A cold treachery - Charles Todd [54]
“Yes, well, he would tell you that, wouldn't he?”
She turned to go back into the sitting room, and the pain seemed to come back again, as if held at bay by her hope that Rutledge would take Paul Elcott into custody. She sat in the chair by the hearth, and he could see how pale she'd become. “I wish I could do something besides sit here,” she said to the room at large, rather than to him. “I wish I could go out and talk to him myself!”
“You'll stay away from him,” Rutledge ordered. “Do you understand that? It's my duty to find out who's behind these murders, not yours.”
She looked up then and there were tears in her eyes. “You've never lost anyone, have you? I mean, other than parents—natural deaths. You can't imagine the frustration and the grief, and the anger. I keep seeing them dead, my only family—and it's worse because I don't know.” She was weeping, bereft and hurt.
Hamish said, “To listen to the lassie, she's told the truth from the start.”
But Paul Elcott had just said she was clever and managing.
“I can't tell you they didn't suffer,” Rutledge answered, sitting down across from her. After the cold of the wind, the fire seemed almost too hot to bear. “But it must have been very quick. They didn't respond—they didn't try to defend themselves. There was no time.”
Was that the truth? Or did the woman before him know better than he ever could what had taken place in that snug kitchen with the snow piling against the house and the wind whipping it down the chimneys and into drifts against the barn?
“Did you love Gerald Elcott?” he asked after a moment.
Her face, wet with tears, stared across at him. “Did Paul tell you that?”
“He suggested it was possible.”
“Gerald was my sister's husband. What good would it do me to shoot him? And if I murdered his family, how do you think he would have loved me, knowing what I'd done?”
“Revenge?”
She laughed shakily. “Revenge makes a cold bed partner, Inspector Rutledge. If I'd loved him, I'd have found a better way to rid myself of Grace and then come rushing to help Gerald cope. Josh and Hazel were fond of me. I'd have made a place for myself in that house in no time at all! And it's a short step, don't you see, from housekeeper to wife, when a man needs someone to right his world. Paul was the only one who had a reason to kill the twins. For me, those babies would have been a stepping-stone. . . .”
But Hamish was pointing out that she hadn't directly answered Rutledge's question.
Yet in a way, hadn't she? It would be easier to lay her sister's death at Janet Ashton's door, than all five murders. And a good barrister could make that part of her defense. But twice Gerald had chosen Grace instead of her sister. Was that why Grace had been the last in that kitchen to die? To see what she had brought down on her family by not stepping aside and doing her duty to Robinson?
Young Hazel and Josh had kept their proper father's name. If Grace hadn't remarried Gerald and instead had returned to Robinson, the twins would not have borne Elcott's name. By law they would have been Robinson's. Or been branded illegitimate, if he'd refused to accept them. Had that been in her mind when she stayed with Gerald? To give him heirs to High Fell, and the children she was carrying a rightful place in their proper world?
What had motivated Grace Robinson Elcott? But there was no way of guessing what had passed through her mind. Or how much she'd known about her sister and Gerald Elcott. . . .
All the same, as Hamish was saying in the reaches of his mind, whatever happened at the farm, Grace Elcott was the pivotal factor.
She had taken the man her sister loved. By bearing the twins, she'd deprived Paul Elcott of his hopes of inheriting High Fell. And she had been given the chance of returning to the father of her older children, and refused it.
Which brought Rutledge back to motive. Greed. Jealousy. Revenge. The land—the lover—the wife . . .
Given the savagery of the attack, he would have added one other motive: Fear.
Yet who had been afraid of the Elcotts? What