The Confession - Charles Todd [134]
Into the hostile silence, Barber said, “If we tell you, will you leave us in peace?”
“No!” Jessup said explosively.
“We’re making a spectacle of ourselves.” Barber shouted at him in his turn. “There’s no one in The Boat. We’ll settle it there.”
Barber waited, and Rutledge held his tongue.
Jessup was struggling to get himself under control. He seemed to realize through the haze of fury that villagers going in and out of the shops were staring at the confrontation on his doorstep.
Rutledge could almost read the thoughts passing though the man’s mind, that this was too public a place to do murder.
Finally he nodded curtly, shoved Rutledge to one side, and walked off toward the pub. He didn’t look to see if anyone was following him.
When he was out of earshot, Barber snapped, “Why did you make him so angry? He could have killed you.”
“He could have tried,” Rutledge said, and strode to the pub in his turn, with Barber hastily falling in beside him.
“Was the book that explicit?” he asked. “God, I never—he went to be a footman. That’s all Ben wanted. What happened?”
“I expect it was going to France that changed him. The war. He must have kept a diary. He wrote a memoir after it was over, and someone in Paris published it.”
“Damn the war,” Barber said as Rutledge opened the door into the pub. “And damn the French while we’re about it.”
Jessup was waiting. He said to Barber, “What are we going to do with him? He has to be stopped.”
“You fool, do you want to hang? They know where he is. The Yard does. If he goes missing, he’s right, they’ll come down on us and tear Furnham apart. Tell him what he wants to know. Tell him, or I will. Then make him promise.”
The flush on Jessup’s face was a measure of his rage. “They won’t know what he knows. They can’t.”
“There are the boxes Willet left behind. The manuscripts are in them,” Rutledge said. “You’ll be taken up for the murder of Benjamin Willet when they come to light. What’s more, the murder of Justin Fowler and the attack on Wyatt Russell happened here, not in London. You have that to answer for as well.”
“You selfish bastard,” Barber said. “You’ve got us into this. Get us out of it.”
There was a long silence as Jessup weighed alternatives.
Rutledge saw the man glance once at the windows that looked down on the river. Then he shook his head as if to rid it of the thought. Instead, he grappled with the realization that he had no choice at all.
“All right,” he said finally. “We found Fowler floating, already dead. We thought at first he was a German spy come to grief on the river. But it wasn’t all that long after the old woman vanished, and we didn’t want the police here again. We towed him to the mouth of the river and turned him loose.”
“Who told Willet that Wyatt Russell had killed him?”
“It must have been Ned,” Barber said. “I can’t think who else could have told him.”
Jessup cut across his words. “It wasn’t Ned. I wrote to him in France and mentioned there’d been a falling-out between Russell and Fowler, and we’d heard a gunshot. Just in case the body washed up somewhere else. He wanted to know if they’d quarreled over Miss Farraday, and I answered that it was likely.”
“You told him—damn it, you never told me,” Barber said angrily.
“It was to cover us. I thought it best.”
Rutledge said, “Willet believed you. That’s why I was drawn into this inquiry in the first place. He came to the Yard and told me that Wyatt Russell had killed Fowler. Willet knew he was dying. My guess is he wanted Miss Farraday to learn what had become of Fowler, and he could hardly tell her himself. He must have known how she felt about the man, and it was a way to repay all she’d done for Willet himself.” He smiled grimly. “You brought your own house crashing down around your ears, Jessup.”
“Willet wasn’t dead,” Jessup said. “Not when you came to Furnham that first time.”
“I was curious,” Rutledge countered. “Who killed Mrs. Russell?”
“I don’t know. Ned found her locket. He wanted