The Confession - Charles Todd [74]
He walked down to the water and stood looking toward the sea. The day was fair and already warmer than usual. Far out in the North Sea he could just make out a ship steaming by, the smoke of its funnels a thick gray line above a hull that was nearly invisible from here.
Barber spoke just behind him, and Rutledge turned quickly. He hadn’t heard him walk down to the water’s edge. The lapping of the river on the strand had covered the sound of his footsteps.
“What brings you back to our fair village?” he asked.
“Ned Willet’s funeral,” Rutledge said, keeping his voice light. “When is it to be?”
“It was yesterday. You missed it,” the man replied, with some satisfaction.
“I’m sorry.”
“We’re not.” Barber reached down and picked up something from the strand. It was a flat stone, and he sent it skimming across the water. “Not bad. Seven skips,” Barber went on. Then he turned back to Rutledge. “You’ll be leaving then?”
There was nothing to keep him here. Except for the search for Russell. And yet the man’s eagerness to see the last of him aroused his suspicions.
He took a chance. “Making another run to France, are you? Before the moon is full?”
Barber’s face was a picture of dismay and anger, then wariness. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Rutledge picked up a stone just by the toe of his boot and sent it skimming across the river. It skipped nine times. “Hypothetically, of course.”
Weighing the word, Barber stared at Rutledge, then looked out to sea as Rutledge himself had done earlier. But not before Rutledge had caught the doubt in his eyes.
He had pushed far enough. After a moment Rutledge added, “My only interest is what happened to Ben Willet. I’ve told you. Help me there, and I’ll be on my way.”
“I don’t know who killed him.”
“Nor do I. Was it you, because when he came home from France he was different, no longer a villager, prepared to keep village secrets? Or was it Major Russell, perhaps out of jealousy? Or because Willet knew too much about the death of Justin Fowler? Miss Farraday, because Willet presumed on her friendship?”
Barber picked up another stone, looked at it, and let it drop to the strand again. He was silent so long that Rutledge thought he wasn’t going to answer at all.
Finally he said, “The answer could lie in France. Have you thought about that? He wouldn’t be the first one to want to stay, hanging about with that useless lot in Paris, drinking and whoring and posturing with the rest of them, rather than coming home and doing right by his family. It would have killed the old man.”
Rutledge turned to look up the river so that Barber couldn’t read his face.
On the postal card Willet had sent to Cynthia Farraday a few days before his murder, he’d told her he was intending to visit his father and then return to Paris and finish his last book. But Abigail claimed he hadn’t come home since the war. And if he hadn’t, why did Sandy Barber suspect his brother-in-law had chosen to stay in Paris after 1918?
A footman from Thetford, son of a fisherman in Furnham, would have been eager to return to the Laughton house where his former position was awaiting him.
“Why should you think that Ben Willet would be one of them?” he asked, his eyes on a shorebird flitting here and there after whatever the current had on offer.
Barber lifted a shoulder in irritation. “I don’t know. Someone—Jessup, I believe it was—said something after—” He cleared his throat. “He said better men than Ben had been tempted to stay on.”
What had Barber been about to say before he’d caught himself ? After one of his runs to France for contraband? After meeting Ben Willet in London or Tilbury or on the road to Furnham?
“That was an odd remark,” Rutledge said, facing him. “Did he know Ben so well?”
Barber flushed. “I don’t know what