A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [73]
Rutledge, who had been studying the churchyard, turned to look sharply at Grimes.
Tristan . . .
His first thought was the opera. But he doubted Miss Whelkin had ever set foot in a London theater. She was not likely, from Grimes’s description, to be a lover of foreign works.
“How old is she, this Miss Whelkin?”
“Fifty-five if she’s a day,” Grimes declared. “Her father was schoolmaster here for most of her life.”
“Then she’d have known the Idylls of the King—” Tennyson’s romantic series of poems about Arthur and his Court. They had brought the Round Table knights back into fashion, and all things Gothic. Tristan . . .
Grimes’s face cleared. “Tennyson,” he nodded, recalling his school days. “I had to learn a good bit of his poems by heart.”
Dowling was talking to Grimes, and Rutledge shut out their voices as he dredged his memory. There had been a painting just before the war, very popular with Londoners. C. Tarrant’s portrait of a young, fair man on a narrow, grubby back street of a Midlands town, staring up at an aeroplane overhead. Ignoring the signs of poverty all around him, the young man’s eyes were fixed in wonder on the miracle of flying. Earthbound, he longed for the skies. Like a Grail Knight blind to the misery of the world in his vainglorious search for the miraculous Cup. And the artist had called it Tristan.
There had been two schools of thought on the intent of the portrait, and much had been written about it. The show had been a triumph. Much later, Rutledge had met the man who might have posed for that knightly figure. . . .
Miss Whelkin would probably have agreed with the artist about the depiction of Tristan. There had been reproductions of the painting in bookshops, and she might even have seen one of them. But why had she connected that Tristan with a stranger from Cornwall?
Hamish said, “You canna’ be sure she did!”
Rutledge said aloud, “I think we ought to speak to Miss Whelkin.”
“You’ll have to come back, then. She’s off to her sister’s in Canterbury for the week. Miss Whelkin visits her every November, like clockwork. They don’t get on together. It’s a trial for both of them. But she’s bent and determined to do her duty by her kin.”
DOWLING WISTFULLY SUGGESTED luncheon at the hotel before returning to Marling, but Rutledge still had to address the problem of Nell Shaw’s daughter. Grimes and Dowling set off toward the police station, where Dowling had left his bicycle, and Rutledge walked on to the Seelyham Arms.
Margaret Shaw had managed to reach Marling on her own, but it was necessary to find her safe transportation back to London. With promises that he would not forget her mother and would visit her as soon as possible, Rutledge handed her into the carriage of an elderly and respectable greengrocer driving to London to see his dentist. He also gave her fare for a cab to take her across the river from Charing Cross.
There was trepidation in her face as she asked, “But what must I do about Mama? I can’t go home and tell her there’s nothing new, and watch her worry herself into one of her blinding headaches! She’ll be fit to be tied, if I come back empty-handed!”
Rutledge said, “Did she send you to me?”
The girl shook her head. “No, but she’d want to know where I’ve been and who I saw. She’s that strict! I’ll have to tell her—if I lie, she catches me out, and it’s all the worse. Last night she sat on the side of my bed and told me she was at her wit’s end. She had that pinched look about her eyes, as if the lamp was too bright.” She stared around her at the village of Seelyham, her gaze wandering to the stone church tower, green with moss, and the hummocky ground of the ancient churchyard. “Do you believe Papa killed those women? Truly believe it?”
As her eyes swung back to his face, she read the uncertainty there before he could control the doubt that had plagued him since the day her mother had walked back into his life.
“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” he said wearily.
The key to this muddle was very likely the stroke Janet Cutter had had shortly after Shaw’s