A cold treachery - Charles Todd [126]
There was a smugness in her face as her eyes ran around the table.
“You can't mean that!” her husband exclaimed. “You hardly know him.”
“I've said I never liked him . . .”
Cummins's eyes met Rutledge's over her head. Pleading in them.
“Yes, thank you, Mrs. Cummins,” Rutledge said hastily. “I'll look into that myself.”
She subsided, her attention returning to her plate. Cummins's fingers were shaking as he set down his knife and fork. He said quietly, “Standish is probably— He began taking in paying guests at the farm last summer. It rather cut into our own business. My wife was—understandably unsettled by it.”
Elizabeth Fraser, sitting beside Rutledge at the table, added under her breath, “He's seventy . . .”
Rutledge said, “How well did the Ingersons know the Elcotts?”
Cummins threw a grateful glance in Rutledge's direction. “I expect they knew them as well as any of us did. I don't think there was a particular friendship. Miss Ingerson's father died some years ago—he was Henry Elcott's generation. Maggie has always been rather—reclusive. Perhaps that's the best word. There was no son; she took over the farm herself, and proved soon enough that she ran it as well as her father had before her. But it drained all the life out of her. When the man who helped her with the sheep died in the war, she did what everyone else had done: made do as best she could.”
“That was the opinion I'd formed,” Rutledge answered. “She's forthright and apparently unflappable. If she hadn't had a problem with her leg, she might have been out with the searchers.”
Mrs. Cummins said, “It's Dr. Jarvis's fault, that. He didn't have the sense to leave well enough alone. There is no hope of her finding a husband, crippled as she is.”
Elizabeth Fraser flinched, but Mrs. Cummins had turned to look at her husband. “I expect she knows all about the old road over the fells to the coast. She showed Harry where it was, and how it ran. But that was years ago, wasn't it, my dear? When she was much, much prettier . . .”
Restless in the night, Rutledge got up and dressed, then made his way out of the house. The walls seemed to close in on him, and Hamish was busily reminding him that Inspector Mickelson would arrive the next day.
“It wouldna' be politic to stay on after he's reported to you.”
But Rutledge ignored him.
He had never dealt with a case where so many people were intent on misdirecting the course of the inquiry—each for his or her own ends. Lies, obstruction, muddled evidence, finger-pointing. As if mourning were not enough. Elcott and Miss Ashton had argued with the victims. Even Robinson was so intent on his own troubled role in the family's past that he wouldn't or couldn't look elsewhere. The ironmonger, Belfors, was protecting Paul Elcott out of habit, and because the information he could give the police was proof that Elcott knew where a revolver was to be had. Greeley wanted to live in peace with his neighbors long after Rutledge had moved on. Harry Cummins was intent on protecting his own secret. And his wife was not trustworthy as she pursued her own nightmares.
Of them all, Elizabeth Fraser had the least to win or lose. But she, too, had a past that made her vulnerable. Would Mickelson look at that and hear the whispers that she had cared for Gerald Elcott more than she should, and decide to point his finger in her direction?
He clenched his teeth and swore. There was nothing he could do about that now. He had had his chance to come to a suitable conclusion.
He could see all the twists and turns of the interviews he'd conducted. He could see where each of the people involved had something to hide. Except for Maggie Ingerson. Why should she offer up a cap that had nothing to do with the south road?
Unless she, like Belfors, saw in Paul Elcott the local man being sent to the gallows by outsiders who were glad to let him take the blame . . .
All of them—Cummins and his wife,