"Who is she?"
"Mrs. Winslow."
Rutledge sat there and digested what he had just been told.
"Does she return his feelings?"
"She did when she was sixteen. But I put a stop to that. And a good thing too, because just before the war she chose to marry Winslow. I'm sure she's regretted it every day since then. Martyrdom is best enjoyed briefly."
A vicious remark, but then Peggy Winslow had threatened this man's view of how his sons would prosper as he had prospered, climbing the social ladder with their looks, their charm, and their money. He'd seen Mrs. Farrell-Smith as eminently suitable for Anthony. He didn't seem to know she preferred the younger brother.
"Where is he now, your son?"
"I don't know. But that's why he left Eastfield again so soon after coming home from France. He couldn't bear to be in the same village with Winslow. He was afraid he'd do him a harm. And if you pass that on to anyone, even Constable Walker, I'll tell the world you lied."
That, Hamish was pointing out, explained why Pierce had been distraught when village men began dying. He'd been terrified that their deaths, even his own son's, had been random, to make Winslow's death, when it happened, seem part of a pattern that had nothing to do with the man's wife.
Rutledge said tightly, "It's not my intention to gossip. Unfortunately, I can't walk away from potential evidence, however odd or unimportant it appears to be."
"Did you see Mrs. Winslow's cat?" Pierce asked.
"Cat? No, I'm afraid not. Should I have done?"
"He gave it to her. A tortoiseshell. Named the damned thing Arrow, after our firm, and told her that as long as she possessed Arrow, she had his heart in her hands. He'd found it as a kitten in a corner of the brewery wall one winter's night. He had a soft spot for cats. I never could understand that. With any luck, Arrow has used up her nine lives and has gone on to whatever heaven God reserves for animals."
Rutledge thanked him and was walking to the door when Pierce added, still fuming over Rutledge's allegations about Daniel, "I know you're lying to me. I can prove it. Daniel can't be in contact with dogs. They make his eyes red, and he wheezes. And so you may tell Inspector Norman that this trick won't wash."
Standing in the doorway, Rutledge said, "I'm sorry?"
"We had him to specialists in London. Daniel. Dogs and chocolates. We were warned that either of them could kill him by choking off his air."
Closing the door, Rutledge stood there, his mind flying.
If that hadn't been Daniel Pierce and his bride with her dog Muffin, who the hell had it been?
20
R utledge turned on his heel and knocked at the door behind him, opening it almost at once before Pierce could deny him entrance.
"Do you have a photograph of your son?" he asked the man behind the desk. "As recent as may be."
Pierce said warily, "Not here. At my home. Why do you need a photograph? I have told you, Daniel isn't a murderer."
"To eliminate him finally from the queue of suspects."
"I'll bring it to the hotel later in the day, shall I?"
Rutledge had to be satisfied with that.
He asked the clerk, Starret, for the use of the brewery telephone. He thought at first that the man would refuse, for he looked toward Pierce's office uncertainly.
It took some time to reach Gibson at the Yard, and his voice was testy.
"I've not found this Thomas Summers. The Army records show that he enlisted in Buildwas, Shropshire, he was wounded twice in France, he was demobilized in early 1919 because he was attached to the details reburying the dead. His current residence is still in Shropshire. They don't have a more recent one."
"I've been there," Rutledge said, Hamish hammering in the back of his head to the point that he could hardly think. "He's not there. What else?"
"I was at Somerset House, and after looking up Lieutenant Pierce's marriage-there is no record of it-I took the liberty of looking up Corporal Summers's records. I see his birth, right enough, there in Eastfield. He was married in Brighton three weeks ago to one Edna Stallings, spinster, from Bedford. He put down Shropshire again as his residence."
Rutledge swore with feeling. He'd had the man within reach, and he'd lost him.
Hamish said, "He used another man's name."
And how had he convinced his bride to allow that?
My friends will track us down, they'll stand on the terrace and serenade us. It will be shockingly embarrassing. Everyone will stare. Daniel is a good friend, he told me he doesn't mind, as long as we don't leave him to settle up.
She would laugh and find it exciting to be someone else.
She had a sweet face, she'd stared up at her husband adoringly in that wedding photograph. Was she the nurse he'd gone in search of?
"Did you by any chance look into Edna Stallings?"
"I did that, sir, when I discovered who her father was. Matthew Edgeworth Stallings. She's a little younger than Summers, at a guess, and was a nurse in a clinic in Bedford during the last two years of the war, before going to live in Hertfordshire with an aunt until she came of age this past spring."
Matthew Stallings, it seemed, had made his modest fortune in footwear, and the Army contract for boots had sealed it. He'd died of a stroke six months after the Armistice, leaving a large sum to the National Trust and another to a fund for war widows. The bulk of his estate went to his only child. His daughter, it appeared, was an heiress.
"Well done," Rutledge told Sergeant Gibson. It was praise well earned. There was more he wished to say to Gibson, but not with half the brewery office staff listening with one ear.
Putting up the receiver, he thanked Starret and left the brewery.
Constable Walker was not in the police station when Rutledge stopped there. And so he drove on to Hastings with all the speed he could muster.
He caught Inspector Norman just as he was leaving his office and said, "There have been developments. I need to speak to you."
"Not now," Norman told him. "I've just been informed that Inspector Mickelson is showing signs of coming to his senses again. And I'm not letting this opportunity slip through my fingers, I can tell you. Your developments can wait."
And he got into the motorcar waiting for him, one of his constables at the wheel.
Rutledge watched them pull out into the afternoon traffic, then returned to his own vehicle.
For the next six hours, he called at every hotel of any size between The White Swans and the town of Brighton.
And as he searched, he tried to think through this swiftly evolving situation.
So much was explained now. How Summers could afford to live at The Swans as Daniel Pierce. How he had been able to reach Eastfield and disappear at will. How in fact he had managed to learn the details of his victims' lives, where he could find them when he was ready to kill them. And how he had been invisible, because the lowly school groundskeeper who kept to himself roused no interest in the village.
There was always a social hierarchy.
A groundskeeper at the school was in effect a laborer. The farmers and their wives, the tradesmen and their wives, would have nothing in common with him, and people like the brewer and Mr. Kenton, who felt they had risen above both classes, would hardly be aware of his existence, though they would know where he worked. It was that which gave him his place in the village, not his face or his qualities or his hopes and dreams. The rector would be kinder, the doctor would treat the man and whatever family he had, and the Mrs. Farrell-Smiths of this world would see that he was paid but barely know his name.