Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [163]
She glared at him through her tears. “I don’t have the money to stay—or to bury Matthew. I spent nearly every penny coming here—I’ve barely enough to see me back to London!”
Hamish said, “He’s no’ a man for the ladies. He doesna’ ken that it’s no’ so much Walsh’s dying as it is the disappointment of her expectations. She canna’ face what to do now.”
Rutledge stepped toward her chair. “Miss Kenneth, it’s been a very difficult morning for you. A cup of tea and an hour’s rest at the hotel will help. I’m sure Inspector Blevins will meet with you in the afternoon.”
Blevins glowered at him, and she caught it.
Iris Kenneth’s shoulders slumped. “I could use a cup of tea,” she said. “This has been a terrible shock—!”
“I’m sure it has. Mrs. Barnett, at the hotel, is very kind. She’ll see that you’re taken care of.”
She looked more closely at the tall man by the door. He could read her eyes as they swept over his face and across his shoulders, and back again.
With the resourcefulness of her class, she recognized that she would make no headway with the stolid man behind the desk. And she was desperate, willing to try any port in the unsettled climate of her life just now. She got to her feet with some grace and said, “You’re very kind. If the Inspector here—” She groped for a name.
“Blevins,” he said, relief already spreading across his features. “Inspector Rutledge is right, Miss Kenneth. Take your time and you’ll soon see your way clear again.” The false heartiness in his voice was almost insulting.
“—Blevins,” she acknowledged, “will give me a little more of his time later?”
“Oh, yes, to be sure,” he said hurriedly, rising from his chair to escort her to the door.
Rutledge glanced at Iris Kenneth and then said cryptically to Blevins, “I’d come to ask. The doctor was satisfied that it was the mare’s shoe that was the cause of death?”
“Oh, yes. There’s no doubt. I’m completely satisfied.”
Rutledge nodded.
Holding the umbrella over his companion’s hat, Rutledge took her arm to guide her toward the hotel. “I’m sorry that you’ve come so far,” he told her, “to hear such tragic news.”
“He wouldn’t have killed anyone. Much less this priest! Matthew was always on his best behavior at church bazaars, superstitious, if you like. And he never cared for being penned up—I’m not surprised he escaped! A big man like him? In such a small space? It would have been torture!”
Rutledge though , God! I’d have tried to escape, too. Shut in away from the air and the light—smothered by the walls—
Hamish said, “Ye ken, murderers are always locked away. If they’re half mad, like you, it’s the cell, it’s no’ the rope.”
Iris Kenneth kept up her earnest defense of Matthew Walsh all the way to the hotel, one hand holding her skirts out of the rainwater washing down the street toward the quay. When they reached the door, she looked out at the marshes, and Rutledge could feel her shudder through the arm inside his. “What a dreary place,” she remarked. “Enough to turn anybody into a murderer, living here long enough!”
Mrs. Barnett stepped out of her tiny office and said, “Good morning, Inspector, you’re about early on such a nasty day. I believe Miss Trent and Monsignor Holston have been waiting for you in the lounge. Shall I bring tea to warm you up?”
“Meanwhile, I’ve brought you another guest—”
She reluctantly took charge of Miss Kenneth, eyeing her with some dismay. In the calm, gracious lobby of the hotel, Iris Kenneth’s style was decidedly out of place, garish, her voice a little loud, her clothes a little shabby, her face rather too heavily made up for a country town. Her rouge and the line of kohl beneath her eyes had run from her tears, giving her a clownish expression of surprise.
Iris Kenneth seemed equally reluctant to give up Rutledge’s company. She said, “You will take me back to see Inspector Blevins later?”
“Yes. And see you safely on your way back to London,