After a moment, Rutledge dropped the prayer book into the drawer of the table by the bed, unwilling to go back under it. Then he changed his mind, and put the book back where it had come from. Putting it back took less time than finding it in the first place, and he did it holding his breath this time.
Afterward he dusted off his trousers and jacket, then closed the curtains at the windows.
The house was already too dark to do more than a cursory search elsewhere. Most of the other bedrooms had already been stripped of clothing, closets and desks and chests empty, drawers already smelling musty. But Rutledge, mindful of the hollowed out shelf in Olivia’s room, checked each closet with infinite care.
There was nothing more to find, nothing that told him where Olivia had left her papers—not even whether they were still in the house. Susannah and her husband, Rachel and Stephen, with the help of Cormac, Mrs. Trepol, and the old woman Sadie, had spent days going through the house and cleaning room after room. He wasn’t surprised to find nothing out of the ordinary where they had worked.
He went back to study. But the desk by the window was as sterile as the one in Olivia’s bedroom. It was a wild goose chase—Stephen must have removed any papers left to him. Yet Rutledge had the feeling that a man hell-bent and determined to preserve his half sister’s fame as a poet would stubbornly resist taking them too far, just as he’d fought to keep Olivia’s room inviolate.
To which Hamish riposted, “What do you need the papers for, when you’ve found yon golden trophies? Or are ye shutting out what they say?”
The sun was a red ball on the horizon when Rutledge walked out to the headland, its warmth lingering in the light wind that preceded the stillness of sunset. Behind him the windows of the Hall were ablaze, and the weather vane on the church tower as well. Red sky at night ...
He should have listened to Hamish and gone back to London on Saturday morning. He should have told Rachel this morning that there was no need to reopen the three deaths. Let sleeping murderers lie.
Now—now he was committed, the truth was something he had to uncover, for his own peace of mind. For the policeman in him who had to look at the good and the evil in human nature and live with its impact in his own soul.
What right had O. A. Manning to survive unscathed the nightmares of Olivia Marlowe? What right had she to be praised and revered as a creator of beauty, if she had been a woman without mercy or compassion?
Stephen FitzHugh had been left as Olivia’s literary executor. To decide which of her papers and her worksheets biographers and critics and readers might see. And now, through no fault of his own, he was dead, and neither Rachel nor Susannah seemed to be particularly interested in shouldering the responsibility. Cormac, by his own admission, was more likely to destroy any family skeletons than allow them to rattle. The O. A. Manning he might choose to show to the public would be Olivia Marlowe’s own public face, a quiet recluse who knew very little about the real world and yet had a wondrous insight into the human heart, a gift from God.
Or the devil. Depending on your knowledge of her.
Even if he, Rutledge, drove back to London in the morning, he would be the only person living who had proof that what Cormac suspected could be true. His burden to learn to live with. Not Corrnac’s. Not Susannah’s. Not Rachel’s.
Damn Stephen FitzHugh for falling down those blasted stairs!
If he stayed in Cornwall, he’d have to find a way to get to the bottom of a string of murders committed by a woman already dead.
But that was just the problem.
Olivia Marlowe had been buried. It was O. A. Manning who was still alive—and possibly had no right to be.
And when he, Rutledge, found out the whole truth, what in hell would he do about it? Deliberately destroy the author of Wings of Fire? Bring down the beauty and the genius along with the cruelty and the lies?
“You’ve been executioner once.” Hamish warned him. “And you no’ have forgotten it. Will ye choose to do it again, then?”
Rutledge turned and walked back towards the house and the path to the village.
“If I have to,” he said bitterly.
11
The next morning Rutledge sent a carefully worded message to London.
“Background material sparse but enlightening. No determination of crime possible at this time. Will take several more days, if presence not required in City.”
Nothing to alarm Bowies, nothing to prevent Rutledge from coming to any conclusion he chose. And he had a feeling his superior would not be anxious to see him in London straight away.
The Monday papers had been awash with news of another killing in the City. Bowles had been interviewed in depth about the Yard’s pursuit of the murderer, and talked ful-somely of modern forensic science and its role in tracking down the guilty party. Bowles leaned towards cold fact rather than intuition and a careful analysis of the killer’s reasons for acting now, against this particular victim, and in this particular place. Rutledge had found that scientists were not always the best witnesses in the box, and as often as not a good man for the defense could walk rings around them.
He looked at his own cold facts. That Corrmac had seen Olivia shove her sister out of an apple tree. That Olivia hadn’t had the heart to dispose of her trophies of the dead, even in the face of her own death. That they were an admission of guilt in six possible murders, not just the two that Cormac laid at Olivia’s door—indicating, perhaps, a cooler, more cunning skill as the child grew older.
But these facts, alone or together, were not sufficient proof of guilt in a courtroom. Cormac was young at the time, his own memory might have been at fault. A good barrister might point out that Olivia could have had those small articles in her possession for any number of reasons: she’d been given them, she’d taken them as a childhood prank, she’d won them in a wager. In themselves, without more evidence to lay out beside them, they couldn’t be viewed as the fruits of sin.
Her papers might hold a confession. However convoluted or concealed in verse. But poets and writers were allowed literary license. That too could prove to be more circumstantial than conclusive.
Who then among the living might give him the proof he needed? Who would make a dependable, incontrovertible witness in the box?
He set out to look for one.
Constable Dawlish, finishing his breakfast in his wife’s sunny kitchen, came out to the parlor to listen and found Rutledge’s line of questioning hard to follow.
So did Hamish, who was still contending that they’d both live to regret staying on in Cornwall, and was muttering ominously about Rutledge’s own stubbornness.
“You’re asking about Mr. Nicholas’ father?” Dawlish asked. “And Mr. Stephen’s father? That was well before my time in uniform, sir! But James Cheney shot himself in his own gun room, and everyone knew he’d been blaming himself for what happened to his son. He took it hard, and who’s to say whether the revolver went off by accident or of a purpose? Death by misadventure was the coroner’s verdict, and Mrs. Cheney, sick with grief, thanked him for it. Are you thinking that she or one of the children might have shot him?” Dawlish shook his head. “I’d as soon believe my own wife would take a gun to my head, as Mrs. Cheney! You didn’t know her, sir! And as for the children, they weren’t old enough, any of them, to do such mischief. Besides, no man in his right mind would have let a child so young handle a gun, much less play about with a loaded one.”