"He's had a long time to plan his revenge, if that's what we're dealing with. He knew it would be a risky business. He must have considered every contingency."
"Shall I ask for Constable Petty to come again? An extra pair of eyes won't come amiss if you're right and Summers is on the prowl again."
"With any luck, we'll find him first," Rutledge said grimly.
But where to look?
He went to The Fishermen's Arms and paced his room, thinking.
"If I were Tommy Summers, what would I do?" he said aloud.
But Hamish gave him no answer.
The cottage where the man had lived before as groundskeeper for the Misses Tate School? But surely that would have been given to whoever had taken his place in the position?
Still, it was worth finding out.
Rutledge left the hotel and walked to the school. The property ran deep, backing up to pasturage on the outskirts of Eastfield. To one side of the main door was a small wooden gate leading into a tradesman's passage to the rear of the house. Here were the kitchen gardens, he saw as he rounded a corner of the building. A path led on between the beds to the barnyard and outbuildings. Behind these was a small walled orchard, apple and pear trees heavy with fruit. To the left of the orchard gate was another that opened into a small plot of ground with a smaller cottage set in it. Empty by the look of it, but all the same, Rutledge went up to the door and opened it after knocking.
There were two rooms and a tiny kitchen with a woodstove. The furnishings were simple and well worn. A table and chairs, a cluster of other chairs, their padded cushions faded with age. He could see the bedroom through an arch without a door. It contained a bed frame with a rolled mattress on it, some chests, another pair of chairs, one of them on rockers, and a cradle.
A patina of dust lay over everything, and as he walked to the bedroom, his own footsteps left faint impressions in the dust on the floor.
It was likely that the present groundskeeper lived not on the property but at his own home in Eastfield.
A wild-goose chase.
He went out and closed the door behind him and then latched the gate.
As he crossed the barnyard, he found himself face-to-face with Mrs. Farrell-Smith. She stood there, watching him approach along the path. There was something in the way she held herself that raised alarm bells in his head.
She said, "Policeman or not, you're trespassing."
"I'm sorry," he said, keeping his voice level. "If I'd known you were in the school today, I'd have asked permission to enter the grounds."
"What are you searching for? Something to identify the groundskeeper you believe was Tommy Summers?"
"I thought he might have come back here," Rutledge answered. "It's familiar, and that means safe. But it appears no one has been in the cottage for some time."
"The greengrocer's son has agreed to work for us. He still lives with his parents. Besides, I doubt Summers would even try to slip into the grounds. The staff know him by sight. Well. I suppose you must start somewhere." She watched a dove circle the barn roof and then perch there, its voice soft on the summer air. "Is it true? Is it this Tom Summers who has done these murders?"
"As far as we can tell. Yes. The trouble is, we can't find him. That's why I came to look in the cottage."
"You won't be arresting Daniel Pierce, then?"
"Are you in love with him?" he asked.
She sighed, and to his amazement, appeared to answer the question honestly. "I think I've always loved him. Sadly, he didn't love me. I thought perhaps in time-I was foolish, I know that now. I even thought I could use Anthony to make him jealous. But you can't make someone jealous who doesn't love you at all."
"You defended him fiercely enough."
She flushed. "I had a very good reason." After a moment she met his gaze and said, "Come with me."
He followed her back to the school building and through a side door into a shadowy passage. This led in turn to a staircase, and at the top he found that they were in the foyer outside her office. The door was standing wide-it was obvious she'd seen him walk to the school and go through the tradesman's gate. She had made a point to follow him to find out what it was he was up to.
Pointing to a chair, she went to her desk, and with a key on a chain around her neck, she opened a bottom drawer.
Looking up at him again, she asked, "Do I have your word that you haven't lied to me about Daniel or Tommy Summers?"
"You have my word," he replied.
She reached into the drawer and brought out a thick envelope, then closed the drawer again.
"You asked me to look into any event here at the school while members of the Eastfield Company were students. I couldn't tell you that I'd already learned something about one of them. It had been in my aunts' personal papers, and I stumbled across it in my first year as head mistress. Although it was rather shocking, it had no immediate importance then, you see, except for a personal interest in the child this once belonged to."
She upended the envelope, and something fell out onto her blotter. Rutledge looked at the tangle and then felt cold as he recognized what it was.
A garrote.
No, not really a garrote. A clumsy, crude imitation of one.
"Daniel," she went on, "was apparently very different from his brother. Anthony was a gentleman in every sense. Daniel was-he was more at home with the sons of tradesmen. He fought with them, played with them, felt comfortable in their presence. My aunts referred to him as a little ruffian. He enjoyed the Army as well, I think. I've been told that he was very popular with his men."
Her fingertip touched the garrote. "According to my aunt Felicity's note, on the last day before the Pierce brothers were to leave Eastfield and go to the school in Surrey, Daniel brought this in, and during the morning, he threatened his classmates with it. The boys, that is, not the girls. Aunt Felicity was quite shocked when she overheard him swearing he'd slip into their houses in the dead of night and dispatch them, and she took the garrote away from him. She insisted on summoning his father, but Daniel begged her not to. He swore he'd done it to protect someone. It's all there in the file. The fear of God, he told my aunt, was nothing to the fear of death, and so he'd used the threat. In the end, she was dissuaded, against her better judgment. So she wrote an account of what had transpired, kept the garrote with it, and told Daniel that if he didn't behave himself in Surrey and become a fine example of the Misses Tate School, like his brother, she would go directly to his father. He gave her his solemn promise."
Rutledge reached for the garrote, picked up the length of rope and the two short, carefully whittled sticks tied at each end. Crudely made though it was, it was still too close to the mark for comfort. "Where the devil did a small boy Daniel's age come to learn about garrote?"
"Aunt Felicity wrote that Daniel had already made a friend at the new school and had been invited to stay with him one weekend. The friend's father had served in India and had books on Thuggee, the bandits who preyed on caravans. Quite the sort of thing a boy would read, if he had the chance. Daniel told my aunt that he had tried to make a garrote like the one described in the book, only he didn't have a man's head scarf or a handful of rupees to tie at each end. He only had some rope he'd found in a shed at the brewery and two sticks he'd been whittling."
Rutledge tested the rope between his hands, snapping it taut, but the threads of hemp were worn and gave under the pressure. "It wouldn't have worked, of course," he said.
"Ah, but the other boys weren't to know that, were they? No one locked doors-and Daniel's version of Thuggee would have been appropriately bloodcurdling."