The Confession - Charles Todd [104]
The only people who were usually abroad late at night were the smugglers.
And while they wouldn’t brook any interference in their business, it seemed unlikely that they would go out of their way to stalk Major Russell through the marshes.
Although Timothy Jessup might well have his own reasons for seeing that River’s Edge remained closed. Hadn’t he asked if Rutledge was interested in the property? On that first encounter when he was here with Frances?
Perhaps it was time to find out who would inherit River’s Edge if the last of the Russells died. Rutledge realized he knew very little about the Major’s father, who had been killed in the Boer War. Cynthia Farraday was distantly related to him. Who else might be? Surely not Jessup. But stranger things had happened. Men sometimes committed indiscretions in their youth—witness Justin Fowler’s father—that they kept firmly locked away in their past.
Dr. Wade, Rutledge thought, was right. The Major seemed to live a charmed life. The war wound, the motorcycle crash, and now this gunshot. Any one of them should have killed him.
Hamish said, “He willna’ escape the hangman.”
“We must prove he killed Fowler first.”
He was suddenly aware that the Major was awake and staring up at him. His first thought was that he’d answered Hamish aloud, without thinking.
Russell said after a moment, “Have you come back—or have you never left?”
“I was at the Yard. Where is Morrison?”
“He went to the canteen. He wanted a cup of tea.”
“Just as well. Do you feel like talking?”
“Not particularly.”
“If you had died of this gunshot wound, who stands to inherit River’s Edge?”
“I made a will leaving it to my wife. After she died, I left everything to Cynthia. Why?”
“Are there any other cousins?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember much about my father. Or his side of the family for that matter. A grandmother, I think, when I was very young. She read to me, and I remember her voice, not her face.”
“Do you know where Justin Fowler stayed, when he was on leave during the war?”
“There was a hotel in London he liked. A little out of the way for my tastes, but it suited him, he said. Cynthia went there to dine with him, I think. But don’t trust that memory. I was jealous and could have imagined it.”
“I’m told the hotel was destroyed in a Zeppelin raid.”
“Was it?”
“Did he go back to River’s Edge, after it was closed?”
“I ran into him in France and he told me he’d gone down to Essex a last time before being sent over with his regiment. That it was all right. I’d heard that one of the raids had taken out a windmill and some houses, but he told me that that was on the Blackwater. Or maybe the Crouch. I don’t remember.”
“When was this?”
“Early in 1915, I think. He’d seen some fighting, and I was in the relief column. He told me he’d borrowed my motorcar and driven out to Essex.”
“Did he stay at the house? Or just spend a few hours there?”
“He built a fire in my mother’s sitting room, he said. It was damned cold, the house had been shut up for months. He’d brought tea in a Thermos and a packet of sandwiches, and he ate them by the fire rather than on the terrace as he’d planned. I asked if the chimneys were all right—I didn’t relish the idea of the house burning down. But he’d checked them first, he said, and made certain the fire was out before leaving.”
“When next did you see or hear from him?”
“Someone told me he’d been wounded. Late May? It earned him a ticket home, I expect. He wrote once from hospital. He’d heard that we were expecting a child, my wife and I. They’d done surgery on his knee and he was hoping to be released for duty by late August. He told me he might drive down to Essex again, if he could manage it.” Russell lay still, closing his eyes. “I never heard from him again as far as I recall. But letters get lost.”
“Do you know if he survived the war?”
“You must ask Cynthia that. She kept track of both of us and Harold Finley as