Anne Perry's Silent Nights_ Two Victorian Christmas Mysteries - Anne Perry [22]
It was difficult to gain an interview with Newbridge and it took Runcorn the best part of the morning before he finally stood face-to-face with him in his withdrawing room. The house was old and comfortable. Possibly it had stood in those grounds for two centuries or more, occupied by the one family in times both fat and lean. There were portraits on the walls that bore the same cast of features back to the times of Oliver Cromwell and the Civil War. They were dressed in the ruffles and lace of the Cavaliers. There were no grim-faced, white-collared Puritans.
Some of the furniture had been magnificent in its time, but it now bore marks of heavy use—legs were uneven, one or two surfaces were stained and needed refinishing. But Runcorn had time to notice no more than that before he was aware of Newbridge’s impatience.
“What is it you want, Mr. Runcorn?” There was a thickness to his voice and he moved his weight from one foot to the other as though he were anxious to be elsewhere. “I have nothing I can tell you about poor Olivia’s death. If I had, I would have told Faraday, for God’s sake! Is it not bad enough that we have to live with this tragedy without having to drag out all our memories and our grief over and over again for strangers?” He stood leaning against the mantelshelf, an elegant man, tall and a little lean, with thick wavy hair that grew high from his forehead. His eyes were hazel, deep set, and there was the thin, angry line to his mouth that Runcorn had first noticed in church.
Runcorn found his tolerance already stretched. Loss had different effects on people, and most of them were not attractive. In men it often turned to anger, a kind of suppressed fury as if they had been dealt a blow.
Runcorn bit back his own emotions. “In order to have some better idea of who might have killed her, sir, I need to know more about her. Her family are overweighed with grief just now, and of course they see only one side of her. It is very difficult to speak anything but good of loved ones you mourn. And yet they were also human. She was not killed by accident. Someone was consumed by an unholy rage, and stood face-to-face with her, and even at the last moment, she did not run away. That needs explaining.”
Newbridge was very pale and his chest was rising and falling as if he had climbed to a great altitude and was struggling for breath.
“Are you saying that something in her nature provoked the act, Mr. Runcorn?” he said at last.
“Do you think that impossible?” Runcorn kept his voice low, as though they were confiding in each other.
“Well … it’s … you place me in a terrible situation,” Newbridge protested. “How can I observe any decency, and answer such a question?”
“There was no decency in the way she was killed, or indeed, that she was killed at all,” Runcorn pointed out.
Newbridge sighed. His face was even paler. “Then you force me in honor to speak more frankly than I would have wished. But if you repeat it to her family, I shall deny it.”
Runcorn nodded very slightly.
“She was charming,” Newbridge said, looking somewhere away from Runcorn into a distance only he could see. “And beautiful, but I imagine you know that. She was also childish. She was twenty-six, an age when most women are married and have children, and yet she refused to grow up.” His body stiffened.
“She would not take any responsibility for herself, which placed an unfair burden upon her brother. I think she took advantage of the fact that he is childless, to remain immature herself, and charge him with her care long past the time when she should have accepted that burden herself.”
“Do you think Reverend Costain resented this?”
“He is too good a man to have refused to care for her,” Newbridge answered. “And frankly, I think he indulged her. His sense of obligation as a Christian minister was out of proportion. She knew that and took advantage of it.”
That was the harshest thing Runcorn had heard said of