Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [78]
“Do you know if she might have owned a pair of old shoes, a man’s, with a worn heel and a tear in the sole?”
Mrs. Rollings’s eyebrows rose almost to her hairline. “Old shoes? Men’s shoes?”
“Yes. We’d like very much to know if she possessed such a pair.” Realizing that the concept was totally foreign to his hostess, Rutledge added, “Perhaps from some role or other.”
Wilkerson, stolid and silent, was looking around the room as if he expected to find something nasty hidden behind the wallpaper.
“Well, I should think not! She wasn’t the kind of girl who played in farce—she didn’t have the talent for it! It was more in her line to stand there looking respectable and drawing custom. She was quite lovely in green. You’d have thought her a lady, if she didn’t open her mouth.” Lovely was pronounced as luuvley.
Wilkerson said, “Then you are telling us that no such shoes were found in her belongings?”
“None that I know of! And I was fairly careful in searching through them.”
“Would another—er—guest have searched them before you did?” the Sergeant continued.
“Here! There’s no stealing in my house.”
“No, surely not,” Rutledge soothed. “But if you come across old shoes like those I’ve described—even in an unexpected place—will you send a message to Sergeant Wilkerson here?”
“Is there a reward for what you want to know?” she asked sharply.
“No. But it will be in the public interest.”
Her expression informed him what she thought of the public interest.
Hamish had been right. Rutledge stood up, and Wilkerson lumbered to his feet as well.
“You’ve been most helpful, Mrs. Rollings. Thank you for your time.”
She regarded them warily, uncertain if it was truly old shoes that had brought the police around. “There’s nothing else you wanted to know about her things?”
“Only if she’d pinched any of them,” Wilkerson answered.
That silenced Mrs. Rollings. Anything nice enough to have been stolen had already found its way to the next owner or a shop dealing in secondhand goods, no questions asked.
She saw them out with poor grace, and shut the door on their heels.
Sergeant Wilkerson laughed. “She’s a right old besom, but there are any number on the street like her.” He gestured in either direction at houses no better kept than hers, their paint peeling and roofs showing stains from years of damp. “But they serve a purpose. Many a pretty girl who went out to seek her fame and fortune would be lucky to wind up here, and not selling herself in the stews. There’s not been a lot of work for this lot, what with the War and all, but they’ve managed to survive. Somehow they always do. This Iris Kenneth would have had an eye for the main chance.”
“And yet she ended her life in the river.”
Rutledge compared the street here with Osterley, where prosperity had slipped away but dignity and resourcefulness had kept up appearances.
“Well,” Sergeant Wilkerson added as he turned to walk back to Rutledge’s motorcar, “it wasn’t much to go on, but you never know.”
The epitaph of police work, Rutledge thought.
“Yes,” he answered. “But I’d give much to know if Iris Kenneth was pushed, or was desperate enough to throw herself into the water.”
“You think that man Walsh might have wanted to be rid of her?”
“It’s possible. If she helped him rob the priest’s house. Or she may have been working for someone else with a better reason to kill her than Walsh had. The Iris Kenneths of this world seldom live to old age.” Although Mrs. Rollings had. It depended, he thought, whether the woman was clever or naive. Whether she could protect herself or was destined to be a victim.
He started the motorcar and stepped up behind the wheel. “I’ll be going back to Norfolk,” he told Wilkerson. “Will you pass that message to Chief Superintendent Bowles? And if there’s any more information about this Iris Kenneth or her death, I want to know about it.”
“Aye, I’ll see to that,” the Sergeant promised. He