The Red Door (13 page)

P
eter Teller sat in his garden in Bolingbroke Street and poured himself another glass of whisky. His hand was shaking, but he was far from as drunk as he wanted to be.

His brother Walter was back, greeted like the prodigal son. It was a travesty. All that was needed was the fatted calf, he told himself sourly.

What did he know?
He had stared into his brother’s eyes and seen nothing. And not even Walter was that cold-blooded.

Draining the glass, he sat back in his chair, moved his bad leg a little in the hope of finding a more comfortable position, and stared through the silhouetted leaves above his head at the night sky, black as he was sure his soul was.

What in God’s name had he done?
To make matters worse, he couldn’t have said under oath what had become of his cane. It wasn’t in the motorcar. In his haste he must have dropped it. In the grass? Along the road? When he got out two hours later to stretch and massage his leg?

He hadn’t intended to frighten her. He had only wanted to say what he’d come to say and walk away.

He wasn’t even sure now just what he
had
said—the words had spilled out, a reflection of fear and anger. He’d charged German positions under fire, he’d killed men, he’d fought for King and Country, and yet in those few seconds he’d lost his courage, and with it lost his head.

What sort of man was he? To run as he had, to leave her there, an act of such sheer cowardice that he couldn’t blot it out of his mind, no matter how much he drank.

And he could tell no one. Not Edwin, not Susannah. Certainly not Leticia.

For a time he considered going inside, finding his service revolver, and putting an end to his shame and revulsion. But he couldn’t do it. The same tenacity that had made him fight over and over again to keep his damaged leg when the surgeons were intent on removing it forced him to face the man he was. Perhaps, he told himself bitterly, after the shock wore off, he might even learn to stand himself again.

He was becoming a maudlin drunk, and that he despised.

Susannah came out into the garden, wrapping her dressing gown closer against the late night chill.

“Won’t you come to bed? A night’s rest will do you more good than this.” She nodded toward the glass in his hand.

“In a little while,” he said, still studying the stars, avoiding her eyes.

“You promised two hours ago. Please, won’t you see the doctor tomorrow, and ask him for drops or something to help with the pain? You can’t go on drinking to dull it. I blame Edwin if you want the truth, for not going himself.”

There were no drops to cure this pain, he answered her silently, and then aloud, “I expect the doctor will say what he always does. That I shouldn’t drive.”

She regarded him for a moment, and then asked, “What’s wrong, Peter? It’s eating away at you. Is there something you haven’t told me?”

“Go to bed, Susannah. I’ve had too much to drink to make any sense. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

She turned and walked back to the terrace door. There she paused and said, her voice carrying perfectly to him where he sat, “Did you kill her, Peter? Was all the rest of what you told us a lie?”

He pretended he didn’t hear. Reaching for the decanter again, he poured himself another measure, concentrating on not spilling it.

The terrace door closed behind his wife, and in a sudden fury, he flung the glass of whisky against the trunk of the ginkgo overhanging the iron rail fence. It shattered, but he was already regretting what he’d done and he shoved himself to his feet to cross the lawn and pick up the shards before someone found them in the morning and read more than anger in the glittering, whisky-soaked pieces.

R
utledge finished his report and handed it to a constable to be typed for Chief Superintendent Bowles.

And still restless, he considered going to Frances’s house and spending the remainder of the afternoon with his godfather. Then he recalled that today was the grand excursion to Hampton Court by boat.

He stopped to speak to Chief Inspector Cummins, who had just returned from Paris, where he’d been persuading the French to allow him to bring a witness back to England to testify in regard to a killing in Surrey.

Cummins greeted him, then said, “Go away for four days and my desk grows papers like the French grow grapes. What sort of mood is his lordship in?”

Rutledge smiled. “Mercurial.”

“Damn. The French are being pigheaded. He’s not going to like that.”

Rutledge hesitated, and then in spite of himself asked, “Has the Front changed much?”

He had meant the France of the war years. The blackened ruin of a countryside. Cummins had not pretended to misunderstand him.

“Not very. It takes trees a while to grow back, although there’s more grass now. I found myself feeling depressed and turned around. But the French farmers are a hardy lot. They’ll not let good land go to waste for very long.”

“Blood-soaked land . . .”

Rutledge shivered at Hamish’s words.

They talked for several minutes, then Rutledge returned to his office.

A quarter of an hour later, Constable Ellis was at his door, saying quickly, “You’re wanted, sir. Chief Superintendent.”

Hamish said, “ ’Ware!” as Rutledge crossed the threshold, and he guessed that Cummins had been there before him with his own bad news. And Bowles had not taken it well.

He was muttering about the French under his breath, then he looked up and said, “What the hell kept you?” But before Rutledge could frame an answer, Bowles went on testily, “I thought we were finished with these Tellers.”

“Sir?”

The Chief Superintendent barked, “Now we have a request from a village in Lancashire to look into the death of a Mrs. Peter Teller. Seems she was murdered.”

It required a moment for Rutledge to digest the news.

“Sir?” he repeated. “I just saw the Captain’s wife. Yesterday. Surely there’s some mistake?”

“Are you deaf, or is your mind wandering? I’ve just told you, Peter Teller’s wife. Who said anything about Captain Teller? She’s just been found dead by the constable in Hobson. Unusual name, all the same. Might be a relation, though it’s unlikely. Lancashire?” He shook his head. In Bowles’s view, the farther from London, the more benighted the place. “You’ll have to deal with it, I can’t spare anyone else.” He closed the file and looked Rutledge in the face. “I’d counted on you to handle Walter Teller’s disappearance. It would have pleased a number of people to see us successful in that quarter. Instead he came back under his own power. You reported that he slept in a church. Why didn’t someone think to have a constable concealed there? Failure on your part, you know. See that we’re not embarrassed a second time. Do I make myself clear?”

“I understand,” Rutledge replied as Bowles searched his cluttered desk for his pen. And he did understand. Political repercussions were always uppermost in Bowles’s mind. Using them or avoiding them, he had become quite adept at sensing the way the wind would blow. But to clear the record, Rutledge added, “Teller slept in different churches. Not just one. That’s to say, if he was telling the truth. There are dozens of churches in London.”

“He’s a cleric, is he not? Someone should have taken that into account.” He found his pen and uncapped it. “You’re to leave for Hobson straightaway.” He made a final note on the file and passed it to Rutledge.

Rutledge crossed to the door. Bowles said, “And, Rutledge . . .”

He turned.

“I shouldn’t think the family would like seeing this bruited in the newspapers. For all we know, this Teller could be on the wrong side of the blanket. Might explain Hobson, if you take my meaning. The family has had a very trying time of it already.”

As Rutledge walked back to his office to set his desk in order, Hamish said, “Ye willna’ be here to take yon godfather to the station.”

“I’ll leave a note.”

Sergeant Gibson, standing in the doorway, asked, “Sir?”

Rutledge had answered the voice in his head aloud, without thinking. He turned to face Gibson and forced a smile. “A commentary on what’s ahead,” he answered lightly. “Do you know anything about the police in this village of Hobson?”

“The constable—Satterthwaite is his name—gives the impression he’s a sound man, sir. He’ll steer you right.”

“Let us hope. All right, anything else I should know?”

“No witnesses. No sign of robbery. No physical assault. Nothing to go on but the woman’s body found in the front passage of her house.”

“What did the husband have to say about it?”

“It appears he’s dead, sir.”

“Indeed?”

“So the constable informed me, sir. Didn’t come home from the war.”

“I don’t remember Hobson. Is it hard to find?”

“Satterthwaite says, look for the turning after the crossroads. It’s not very well marked from this direction, but it’s off the road to Thielwald.”

“I’ll bear that in mind.”

Rutledge stopped at his sister’s house and left a note for her explaining his absence, and another of farewell to his godfather. He would have liked to see Trevor and the boy, to say good-bye and wish them a safe journey, but they weren’t planning to return until late that evening, hoping to dine near Hampton Court. And he had a long drive ahead with no time to lose.

Half an hour later he was on the road north, facing little traffic, with Hamish unsettled in the seat just behind him, the voice close enough that sometimes over the soft purr of the motor, he could almost swear he heard Hamish breathing. He was always careful not to look in the rear seat, and he kept the small mirror turned in such a way that he couldn’t see any reflection but his own. He’d made a bargain with himself four years before when he realized that he couldn’t shut the voice out of his head: the day he saw Hamish MacLeod would be the day he sent both of them to the grave.

Even when he stopped for a late dinner this side of Derby, the voice followed him, a counterpoint to his own thoughts.

He had traveled this road before, coming down from Westmorland, although instead of warm breezes sweeping through the motorcar there had been a harsh wind off the winter snow, the aftermath of a blizzard that had shut down roads and cut off families from one another but not from a murderer.

And then the turning he was after appeared around a bend in the road, and he was heading in a different direction, the shadows in his mind receding with distance.

After one last turn, he found crossroads and the fingerboard pointing toward Thielwald. Some three miles beyond that, he saw the side road that bore to the left toward Hobson. He followed that through grassy pastures and a thin stand of trees, before cresting a slight hill and coming down to the first of Hobson’s houses, sturdy and uncompromisingly independent, like the people who lived in them. A milking barn in the distance to his left caught the last long rays of sunlight, and ahead of him, just leaving the muddy lane that led to it, a line of cows made their way down the High Street, heading for their night’s grazing on the other side of the village, their udders flaccid after milking. The bell on the leather strap around the neck of their leader clanked rhythmically as she swayed from side to side, paying no attention to the motorcar in her wake.

Rutledge could see the police station just beyond the herd and waited patiently for the last of the cows to pass. Constable Satterthwaite had just come out the door and was standing there on the point of filling his pipe.

He was a heavyset man of middle years, with an air of knowing his patch well. As Rutledge pulled up, he greeted him. “Inspector Rutledge? You’ve made good time, sir. The light’s still good. Would you like to go on out to the Teller house, or wait until morning?”

Rutledge considered the sky. “Now is best. I’ll drive.”

Constable Satterthwaite shoved his pipe back into his pocket and got in, giving directions to the scene of the crime. Then he settled back and said, “I’m that happy to see you, sir. This is a puzzle I can’t fathom. Florence Teller is the last person I’d have expected to find murdered. We’re a quiet village, not a place where there’s been much in the way of violence over the years. We know one another fairly well, and for the most part, that’s a good thing. If someone is in need, we try to help. No one needs to go stealing from his neighbor.”

“Murder isn’t always to do with need,” Rutledge told him. “There’s passion and greed and anger and jealousy—and sometimes just sheer cruelty.”

“I understand, sir. But I don’t know how any of those things might touch Florence Teller. Why someone would come to her door, and then strike her down and leave her for dead where she fell is beyond me. The doctor says it would have done no good if she’d got help straightaway. The damage was done. But how was her killer to know that? She might have lain there suffering for hours. And no one to help her. That was a cruelty.”

“She lived alone?”

“Yes, sir. The aunt who brought her up when she lost her parents died about fifteen years ago. Maybe more. And her son died some twelve years back. Then her husband didn’t come home from France. That took the heart out of her, though I never heard her complain. And she more or less kept to herself afterward. Gardening was always her joy, you might say, and even that couldn’t make a difference.”

Rutledge glanced his way. “You seem to know her well.”

“I know all my people well,” Satterthwaite said with dignity. “But yes, I kept an eye on her. To be sure she didn’t fall ill or lack for anything.”

He could hear the pain in the other man’s voice as he tried to keep his feelings in check. Not love, precisely, but a protective fondness all the same.

“She would do anything for anyone,” Satterthwaite went on, when Rutledge made no comment. “She stayed up three nights with the Burtons’ little girl when she had typhoid, and the mother was too ill to nurse her. All of us knew what sort of person she was. So where was the need to kill her?”

“What was her maiden name?”

“Marshall. Her parents lived in Cheshire. The father was originally from Cheshire as I recall.”

The village had straggled along the High Street and then, as if tired of trying to grow any larger, it simply stopped. Beyond Hobson, the land spread out in a carpet of early summer green, rising a little to show where plowed fields and pastures intersected, and flocks of shorn sheep cropped the grass.

Save for the sheep and a man on a bicycle passing them, there was no other sign of life. Yet the emptiness was friendly, not like the great haunted barren sweeps of the Highlands. Rutledge could hear Hamish making the comparison in his mind.

“Where is Mrs. Teller’s body?”

“Over to the doctor’s surgery in Thielwald. It was a single blow, he says, delivered with some force from behind. Looking at her face, you’d never guess she’d been killed. I was that surprised to see a peaceful expression, as if she had been put out of her pain, like. That’s an odd thing to say, but it was my feeling.”

“Yes, I understand.”

They made two more turnings and came up a slight rise to meet a hedge that surrounded the front of a two-story white house. The land continued to rise about fifty yards behind it but sloped away from the road at the front, giving a long view across a high stand of grass down toward what to Rutledge appeared to be a distant line of the bay.

“That’s the cottage,” Constable Satterthwaite told Rutledge. “You can see how isolated it is, from the point of view of finding any witnesses. There’s a farm just down this road a bit, but the owner was trying to save a sick ram, and he doesn’t know if anyone passed this way or not. And just over the shoulder of the rise is where the Widow Blaine lives. Mrs. Blaine still keeps the farm but has given up running sheep and planting corn. A small dairy herd is all that’s left. She’s short and square, with a temper to match her red hair. If the killer had gone there, she’d have taken her broom to him. Or her.” He smiled at Rutledge. “Village gossip says she’s twice the man her husband was.”

“And she saw nothing unusual here either.”

“No, sir. She has to milk the cows twice a day, and muck out the milking barn, but she comes into Hobson once a fortnight, for whatever goods she wants. That’s how she came to find the body. She stopped to ask Mrs. Teller if there was anything she needed.”

“There appears to be a good bit of fallow land around the cottage. Did Mrs. Teller farm it?” They had come to a white gate set into the hedge. It led up a grassy walk to a painted door, weathered a soft rose. Rutledge drew up just past the gate.

“She hasn’t since the war years. No help. Not with all the men we lost. And probably no heart for it either. She didn’t need the money.”

They left the motorcar and opened the gate.

Rutledge noted the sign on the front of it, with the name: sunrise cottage. Then he stood there, looking up at the house. It was typical of farmhouses out in this rolling country, tall and square and open to the buffeting of the wind, as if daring it to do its worst. There were no trees to shelter it and no fuss about the architecture. Guessing the age of Sunrise Cottage was nearly impossible, built as it was to withstand whatever the seasons or the years brought. A hundred years old? Fifty?

He followed the constable up the path, taking in the flowers that gave the walk and the door a little touch of color, a softness that belied what had happened here.

“There was no indication of a struggle? Or that Mrs. Teller had tried to run from her killer?”

“Nothing to tell us anything. She was just lying there, face to one side, as if she had decided to have a little nap. There wasn’t much blood. She must have died very quickly.”

“And no sign of the murder weapon?”

“He must have taken it with him. A walking stick? There are enough visitors in the summer on walking holidays. A hammer or tool from a motorcar?”