A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [45]
“It will come,” Mrs. Crawford said. “In time. But what will happen then is not to be thought of. I’m glad I won’t be here to see it. Civil war is always the bloodiest. And this Mr. Wilson in America has pushed through the self-determination clause he was so bent on having. It will bear bitter fruit, mark me. Well-intentioned people are often blind to the results of their good deeds.”
Rutledge said, “Germany is broken. And under the heel of heavy war reparations. From what I hear, people are starving in the towns, and there’s no money to buy food or fuel.”
“Yes. If I were a German, I would get out. Try my luck in Argentina or Chile. Sell up, beg, borrow, or steal the money for my passage, and go.”
“If the best people leave, how will she rebuild? Or more to the point, how will she be rebuilt? In what form? I think I’d stay and fight.”
“Of course you would.” She nodded. “And in the end be shot for your pains. Germany isn’t ready for democracy. India is better suited for change than Germany because they’ve learned from us how a country is run. They’d inherit our infrastructure, the railroads and the communications systems, the trained bureaucracy and so on. It’s the religious issue that will tear India apart. In Germany it will be the vacuum of leadership.”
Hamish said, intrigued, “My ain granny never traveled more than thirty miles in any direction. The glen was her home. She never fancied telling her menfolk how to run the world.”
Rutledge answered, “Your grandmother never had the opportunities that came this woman’s way.”
As if she’d been a party to the exchange between Rutledge and Hamish, Mrs. Crawford smiled and added, “Politicians never heed old ladies. It’s more than time we women had the vote and showed them a thing or two.”
Rutledge laughed. “You’d make a superb prime minister.”
“Don’t be silly,” she retorted. “Mr. Churchill already has his eye on filling those shoes. Gallipoli was a setback, it’s true, but he won’t languish forgotten for long!”
AFTER SEEING MRS. Crawford to her motorcar and placing her safely in the hands of her driver, Rutledge went back into the hotel and asked for a telephone. He knew Elizabeth Mayhew was on the exchange, but there was no answer to his call. The operator told him after ten rings, “There appears to be no one at home.”
But there were servants in the house.
He found himself worrying about Elizabeth and unable to sleep. As the bells in the clock tower struck the hour of one, Hamish said, “It willna’ matter what you want. It’s her life, and no’ your own.”
THE NEXT MORNING, as Rutledge stood shaving in front of the framed mirror above his washstand, he began to feel a stirring of intuition as he reviewed what he had seen and heard about the three men who had been killed near Marling. A stirring that was just out of reach in his mind, a pattern that was on the edge of consciousness. He had felt this kind of thing before, when he was working on what seemed at first to be disconnected events and facts. For there was always a key, in murder—a logical progression of circumstance that led to the destruction of another human being.
He knew what had brought these men out into the night, to walk a lonely road home. It was the wine that was incongruous. How was it offered? And where? Under what pretense? What had happened then? Had the men been left to die on the roadside? Or had the killer watched each die, before abandoning the body? That was a macabre thought. . . .
Walking down the stairs to his breakfast, Rutledge tried to re-create the scene in his mind. Instead, he found himself intercepted by the elderly desk clerk, who had been standing behind the reception desk as if waiting for someone. For him, it appeared—
“Good morning, Inspector! There are—um—two persons who asked for you. I’ve put them in the small sitting room.”
Two persons. Someone, then, not acceptable in the eyes of the hotel staff. Rutledge cast about in his memory. Elizabeth’s servants, perhaps? He remembered she hadn’t been at home last night when Melinda Crawford had telephoned.
“I’ll see them.