“What about the man on the moors? Did you kill him too?” Rutledge asked, suddenly remembering.
“The tramp. There was a chance—they never found Richard, you see—I thought he’d come back one day—yes.” He was still doubled over, hugging his body, his face grimacing as the waves of pain subsided in their own good time.
From somewhere in the distance they could hear voices calling.
Cormac lifted his head in the darkness, and stared at Rut-ledge.
“You had better kill me now. If you don’t, I’ll ruin you in the courtroom. They’ll blame you—before I’m done—”
For a split second, there was an overwhelming temptation to take him at his word. Rutledge clamped down on it, the policeman in him routing the soldier who’d swiftly calculated the odds, and he heard Hamish growl when the policeman won. In satisfaction? Or regret. He was too spent to care.
“Or will they be glad to convict the Irish bastard whose deception took in half the City?” Rutledge answered, and got slowly, achingly to his feet. He reached down a hand, and then thought better of it, grabbing the back of Cormac’s collar instead and dragging him to his knees.
Cormac managed to stand, half bent over, then suddenly found the strength of will to stand straight, eye to eye with Rutledge.
Lucifer had been stopped but not vanquished. Not yet.
Down the strand Constable Dawlish appeared in the heavy rain, peering towards them and shouting, “I think they’re over here!”
Inspector Harvey, with Smedley at his back and Rachel coming up at the run, something in her arms—blankets, he thought as she stumbled and slipped down the path from the lawns.
Cormac swung to face them and smiled as Harvey clapped handcuffs over his wet wrists. Watching, Rutledge unconsciously braced himself. It would be an appalling trial. The tragedy—as always, in Rutledge’s eyes—was that the murderer could never be charged with the havoc he’d brought to other people’s lives, only with the deaths laid at his door. Smedley was right, it wasn’t over for the villagers of Borcombe. Not for Rachel and Susannah. Not even for Olivia and Nicholas and Rosamund ...
“And you. They’ll be after breaking you on the stand,” Hamish warned.
“They can try,” he answered, silently.
Rachel, looking up at him, said in a low, strained voice as she gripped his arm with wet, icy fingers. “I have to know. Was it me that Nicholas loved, or was it Olivia?” The words seemed to be torn from her, as if they had never been allowed to surface from the darkness of her dread. Until now.
Rutledge shook his head. And consciously told a lie, out of infinite compassion. “He didn’t want her to die alone,” he said. “It took courage to make such a choice. Forgive him for it.”
She bowed her head and began to cry.
When they’d taken Cormac away, and Rachel, her face set and pale, had followed Smedley back towards the village, Rutledge was left on the headland alone. Pulling one of the blankets she’d brought tighter against the cold air that had followed the storm, he limped across to where the black patch of burned grass had once been, even its shadowed outline filled in with green now, the ashes long since washed away.
He knew what had perished here in the fire Nicholas had built. Why Olivia and Nicholas chose that moonlit night of beauty in which to end it.
A love they couldn’t have.
After a time ... “I envy you both,” he said softly in the night, lifting his head to look up at the room where they had died.
As he turned towards Borcombe, the wind followed, but Rutledge wasn’t aware of it. He stopped at the end of the drive and looked once more at the house below the headland. It stood there dark and silent, man-made and vulnerable, yet somehow invested with a grace all its own.
And he knew, without knowing how, that Olivia was finally at peace.
But that he would be possessed, for a very long time, by the woman she had been.
Here s an excerpt from
Charles Todd’s next book
SEARCH THE DARK
Now available from
St. Martins/Minotaur
Paperbacks!
The murder appealed to be a crime of passion, the killer having left a trail of evidence behind him that even a blind man might have followed.
It was the identity of the victim, not the murderer, that brought Scotland Yard into the case.
No one knew who she was. Or, more correctly perhaps, what name she might have used since 1916. And what had become of the man and the two children who had been with her at the railway station? Were they a figment of the killer’s overheated imagination? Or were their bodies yet to be discovered?
The police in Dorset were quite happy to turn the search over to the Yard. And the Yard was very happy indeed to oblige, in the person of Inspector Ian Rutledge.
It began simply enough, with the London train pulling into the station at the small Dorset town of Singleton Magna. The stop there was always brief. Half a dozen passengers got off, and another handful generally got on, heading south to the coast. A few boxes and sacks were offloaded with efficiency, and the train rolled out almost before the acrid smoke of its arrival had blown away.
Today, late August and quite hot for the season, there was a man standing by the lowered window in the second-class car, trying to find a bit of air. His shirt clung to his back under the shabby suit, and his dark hair lay damply across his forehead. His face was worn, dejection sunk deep in the lines about his mouth and in the circles under tired eyes. He was young, but youth was gone.
Leaning out, he watched the portly Stationmaster helping a pale, drooping woman to the gate, the thin thread of her complaining voice just reaching him. “... such hardship” she was saying.
What did she know about hardship? he thought wearily. She had traveled first class, and the leather dressing case clutched in her left hand had cost more than most men earned in a month. If they were lucky enough to have a job.
There had been no work in London. But he’d heard there was a builder hiring down Lyme Regis way. The train was a luxury Bert Mowbray couldn’t afford. Still, jobs didn’t wait, and you sometimes had to make the extra effort. He refused to think what he would do if he’d guessed wrong and there was nothing at the end of his journey but a grim shake of the head and “No work. Sorry.”
His gaze idly followed a porter awkwardly trundling his cart full of luggage across the platform, followed by a pair of elderly women. The cars were already jammed with families on their way to the seaside, but room was found for two more. Then his eye was suddenly caught by another woman outside one of the cars farther down the train, kneeling to comfort a little girl who was crying. A boy much younger, not more than two, clung to the trouser leg of the man bending protectively over them, speaking to the woman and then to the little girl.