overrun with strangers and there’s not a spot we can call our own? What we saw in the war will last us a lifetime. Prying, taking us for fools who didn’t know our elbow from our nose, cheating us where they could, laughing at us behind their hands. I saw it for myself, the way they lorded it over the rest of us. Loud and brash and not taking no for an answer when it was something they wanted.” He was incensed now. “It was a trial of the spirit, the four years they was here. If it hadn’t been for the war, we’d have run them off in the first six months. I wasn’t the only one went off to fight the war, not knowing if my wife would be mine when I got back, if this inn would still be standing after one of their wild parties. Betwixt the Coastguard and the airmen, it was four years of hell.” He turned and walked out of the dining room, leaving Rutledge sitting there.
He rose and left as well, but the clerk was nowhere in sight when he walked through Reception and went out to his motorcar.
This wasn’t the only village that war had disrupted and overrun. But for people more or less left to their own devices for hundreds of years, it was harsh reality with no respite, and for some of them, it was impossible to go back to the past.
Hard as Furnham was trying, he didn’t think the village would win. Men like Frederick Marshall were always looking to the main chance, and in the end, the villages along rivers like the Blackwater and the Crouch and the Hawking would succumb. Thanks to the motorcar they were too close to London now to survive for very long.
He walked down to the water and stood looking toward the sea. The day was fair and already warmer than usual. Far out in the North Sea he could just make out a ship steaming by, the smoke of its funnels a thick gray line above a hull that was nearly invisible from here.
Barber spoke just behind him, and Rutledge turned quickly. He hadn’t heard him walk down to the water’s edge. The lapping of the river on the strand had covered the sound of his footsteps.
“What brings you back to our fair village?” he asked.
“Ned Willet’s funeral,” Rutledge said, keeping his voice light. “When is it to be?”
“It was yesterday. You missed it,” the man replied, with some satisfaction.
“I’m sorry.”
“We’re not.” Barber reached down and picked up something from the strand. It was a flat stone, and he sent it skimming across the water. “Not bad. Seven skips,” Barber went on. Then he turned back to Rutledge. “You’ll be leaving then?”
There was nothing to keep him here. Except for the search for Russell. And yet the man’s eagerness to see the last of him aroused his suspicions.
He took a chance. “Making another run to France, are you? Before the moon is full?”
Barber’s face was a picture of dismay and anger, then wariness. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Rutledge picked up a stone just by the toe of his boot and sent it skimming across the river. It skipped nine times. “Hypothetically, of course.”
Weighing the word, Barber stared at Rutledge, then looked out to sea as Rutledge himself had done earlier. But not before Rutledge had caught the doubt in his eyes.
He had pushed far enough. After a moment Rutledge added, “My only interest is what happened to Ben Willet. I’ve told you. Help me there, and I’ll be on my way.”
“I don’t know who killed him.”
“Nor do I. Was it you, because when he came home from France he was different, no longer a villager, prepared to keep village secrets? Or was it Major Russell, perhaps out of jealousy? Or because Willet knew too much about the death of Justin Fowler? Miss Farraday, because Willet presumed on her friendship?”
Barber picked up another stone, looked at it, and let it drop to the strand again. He was silent so long that Rutledge thought he wasn’t going to answer at all.
Finally he said, “The answer could lie in France. Have you thought about that? He wouldn’t be the first one to want to stay, hanging about with that useless lot in Paris, drinking and whoring and posturing with the rest of them, rather than coming home and doing right by his family. It would have killed the old man.”
Rutledge turned to look up the river so that Barber couldn’t read his face.
On the postal card Willet had sent to Cynthia Farraday a few days before his murder, he’d told her he was intending to visit his father and then return to Paris and finish his last book. But Abigail claimed he
hadn’t come home since the war. And if he hadn’t, why did Sandy Barber suspect his brother-in-law had chosen to stay in Paris after 1918?
A footman from Thetford, son of a fisherman in Furnham, would have been eager to return to the Laughton house where his former position was awaiting him.
“Why should you think that Ben Willet would be one of them?” he asked, his eyes on a shorebird flitting here and there after whatever the current had on offer.
Barber lifted a shoulder in irritation. “I don’t know. Someone-Jessup, I believe it was-said something after-” He cleared his throat. “He said better men than Ben had been tempted to stay on.”
What had Barber been about to say before he’d caught himself? After one of his runs to France for contraband? After meeting Ben Willet in London or Tilbury or on the road to Furnham?
“That was an odd remark,” Rutledge said, facing him. “Did he know Ben so well?”
Barber flushed. “I don’t know what the hell possessed him to make it. It doesn’t matter, does it? The point being that once Ben was free from Furnham, he never looked back, not really. Too good for the likes of us, I expect. In his cast-off clothes and his airs, he made fun of the household in Thetford. And most likely he kept the kitchen staff in Thetford rolling on the floor with his imitations of us.” There was an intensity of bitterness in his voice that was unexpected.
He loved his wife, Rutledge thought, and was angry for her sake. But this was a new intensity.
What did he know?
And as if he knew he’d already said too much, Barber turned on his heel and walked away without a word.
Tales of the wild bohemian ways of Paris, painted in lurid detail, had come home from France with returning soldiers. Most of them had never seen Paris, but most knew someone who had, and those who had were not above embellishing for greater effect. For Ned Willet’s son to prefer that world to the staid life of service in a respectable household was unimaginable to someone who had rarely left this backwater of Essex.
Rutledge turned to follow him. “Will you let me speak to your wife?”
Barber shook his head. “She can’t help you. And besides, she’s still cut up about her father’s death and Ben not making it back here in time. She told me this morning that she couldn’t understand why he hadn’t written. What am I to do? Tell her that he’s dead as well? She even asked me to go to Thetford and see if he’s all right. What’s more, the whispers have already started. Someone talked to his wife, despite my warning. And when I find out who, I’ll kill him myself.”
Rutledge said, “She’ll have to know the truth sometime.”
“Let her heal a little first. When will they release his body?”
“I can give the order tomorrow.”
“That’s too soon.”
With a nod Barber turned and walked away again. Rutledge let him go this time.
Hamish said, “There’s more to him than meets the eye.”
“I agree.” Then Rutledge added thoughtfully, “He would kill Ben Willet himself, if he thought Willet was going to hurt Abigail. But there’s nothing he can do. The man is already dead. And that’s grief he has to carry.”
“It’s verra’ possible that he did kill him. Gie him a little rope
…”
“Meanwhile, I have to find Major Russell.”
And that meant returning to River’s Edge.
Halfway to his motorcar in the inn yard, Rutledge saw Nancy Brothers coming toward him, a market basket over one arm. She hesitated, and he thought perhaps she didn’t wish it to be known that he had come to the farm to interview her. But after that brief moment she walked on, ducked her head in a diffident nod, and passed him without a word. He touched his hat, but didn’t speak, in accordance with her unexpressed wish.
It was a measure, he thought, of the village attitude toward him. Indeed, he’d been surprised that Sandy Barber had sought him out. Hamish reminded him that Barber was a force to be reckoned with in Furnham and
