The Confession - Charles Todd [54]
The sergeant made a note of that. “Anything else?”
“Yes. See what sort of records the Tilbury police can find on the disappearance of Mrs. Elizabeth Russell, August 1914.”
“Where will I find you?”
“I’ll be in London this morning, and then I’m off to this clinic in Oxfordshire. Then back to Essex, I expect. I’ve a funeral to attend.”
“If you’re leaving, now’s the time,” Gibson warned him. “Else you’ll be taken off the Gravesend death and put to work on the St. James’s Park murder. Sir.”
The man pulled from the Thames had had no Connections, after all. Bowles’s only concern had been to put his opposite number’s nose out of joint.
“I’ll take your good advice,” Rutledge said and reached for his hat.
He made it out of the Yard without encountering Bowles, and drove to a street in Chelsea, not far from where Meredith Channing lived. But she was still out of the country, as far as he knew, and he made a point of avoiding her house. The fewer reminders of her the better, he told himself. Out of sight, out of mind.
Hamish snorted derisively. “You tell yoursel’ that, but it does no good.”
Rutledge ignored the voice. But he knew that Hamish was right. It had been hard these last weeks to know what to feel.
He found the street number. It was a very good address, and the house was handsome, the sort that would suit a woman like Cynthia Farraday. Large enough for comfort, small enough not to require an army of servants to maintain it. He remembered that someone had told him she had inherited it from her dead parents.
He walked up to the door and was amused when he saw the knocker. It was in the shape of an orchid. He let it fall and waited until a maid appeared to ask his business.
“Mr. Rutledge to see Miss Farraday,” he said briskly.
Apparently the young woman hadn’t been warned to turn him away. Instead she asked him to wait in the hall while she went to see if Miss Farraday was at home.
He did as she asked.
There was a small table to one side of the door, and above it hung a rather good watercolor of the marshes. On the opposite wall, a gilt-framed mirror reflected both. He thought Cynthia Farraday must have been telling the truth when she said she liked the marshes at River’s Edge.
Several minutes later, a door opened down the passage and Miss Farraday herself came out to greet him.
“So you found me at last,” she said, smiling, amused. “And the house, River’s Edge? Is it for sale?”
“I wouldn’t know. Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard,” he informed her. “I don’t believe your housemaid heard the title.”
She opened her mouth, shut it again, and then said, “We’ll be more comfortable in my sitting room.” She turned and walked back the way she’d come, not looking to see if he followed or not.
It was a bright room she took him to, done up in lavender and cream and apricot, a very feminine and unusual setting, and it suited her. Closing the door behind him, she gestured to a pair of chairs set before a window overlooking the back garden.
She said, seating herself opposite him, “Scotland Yard. You led me to believe you were Wyatt’s solicitor.”
“And you led me to believe you were there in the closed house because you wished to purchase it.”
“Touché. Why did you follow me to London? I can’t think where you were waiting for me. Still, I didn’t know whether to be flattered or annoyed.”
He was unexpectedly pleased that she knew nothing about his presence at the landing stage where she’d returned the launch. “Your photograph has a way of showing up in surprising places. For one, in the possession of a dead man.”
She was very still. “A dead man?” she asked, bracing herself for the answer. “Not Wyatt?”
“No. It was Ben Willet who was found floating in the Thames,” he told her baldly.
He could see the blood drain from her face. But she said, “I don’t know anyone