The Confession - Charles Todd [86]
“The staff was cleared of any involvement?”
“Yes, we felt fairly confident that they weren’t to blame. The housekeeper was fifty, the three maids in their early forties, the cook nearing sixty. All of them had been with the family for twenty years or more. And we found a window in the dining room broken, a bloody handprint on the post at the bottom of the drive, and signs that someone had been sick just there. We questioned the staff, but they knew of no one who had a reason to kill Mr. or Mrs. Fowler. He was a solicitor. We spoke to his partner, and we were assured that there was no evidence that the murders were related to his work. Mostly wills, conveyances, and the like. The partner himself had been attending a funeral in Suffolk, and there must be twenty witnesses to that.” It was clear that Robinson was not happy admitting to Scotland Yard that the murders had gone unsolved. And it was just as clear that with two dead and one severely injured, no suspects and no answers, the local constabulary had chosen not to call in the Yard. Why?
“Who was in charge of the inquiry?” he asked Robinson.
“Inspector Eaton. I was a constable at the time. I had no voice in decisions. But I can tell you that I saw the bodies. Repeatedly stabbed. As bloody a sight as I’d ever seen, until the war.”
“Is Eaton still here?”
“He died in the influenza epidemic. Overworked, if you want my opinion. Policeman, confessor, nurse, he tried to do it all.”
“There was no possibility that Justin Fowler killed his parents and then stabbed himself?”
“Good God, no. For one thing, we never found a weapon, even though we searched his room, the ground under his windows, and every inch of the house wall in between. And only his bedding was bloody. There was no blood at all on the floor, and considering his wounds, there most certainly would have been if he’d stabbed himself, thrown away the weapon, and returned to his bed. What’s more, he said he’d been too frightened to move. He thought the killer was still in the room, and soon afterward, he fainted from pain and loss of blood.”
“And neither parent could have committed the crimes?”
“Not from the evidence. We also looked into that very carefully.”
“The inquest?”
“Person or persons unknown. We spent six months investigating every possibility, even a botched housebreaking, and we discovered nothing new in all that time.”
“What became of the staff?”
“They stayed in the house until Justin Fowler’s future was decided. And then the house was sold, the staff pensioned off according to Mrs. Fowler’s will—she survived her husband, you see, but the provisions were very much the same in both cases. There was the usual gift to the church fund, and to a charity school in London that Mr. Fowler had made gifts to over the years. Nothing of a size to suggest that they were killed for what anyone expected to inherit.”
“And no disgruntled servant, client, or other person with a grudge against Fowler or his family?”
“None at all. We looked into that as well.”
“Had the elder Fowler always lived in Colchester?”
“Indeed, except for a brief time in London—three years when he was a very young man. As I recall, he was a junior in a firm of solicitors there, before coming here and setting up his own chambers.”
Rutledge remembered what Nancy Brothers had said, that Mrs. Russell had lost touch with her cousin after she’d married Fowler. That Mrs. Russell hadn’t cared for him.
“Was there anything in Fowler’s background that was in any way irregular?”
“Irregular?”
“Unusual, a source of concern for the family, skeletons in the closet.”
“We never discovered any. He was some years older than his wife, as I remember, a pillar of the church, impeccable reputation here in Colchester. I heard one of the other constables, an older man, say that Fowler was too dull to look for trouble, much less to find