He had seen dozens of collections like them, in the trenches in France. A button from the greatcoat of a German officer, goggles from a downed airman, stripes from the sleeves of corporals and sergeants, collar tabs from officers, a battered Prussian helmet, a pistol taken from a corpse, an empty ammo belt from a machine gunner’s nest, whatever a man fancied ...
When his mind stubbornly refused to frame the words, Hamish did it for him.
“Trophies of the dead,” he said softly.
Small golden treasures, very personal and surely very precious, that marked each of Olivia Marlowe’s unwitting victims.
10
Rutledge forced himself to walk away from the things he’d found, and instead to go through the motions required of him.
He began with the olive wood desk on its graceful, delicate legs. In the several drawers he found stationery in various sizes, engraved, and matching envelopes, bottles of ink, scissors, a box of visiting cards with Rosamund’s name on them, a book of accounts for shops in London and in Borcombe, a leather notebook with stamps and addresses—none of them of special interest—and the usual clutter of pens and pencils. The only truly personal item was a wooden pen holder, hand carved, in the shape of a monster fish, the kind drawn on ancient maps at the edge of the known world, where they waited to swallow unwary ships. On the bottom, following the curve of a tiny scale, he found the initials NMC/OAM. From Nicholas to Olivia. Or to O. A. Manning?
The bottom drawer on the left side was empty.
The dressing table, the tall chest, the bureau, and the bedside table yielded more personal things, perfume and cosmetics, combs and brushes, odds and ends of jewelry, filmy lingerie, silk scarves and stockings, lacy handkerchiefs, and a prayer book, candles, and matches. Nothing out of the ordinary in any way, though sometimes intimate and daunting.
He knew, from what Rachel had told him, that the family had already taken away the things that made a room personal and individual—pictures and photographs and possessions with a particular value that wouldn’t be put up for sale with the house. But perhaps out of respect for Stephen’s insistence, much of Olivia’s life still survived in this room.
Yet Olivia had been careful to leave nothing behind for either the police or her biographers that could be construed— or misconstrued—into the woman who’d lived in this room.
The items buried deep in the closet must have been there a very long time, and if no one had found them before now, the chances were that no one might have discovered them for years to come. When they would have no meaning to strangers living here ...
He went back to the window and picked up each article, one at a time.
Six victims, if these were indeed trophies. Olivia’s sister, Anne. Her stepfather James Cheney. Her half brother Richard Cheney. Her stepfather Brian FitzHugh.
Her own mother, Rosamund Trevelyan.
And the man who’d spent his life in her service. Nicholas Cheney.
She’d been so sure of him, then, so sure that he would die with her. Or that she could send him into the darkness before her.
“Gentle God,” Rutledge whispered softly.
And after a moment, he found himself silently cursing Chief Superintendent Bowles for sending him here.
Drawing the drapes again and closing the door firmly behind him, Rutledge went down the passage, his mind still working with a policeman’s precision, his thoughts far from where his feet carried him. The tiny, betraying trophies had been safely returned to their hiding place, out of sight. But not out of his thoughts, burned with molten brightness into his very brain. In Stephen’s room was the comfortable chaos of living. There was a cricket bat in the corner, a pair of riding boots by the closet door, suits and shirts and jackets hung haphazardly on the rod inside, books on the table under the window—they were mostly about golf and tennis, Ireland and horses—and ivory inlaid cuff links in the dish on the dressing table, with a fish hook and a length of gut from a tennis racket beside them. But no boxes. No folders of personal papers, no literary failures or private letters or contracts. What Stephen kept here was the detritus of boyhood and the things one left in a country house visited fairly often.
In the interim between her death and his, Stephen might well have taken Olivia’s papers to his bank for safekeeping. But Rutledge went through the drawers again, found a routine letter from Stephen’s bank manager, and copied the address in his notebook.
As he was about to close the curtains, Hamish said, “When I was a laddie, Ma was a fierce one with broom and rag, nothing safe from her eyes when the fit to clean was on her. I’d hide what 1 cherished in the shed behind the straw, or above the rafters in the loft, after Pa died. She wasna’ as tall as my pa.”
Rutledge stopped, listening to what Hamish said. Stephen was a child from a large family. Nosy sisters and prying brothers. He might well have had a secret place of his own. But not in this room. He, Rutledge, had been damned thorough . . .
Or had he?
He glanced around the room again. He’d even had up the carpet, looked inside the grate, under the bed—
He knelt again by the bed. Nothing, only a thin coating of dust, sifting down gently since Mrs. Trepol’s last visit.
The frame. The slats that held the springs. Above that the mattress, sagging a little in the center. The bedclothes—
The slats? What could you hide on a slat? A key, perhaps ...
He went under the bed, on his back, mindful of his coat and careful not to scrape his head on the springs as he used his arms on the side boards to propel himself. Claustrophobia caught at him, and he had to shut his eyes against the wave of terror that ran through him. He coughed hard, the dry dust sucked into his drier throat. The springs were all but pressing into his face, not as high as he’d first thought!
With eyes still shut tight, he forced his breathing back to a normal rhythm. What you don’t see can’t fall in on you! he told himself sternly.
After a moment, searching with his memory rather than his eyes, he ran shaking fingers over the nearest slat, between the springs and the wood, barking his knuckles and collecting fine splinters. Nothing but more dust. There were five slats in all. He felt for the others, and began again, moving his shoulders and hips across the floor until he could reach each slat. Nothing. It was useless, he might as well give up. The last slat now—
Only the slight rustle of sound warned him in time, but the object still clipped his ear, falling, and he banged his head as he recoiled.
Slithering swiftly out from under the frame again, he turned and looked back. The springs were a good fifteen inches above the floor, not face high.
And a small book was lying, spine upward, in an inverted V on the floor. He reached for it, and managed to fish it out without going back under the bed again.
A prayer book, pages thin as rice paper, the tiny print old and ornately lettered, the cover worn black leather, the edges of the pages once gilded.
There was on the front cover an outline in raised leather, and Rutledge recognized it as the figure of St. Patrick, staff lifted to cast out the snakes.
On the flyleaf inside, in a spidery scrawl in fading ink, he read, “Presented to Patrick Samuel FitzHugh, on his first Communion, June, 1803. From his loving Sister Mary Joseph Claire.”
FitzHugh, not Trevelyan or Marlowe or Cheney. The FitzHughs had been Irish Catholic, the Trevelyans and Marlowes and Cheneys Church of England. This had been hidden, but not for reasons that had anything to do with murder. As a boy, had Stephen had Catholic leanings his family didn’t know about?
Rutledge thumbed through the fragile pages, eyes scanning the printed lines. In the back, where the pages were blank, someone had written out a family genealogy beginning with the parents of Patrick Samuel, then his marriage and offspring. The ink and writing changed over the next generations, which followed in sad order. So many of them died in the Potato Famine and the nightmare years afterward that it was more a litany of death than of life. At the top of the last page Rutledge found Brian FitzHugh’s name, and Cormac’s, but neither Stephen nor Susannah were recorded here. Nor, apparently, any other secrets that mattered to an investigation into murder.