Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [16]
The sunlight pouring through the open door failed to reach them or warm the vastness of the hall. But he could hear birds somewhere, singing.
“If she had wanted to kill herself—for whatever reason—” Rutledge said, “why would she allow Nicholas to join her in death? Why not see that he survived, and got on with life. However hard it might seem to be at first? Why not kill herself in her bedroom, with no one to see?”
She pressed her fingers to her eyes, as if they still hurt from crying. Or to hide them from him. “I’ve asked myself that a hundred—a thousand—times since then. They were very close, Olivia and Nicholas. I’d have said, if anyone had ever thought to ask me, that she would have jumped into the sea in the night, rather that let him die with her. It doesn’t mean that perhaps in the first shock he might not have wished to follow, but Nicholas had a cool head, a clear mind, he wasn’t the dramatic, overly emotional sort of man who could leap into the sea himself the next morning. When she was already dead.” Dropping her hands, she said painfully, “If you understand what I’m saying?”
He did, though Hamish was grumbling that it made no sense. “Yet they died together.”
“Yes, and that’s what put me off in the very beginning. I didn’t say much to the others; they wouldn’t have wanted to hear me worrying over what couldn’t be changed. Or making it worse by starting a fuss over it. But the more I thought about the circumstances, the more I was convinced that something was very wrong, very—unusual.”
“Do you think one of your cousins—including Stephen— could be capable of murdering Olivia and Nicholas? For whatever reasons?”
She stared at him, stunned. “Oh, God, no! Susannah and Stephen couldn’t have killed either of them. And Daniel, what on earth for?”
Rutledge smiled. “Where there’s murder, there’s usually a murderer.”
“But not one of us!” she cried, alarmed.
How often had he heard the same cry when he’d begun an investigation into suspicious death. Murder, possibly. But not one of us. A stranger. A madman. An envious neighbor or colleague. The woman down the road. But not one of us. Then the finger-pointing began, as suspicion and fear and uncertainty and old memories came to the surface.
“Who, then?” he asked gently.
“That’s why I called Henry and begged him to ask the Yard to come down here and look into the deaths. Someone who could be objective, someone with the experience to judge what had really happened. Not a village policeman who preferred the safest answer to embarrassing the family any more than it already was. I mean, suicide is unacceptable enough— murder would be, well, a family calamity.” She looked at him, seeing him for the first time. The thin face. The haunted eyes. Intelligence, too, but something more. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
“There were no photographs upstairs. Do you have any of the family that I could borrow for a time?” He was mainly interested in Olivia Marlowe, the woman behind the poems. But it helped, often, to see the faces of the dead if you were late at the murder scene.
“We’d taken them all. The house will be put up for sale soon, and we didn’t want to leave—I’ve just come to fetch the ships,” she said, flustered. “I—I haven’t had the courage yet to go in there. Where they—where it happened. There are photographs in my things, I’ll find them. Where are you staying?”
“The Three Bells,” he said, curious about her reaction. “What can you tell me about Stephen FitzHugh’s death?”
She shivered, not looking over his shoulder at the stairs, though her head had turned that way. “It was awful. He was lying at the foot of the steps, his eyes wide, a little blood— I couldn’t tell if it was from his ear or his mouth—smeared across his cheek. Cormac said he died as we watched, but I saw nothing change, didn’t hear a sigh or—or anything. And I was kneeling there, beside him, my hand on his chest, calling his name. It was—I’ve seen men die before. I