A False Mirror - Charles Todd [126]
Mr. Putnam looked up and said, “Shall I go and see?”
“Dr. Granville will see to it, Rector. You’re needed here at the moment.”
“Don’t leave me,” Felicity Hamilton asked. “Not until I’m asleep.”
“Yes, by all means. If it’s a comfort to you, my dear, I’ll gladly stay.”
Rutledge accompanied Dr. Granville to the door. “Thank you for coming. There was no time to send for Dr. Hester.”
“I understand. It’s the least I could do, after the debacle with her husband. There’s still no news of him?”
“None.”
“He’s dead, then. In that cottage. There aren’t that many places for a man to hide in Hampton Regis, when everyone is on the lookout for him.”
“I still find it difficult to believe he could have walked away under his own power. What’s your opinion?”
Granville gave his question serious consideration. “Anything is possible, medically speaking. But that means he must have killed Margaret. And I refuse to believe it. Someone took him away, and that someone had already done his best once before to see Hamilton into his grave.”
“You know the people here. Can you tell me who might have started this by attacking Hamilton in the first place?”
Granville shrugged. “Your best suspect is Stephen Mallory. But then someone else could have decided to finish his work for him. Get him to confess to what happened out there by the water, and clear that up. Then you can begin to think about Margaret’s death. And Nan’s.”
“I’ve asked myself again and again why these two women needed to die. There’s no clear answer.”
“Nan worked for a number of people over the years, Rutledge. You can’t be sure what secrets she took with her when she was killed.”
“But the house was locked.”
Granville raised his eyebrows. “What difference does that make? Hamilton isn’t the only person to have lived in Casa Miranda, you know. And I doubt he thought to change the locks. There must be other keys floating about. For that matter, you could probably collect half a hundred from other houses of the same age, and find that some of them fit. Ask the rector to test his.”
When Granville had gone and before Mallory had presented himself again, Rutledge tapped lightly on the door to Mrs. Hamilton’s room.
“Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Putnam. I should like to borrow your keys for a little while. Do you mind?”
Putnam, his eyes on Rutledge’s face, said, “Ah, I haven’t given Dr. Granville one, have I? My mistake. Thank you, Inspector.” He brought them to the door. “It’s rather an unconventional collection, I’m afraid. I never think to take off one when I add another. Those to this side of the longest one are to the church. The others are the rectory keys. I can’t tell you where one or two of them came from. My predecessor, very likely.”
He passed them to Rutledge.
“You aren’t leaving, are you, Inspector?” Felicity asked anxiously.
“Not for a while,” he reassured her.
And then he set about trying the rector’s keys on the locks of Casa Miranda.
The trouble, he thought, was that there were too many doors. The main entrance facing the drive possessed a newer lock, and none of Putnam’s fit it. There was a door to the back garden, another down a short passage where Mrs. Hamilton or her predecessors had cut and potted plants for the house, several ways into the kitchen area, and a door leading directly into the servants’ quarters, where they could come and go without walking through the kitchen. The cellar door boasted a padlock.
He found, working methodically through the handful of keys, that while several of them raised his hopes at first, only two of them actually fit into a lock well enough to reach the tumblers. Both turned stiffly at first, but after a little effort on his part, he heard the tumblers fall into place.
He now had two keys that unlocked two house doors: one that led to the servants’ belowstairs quarters and the other to the door where tradesmen brought their goods and supplies. Holding them up to the light, edge to edge, he could see that they were identical.
Dr. Granville had been right. It wasn’t only