A False Mirror - Charles Todd [129]
“So it is.” Rutledge could hear fingers tapping on the man’s desk. “You’ll come and fetch me if there’s more than a formality involved, won’t you? I’d like to think we look after our own.”
He took a chance. “If you’ve nothing better to do, meet me there.”
“We don’t have murderers running about undetected, but I’ve got a pleasing sufficiency on my plate at the moment. No, I leave it to your good judgment, Rutledge. You know where to find me.”
And he rang off.
Rutledge went to the dining room for Mrs. Hamilton’s broth and discovered that luncheon would be served in fifteen minutes. He used the time to dress for his coming meeting with Miss Cole and then ate his meal in his usual corner.
He dropped the thermos of broth at the door of Casa Miranda.
Mallory, accepting it, said, “She probably won’t touch it, now that I have.”
“She isn’t expecting you to poison her.”
“You’d think she was, refusing to let me come near her.”
“Leave her alone, Mallory, and set your own house in order.”
With that he turned on his heel and strode back to the motorcar.
“Where will you be, if we need you?” Mallory called to him.
“Not far away.”
“I saw you on the headland over there. Did you find anything?”
“Only the marks of your tires,” Rutledge retorted as he let out the clutch. “So much for secrecy and discretion.”
At the end of the drive, he turned to the west, soon leaving Hampton Regis behind.
It must have been market day somewhere, Rutledge decided, driving through the second herd of cows moving placidly along the road ahead of him. He caught up with another cart shortly afterward, laden with chickens in wicker baskets. They squawked in alarm as the motorcar passed by.
But he made steady time in spite of the traffic, and it was only a little after afternoon tea that he found himself pulling into the drive at the house where Miranda Cole lived with her aunt.
Dedham answered his knocks, her face drawn as if she hadn’t slept well. “She’s expecting you. Don’t upset her any more than you already have.”
“I never intended to upset your mistress.”
She opened the door to the sitting room, ushered him in, and shut it almost on his heels with a snap that told him her opinion of him.
Miss Cole was sitting in the sunlight that poured through the window beside her. He thought at first that she’d been crying, and then realized that her eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep.
It had been a long night in this house as well as the one named for this woman in Hampton Regis.
“Sit down, Inspector. I have had my tea. You’ll find the pot is still warm, if you care for a cup.”
“Thank you, no.”
“Then please tell me, from the beginning, what you know about Matthew Hamilton and everything that happened to him in the last week.”
Rutledge began with Mallory’s decision after leaving hospital to live outside Hampton Regis, and his inability to stop himself from seeing Felicity, one way or another.
“Is she pretty, the woman Matthew married? Felicity.” She seemed to taste the name, as if it could present her with an image of his wife.
“I would call her pretty. She has a vivacity that must be attractive in happier circumstances. And a certain vulnerability.”
He went through the morning that Matthew Hamilton had walked along the water, and how he had been found. Watching her—for she couldn’t see him and he kept his gaze steady, reading each expression that flitted across what she must have supposed to be a still face—he thought, She wasn’t blind from birth. Her eyes follow me when I move. There must be some sense of light and dark, or perhaps a range of shadows.
But she couldn’t distinguish, for instance, the shabbiness of her surroundings. How the colors had faded, and how alive she looked among them, her fair hair and the dark blue sweater and string of fine pearls setting her apart, as if she’d wandered here by mistake.
She lifted her hand to her face as he described Hamilton’s injuries, and said, “He must have been in great pain.”
“The doctor took every care of him,” he assured her.
As he told