A Fine Summer's Day (6 page)

Rutledge walked back to the police station and found Inspector Farraday filling out forms.

“Don't tell me you've finished your work and can give me the murderer's name?” he asked with a grin that was more sly than humorous.

“Not yet. It's a shame the doctor poured out the sour milk before it could be tested. I wonder if Clayton had been given something to sedate him.”

“The odd thing is, he hadn't gone to bed. Instead, he'd fallen asleep in his chair, in his shirtsleeves but still fully clothed. That would tend to make you think he hadn't got around to taking his powders. The milk was gone before I got there, I can't tell you what was in it. I know it existed, but at the time I was more concerned with what was hanging there above my head. The doctor tells me Clayton died from hanging. Not an overdose of anything he'd swallowed, although he appeared to have taken his powders. That brings us around to the fact that it was the daughter who set out the milk on the tray. Do you think Annie Clayton drugged her father?”

“It's hard to believe, but stranger things have happened.”

“Or Michael Clayton, more likely. Although I have sworn statements that place him in York. I can't think he'd find that many people prepared to lie for him. Not in a case of patricide.”

Rutledge sat down in the chair across from Farraday's desk. “If it isn't his family, and there were no known enemies, then we're back to the outsiders visiting Moresby. You've been interviewing them. Is there any reason to question them again?”

Farraday reached for a writing tablet, then tossed it across the desk to Rutledge. “You're the man from Scotland Yard.”

Ignoring the sarcasm, he read the list, then nodded.

“All right, I'll have another look at them.”

Farraday opened his mouth to say something, then shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

Rutledge returned to the flat above the furniture maker's shop. But Peter Clayton was in the shop itself, sitting at a desk in the back of the show room, head in hands. He looked up as Rutledge walked in, hope flaring in his face.

“You've found out who it is?”

“We're pursuing our inquiries,” Rutledge said, and handed him the list. “Know any of these people? Have any of them come to the shop?”

The man read through it, frowning as he came to each new name, then shook his head. “I don't recognize any of them. If my father knew one of them, then he kept it to himself.”

“Which once more brings us around to his past.”

“I can't think he was running from anything he'd done. You didn't know my father—he was upright and good.”

“Even upright and good men can do things they've regretted.”

“I refuse to believe it. And my mother was a good judge of character. Come to that my grandfather—her father—wouldn't have trusted his only daughter to a stranger. He'd have made inquiries, he'd have been certain that my father was the man he claimed to be. It wouldn't surprise me if he himself made it his business to travel to the village where my father had lived.” He passed the list of names back to Rutledge.

He realized that Clayton's children, Annie, Peter, and Michael, were young, and the young dwelled in the present. They weren't of an age yet to ask their parent about his own youth, or for that matter, even think of him as having been young. The possibility that the father might have been an escaped murderer or had enjoyed a dissolute year or two in his twenties was as foreign to them as the West Country.

He thanked Clayton, and set out to find the men and women whose names were on the list.

That took him nearly three hours, but he managed to find all but one of them. They had been questioned before by Farraday and knew why he had come to speak to them, but they had nothing to add to what they'd told the local man. Only one of them had been to Moresby
before, and that was seven years ago. None of them had roots in the West Country. On the whole, Rutledge thought they were telling him the truth, that they'd never heard of a man named Clayton until Farraday had appeared to interview them. Even the elusive artist, a man in his late fifties, was appalled that anyone could consider him guilty of murder. As he was a short, slim man, unlikely to have managed a hanging, Rutledge tended to agree.

No one seemed to know where to find the name at the top of the list—it wasn't familiar to anyone Rutledge spoke to, and the man didn't seem to frequent any of the usual restaurants or tearooms that catered to visitors. And so Rutledge went back to Farraday.

“That's the only one of that lot I didn't like,” the Inspector told him. “This is the man who came to view the ruins. There's something rather odd about him. Anxious, couldn't look me in the eye. A writer, he says. Amateur archaeologist. But when I talked to him about the abbey, he only seemed to know what had been drummed into our heads in school. You'd think, wouldn't you, that he'd have learned something new about the monks or the building, if he was going to write about them? Or how Moresby compared with the other well-known Yorkshire monastic ruins at Ripon or Fountains?”

“I thought you told me earlier that it was possible he was telling the truth? That you were waiting for a response from the magazine that intended to print his article?”

“The magazine hasn't got back to me. Look, his story about where he was all evening appeared to check out. But I ran into him a quarter of an hour ago up on the path to the abbey, and we talked again. I hadn't sought him out, mind you. He'd have stayed in the clear if he'd kept his mouth shut. I'd have believed him if he'd said he couldn't discuss his work.”

“Interesting. If he isn't writing for a magazine, then why is he here?”

“A German spy? There's a good harbor here.”

“You can't be serious?” Rutledge asked.

“Who's to say? Like everyone else in the country, I've been following the news. If the Russians attack Austria and the Germans come to Austria's aid, where will we be? I can't believe it's a question of if, but of when. I tell you, if Russia has her wits about her, she'll leave those assassins to stand trial for what they did. She won't interfere. But who knows what the Tsar will decide to do? And how steady is the German Kaiser? Then there's France,” he added darkly. “France has a treaty with Russia, just as Germany has an alliance with Austria.”

“You've been following events very closely.”

“I'm of an age where I might find myself in uniform, if worse comes to worst. But more to the point, my younger brother most certainly will, if we're drawn into this business. And I'd not like to see that. I could fend for myself. I'm not sure he has the bottom to last it through. He's a theology student. He failed at everything else he tried, but he seems to like this.”

Rather like Michael, Rutledge thought. What would the Army do for someone like Michael? Make a man of him? Or turn him bitter?

Farraday was saying, “You're of an age, yourself.”

“So far, Britain's stayed out of it.” In truth, Rutledge hadn't given much thought to the chances of war. For one thing, he was a policeman, not an Army officer. For another, there hadn't been a war in over a hundred years where men had been conscripted into the Army. He'd been seduced by happiness into thinking this saber rattling in Europe was no different from any other Balkan conflict. What if it were?

“Yes, well, we're speaking of Europe. They'll find a way to drag us in, mark my words. Remember Napoleon? Not that any of the present-day rulers are his match. Far from it. But before he was finished, all of Europe was ablaze.”

“You're pessimistic,” Rutledge said. “We weren't drawn into the Franco-Prussian War.”

“Not so much pessimistic as concerned. France and Prussia had
at it in 1870. And France didn't much care for the outcome. She'll not walk away from a chance to get her own back. If Germany comes in on the side of Austria, mark my words, she'll leap at the chance to take on the Kaiser.”

If so, a little Balkan war wouldn't stay little or confined to Serbia and the Balkans. “The Kaiser is a cousin of the King. He's not a Chancellor Bismarck. And he's no Frederick the Great.”

But even as he said the words, Rutledge remembered glimpsing the German Kaiser on his last visit to England. A pompous man with a withered arm . . .

“That may well be what the French are counting on.”

“You can't be serious about the possibility that this man—what's his name?—could be a spy?”

Farraday rubbed his face with both hands, his voice sounding hollow as he answered. “God knows. But we've not much else to choose from.” He dropped his hands. “Name's Hartle. Edward Hartle. See if you don't see something about him that raises the hackles.”

“Where can I find him?”

“At the ruins, I expect. You needn't go around by land, there are stairs on the cliff that will take you up. I'll show you.”

He led Rutledge out into the street, and shading his eyes, he pointed. “That row of houses. Halfway along you'll find the stairs. Can't miss them.”

Rutledge thanked him and set out for the ruins. It was warm in the sun, and by the time he was halfway up the steps—nearly two hundred of them—he'd taken off his coat and his tie. Higher up, he began to catch the breeze from the sea, and by the time he'd reached the flat top of the headland, he could feel it ruffle his hair even as the sun baked his face.

The ruins were majestic. There was no other word for them, at a distance or close to. He'd been to Fountains Abbey and a few of the other well-known abbey ruins, but not all of them had such a
spectacular setting, here on the headland, the sky above and the sea beyond. He turned for a moment to look back down at the little harbor, the houses straggling below him. He could just make out the bunch of black crepe on the door of the furniture maker's shop. A mother and daughter were stepping out of the tea shop, Mrs. Calder seeing them off and closing the door behind them. Several other women were standing in front of the milliner's shop, admiring the latest display. As he scanned the town center, two men came out of the tobacconist's, conversing earnestly, their heads together.

As a place from which to watch the town, this was an excellent vantage point. Rutledge followed the street patterns toward the Clayton bungalow. Moving slightly to his left, he found he could even pick out the walk leading up to the door.

Had someone stood here and waited for Annie Clayton to leave for her brother's flat above the shop? The days were long, it might well be light enough by ten to see her step out the door and to make certain she entered the shop. Signaling that Clayton was alone . . .

Who had had a reason to kill Clayton? An ordinary man, a furniture maker, a family man, and a widower? Soon to be a grandfather for the first time?

Was it someone in Moresby? Not a stranger, as Farraday seemed to hope, someone Clayton might not recognize at two in the morning, but a friend who had harbored a hatred that finally spilled over into bloodshed?

He turned and walked on toward the ruins, to find this man Hartle.

The tracery of empty windows was sharp against the sky and quite lovely. The remaining walls gave him some sense of what the abbey must once have looked like. Certainly if its builders had feared Viking invaders from the sea, this was the spot to choose for the abbey. The monks could see for miles around, could have been prepared for any attack, and yet the original abbey had been plundered and destroyed
by Northmen. This ruin was, like so many others in England, Norman. And they had built for beauty as well as endurance.

The pond just beyond the abbey's west front rippled as the breeze touched it, and the abbey's reflection shivered across the surface.

There was someone in the nave. Rutledge had seen the flash of a white shirt before the man moved out of sight behind a portion of the wall that had once been part of the north transept.

Better, Rutledge thought, to approach in a roundabout fashion, and so, picking up his pace, he crossed the headland in the direction of the pond and the west front of the ruins, walking through the high grass at an unhurried pace, so as not to alarm his quarry. He looked up at the massive and beautiful facade as he made his way through the summer wildflowers toward it. Stepping into the shadows of the nave, he paused for a moment to get his bearings, and then he walked on toward the towering transept wall. There was no sun beating down on his shoulders here, and he felt a distinct chill as the perspiration on his body began to cool.

He cornered his quarry on the far side of the transept, and he said, raising his voice to carry above the whisper of the wind, “Hallo.”

The man turned, his face anxious, but he relaxed when he saw Rutledge.

Who was he expecting to come up here to meet him? Farraday? Or someone else?

Rutledge put his age at perhaps thirty, his build slender, his hair sun-streaked fair, although his eyes were brown.

“Beautiful to walk here,” Rutledge said casually. “Is it usually so quiet?”

“Yes. Well, sometimes there are visitors.” He paused. “What brings you here?”

“I had time on my hands. And I'd never climbed up before. I thought it might be worthwhile. You?”

“I—Working on an essay about Moresby. Its history and construction. I hope to see it published.”

“Interesting. A don, are you?” But he was already fairly certain the man wasn't an academic. His voice had given him away, and his clothing.

“No, no. More like an amateur historian, I expect.” He stared up at the walls, then turned the subject. “They built well, didn't they, those monks.”

“Very well. A pity the years have taken their toll,” Rutledge answered, gesturing to where a part of the wall had fallen in, stones scattered in the high grass. “What made you choose Moresby for your work?”

“Its isolation.”