The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 (52 page)

“One of her ancestors served aboard
Victory.
”

“Did he indeed! I don't think Sir John ever mentioned that fact. Just that hers was a naval family and he'd enjoyed more than a few arguments with her father about sea power and the course of the empire.”

“Sir John also appears to have been writing a history of the Great War.”

“He always said he was tempted to write about his experiences. I didn't know he'd actually begun. It would have been worth reading, his view of the war.”

Mrs. Gravely said, “A history? He liked to work of an evening, after his dinner. I wasn't to disturb him then, he said. He was a great reader. I never gave it another thought on mornings when I found the study floor littered with his atlases and notes.”

Rutledge turned back to Harris. “Who lives in the Barnes house in Dartmouth now?”

“There's a house? I had no idea. Let me see, there was something said once about Althea Middleton having had a brother. But as I remember, he was disinherited. And Barnes himself died whilst his daughter was in India.”

“Then it must have been his daughter who inherited the property, and it passed to Sir John at her death.” He would ask Sergeant Gibson at the Yard to look into the matter.

“His solicitor is the same as mine,” Harris told him, and gave Rutledge directions to the firm in Mumford.

“Would you care for a cup of tea, Mr. Rutledge?” Mrs. Gravely asked. “I was just about to make a fresh pot.”

“Thank you, no,” he said. “Has anyone come to call on Sir John in the past few weeks?”

“Not since before Christmas,” she answered him. “And then it was a man who'd lost his foot in the war and had been given a wooden one in its place. I heard him come up the walk, because it made an odd sound. A thump it was, and then a lighter sound, as he put his cane down with the good foot. The old dog growled something fierce, and I had to hold on to his collar when I went to the door.”

A cane. The murder weapon hadn't been found, the likelihood being that the killer had taken it away with him. A cane could have done the damage to Middleton's head and face, if wielded with enough force.

“Do you remember his name?”

“He didn't give it, sir. He said, ‘Tell Sir John it's an old comrade in arms.' And I did as he asked. Sir John went to see for himself, while I took the old dog into the kitchen with me.”

Was that why the dog had been put outside? Because he knew —and disliked—the killer?

Rutledge thanked her and went back to his search of the house. There was money in a wallet in the bedside table, but it had not been touched. Nor had the gold cuff links in a box on the tall chest by the bedroom door. What had the killer been after, if not robbery?

Trafalgar? A property in Dartmouth?

The deed.

Rutledge left to find a telephone, and had to drive into Cambridge before he was successful. He put in a call to Sergeant Gibson at the Yard and gave him a list of what he needed.

“I'm driving to Dartmouth,” he said. “I'll find a telephone there as soon as I arrive.”

“To Dartmouth?” Gibson repeated doubtfully. “You know your own business best.”

“Let's hope I do,” Rutledge replied. He left a message with the Cambridge police and set out to skirt London to the southwest.

It was early on the third day that he arrived in Dartmouth, having spent two nights on the road after running short of petrol near Slough. Colorful houses spilled down the sides of the high ridge that overlooked the town and the water. Most of them were still dark at this hour. Across the harbor was the town of Kingswear, just as dark. He found a hotel on a quiet side street, a narrow building with three floors, its facade black and white half-timbering. The sleepy clerk, yawning prodigiously, gave him a room at the front of the hotel with a view of the harbor. He stood by the window for some time, looking down toward the quay and the dark water, dotted with boats silently riding the current.

The Dart River opened up here to form the harbor, and castles—ruins now—had once guarded the entrance to this safe haven. It was deep enough for ships, and wide enough for a ferry to convey passengers from one side to the other. Just whereabouts the house called Trafalgar was situated, he didn't know. He hoped the hotel clerk might.

In the event, the man did not. “Before my time, I daresay. You could ask at the bookshop on the next corner,” he suggested later that morning. “Arthur Hillier is the person you want. Oldest man hereabouts. If there was a house by that name, he'll know of it. But I doubt there is. You've come on a wild goose chase to my way of thinking.”

Rutledge found the bookstore just past the shoemaker's shop. It possessed a broad front, the tall windows displaying books on every subject, but mostly about the sea and Dartmouth itself, including works on the wine trade with France and fishing the cod banks. A bell jingled as he opened the door, and an elderly man looked up, brushing a strand of white hair out of still-sharp blue eyes.

“Good morning, sir,” he said cheerfully. “Here to browse, or is there something in particular you're looking for?”

“Information, if you please,” Rutledge replied. “I'm trying to locate a dwelling that was here some years ago.” He had brought with him the volume on the Barnes family history and opened it to the frontispiece. “This house, in fact.”

Hillier pulled a pair of eyeglasses from his sweater pocket and put them on. “Ah. Trafalgar. It isn't called that anymore. For a time it was a home for indigent naval officers, and after that, it was a clinic during the war. Now it's more or less derelict. Sad, really.”

“Do you know anything about the former owners?”

“Well, you do have the Barnes history, don't you? But I knew the last of the family to live there. Not well, you understand. Fanciful name for the house. It was called that after an ancestor was wounded the same day Lord Nelson was killed. Quite the fashion to commemorate the battle with monuments and the like. Trafalgar Square in London was one of the last to do so; I expect they didn't know what else to do with that great patch of emptiness. At any rate, the house was River's End before that—just where the Dart opens into the harbor, you see.” He gestured to the door. “Come with me, and I'll show you. “

Rutledge followed him out of the shop, toward the harbor. “There's a boat,” Hillier was saying, “that will convey you to the mouth of the River Dart. Where it broadens into the harbor, you can just see the rooftops of Trafalgar over that stand of trees. They weren't there in my day, those trees. You could see the gardens then. Quite a sight in the spring, I remember.”

He could see where Hillier was pointing, but the morning sun hadn't yet reached that part of the harbor, and he had to take the man's word for it that the house was behind the trees. But then he looked a little farther along. There, just visible over the treetops, was the line of a roof.

“The boatman is just there, at the foot of the water stairs. Jesse is his name. He'll see you there and back without any trouble.”

“You said you knew the last of the family to live there. What do you remember about him?”

“He was troubled with gout and often ill-tempered,” the bookseller answered. “But catch him in good spirits, and he could tell sea stories that were marvelous to hear.”

Rutledge thanked Hillier and walked on toward the harbor. He found the water stairs and the small boat tied up just under them. Jesse was nowhere to be seen. Rutledge turned to look back at the town just as a man popped out of the pub on the corner, rolling down in his direction, a wide grin on his unshaven face.

“Morning,” he said. “Going sommers?”

“I'd like to hire your boat for an hour or so. Are you willing?”

“I come with the boat,” he said, close enough now for Rutledge to smell the gin on his breath. He began to cast off, gestured to Rutledge to step aboard, and sat down to pick up the heavy oak oars.

“Where to?”

“The house you can hardly see behind the trees over there.”

“The clinic that was? Why do you want to go there? Not much to see, now.”

“Nevertheless . . .”

Nodding, Jesse moved out of the shelter of the water stairs, pulled into the current, turned smartly, and headed upstream. “We're against the tide,” he said. “It will cost you more to go up than to come down.”

“I understand.”

It was cold down here on the water, wind sweeping down the chute between the high ridge on which Dartmouth sprawled and the lower one on the opposite bank. In the distance he could hear a train whistle, and soon after, the white plumes of a steam engine could be seen coming into Kingswear. As they reached midharbor, Rutledge buttoned his coat up to his collar against the bite of the January air. But Jesse, in shirtsleeves, seemed not to feel the cold, plying his oars and glancing over his shoulder from time to time to take stock of any other river traffic that morning. A quarter of an hour later, Jesse drew up by what had once been a fine private landing, rotting now and slippery with moss.

“Going to explore, are you? Watch where you step or I'll be fishing you out of the river.”

As he clambered out on what was left of the private landing, he saw that it would be precarious at best to make his way across the broken boards. Moving gingerly, he finally gained the tree line and stepped ashore. The trees had grown unhindered for fifteen years or more, he thought. He needed an ax, really, to fight his way through the undergrowth that blocked any semblance of a path.

Eventually he'd made it to the garden beyond—itself a thicket of dead plants, weeds, and vines. Above it was a terrace, and he climbed the broad steps to the long French doors that let into the house. To his surprise, one of them was unlocked, and after the briefest hesitation, he went inside.

It was out of the wind, but the house was cold in a different way: unused, unheated, winter seeping into the very bricks. The room in which he found himself had once been beautiful, with a pale green paper on the walls, a pattern of Chinese figures in blues and reds and deep gold sitting in a formal garden. But it was stained now, and torn in places. A temporary wall, still there, divided the spacious room in half. If there had been any of the original furniture here, it had certainly now gone.

He made his way to the door, found himself in a passage, and began to explore. The stairs had been battered and bruised by the comings and goings of staff and patients, and the only furniture he saw was the remnants of cots in a few rooms, mostly with legs missing or springs broken. Not worth removing, he thought, when the clinic was closed. He wondered if Sir John had been aware of the state of the house, or didn't care. He walked through the rooms, noting how they had been used, and how they had been left. A broken window on the ground floor had allowed leaves and rain to ruin the floorboards, and a desk in what must have been Matron's office lay on its side, a nest of mice or squirrels in one half-opened drawer.

He found nothing of interest—except for signs that someone had been here before him, footprints in the dust, a bed of worn blankets and quilts by the coal stove in the kitchen, and indications that someone had also cooked there—a dented teapot still on the cast-iron top, and a saucepan on the floor.

Who had been in this house? A vagrant, looking for shelter against the winter cold and happening on it quite by accident, or someone who had come to this house because he knew it was there? A former patient? Or someone else?

Hamish said, “Look at the dust.”

And he lit a match, studying the pattern of footprints hardly visible in the pale light coming through the dirty windowpanes.

The person who had been here had left his mark. Two shoes, one dragging a little as if the ankle didn't bend properly. And the small round ferrule of a walking stick. Or a lame man's cane.

Rutledge knelt there considering the prints, hearing again Mrs. Gravely's description of how Sir John's December caller had sounded coming up the walk to the door. These prints were not recent. He would swear to that. Fresh dust had settled over them, almost obliterating them in places.

He went back through the house looking for something, anything, that might be a clue to the interloper.

All he found was a crushed packet that once held cigarettes. It had been tossed into the coal stove and forgotten. He smoothed it out as best he could and saw that it was an Australian brand.

Giving it up, he went back to the door onto the terrace and stepped out, shutting it behind him.

Jesse was still sitting in his boat, smoking a cigarette of his own.

“Where can I buy Australian cigarettes?” Rutledge asked the man.

“Portsmouth, at a guess. London. Not here. No call for them here. Why? Develop a taste for them in the war, did you?”

“No. I found an empty box in the house. Someone had been living there.”

Jesse seemed not to be too surprised. “Men out of work in this weather take what shelter they can find. I came on one asleep in my boat a year back. Wrapped in a London newspaper for warmth, he was. I bought him a breakfast and sent him on his way.”

“Any Australians in Dartmouth?”

“Up at the Royal Navy College on the hill, there might be,” Jesse told him, maneuvering the boat expertly into the stream again. “But they'd be officers, wouldn't they? Not likely to be breaking into a house.” The ornate red-brick college, more like a palace than a school and completed in 1905, had seen the present king, George V, attend as a cadet. Jesse bent his back to the oars, grinning. “What do you want with a derelict old house?”

“It's not what
I
want,” Rutledge said pensively, “but what someone else could very easily wish for.” He turned slightly to look up the reaches of the River Dart, already a broad stream here as it fed into the harbor. “It wasn't always in disrepair.”