lurching violently, tipping first onto two wheels, then crashing onto four, only to tip to the other side, like a runaway carriage that had broken loose from its horses. She laid her hand on the brake lever but did not push it. At this speed, braking would do no good: the leather-covered wooden blocks that rubbed on the tires would be burned up in an instant. All she could do was hold on, and pray.

This mad, bone-rattling ride went on and on as she plummeted down the hill. But at last she was at the bottom. If she could hold the road, she would shoot across Devil's Bridge and up the hill on the other side of the deep, wooded ravine, where the runaway momentum would be slowed. But just before she reached the wooden bridge, she saw a caped and hooded figure appear as if from nowhere and step into the middle of the road. In its hands was the iron grapnel. The figure turned full toward her and raised the grapnel. In an instant of sheer terror, Kate saw that the figure had no face.