Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [88]
“The Sedgwicks were at the bazaar?” Rutledge asked, although he knew they were. But Mrs. Beeling seemed to have perfect recall.
“Osterley doesn’t have a lord, you see,” Mrs. Beeling explained graciously, “though there’s always been good blood here. The Cullens and the Giffords and so on. But there’s no title. Still, the family does try to make an appearance on special days, and that’s as it should be.” She nodded. The Sedgwicks were not old money, but they were still money. “As for Arthur, he’s in terrible pain, they say, but he can get about. He’d come down for the fete and stayed on for that Herbert Baker’s funeral.”
“He was at Herbert Baker’s funeral?” The garrulous old woman had given Rutledge more information in a quarter of an hour than anyone else had done in several days of asking questions.
“Of course he was. Herbert Baker had been his father’s coachman, and then driven Arthur’s wife about in the motorcar until her death.”
Rutledge turned to Mrs. Wainer and said, “If you don’t mind, I’ll take you up on the offer of a cup of tea.”
She wasn’t pleased to serve him in the kitchen. And as it turned out, he wasted the next quarter of an hour.
Whatever her sources were for the gossip she had freely dispensed, Rutledge discovered that Mrs. Beeling had nothing more of interest to tell him, except that she most certainly had her own opinion on why Herbert Baker had seen two priests shortly before he died.
“When you’re old, things begin to prey on your mind,” she told him affably, as if from personal knowledge. “You wake up in the night, dwelling on what was done or left undone. And it seems far worse in the darkness than it ever was in the light, until you take to brooding on it, more often than’s good for you. You take to worrying that it’s too late to make amends. I know myself, sometimes it weighs heavily on me, the things I’ve said and done. There’s nights when my bones are aching and I can’t sleep, and I’d even bow down to those heathen idols that His Lordship has in his garden, if I thought it might clear my mind!”
The Watchers of Time.
Rutledge said, “But what had Herbert Baker done, that made him send for the Vicar and the priest?”
“Who’s to say? But I heard he’s the one who let Arthur’s wife step out of the motorcar in King’s Lynn, and then went off to get himself drunk while she was speaking with the shopkeepers about a birthday party. Only she never visited the shops. She went instead to the station and took the next train to London, and disappeared. Until the ship went down, and they discovered the poor lady had been aboard!”
It made sense. Hamish, listening to the nuances behind the words, agreed. Guilt might have tormented Herbert Baker—who had the gift of loyalty. Not a sin of commission, but instead failure to do one’s duty for a single hour. His drinking couldn’t have set in motion any of the events that had followed. All the same, he might have bitterly blamed himself for them.
If—if—if. If I had been there—if I hadn’t been drinking— if I had minded my duty . . .
Was that what lay on a dying man’s conscience, driving him to try to buy himself absolution in two faiths?
CHAPTER 14
RUTLEDGE, DRIVING BACK TO THE HOTEL, told himself that Herbert Baker was proving to be a dead end. But the bequeathed photograph was still elusive . . .
He braked to a slow pace behind a wain piled high with hay.
Rutledge was beginning to wonder if the killer hadn’t taken it with him. Did that explain the ransacking of the desk? But what would Walsh—or his accomplice, for that matter—want with a photograph? How would they have known it even existed, and what earthly value did it have? And if it did have value, why had Father James made a sudden decision to leave it to May Trent?
Why—when he could have given it to her on the same day he’d brought that carefully crafted paragraph into the solicitor’s office