Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [91]
‘‘Yes, it has Brian’s initials on the back. See?”
He turned it over, and she peered at it for a moment. “They all have initials on them,” he told her. “The mark of the owner.”
“How very odd. Where did you find these? Surely not inside that board! And where did they come from? Olivia must have had the ring and the locket, but surely not Richard’s and James’ things. Or Brian’s. Cormac might have wanted that crucifix.”
“They were hidden in the board, just as I showed you. One fell out—the locket—when I was going through the closet looking for Olivia’s papers. After a time I discovered the others.”
“But why were they hidden? I don’t understand!”
“They’re trophies of the dead. I thought that Olivia had collected them from each of her victims. Something they’d treasured and she’d coveted. Now, I don’t know.” He picked up the board again, and the wood that slotted so perfectly into it. “It was Nicholas who worked in wood. It was his skill that must have made this hiding place. I realize that now. Not Olivia’s. And it was Nicholas who led the hunt for the crucifix. Susannah mentioned that. What better place to keep them safe than Olivia’s closet? She wouldn’t be likely, would she, to go moving shelves around on her own.”
There was pain in her eyes. “You can’t think—but there’s the fob. Why should Nicholas add a trophy of his own, and not one for Olivia, if he was the killer. If he killed her before he took his own life?” Her face begged him to tell her it couldn’t be true.
“I don’t know what was burned in the fire. But could Olivia have carried things out there, burned them, and come back into the house without Nicholas knowing what she was doing? Especially if it was done at night? Someone made very certain that a number of things were destroyed. Secretly. It would have been easy for him to go out there. At night, while Olivia slept.”
“No, not Nicholas!”
“Rachel, Olivia couldn’t have gone out there without his knowing.”
“She could have! He went into the village, to the church, to visit the rector, to have a meal at the inn, talk to people. She could have done it then.”
“All right. But the fire—and the letter—tell me that one of them knew that it was all over. Nicholas couldn’t possibly have written to you if Olivia planned all this on her own. If he hadn’t known what was about to happen.”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He may— something might have been worrying him—he might have known, without really knowing. You do sometimes! He might have—suspected what she was planning. They understood each other so well.”
“And on the moors yesterday,” he went on, ignoring her interjection, “they found what looked like a small boy’s clothing. Wrapped in oiled cloth, to keep it from rotting too soon. That means someone stripped the boy’s body. Took away the clothing that might have made it easier to identify him. That’s planning, Rachel. Someone planned his disappearance!”
“If you found his clothing, you must have found his bones,” she pointed out, desperate now.
“No. I told you, the body had been stripped. If you’re going to that trouble, you don’t leave the body and the clothing in the same hole. It would make no sense, would it? Next point. I have a witness who says that Brian FitzHugh was talking to someone on the beach just before he died. Can you see Olivia trying to make her way down through those rocks? Wouldn’t Brian have gone up to meet her, to save her the effort? Finally, if Nicholas was jealous of Rosamund’s remarriage to Brian, he wouldn’t be eager to see Thomas Chambers move in to fill FitzHugh’s shoes either. And it looked very much as if that could happen. But Chambers