A False Mirror - Charles Todd [116]
After Felicity Hamilton had eaten, Putnam offered to come and chaperone her, now that Nan was dead.
But she shook her head. “I must see it through,” she told him. “I was the cause of so much of the trouble here. I must somehow make restitution.”
“You shouldn’t concern yourself with that. Leave it to Mr. Rutledge, my dear.”
“Where is Matthew, Mr. Putnam? No one will talk to me about him. And I know what the police must be thinking. If it wasn’t Stephen who killed her, then it was Matthew, trying to find Stephen and stumbling on Nan instead. But she wouldn’t have given him away, you know, even if he’d decided to slaughter half of Hampton Regis.”
“Is that what you believe must have happened? That he managed to make his way here?”
She rubbed her temples, as if her head throbbed. “Either I’m married to a murderer or locked in this house with one. And I don’t want to think about that. Stephen was as tired as I was of Nan’s tantrums, he could have killed her out of sheer despair. But not in cold blood, not in her sleep. Matthew could have decided that it was Stephen who was on the strand with him and wanted revenge. But why harm Nan? She liked Matthew, and he was wonderful with her, keeping her jolly when I couldn’t. She didn’t like me very much. And now either way I’ve got her killed.” Felicity turned to look out the window. “If Matthew came searching for his revolver and couldn’t find it because I’d given it to Stephen, Nan could have told him. She knew.”
Putnam didn’t put what was on his mind into words. That Nan, in that back passage, would have raised the alarm if someone had crept in. And it might have been all the warning Stephen Mallory and that revolver of his needed.
He was ashamed of the thought as soon as it had formed.
But almost at the same time that Putnam was considering the possibility, Bennett brought it up to Mallory.
“All right, let’s assume for the sake of argument that this is Mr. Hamilton’s work. In for a penny and all that. If he’s going to be hanged for Mrs. Granville, what’s one more corpse? And if he wanted you badly enough, he might feel that the maid was a fair exchange for the opportunity. Only, he discovered you had his revolver. Oh, don’t be a fool, Mallory, it must have been his, you weren’t in possession of one when you ran me down.”
“I can’t see why Hamilton had to hurt her,” Mallory said, rubbing his face with his hands, as if to scrub away his fatigue. “At least if he’s in his right mind. If he’d come to the bed and put a hand over her mouth, she’d have listened to him and done whatever he asked. Mrs. Hamilton tells me she thought he walked on water.”
Rutledge, the devil’s advocate, said, “In the dark, how could he know it was Nan? Or even that she was here? Besides, if he’d touched her, she’d have screamed bloody murder before he could convince her who he was. Her first thought would have been that you were in the room with her, Mallory. What I want to know is, if Hamilton is alive, if he didn’t go into the sea with that cottage, where was he concealed, all day yesterday when we were searching everywhere for him?”
“In the Granvillle house?” Bennett asked, hazarding a guess. “We never actually searched it, only the surgery. And after Granville went to the rectory, it stood empty. Or there’s the church. Putnam is half daft, he wouldn’t have noticed Hamilton if he’d hidden himself beneath one of those wretched choir stalls. Besides, he was occupied all the day with Dr. Granville. I doubt he set foot in the church.”
“Then why did we find bandages in the ruin of