The day wore on, a long straggle of people coming to the house, the rector among them, giving their statements to Daw-lish and then leaving again, strangely subdued. For a time Rutledge watched them from the headland, and he saw too that Harvey made his appearance in due course, then left shaking his head. Rutledge wondered whether Dawlish had told him more than he should have about the questions asked—and answers received. Reporting to his superior, that’s how he’d have viewed it. Rutledge hoped he had not. Harvey’s stubborn, straight mind might just make the right leap. Good policemen, clever or not, had a sense about some things. It didn’t take imagination to learn from experience. The problem was, where would Harvey turn if he learned the truth? How would he use it? Hasty decisions had a way of wrecking a clean, tight investigation. And Harvey wanted to be seen as running his own territory, not following the lead of strangers from London.
By dinnertime Rutledge had collected the statements from the weary constable eager to get home to his wife. Then he went up the stairs two at a time, and carefully collected the small gold articles from Olivia’s closet. For a moment he held them in the palm of his hand, where they shone with soft beauty, as if innocent of blood and death.
As they were, in themselves, he thought sadly.
Downstairs he took one last long look at Rosamund’s portrait, silently apologizing for what he’d caused to be done in her drawing room that day. She stared back at him in silence, a faraway look in her eyes.
He walked back towards the village alone, his mind busy.
Sadie hadn’t come, Dawlish reported, though Dr. Penrith, walking slowly on his daughter’s arm, had arrived at the Hall at the time set for him. And Wilkins, and Mary Otley. Later someone would have to interview Susannah and her husband, and Tom Chambers, the solicitor. Rutledge himself had questioned Dawlish at the end of the day, writing down his answers without looking up at the man’s accusing eyes.
The constable was an intelligent man, he could think through what he had spent the long day doing. But how far had he gotten in putting the pieces of the puzzle together? Far enough to wonder, Rutledge thought, but not quite far enough to know the whole ...
Passing through the woods, Rutledge considered the problem of Sadie. Did she know what a sworn statement was?
He would have to go to her, then, and hope her mind was clear.
As he passed the Otley cottage he could see someone standing in the shadow by the door. Rachel, watching him. He could feel her eyes, the intensity of emotions, the uncertainty. But she stayed where she was, and he wondered what was going through her mind. What she would do now. Or if she would wait. Women often thought along different lines. Where a man saw duty, women were more concerned with emotions, feelings. He’d learned early on that a policeman ignored such differences at his peril.
Rutledge was just beside the Trepol gate when the housekeeper stepped out her door and called to him.
“Inspector Rutledge?”
He opened the gate and went up the walk where he would be out of earshot of Rachel. If Mrs. Trepol had questions about the statement she’d given, it was better not to broadcast them.
When he reached her, she acknowledged him with a nod and then said, “You’ll be wanting me to clean up after all those feet tracking dirt into the hall and the drawing room?”
“It would be kind of you,” he said. “Yes, thank you.”
“Miss Rosamund would never have allowed it,” she said, resigned to what she must have considered little short of desecration. One did not invite half the village in to sit in a fine chair under the best portrait in the house, not in the age in which Mrs. Trepol or Rosamund Trevelyan had grown up and learned their respective places in Borcombe.
“I know,” he told her, “but sometimes the law must do what has to be done, and worry about the fitness of it afterward. I think she would have been glad to be a party to settling her family’s affairs.”
“Is that what you’re doing, sir?” Mrs. Trepol asked earnestly.
“It’s what I’m trying to do. To explain the deaths of Olivia Marlowe and Nicholas Cheney. To set it right.”
She nodded, as if she understood.
“Thank you, sir,” she said quietly. “I’d not like to think of them in pain and grief over what they did. A sad end to two lives, that was. I could never feel quite right about it, and I couldn’t see the purpose. We have to live the lives we’ve been given, there’s naught else for it. God doesn’t give us a choice. That’s what the church says. Suffering teaches in its own way.”
“Yes, sometimes,” he said, knowing how close he himself had come more than once to ending his own suffering.
She nodded again, and looked around her for her cat. Rut-ledge turned and started up the walk again.
Mrs. Trepol said, tentatively, “Sir?”
“Yes?” He only half turned back towards her, wanting to go on to the inn and read the statements.
“If you’re finished with us, well, sir, I was wondering if maybe you’d know what was best to do with them boxes Mr. Stephen gave me to hold for him. I kept expecting Mr. Chambers to come and fetch them, after Mr. Stephen died, but he hasn’t. Maybe he doesn’t want them any more, now that Mr. Stephen is dead? Just some old things, he told me, some treasures he wanted to keep for himself, memories of the family, he said. Nothing but a boy’s foolishness, he said, but he didn’t want them left behind in the empty house and he wasn’t ready to take them up to London with him, no room in the car with all those things Miss Susannah and the others wanted to carry away.”
Rutledge turned and looked at her in the late evening light, at the plain, earnest face that waited for him to do what was best.
“I thought of mentioning it to Miss Rachel, but they’re Mr. Stephen’s things, and I haven’t seen Miss Susannah by herself, only with Mr. Daniel there, and I didn’t know—I thought perhaps that wasn’t what Mr. Stephen would want. He’d said I was to keep the boxes for him, you see. Just for him, as a favor. And he was always a hard one to say no to, so I thought I’d just ask and you might tell me what was best. They’re not my things—I wouldn’t want to do anything wrong.”
He couldn’t turn to see if Rachel was still in her doorway. He couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t see him carrying boxes away.
Instead, he scooped up the cat that was coming through the open gate, and said, quietly, “Show me.”
Mrs. Trepol went indoors, and Rutledge, still carrying the cat, followed her. In a closet set in the hall between her bedroom and the kitchen there was a stack of boxes, three of them. To the other side two coats, a rack of gardening boots, and a line of old umbrellas crowded the narrow space.
Rutledge had already put down the squirming cat, and he stood there staring for a moment at the boxes. Then he lifted down the first of the three and opened it carefully. Mrs. Trepol turned away, as if afraid she might be trespassing if she looked at the contents.
He felt no such compunction.
The first box held Olivia’s notebooks of verse, annotated and revised, her record of creative thought, the process of making words do her bidding. He regarded the neat rows thoughtfully, not reading any of them but paying silent homage to them as his fingers gently touched their spines. The second box held contracts, letters, and bank records. He was amazed at how well good verse paid. The third was a collection of many things, photographs, a genealogy of the Trevel-yan family, personal letters, childhood scribbling that gradually foretold the growth of a formidable talent, and a number of books with her name in lovely script on the flyleaves.
Rutledge, trying to hide his disappointment and quell Hamish’s fierce litany of “I told you so!” prodded the contents again, as if expecting them to produce, by magic, the answers he wanted. Mrs. Trepol had gone into the kitchen to feed her cat, and he squatted on the wide floorboards, refusing to give up.