The Confession - Charles Todd [82]
“Are you saying that there actually was smuggling going on? In Furnham? That Ben was a part of it?” She shook her head. “You must be mistaken. He liked the way the past shaped the future. Nothing to do with reality.”
And he had lied to her. To protect her? Or to protect the people of Furnham?
There was nothing here, with the possible exception of the reference to Captain F—, to cause a man’s death. Or to support Willet’s claim that Russell had killed Justin Fowler.
With regret he set the books aside.
Cynthia Farraday was saying, “I’m not in a position to judge, not really, I know so little about writing. But I think the second book is much more mature than anything he’d written before the war. He’d seen the world. He understood far better what he was trying to say. The money I gave him was well repaid. Can you imagine what Paris must have been like after Furnham, or even Thetford for that matter?”
“You lived at River’s Edge. Did you feel that the village in the second novel was Furnham?”
“Well, of course it was. I mean to say, he didn’t use real names, but I recognized a few of the residents. Those I knew. There are probably more.”
“Reading these, I keep asking myself why he came to Scotland Yard and posed as Wyatt Russell. Was that the only lie he told me? Or have I been chasing shadows?”
“I don’t know. You haven’t told me if you’d found Wyatt. Are you saving bad news for the last?”
“I can’t find him. I thought he’d be in Essex, there was nowhere else to go. And I was wrong. Why did you tell me you wished to buy River’s Edge, if it were for sale?”
Color rose in her face. “To find the girl I once was, I suppose. Don’t you ever wish you could go back? It’s heartbreaking to see it standing empty. And I have a feeling Wyatt won’t ever live there again. He sees the ghosts that walk. I don’t.”
“Not even the ghost of Justin Fowler?”
“Justin was handsome, he loved sports—we had croquet and lawn tennis and the like, horses to ride, a boat. But he was—there was something about him, a darkness, I thought at the time, having read too many novels. Still, it was there. I thought at first he missed his parents. They were dead, like mine, but he never talked about them. Never, ‘My father and I did this,’ or ‘My mother loved roses.’ I wondered afterward if perhaps he wanted to forget them.”
“Why?”
She looked across at the window. “Perhaps it was too painful to remember. My parents died on holiday. There was a typhoid outbreak in Spain, while they were in Córdoba. They were there—and then they weren’t. Horrible for me, but I’d said good-bye when they went away, and when their luggage was returned, there were presents for me, ribbons and a cut-glass bottle for scent, some lace, and a collection of photographs they’d bought in famous places. I knew they’d been thinking about me, and I found it comforting. I don’t know how his died. Perhaps they were ill and had been suffering for some time. The sort of thing one tries to put behind one.”
It was an interesting possibility.
He thanked her and was preparing to leave when she said, “Wyatt didn’t come back. Not even to apologize. Do you think he ever will?”
For her sake, he lied once more. “I’m sure he will.”
Stopping at The Marlborough Hotel, he used their telephone to put in a call to the Yard.
It was some time before Gibson could be found, and he sounded harassed when he finally answered.
“Sir? Where are you?” was his first question, after Rutledge had identified himself.
“What news do you have of the Chief Superintendent?” Rutledge countered.
“In hospital, sir, and the report is not good. Where are you?”
“Traveling,” Rutledge replied. “Have you learned anything about Justin Fowler? Or Benjamin Willet?”
“Nothing about Fowler. As for the other man, he had rooms in Bloomsbury but gave them up to return to France.” There was no real connection then with The Marlborough Hotel. Willet had lied when he claimed he had rooms there.
Gibson was saying,