share this next part of his life, given the trouble he’d had over becoming a footman.
Rutledge said to Cynthia Farraday, “Have you read this one?”
“Yes, I thought it quite good.”
But had she known how much truth had gone into the story?
Skimming again, he looked for a chapter similar to the one he’d read in Thetford, and he found it. The description of the war-torn French village was astonishingly real now, unlike the poorly imagined village in the copybook. The odd thing was, the woman in the earlier version had been dark haired, dark eyed, the girl Willet must have recalled from his boyhood. In this version, she had light brown hair and sounded very much like Cynthia Farraday. Had she recognized herself?
The early pages, describing where Browning Warden lived, evoked Furnham, although Willet had renamed it and the river. The isolation, the marshes, the dark river where he learned to sail, the crossing to France, all spoke of firsthand knowledge. The first meeting with the girl he would seek during the war, her search later for the wounded soldier who had deserted to marry her, shadowed a fulfillment of the promise glimpsed in the Thetford notebooks.
Realizing that he’d been reading for some minutes, he set the book aside. “You’re right. Willet was quite a fine writer. Do you by any chance know what the third book was to be about?”
“Pure evil,” she replied. “That’s what he said once, that it was a study in man’s depravity. But I can’t tell you what story he was telling. I’m sorry. He didn’t want to talk about it very much. He said it was a reflection of what he’d seen in the war and what he knew of heroism and cruelty. Ambitious, that was his word for it. And Gertrude Stein, whoever she may be, thought what she’d read was splendid.”
“These first two books had roots in Willet’s life. His experiences in the war, this love for a girl he could never marry, based on the smuggling he knew so much about. I wonder if the third book did the same.”
“Are you saying that there actually was smuggling going on? In Furnham? That Ben was a part of it?” She shook her head. “You must be mistaken. He liked the way the past shaped the future. Nothing to do with reality.”
And he had lied to her. To protect her? Or to protect the people of Furnham?
There was nothing here, with the possible exception of the reference to Captain F-, to cause a man’s death. Or to support Willet’s claim that Russell had killed Justin Fowler.
With regret he set the books aside.
Cynthia Farraday was saying, “I’m not in a position to judge, not really, I know so little about writing. But I think the second book is much more mature than anything he’d written before the war. He’d seen the world. He understood far better what he was trying to say. The money I gave him was well repaid. Can you imagine what Paris must have been like after Furnham, or even Thetford for that matter?”
“You lived at River’s Edge. Did you feel that the village in the second novel was Furnham?”
“Well, of course it was. I mean to say, he didn’t use real names, but I recognized a few of the residents. Those I knew. There are probably more.”
“Reading these, I keep asking myself why he came to Scotland Yard and posed as Wyatt Russell. Was that the only lie he told me? Or have I been chasing shadows?”
“I don’t know. You haven’t told me if you’d found Wyatt. Are you saving bad news for the last?”
“I can’t find him. I thought he’d be in Essex, there was nowhere else to go. And I was wrong. Why did you tell me you wished to buy River’s Edge, if it were for sale?”
Color rose in her face. “To find the girl I once was, I suppose. Don’t you ever wish you could go back? It’s heartbreaking to see it standing empty. And I have a feeling Wyatt won’t ever live there again. He sees the ghosts that walk. I don’t.”
“Not even the ghost of Justin Fowler?”
“Justin was handsome, he loved sports-we had croquet and lawn tennis and the like, horses to ride, a boat. But he was-there was something about him, a darkness, I thought at the time, having read too many novels. Still, it was there. I thought at first he missed his parents. They were dead, like mine, but he never talked about them. Never, ‘My father and I did this,’ or ‘My mother loved roses.’ I wondered afterward if perhaps he wanted to forget them.”
“Why?”
She looked across at the window. “Perhaps it was too painful to remember. My parents died on holiday. There was a typhoid outbreak in Spain, while they were in Cordoba. They were there-and then they weren’t. Horrible for me, but I’d said good-bye when they went away, and when their luggage was returned, there were presents for me, ribbons and a cut-glass bottle for scent, some lace, and a collection of photographs they’d bought in famous places. I knew they’d been thinking about me, and I found it comforting. I don’t know how his died. Perhaps they were ill and had been suffering for some time. The sort of thing one tries to put behind one.”
It was an interesting possibility.
He thanked her and was preparing to leave when she said, “Wyatt didn’t come back. Not even to apologize. Do you think he ever will?”
For her sake, he lied once more. “I’m sure he will.”
S topping at The Marlborough Hotel, he used their telephone to put in a call to the Yard.
It was some time before Gibson could be found, and he sounded harassed when he finally answered.
“Sir? Where are you?” was his first question, after Rutledge had identified himself.
“What news do you have of the Chief Superintendent?” Rutledge countered.
“In hospital, sir, and the report is not good. Where are you?”
“Traveling,” Rutledge replied. “Have you learned anything about Justin Fowler? Or Benjamin Willet?”
“Nothing about Fowler. As for the other man, he had rooms in Bloomsbury but gave them up to return to France.” There was no real connection then with The Marlborough Hotel. Willet had lied when he claimed he had rooms there.
Gibson was saying, “Constable Burton, who located his lodgings, is very thorough. We also found the doctor who treated this man Willet. ” He gave Rutledge the address in Harley Street. “Dr. Baker.”
“Good work. And keep trying with Fowler, if you will.”
“Sir, I’ll try. We’re at sixes and sevens with the Chief Superintendent in hospital.”
Rutledge noticed that Gibson had used Bowles’s title rather than what he and the rank and file called him: Old Bowels. It was not a good sign. Nor was the fact that it appeared that no one had yet been asked to fill in either temporarily or permanently. Much as he himself disliked the man, it was hard to picture the Yard without him.
“Someone’s been looking for the file on the MacGuire trial. By any chance, do you know where that is?”
“I sent it along to the Chief Superintendent. Look there. If it isn’t in his box, it may have been given to someone else.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll do that. And the Weatherly case?”
Rutledge felt a twinge of conscience. “On my desk. The constable who discovered the body hasn’t finished his report.”
“I’ll get on that, then.” Gibson paused, then added quietly, “There’s been some question about what to do. One rumor says Chief Inspector Cummins might be called back.”
That meant that there had been some discussion in the upper echelons after all, and no one’s view had prevailed. In point of fact, the Chief Superintendent would be hard to replace for the simple reason that he had never groomed a successor for fear of being overshadowed-or shown lacking.
Rutledge rang off and stood there for a moment in the telephone closet. He ought to go back to the Yard. But the last thing he wished to do was enter into the speculation and carping that must be going on, much less the ruthless undercurrents as some tried to benefit from Bowles’s crisis. He’d become a policeman for very sound reasons, and political intrigue was not one of them. He’d been pleased when Cummins, who had retired earlier in the summer, had suggested that he be promoted as his replacement. It had been a measure of Cummins’s respect for a junior officer.
But subsequent events had left a bitter taste in Rutledge’s mouth. He’d realized that promotion would leave him vulnerable to attack where he could least afford to tell the real truth about the war. He’d been decorated for bravery, but the stigma of shell shock-regarded as cowardice-would negate that.
He realized that someone was standing outside the door, waiting to use the telephone, and he left the hotel
