The Confession - Charles Todd [120]
In light of what he’d been reading, Rutledge suddenly realized that the manuscript explained the missing luggage.
Whoever had come to see Willet at the lodging house must have known—or guessed—what Willet was carrying to France with him. The finished work. The man had to die so that he couldn’t re-create what he’d written, and the manuscript couldn’t survive him to be sent to Paris posthumously.
Was that what had happened?
Gathering up the pages he’d read, Rutledge set them carefully back into the box they’d come from, and rummaging in what had been his father’s desk, he found a roll of twine with which to bind it shut. That done, he carried the two boxes into the attic and left them there until he could decide whether they were evidence or Willet’s personal property, to be handed over to Cynthia Farraday as the man had wished.
Back in his room, he lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
Most of the facts had been there, and he’d failed to see them. Still, the few that had been missing made a whole of the story, and without them he had been unable to understand what was wrong with the village of Furnham-on-Hawking.
It was a fisherman named Jessup who had tossed the logbook overboard so that no one else would realize that this was a plague ship. The last survivor on board had written there,
All dead but me. I still don’t know who brought the plague aboard. I do fear we stayed too long in Rotterdam. I watched them die, and now I find I can’t face such an end alone and without comfort. If you find this, whoever you are, know that I chose self-destruction. I pray God will forgive me. But if I’m damned for it, then the devil must look for me in the sea.
So many more dying in Furnham all because of one man’s greed. But it was what the villagers did next that was unthinkable.
The rector had gathered all the plague victims in the tiny church and was nursing them there, setting the dead outside on the porch, trying to contain the sickness as best he could, dependent on food and fresh water brought to him by villagers and left in the churchyard. The man had worked day and night to save as many souls as possible.
And outside, by the harbor, the man who had destroyed the logbook harangued the remaining people of the village, telling them that the only way to stop the spread of the plague was to burn it out. In the end, they collected wood and torches, blocked the exits from the church, and set it afire. The rector and the victims inside had screamed for mercy, but there was none. The church burned to the ground.
No one knew whether it was God or the devil who answered their prayers as the church burned, prayers that the plague would end and everyone else would be spared.
There were no more victims.
But Jessup, watching his own wife burn alive, hanged himself within a year on a tree near the harbor, in plain sight of the villagers. A pact was made then never again to speak of what had happened. It was Jessup’s defiant son who had renamed the inn for the doomed ship. No one had dared to change it again.
Chapter 22
After breakfast with his sister, Rutledge went to the Yard.
She had commented as she poured his tea that he looked tired and asked if he’d slept well.
He had lain awake most of the night for fear he would have a nightmare and start up screaming, frightening Frances. But he smiled and said, “Chief Superintendent Bowles has had a heart attack. The Yard is tense, waiting to see if he’ll return when he’s stronger or if we’ll have a new Chief Superintendent. We all feel it.”
“I’m sure that’s true. You and he never got on, did you? Well, I hope the new man, if there is going to be one, is more sympathetic.”
When he walked into his office there was a message on his desk from Gibson, and attached to it was a cutting of the request for information from the Times.
Rutledge read it again, then