A False Mirror - Charles Todd [110]
He wanted to add that she was defenseless and her house isolated, but he thought she was clever enough to understand that for herself.
“Nonsense. And it doesn’t signify anyway. I’ve told you that he’s not here.”
“His wife is being held prisoner against her will. If Hamilton had nothing to hide, why didn’t he go to her and try to help her escape? If he loved her, why didn’t he move heaven and earth to free her? Even at risk to himself.”
She put up a hand to stop him. “You are a very pitiless man, Mr. Rutledge. You have frightened me for your own ends. I won’t hear any more of this.”
Without appearing to be using her hands, she let her fingers lightly touch pieces of furniture in her path, walking toward the door from memory. Before he could stop her she had gone through it and called to her maid.
He didn’t try to follow her. Hamish was already telling him that he had overstepped his bounds.
And what would Frances or Melinda Crawford have to say about his conduct here?
But a policeman was charged with sifting facts and probing truths. Even those secrets innocent people tried to hide from him. If Hamilton had remembered his relationship with her for twenty years, Rutledge found it hard to believe that Miranda Cole cared so little for him. Unless their romance had been one-sided from the start.
Unrequited love? Or what might have been?
He turned and walked back the way he had come, through the door and out to the motorcar. Someone slammed the heavy door behind him. He thought perhaps it was the maid. After a few minutes, Constable Mercer came hurrying around the corner of the house, murmuring “Sorry, sir!” as he stepped into the motorcar.
For a moment Rutledge ignored him, standing there looking up at the house. It was impossible for Hamilton to have come this far, in his condition. And it would be impossible for a blind woman to go to Hampton Regis and bring him here. Neither her maid nor the elderly aunt he hadn’t met would have been able to lift a man of that height and weight.
A wild-goose chase. But he thought, if it wasn’t Miranda Cole, and it wasn’t Miss Esterley who had spirited Matthew Hamilton to safety, who was responsible for what had happened to the man?
And the question brought him again to George Reston. Or Robert Stratton.
Rutledge took Constable Mercer back to Exeter and then faced the long drive back to Hampton Regis.
“Circles within circles,” he found himself saying to Hamish as they shared the darkness behind the powerful glow of the headlamps.
“She called you a liar.”
And a man without pity.
But why would a man like Hamilton name his home for a woman he’d not seen for many years? Sentiment was unlikely. Guilt, then, a reminder of what he’d done when he was young and felt ashamed of, in later life? Guilt was a strong emotion, it drove people into paths that they hadn’t intended to take. He understood it, in his own case, though Dr. Fleming had first pointed it out to him.
“You survived the war and can’t forgive yourself for surviving, when others died or were maimed. Until you do learn to forgive yourself, you’ll never be completely whole.”
“I don’t need to be whole,” he’d responded. “Only to function to the best of my ability. I want to return to the Yard.” May of last year, he’d said those words to the man who’d brought him so far, and could take him no further on his journey back to sanity. He still had an appallingly long way to go.
“Yes, well, it could be a good thing or a bad thing, Ian, to go back. Only you can know which.”
“It isn’t a question of good or bad, it’s a matter of working twelve hours in a day until I’m too tired to think. Here, in hospital, I do nothing but think.”
“Are you trying to leave here to escape me and look for your own way out?” Fleming had asked bluntly.
“Self-slaughter? I can kill myself here just as easily. Well, not as easily as pulling a trigger, but it can be done. You know that.”
“Yes.” Fleming had sat there, watching him. “All right then, let’s see what happens. Your people at the Yard want you back. Let