The Confession - Charles Todd [117]
“Could you describe this visitor?” ”
“I had no reason to remember him, did I? I was only glad for Mr. Willet’s sake that he’d come, hoping he might persuade Mr. Willet to go home and see his father and his sister after all. I tell you I cried when he walked out the door that last time. I was that upset.”
“The other man didn’t come back with Willet?”
“Oh, no, he was alone. He told me the visit hadn’t gone as he’d expected, and I was sorry for that. But here I’ve kept you standing at the door. Come in, Major, my dear, and we’ll find those boxes.”
He followed her inside, and she led him to a tiny box room in the back of the house where there were odds and ends piled neatly to allow access, and to one side were two boxes marked with Willet’s name.
“In a way I’m that sad to see them go,” Mrs. Hurley told Rutledge. “As long as they were here, I’d hoped for a miracle, and that he’d come back the way he was before the sickness came on him. I couldn’t bear to hand them over to that constable who came for them. I was told to pass them to no one but the Major, and I keep my word when it’s given.”
And he was grateful for her insistence.
“There. I’ve said good-bye,” she said as he lifted them to carry them to his motorcar. And she turned and walked swiftly back into the house, shutting the door, so that Rutledge wouldn’t see her cry.
The Major was in Rutledge’s flat, so he took the boxes to his sister’s house. When he walked in carrying the first of them, Frances said, “Are you moving in?”
“Not precisely. I need to leave this and its mate with you after I open them. The study?”
“Yes, that will do very well.”
When he’d brought both boxes in, Rutledge set about opening each one.
Both contained sheets of paper neatly typed, and then others written in longhand.
“I wonder what became of his luggage?” he mused. “But I suppose it went into the Thames with him. I’d have done the same in his shoes.”
“Whose luggage? Whose shoes?” Frances asked.
“If I knew the answer to that I’d be ahead of the game.”
“Does this have to do with that awful village where you took me for tea? I still haven’t forgiven you for that.”
“Furnham? Yes, that was rather dreadful, wasn’t? In hindsight, I shouldn’t have taken you there.” He lifted the first hundred or so pages out of the box.
But the pages he held were drafts of Willet’s first two books, and he set them aside, disappointed. And yet he knew that to the dead man, these had been precious.
When he reached the bottom of the first box he retied the cords and set it aside.
It was in the second box that he found what must have been a draft of the unfinished third book. He took it out, sorted through the handwritten pages, and then came to the typed sheets.
A title had been written by hand above the first paragraph: The Sinners.
He began to read, sitting in a chair by the open window, his sister leaning her elbow on the back beside his head.
After half an hour she turned away.
“It’s Furnham he’s talking about, isn’t it? And it must be true. The inn is called The Dragonfly.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I wish you’d never taken me there,” she said, crossing the room, as if to put as much space as possible between herself and the pages in his hand. Rearranging a bowl of flowers, she said, “It was done, wasn’t it? Luring ships into rocks and the like, bringing them aground so that they could be plundered. In Cornwall, they were called the wreckers.”
“I expect the people along the shore had done well when ships wrecked themselves in a storm or on a foggy night. And then someone had a clever suggestion. ‘If we could bring in more wrecks, not waiting on natural causes, we could prosper.”
They had had to kill the survivors, or else what had happened would quickly reach the ears of the authorities.
Furnham had no rocks on which to beach ships. Only a sandbar at