Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [51]
“Could Walsh have been searching for it? Either time he was at the rectory?” It was not uncommon to keep letters after a loved one died.
“Lord, no, how would he have known such a letter even existed? No, it’s a false scent, and I’m not going to be sidetracked by it. Besides, if Father James had learned something incriminating about Walsh, he wouldn’t have told his sister, would he? Let’s leave it! I told you only because I thought you’d agree with me that it’s not important.”
Hamish reminded Rutledge of an exchange during last night’s dinner at the Norwich hotel on the subject of the murder having to do with the War:
And how to find such a needle in a haystack of returned veterans?
Yet that same needle might have found Father James, nearly a year after the War had ended . . .
Because he’d come to a bazaar?
“I see your point.” It was enough to satisfy Blevins. Changing the subject, Rutledge told him, “I’ve been to the rectory to look at the study.”
“Doesn’t tell you much, does it? Mrs. Wainer scrubbed that carpet nearly through to the nap, trying to get out the blood. Wouldn’t hear of having a constable do it for her. It was her place, she insisted, not his.” He wolfed down the last sandwich, then began to fold the serviettes in which they had been wrapped. A B in Gothic script had been embroidered into one corner, entwined with a sprig of lilac.
“A great deal of force was used to open the desk.”
“More than needful. Yes, that’s true. But I doubt our blossom of fragility back there in the cells knows his own strength. The same force was used to kill Father James.”
“The theory is that he came looking for money to pay for his new cart. But this was some weeks after the bazaar. By that time, the money collected at the fair might well have been already dispersed—to the needy, to pay for a new altar cloth, whatever use it was intended to serve. Why did Walsh believe that the money was still in Father James’s hands?”
“I’ve looked into that myself. More often than not those funds are used as a priest sees fit. The accounts that must be paid by the parish come from another sum that’s on deposit in the bank. The Autumn Fete never brings in a large amount. Although this year, the first since the War ended, we had a better turnout. The men had come home, and the young women who had gone away to do war work were back as well.” He paused. “That’s been the hardest part for me, you know, accepting that a good many men from Osterley won’t be coming home. Whilst you’re fighting, you don’t think about it all that much. But the butcher’s son and Mrs. Barnett’s nephew, and so many other faces you’d expect to see about the town didn’t make it. Or they’re crippled and off somewhere learning how to make baskets or some such that they can sell. The best man we ever had in the marshes is blind. Two of the choirboys are orphans, their mother dead of the influenza and their father killed off Jutland. There’s talk of making a small war memorial here to honor the dead of Osterley. I don’t see it myself. But those who lost loved ones might find it comforting after a fashion.”
Rutledge was reminded of the monument that London was building to the nation’s war dead. An enduring memorial to The Great War, the newspapers called it; a place where wreaths could be laid each November and prayers said for the dead who hadn’t come home.
He shivered. Many of them had never been found. They still lay in Flanders’s Fields, buried so deep in the wrecked earth that not even a farmer’s plow would turn them up. Leather boots might last longer than flesh or bone, and helmets as well, but in time, even leather crumbled and metal rusted. After a few years, peas and corn and vineyards would cover their resting place, not a wooden cross or a plinth of marble. Would they even hear the prayers of a grateful nation? And how long would gratitude last?
Blevins was saying to him, “—Father James survived the War, survived the influenza epidemic. A brave man, but never a foolhardy one. Anybody will tell you that. He’d have dealt with the man in