Wyatt and I left was the hope she might come back and someone ought to be there if she did.”
“And after that?”
“The Prince Frederick was flattened in one of the Zeppelin raids, worst luck, because in my opinion, the hotel restaurant was the best in London. I don’t know where he stayed after that or even if he came to London at all. If he did, he never got in touch with me. His name never appeared on the lists of killed, wounded, and missing. I’ve heard since that not all of the missing and dead were ever accounted for.” She looked away. “Perhaps he found someone he liked and spent every minute of any leaves with her.”
He detected the faintest note of jealousy.
“His solicitors have had no word of him. I’ve spoken to them.”
There was a sadness in her voice that she couldn’t quite conceal. “Justin went his own way, and Wyatt has been damaged by the war. Ben is dead. It makes me aware of how fleeting life is. How little we can hold on to anyone or anything. I wish I could understand why he’d been the way he was. What the shadows were in his life.”
It wasn’t his place to tell her about Justin Fowler’s past. But he said, “Something happened before he came to River’s Edge. The shadows were there before you knew him.”
She nodded. “Thank you for telling me that. It helps. I always had the feeling that he was waiting. For something to happen or someone to come. It was one of the reasons he didn’t go into Furnham. He liked the isolation of River’s Edge. He told Aunt Elizabeth once that he felt safe there. I know, because I happened to overhear him.”
He thought about the boy Justin Fowler had been. His parents had been murdered, he himself had nearly been killed. Was he afraid that the unknown killer would come for him one day and finish what he’d begun? It was a dreadful burden for a child to bear.
“If he went to River’s Edge on one of his leaves, how would he have got there?”
“Aunt Elizabeth’s motorcar. Harold Finley brought it to London when he enlisted and stored it in the mews behind Wyatt’s house. All of us used it from time to time. Mostly it just sat there, of course. But I drove it to Dover once, and another time to Cornwall for a friend’s wedding.”
“Do you remember who used it in the summer of 1915?”
“No, of course not. Not now. I can tell you that the few times I wished to borrow it, it was always there in the mews.”
As he rose to leave, she said, “There’s something I just remembered. The first warm weather we had, after he’d come to River’s Edge, we went swimming in the river. I saw Justin’s chest. It was horribly scarred. I asked him what caused them. He said he’d been in hospital for a long time. I thought he meant he’d had some sort of surgery. It explained how pale and thin he was. I was young, easily put off. But I realize now the scars were not the sort that come from surgery. I helped with the wounded during the war-reading to them, writing letters, keeping their minds off their suffering. It never occurred to me at the time-those scars of his were wounds.”
He said nothing.
“Did his parents-were they responsible?”
“Not his parents,” Rutledge replied. “A stranger.”
“Dear God. I wish someone had told me. I wish I’d known.”
“I don’t think Mrs. Russell wanted you to know. She understood that it was important to forget.”
“But did she tell Wyatt?”
“Probably not. For the same reason.”
She took a deep breath. “If you find him, will you let me know-if he’s all right?”
“If that’s what he wants me to do.”
And she had to be satisfied with that.
Chapter 19
The first person Rutledge met as he walked into the hospital was a nursing sister he had dealt with earlier. As they walked together to the ward where the Major was being kept under observation, he asked if there had been any change in his condition.
She reported, “He’s been rather restless, and the doctors are quite concerned about a fever. That would mean infection. He needs sleep, but he keeps trying to remember what happened to him.” She paused, then said diplomatically, “It might be best if the rector left for a time. There would be less temptation to talk.”
Russell had in fact dropped into a light sleep when Rutledge walked into the ward. Morrison was not there, and so Rutledge took the empty chair by the bed.
He himself had left River’s Edge at a little after two the previous night. And he had seen no one, had heard no shots. Morrison had told him that the Major had left the Rectory after one o’clock. Where had he been between half past one and half past two? Or to look at this problem another way, who had encountered Russell on the road-or in the marshes? Was it a planned meeting-or simply opportune?
Who came to the house at night, who kept those terrace doors unlocked for easy access to the guns in the study? Who stood by the landing stage and stared out over the river to the far side, as if lord of all he surveyed?
The only people who were usually abroad late at night were the smugglers.
And while they wouldn’t brook any interference in their business, it seemed unlikely that they would go out of their way to stalk Major Russell through the marshes.
Although Timothy Jessup might well have his own reasons for seeing that River’s Edge remained closed. Hadn’t he asked if Rutledge was interested in the property? On that first encounter when he was here with Frances?
Perhaps it was time to find out who would inherit River’s Edge if the last of the Russells died. Rutledge realized he knew very little about the Major’s father, who had been killed in the Boer War. Cynthia Farraday was distantly related to him. Who else might be? Surely not Jessup. But stranger things had happened. Men sometimes committed indiscretions in their youth-witness Justin Fowler’s father-that they kept firmly locked away in their past.
Dr. Wade, Rutledge thought, was right. The Major seemed to live a charmed life. The war wound, the motorcycle crash, and now this gunshot. Any one of them should have killed him.
Hamish said, “He willna’ escape the hangman.”
“We must prove he killed Fowler first.”
He was suddenly aware that the Major was awake and staring up at him. His first thought was that he’d answered Hamish aloud, without thinking.
Russell said after a moment, “Have you come back-or have you never left?”
“I was at the Yard. Where is Morrison?”
“He went to the canteen. He wanted a cup of tea.”
“Just as well. Do you feel like talking?”
“Not particularly.”
“If you had died of this gunshot wound, who stands to inherit River’s Edge?”
“I made a will leaving it to my wife. After she died, I left everything to Cynthia. Why?”
“Are there any other cousins?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember much about my father. Or his side of the family for that matter. A grandmother, I think, when I was very young. She read to me, and I remember her voice, not her face.”
“Do you know where Justin Fowler stayed, when he was on leave during the war?”
“There was a hotel in London he liked. A little out of the way for my tastes, but it suited him, he said. Cynthia went there to dine with him, I think. But don’t trust that memory. I was jealous and could have imagined it.”
“I’m told the hotel was destroyed in a Zeppelin raid.”
“Was it?”
“Did he go back to River’s Edge, after it was closed?”
“I ran into him in France and he told me he’d gone down to Essex a last time before being sent over with his
