Rutledge stood up. “Which window did your brother call from, before he fell?”
FitzHugh stared at him blankly. “Which window? It was from the room that had been Father’s. To the right of the stairs. Do you want to see it?”
“No, that’s not necessary. Not this morning. I’ve taken enough of your time. I’ve work to do in the village. Will you be staying here? In the house?”
“If I can find Mrs. Trepol and persuade her to make up my room.” He grinned. “I’m not useful in that regard. Horses I know, and contracts, and how to handle stockholders at a meeting. Sheets and towels are beyond me.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I have a business in the City. FitzHugh Enterprises. Made my fortune in iron and steel, branched out into other interests. Oil. The Navy’s looking into that.” He smiled, immense charm, Irish charm, changing his face. “They call me a war profiteer in some quarters. Because I made money on the killing. But the men in the trenches, when the first tanks came over the barbed wire, didn’t worry about their cost, only about what they could do to the Germans. I saved lives, if you come right down to it.”
“Were you in the war as well as profiting from it?”
The grin faded. “Oh, yes, Inspector, I was. That surprises most people. I was one of the code breakers. I have a skill at mathematics that certain people at Cambridge remembered quite well. I don’t think I could have gotten into the real fighting—I was more useful where I was. Boring work. You never knew whether what you’d just decoded was the most important secret of the campaign or the least important. You just did your best. Like everyone else.”
Rutledge closed the front door behind him and stepped out into the drive. The sunlight now was brilliant, the mists gone, the sea such a deep blue it hurt the eyes to look at it. He walked down the drive and took the path towards what turned out to be a shingle strand, long and narrow and swept by the tides in every gale, but this morning busy with gulls and choughs and a pair of ravens that were squabbling over something the water had brought in. It appeared to be what was left of a fish. The headland shut out the wind, and there was unseasonable warmth by the water, and a stillness of the air that reminded him of France, just before the artillery barrages began. He stood there, looking out to sea, watching a wisp of steam that came out of Wales and sailed, below the horizon, to faraway ports. It was peaceful here, but there were straggles of rocks again to his right, jutting out where the land began to rise once more, tumbled and rough and water-sprayed. He wondered if in the past wreckers had stood here with their lanterns and lured ships onto a stormy shore. Cornwall had always lived from the sea, one way or another.
Shadowed, the headland on his left was massive and dark, white water creaming at its base. And the house was invisible from here, only the line of the roof and the clipped lawns foretelling its presence.
There was the sound of footsteps on the shingle behind him, and he turned to see Rachel Ashford coming towards him. He waited for her, and she said, “Has he gone yet?”
“Cormac FitzHugh? No, I left him in the house.”
Chewing her lip for a moment, she thought about it. “Well, I’ll just have to wait until tomorrow, won’t I? For the ships.” Then she looked up at him, shading her eyes with her hand. “I know,” she said, answering what she read in his face. “I wasn’t actually ready to fetch them anyway. It’s just—” After a moment, she went on in different voice, “You’ve been in there. What did you feel?”
She meant the study upstairs. And he couldn’t pretend to misunderstand.
He said, looking out to sea, “I don’t know.”
But Hamish said, very clearly, “The lassie didn’t ask for lies!”
Startled, Rutledge turned back to her and said, “What makes you think there’s anything to feel?”
It was her turn to be evasive. “I—you don’t make decisions like that, and expect no trace of them to survive. I’m not fanciful, you know. But when I go inside that house, I hear the silence. And I can’t tell what it’s whispering to me. But I’m frightened.”
“Would you like me to fetch the ships for you? Put them out in the gallery, where you could box them up without going inside the study?” He couldn’t have said, afterward, why he’d volunteered to do it. Except that he could sense her pain. And pain he understood.
Surprised, she said, “Would you? I couldn’t impose on Mrs. Trepol. Or ask the others, they’d have laughed at me. But if you could—when Cormac has gone? It—it would be very kind of you.”
He couldn’t stop the next question. It came out more bluntly than he’d intended. Because, he knew, it disturbed him deeply. “Do you think; Olivia Marlowe could have murdered her half brother, then killed herself?”
For an instant he thought she was going to faint, her face turned so white, and she took several gasping breaths, as if to steady herself. He reached out to catch her arm, but she shook him off.
“You—is that what you feel in that room?”
“No, it’s a policeman’s curiosity exploring the possibilities. After all, you sent for me to do that.”
Color flooded back into her face, and she swallowed hard. “That was very cruel,” she said, voice low and husky. “I can’t picture, in my wildest fancies, any reason why Olivia would harm Nicholas. Or why he would harm her!”
And yet the very question had struck a chord in her, one she’d shut out of her mind with all the strength of her will. Until he’d put it into words.
5
They walked back to the village together, in a silence that brooded between them like a summer’s storm, building and darkening, but not breaking. The shortcut through the copse was cool and dim after the sunlight.
Hamish was rattling on about women, about the moodiness this one evoked, about his relief at leaving the house and grounds of Trevelyan Hall. Rutledge ignored him. He was still trying to deal with the concept of Olivia Marlowe as a killer, and damning Cormac FitzHugh for putting it into his head.
No, it wasn’t Olivia Marlowe that disturbed him. He, Rutledge, knew very little about Olivia Marlowe. It was O. A. Manning he knew, and the poetry had touched his own spirit in the darkness of war. Standing before God, Rutledge would have sworn that O. A. Manning was not a murderer. Could not have been. And yet, Cormac FitzHugh had no reason to lie, no reason to twist the truth, no reason to know that Rutledge the man, not the police officer, had seen something fragile shatter as he spoke.
As if she’d sensed something of the turmoil in Rutledge’s mind, Rachel touched his arm and stopped. “What is it? What’s bothering you?”
“I don’t know,” he told her truthfully. “I think I’ve come to Cornwall on a useless errand.” Better London, and boredom, than this!
“You’ve only been here one day,” she said gravely. “How can you know that? Or did the Yard send you here just to please Henry Ashford, a gesture that was never intended to dig very deeply into these deaths?”
The old proverb—to let sleeping dogs lie—flitted through his mind. Instead, he said to her, out of nowhere, except that they were taking the shorter path to Borcombe, “Who is the old crone I met in the village this morning? She must be eighty, by the look of her. Stooped. But with extraordinarily clear eyes.” And a perverted sense of humor, if he was any judge.