A cold treachery - Charles Todd [110]
She faltered, her voice refusing to go on.
Rutledge waited, his back to her, until she could speak again. Finally she said, “I stopped at his flat after a friend's birthday party. Sometime in the evening he'd turned the gas on and killed himself. I'd seen him at tea, and he'd tried to be cheerful for my sake. He hadn't expected me to be the one to find him, but I'd been given a book I thought he might enjoy. I'd hoped it would pick up his spirits, as it had mine.”
Her voice changed. “I was so angry—angry with myself for not seeing his desperation, angry with his father for being so heartless and refusing to understand, angry at his mother for her stupid comparisons with his brother. All I could think of was protecting Ronald from this last indignity. ‘A coward to the end,' his father would have said. ‘Couldn't face the Hun, the way our Willie did. A disgrace to Willie's memory!' And so I took the blame.”
“What do you mean?” He had turned from the window, a dark silhouette against the light. Her knuckles were white on the arms of the chair, her face drained of expression.
“I wrote a note. In it I said that I'd watched Ronald suffer the indignities of others, and I couldn't go on. And so I'd ended it for both of us. But I was afraid if we died together, it would appear to be a double suicide. I went out, shut the door, and let myself be struck by a lorry coming down the road.”
“My God,” he said quietly.
“Melodramatic, wasn't it? Foolishness in the extreme. But I couldn't think of anything but the fact that he was dead and I wanted to die too. Instead, I woke up in hospital with the police by my bed.” She sighed. “My friends at the birthday party—it didn't occur to me that they might be asked—could prove that Ronald was alive earlier when they met me at the flat. The woman who owns the building had seen him on the stairs half an hour after I'd gone. He'd put the cat in the back garden. She swore she hadn't smelled gas then. But of course, she wasn't happy with a murder in her house. The suicide of a coward gave her some standing on the street. And so—his parents learned the truth after all. They were in the gallery at the trial. I could almost see them gloat. And I couldn't walk. They felt God had punished me sufficiently, too.”
“Did you kill him?” he asked her bluntly.
She lifted her face to look at the candlesticks about the hearth, ornate Victorian silver with twining ivy running up the shaft to form the cup for the candle. “I loved him so dearly. I could have done it, I think. But I didn't.” She took a deep breath. “And when Harry asked me to come here, away from London and the gossip, where no one knew—I thought I could forget. But you don't, do you? The past stays with you, like a shadow.”
“And Gerald?”
“Ah, yes, Gerald. He wasn't at all like Ronald, and yet if I watched, sometimes I'd catch a glimpse of Ronald in him. His fairness, the way he walked, that sparkle in his eyes when he was excited about something. I took such pleasure in that! Even, sometimes, Gerald's laughter would catch me unprepared. I would hear it in a shop, and turn quickly— Have you never lost someone, and then looked for them in other people?”
He'd lost Jean, even though he'd come back alive from France. She had been terrified of him, sitting irrational and suicidal in hospital. And he'd seen her only once afterward, in London just before her marriage to someone else. Had he looked for Jean in other women? Or found in other women the traits that he had missed in her? In Aurore—or Olivia Marlowe? Even Fiona . . .
“I don't know,” he answered simply. “I expect I haven't loved as deeply as you did.”
Elizabeth Fraser smiled, but it was more with sadness than humor. “I never want to love anyone again. It hurts too much. Am I free to go now?”
“Yes—”
But when the door closed behind her, Hamish said, “Did you believe her, then?”
Rutledge found he couldn't answer the voice in his head.
The screams brought Maggie up out of a deep sleep. For a moment she lay stock-still, disoriented and uncertain. Then she found her shawl and threw