The Confession - Charles Todd [130]
“He said Wyatt had killed me? But how did he even know I was dead? You said my—the body was never found.”
“A good question.” Had Willet heard something, believed it, and later tried to do the right thing without involving his family? A fisherman’s son, he had a strong connection to the men who lived by the water. He could have heard whispers.
“What are you going to do about me?” Fowler asked after a silence.
“If I ask you to testify, the Army will take you into custody.”
“Yes. I know.”
“Give me a way of reaching you. If I find something, I may need to contact you.”
“If you sent a letter to the Pipes Tobacco shop in Chester, addressed to Finley, it will eventually reach me.”
“Fair enough. It’s late. I’ll take you to a train if you like.”
“Thanks. I’d rather walk.” He got out, thanked Rutledge again, and then said, “I’ve never dealt with such hatred as this. Such evil. You must find him. You know that.”
Rutledge said, thinking about a burning church and the screaming victims inside, “Evil is always there. If we look for it.”
With a nod Fowler walked on. Rutledge watched him go, wondering if he’d done the right thing. Or if he’d made the worst mistake of his career.
In the end, as he started the motorcar, preparing to drive to his sister’s house, he rather thought that he had done the only thing possible in the circumstances.
If he could ignore small-scale smuggling, he could ignore a case of desertion.
But he was still not certain about Fowler, even when he let himself into his sister’s house and climbed the stairs to the room that had once been his.
Hamish said, “Ye didna’ face murder when ye were eleven.”
Rutledge, hanging his clothes in the wardrobe and preparing for bed, tried to put himself in Fowler’s shoes. How would he have felt if he’d been awakened in the night by a murderer, and then barely surviving himself, learned the next morning that his parents had already been killed with the same knife?
It didn’t bear thinking about.
Chapter 23
When Rutledge walked into the police station in Colchester, he found that Inspector Robinson was elsewhere investigating a housebreaking. The constable who had been summoned in the inspector’s place didn’t remember the Fowler case—he had come from Suffolk—and spent over an hour searching for it in the cellar archives.
“And you’re quite certain, sir, that the Inspector is willing to allow you to read the file in his absence?”
“He’s knows of Scotland Yard’s interest in these murders.”
He directed Rutledge to a small interview room and ten minutes later reluctantly turned over the box containing the statements taken when Fowler’s parents were killed.
It took Rutledge two hours to sort through the statements. Everyone had been interviewed. The staff in the house, Fowler’s partner, the neighbors, Mr. Harrison, who represented the family, anyone who made deliveries to the house, from the milk van driver to the man who brought the post. Anyone who had worked on the grounds or in the house, from gardeners to painters to the chimney sweep and the coal man.
No one had seen or heard anything. No one knew of any trouble touching the family. The killer had come quietly, finished his work, and left, taking nothing, leaving nothing but death behind.
Hamish said, “If the wife had screamed, and one of the servants had come running, there would ha’ been another murder.”
“Very likely. But I don’t think the killer wanted that.”
He replaced the statements in the box and sorted quickly through the other pieces of evidence in the file. The postmortem report that graphically described the number and placement of the knife wounds in the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Fowler, indicating the savagery of the attack and commenting that Mrs. Fowler’s survival for even a few hours after it had been nothing short of miraculous, although she hadn’t regained consciousness. That was followed by a statement from the doctor who had treated Justin Fowler, describing the severity of his wounds and expressing