Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [110]
“What was she to you, if you weren’t her priest?”
Sims’s eyes went to the caryatids, the anguished figures howling in pain as they supported the heavy weight of the mantel. Rutledge thought, He knows how they feel—his burden is as heavy.
Hamish said, “He was in love wi’ her. Let it be!”
But Rutledge waited, forcing Sims to say what he did not want to say.
“I—I cared about her, because she was in trouble. But there was nothing I could do to help. With all the might of the Church behind me, there was nothing I could do to help her!”
CHAPTER 17
IN THE SILENCE THAT FOLLOWED, RUTLEDGE gave Sims a space in which to collect himself.
Then he asked, “What was her name? Victoria? Vera? Ver—”
“I won’t give you her name,” the Vicar broke in wearily. “For God’s sake, man, have a little sense! She’s long dead, and you’ll only stir up what’s best forgotten. I gave that photograph to Father James myself, for safe-keeping. It was—it was part of a promise. And I kept it, that promise. I did what was asked of me while she was alive, and I tried to close the door once she was dead. I don’t know why he wished me to have it again. I thought perhaps he’d burned it years ago. But I never quite had the courage to ask. Who knows about this? Gifford? I’ll have to speak to him—”
“Father James didn’t leave it to you,” Rutledge said finally. “But he did wish someone else to have it.”
The impact of the Londoner’s words left Sims stunned. “Not to me? Merciful God!” He tried to absorb that, and then asked, “If not to me—then to whom?” When Rutledge didn’t answer immediately, Sims continued. “Look, you’ve got to tell me! That photograph could do unimaginable harm.”
Rutledge said, “If that’s true—that a dead woman’s photograph could do such harm—I can’t imagine that Father James would have kept it, much less passed it on. He wasn’t, from all I’ve learned about him, either cruel or callous.”
“But don’t you see? It was given to me. Out of simple fondness—a gesture that was meant in all innocence. That’s the trouble, it could be misconstrued—interpreted in another light. It would sully her memory, to no purpose. If you won’t tell me, I’ll go to Gifford myself—”
Relenting, and at the same time testing the waters, Rutledge answered, “I can’t tell you. But if it matters, this was bequeathed to a woman, not a man.”
Sims leaned back in his chair, a man emptied of all feelings. “Yes, that makes a kind of sense. Thank God!” And then he repeated silently, Thank God!, his lips moving without his knowledge, as if they uttered a prayer.
Hamish’s first question came when the motorcar was turning through the vicarage gates into Trinity Lane. “He didna’ ask you who the woman was. He didna’ care.”
“I think he cared—but he felt it was right—just—that she should have it.”
“Which means he already kens the name of the woman.”
“Or—thinks he does. Interesting, isn’t it?”
Mrs. Barnett was crossing the lobby when Rutledge came into the hotel. He stopped her, and left a message for May Trent to give him a time and place where they could meet. He included the words Official Business.
She was still out, Mrs. Barnett informed him as she took the folded sheet of notepaper and put it safely in the drawer of the reception desk. And might be staying the night with her friends.
He didn’t think that was likely. May Trent was avoiding him.
Rutledge went over the cuttings again, looking for any connection between May Trent and any other passenger on the ship and for anyone with a name beginning with V.
But he found no guidance in the reports of the sinking, the survivors, the missing, or the dead. Nothing that leaped out at him as the answer he sought.
He was on his way down the stairs to put in a call to the Yard, to ask Sergeant Gibson—who had an absolute gift for ferreting out information—to look into the shipping files at Lloyds and the White Star Line for women passengers whose