“Murderer! Christ, man, what are you talking about?”
“A cold-blooded killer who for reasons we can’t fathom, decimated the Trevelyan family with methodical cunning. He—or she—was there, in the household. I’ve discovered that much. But so far, I can’t prove it.”
Chambers stared at him, his intelligence slowly reasserting itself as the first shock receded. “I don’t believe you! In Rosamund’s house? No, it’s not possible, you’ve been grasping for straws and looking for an excuse to make your trip down here worthwhile! Looking for promotion on the reputations of people who can’t defend themselves!”
Rutledge smiled, a cold smile that never reached his eyes. “If that were true, I could cause a great deal of trouble. But in the end, I’d only harm myself. No. Come with me, Mr. Chambers.”
He stood up, and without waiting to see if Chambers would follow, he went out into the inn’s hallway, fetched his coat from the rack, and was already picking up the borrowed umbrella when Chambers slowly came after him through the parlor door.
“Where are we going?”
“To the Hall,” Rutledge told him. “Do you have any objections?”
“I don’t—I’d rather not go there!”
“Why?”
“None of your damned business!” Chambers flared into anger as a defense. “I have no responsibility to you or to Scotland Yard. Only to my clients. I have neither obligation nor duty to cooperate with the police in a wild goose chase!”
“If you have a clear conscience, I see no reason why you should refuse to go with me to the Hall. Today or any day.”
“No.” It was very final.
Rutledge shoved the umbrella back into the tall brass stand and went back into the parlor, tossing his coat across the nearest chair. After a moment, Chambers followed him and shut the door with a pointed slam.
“What do you want of me?” he asked, standing there blocking it. “And what do you want of this investigation? Besides this ridiculous charge of murderers in the Trevelyan household.”
“You know something was wrong in that house, don’t you? Rachel felt it, because—she was particularly susceptible to the moods of the people who lived there.” He couldn’t bring himself, objectivity or not, to betray Rachel’s regard for Nicholas. “And you’re vulnerable too. Because you cared deeply for Rosamund and you know she wasn’t a woman likely to kill herself. Or let’s take Nicholas as an example, if you find thinking about Rosamund too painful. Would you have pegged him as a potential suicide? The sort of man who’d quietly choose to die with his half sister rather than face life on his own? A sentimental pact, in the moonlight, on a peaceful Saturday night? Or did Nicholas strike you as a man with a burden he carried with great patience and strength?”
Chambers’ expression was closed, the solicitor yielding nothing, loyalty to his clients coming ahead of any personal feelings.
“Damn it, you’re too intelligent to put your own responses down to sentimentality, but you feel uncomfortable in the Hall. Let me describe it for you. You walk through the door, and the house isn’t benign, it’s alive with jarring forces. To some extent, it’s a subjective response, I grant you, because of the uneasiness in your own mind. Your intuition tries to point out that there’s something very wrong here, but you refuse to listen, you don’t want to believe that what you sense could be true. And you won’t help me to find the answers for the same reasons!”
Rutledge was met with a wall of resistance. But he was beginning to take the measure of it now.
“Even I have felt the emotions in that house! I was moved by O. A. Manning’s poetry, I was shocked by the manner of the poet’s death, I was personally involved in a way that an ordinary policeman wouldn’t have been. And I’m not by nature one to look for moods or—what is it that the crackpots call it?—vibrations? I don’t believe in ghosts, either. But Tre-velyan Hall is haunted, in a sense that you and I both accept.”
Chambers still didn’t answer, but his face was paler, strained.
“I survived in those hellholes they called trenches for four years. It seemed like forty—a lifetime. I learned to trust my intuition. Men who didn’t often died. I was lucky to possess it in the first place, and war honed it. I learned that it wasn’t a figment of my imagination. Nor was it a replacement for the God I’d lost. Whatever it was, you came to recognize it. An inkling, a warning, a sudden flash of caution, a split-second insight that saved your life. Indisputably real, however unorthodox the means of reaching you. It gave you an edge on death, and you were grateful. Then I lost it for a time, it doesn’t matter why. But it hasn’t failed me completely, and I can tell you why you’re afraid to go back to that house. You know that Rosamund’s death haunts you there. You can feed yourself lies down in Plymouth. But not here. Not in the house itself!”
Rutledge could see the clenched jaw. The desperate rejection. In his own head Hamish was clamoring for him to leave the man in peace—
“It was an accidental overdose!”
The words, when they finally came, seemed to be torn from the depths of Chambers’ soul.
“No.” Rutledge waited, relentless. “Rosamund didn’t make such mistakes. She was a strong woman. She was sunshine and light, not despair and darkness. It wasn’t suicide, and it wasn’t an accidental overdose.”
“I refuse to accept murder!”
“Because you believe that murder, if it was done, was your fault. For loving Rosamund. For wanting to marry her. For winning her love. Just as suicide could mean a rejection of your love, murder means someone wanted to prevent another stepfather in the house, another family. Another long wait for whatever it was he—or she—wanted badly enough to kill for.”
Hamish was saying in agitation, “Where did this notion come from? You never spoke of it before!”
In the tumult of his own emotions, Rutledge tersely answered the voice aloud. “I didn’t know before. But it makes sense now. I see the pattern!”
He did. Olivia had systematically eliminated her family— the twin sister who could pass for her and steal her grandfather’s love. The stepfathers she hadn’t wanted. The half brother who had stirred up the household and kept it on its ear. The mother who was planning to marry again. But not Nicholas, never Nicholas, who had looked after her. Not until the very end, when he no longer served any purpose—
Hamish was still raising fierce objections. Rutledge ignored them. He was angry and unsettled and—yes—bewildered by the leap his intuition had taken without warning.
Without a motive, he could keep to himself his suspicions about Olivia. He could deny, on the surface, that he believed in them because there was no real evidence except the carefully hidden trophies of the dead. It was possible—it was likely—it was practicable—But still theory. Still his own torment.
Now, it was real. Suddenly, it was real—
He had nearly forgotten about Chambers in the dark, low-ceilinged room, standing by the door like a man who’d lost his way and waited for a sign.
The hoarse voice startled him.
“Damn you! You should have died in France!” Chambers said with such bitterness that Rutledge knew he’d won.
It was a hollow victory. It had cost both men very dearly.
Suddenly, exhausted and drained, he felt he was on the edge of a precipice inside himself, the blackness he’d fought so long in the hospital, and once, too short a time ago, in Warwickshire. It seemed to draw him, to beckon like the Sirens, a place of peace and darkness and silence where nothing could ever touch him again.