A game of fear, p.18
A Game of Fear, page 18
“He was in the war?”
“I think not. He is lame. But he was a patriot all the same.”
That explained why her convent had sent her here. But the man had done something in the war . . .
On an impulse, he said, “I have looked at the maps and books in the workroom. He served in his own fashion. But there is nothing to take back to England with me. I should like to speak to him again.”
“It is not necessary. I think this is what you came for.” She turned, opened a small cabinet against the wall. It was where spices and flour and salt were kept. In the sack of flour was an envelope.
“Take it and go.” She opened a drawer in the dresser, found a cloth, and cleaned off the flour dust before handing it to him.
It was tightly sealed.
“Leave him now to die quietly.” But when Rutledge didn’t go, she sighed. “He did not trust the post,” she went on, and turned away to begin preparing a broth for Vermuelen, adding a raw egg to it.
Rutledge looked away. “Thank you. I’d still like to speak to him.”
“We shall see, yes? As God wills.”
Finishing his coffee, he thanked her again, and took the envelope back to the workroom.
It was indeed tightly sealed. But Haldane had sent him here without a word to help him find what the man wanted from Vermuelen. And Rutledge told himself that he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to open the wretched envelope and find out what it contained. He needed to return to Essex—but if Vermuelen was dying, this could be his only chance to ask questions.
Inside the envelope, there were pages of that tissue-thin paper, and this time, they were covered in writing. Someone—Vermuelen?—had kept a running account in the tiniest handwriting he could manage. In the dim light of the lamp, Rutledge was hard-pressed to read it. Fortunately it was in English, not Flemish or French.
At first he had no idea what the report was about, and then he began to understand. It was dated, clear, concise, logical. Rutledge wondered if the writer—or Vermuelen himself—had been a policeman in Belgium before the war, for there was a recognizable policeman’s viewpoint about it.
It began with troop movements in Belgium, which regiments the Germans were bringing into that country and staging to march into France. There followed a description of the heroism of the Belgians as they fought back, giving the Allies nine days to get their own armies into the conflict. There was a gap, and then the report began again at the French-Belgian border days later, again noting German troop movements and strategy. As if he had changed his location.
This continued—with gaps, apparently as Vermuelen moved his area of operations to another location. This time he was watching the French coastline and reporting on the submarines and other German naval movements. Once he rescued a British airman, leading him back to his own lines.
Rutledge was beginning to realize that this was a record, not a report, a duplicate of all the information he had managed to get into British hands during the course of the war. In the event that any messages were lost, the information in those messages would not be.
Rutledge began to scan. It wasn’t the war, three years in the past, that Haldane was interested in.
His eyes aching from the tiny print and his stomach growling from missed meals, he forced his mind to keep at it, looking for anything that might be useful. Searching the parlor again, he found a half empty bottle of whisky, and took that back to the workroom. As time passed, he was beginning to think that there was nothing of interest here. Nothing to do with Essex and murder.
He drank from the bottle, unwilling to ask the nun for a glass, and then went on with his search. By the time he’d read the last page, he knew this couldn’t be what he had come all the way from Essex to find. He would see that it reached Haldane, but there had to be another reason for this journey.
Folding the pages and returning them to the envelope, he put it safely in his pocket, capped the bottle of whisky, and returned it to the parlor. Then he went in search of the nun.
She was in the sickroom.
“How is he?” Rutledge asked quietly.
“He fights to live, but it’s only a matter of time.”
“Is he awake?”
“He hasn’t spoken for some hours.”
Rutledge moved closer to the bed. He could hear the man’s rough breathing, but he didn’t think he was actually asleep.
Drawing a chair up to the bedside, he said, “Vermuelen? Haldane sent me. I found your reports, what you’d done in the war. But there must be something else. I understand your need to be circumspect.”
There was no response from the man in the bed.
“If I had come here to find out what you knew, or to kill you and the Sister, I would have burned down the house with both of you in it, and been done with it. Instead, I have waited for the truth.”
Rutledge sat patiently, then was about to try again when Vermuelen spoke.
His accent was heavier, his voice weak as he fought for air. “Notes.”
“I have the war notes.”
“Not war. More.”
“You will have to tell me. I don’t know where to look.”
The man lifted a hand trembling with weakness. “Not finished.” He pointed to a table by the window. It held medicines, a bowl of what appeared to be broth, several glasses, and a spoon. Nothing else.
“Where?”
“Under. In case—someone came—to kill—”
Rutledge stood up and went to the table. It was old, very heavy wood, intended to last down the generations. As it must have done. But there was nothing to be seen. He turned to speak to the nun, but she had quietly left the room.
Dropping down on one knee, Rutledge ran his hands up under the table’s top, where the wood was unfinished. At first his fingers found nothing, and then just as he was about to give up, he felt something.
Not an envelope this time. A roll of papers, taped to the inner front edge.
He pulled them out carefully, then rose and returned to his chair.
“These?”
The man on the bed made an effort, opening his eyes. “Not finished,” he said again with a brief nod. “Ask. Ask him.”
“I shall. And I’ll see that these and the other papers reach London. Is there anything else I can do for you? Is there any message for Haldane?”
But what followed was almost unintelligible, sometimes a rambling murmur, and then the occasional single word. Rutledge found it nearly impossible to follow what Vermuelen was trying to tell him. From the effort the man was making, it was clear that it mattered in some way.
Were these instructions for Haldane? Information for Rutledge, that there hadn’t been time to add to the pages? Vermuelen himself had said that they weren’t finished. Or was his mind wandering as the poisoning in his blood spread? Several times, Rutledge thought he could make out what sounded like lake, and then more clearly, must look, followed by lake once more, and possibly body or was it bloody?
Twice Rutledge had to ask him to repeat something that made no sense at all, but it seemed that Vermuelen was struggling to pass on something that was on his mind and paid no attention.
A pause, finally, before he managed to speak as if to Rutledge directly. “Sister. She will stay.”
Rutledge couldn’t be sure whether the man was speaking of the nun or a relative. And then there was something more, hardly above a whisper. He leaned closer to Vermuelen, but couldn’t make it out.
And then he said, struggling to form the words, but still clearly enough for Rutledge to understand him, “Tell—tell him that it was a privilege to—to—”
His voice faded into silence. For an instant, Rutledge thought the man had died, but he was asleep, the deep sleep of medication. The nun had been giving him his next draft of laudanum or morphine, Rutledge wasn’t sure which.
He sat there for several minutes longer, then rose and went to the kitchen.
The nun was sitting at the table, her head in her hands. She looked up.
“He’s asleep.”
She nodded. “Better that way.”
“Are you his nurse? Or his sister?”
“Both,” she replied, her voice weary. “I will not leave until it is finished.”
“Shall I stay?” he asked.
But she shook her head. “It will happen in God’s good time. I am patient.”
“Who was he?”
“He hated the Germans for what they did to our country. He was lame, he couldn’t be a soldier. He found a different way. It took great courage. He was taken prisoner three times, and three times, he escaped. But not without cost each time. It is a wonder he has lived this long.”
“You must be proud of him.”
“It isn’t pride,” she said harshly. “It was duty.”
And then she added in her usual tone of voice, “I am sad there was no food to offer you. If you have found what you need, please go. He will be with God soon.”
He thanked her and left. But he stopped by the workroom and took up the map of the Essex coast, rolling it carefully.
And then he got into the borrowed motorcar and drove back to Calais.
He had much of the ferry to himself on this crossing and sat where he could read Vermuelen’s additional notes without someone looking over his shoulder. He had purchased some food in Calais, a little cheese and bread, and was glad of the hot tea on board.
The notes were as cryptic as the report had been. It was clear that after the war had ended with the Armistice, there was still work to be done.
Vermuelen had only a brief respite to return to his family in Belgium, and then he was in Paris, where he was set to look for deserters as a cover. But what did he need a cover for?
He was also, it seemed, searching for a killer . . .
Rutledge sat back, staring out at the sea and just ahead, the towering white cliffs just above Dover Castle.
So this was why Haldane had sent him to call on a dying man.
Hamish, quiet in the back of his mind as he had struggled to read the finely written lines on the thin sheets of paper, said, “Ye ken. It’s no’ verra’ much.”
That was true. But Vermuelen’s notes and Haldane’s insistence that he go to Langville had convinced him that he wasn’t hunting a ghost. If Haldane was right, he was after a cold-blooded killer. Who had come back to Essex, where he was killing again.
But who the hell was he now?
12
It wasn’t until the ferry had docked and he’d retrieved his own motorcar that Rutledge could put in a telephone call to Haldane. And then he thought better of it, because there would be other ears on the line.
He went to find a shop that sold postal cards. There was one of the castle on its hill overlooking the Channel, dark against a stormy sky. He paid for it, wrote a short message, added a stamp the woman in the shop had offered him, and then dropped the card in the nearest post box.
It read simply, Sadly, our uncle is dying. I am back, I was given the cuff links he wished you to have. More when I see you. R.
If Haldane wished to play at cryptic messages, he, Rutledge, could do the same.
As he took the road to Gravesend, he was tempted to drive a little farther, to call on Melinda. And Kate.
But he’d been away too long as it was, and there was a murderer to find.
He went over what he’d learned in Vermuelen’s report, trying to compare it with what he already knew.
Early in the war, a man named Miles Franklin had killed three people in Dorset, had been caught and taken into custody, and somehow had managed to escape on his way to trial. He had disappeared.
Shortly after that, a man’s nude body was found in a ditch ten miles away. It was soon identified as Timothy Robinson, a soldier home on compassionate leave. The Army was informed.
It was wartime, 1915, and spy fever was at its height. But no one tried to infiltrate an Army post or use Robinson’s identity to approach a factory or other vulnerable target. It was as if Robinson’s name and history had died with him.
The Foot Police and other interested departments began to suspect that while wearing Robinson’s uniform, Franklin had approached and killed someone else, with more time to dispose of the body than he’d had in Robinson’s case. Six months later, a decaying corpse was found under a railway bridge in Derbyshire, confirming that theory. It was never identified. But in the pocket of the ill-fitting uniform he was wearing someone had written the name Timothy Robinson. Many soldiers had done just that, in the event they were killed in action and unrecognizable.
Who the dead man was, no one ever discovered.
By early 1916, it was decided that Franklin, whatever name he used now, had probably enlisted somewhere, and used the Army to transport him out of the country and to safety. There had been no German-related incidents, ruling out the earlier questions about a German spy. And as far as anyone knew, there were no further killings. Once he was in France, Franklin could travel to Switzerland or take ship from Portugal to Canada or anywhere else he might choose.
That was where the search for Franklin had stopped.
The war had ended and the British Army came home. Franklin had become a dusty file on someone’s desk.
And then some two months ago, Vermuelen, who had already been looking for him, had come across Franklin—or someone, an Englishman, who fit the vague description and used a knife in his killings—in Picardy. To the police questioning Franklin about a murder, he was simply an ex-soldier who had known the victim. The false name he’d given was cleared as having no record, and he was released.
Michel Vermuelen had arrived in Picardy too late to look at the suspect, but managed to follow someone who might have been him as far as Ypres, where the man was looking for transport to Calais. Certain now that the man must indeed be Franklin, Vermuelen had approached him and told him that he himself was going there and would like company on the road. Vermuelen had wired Haldane before the two men set out, alerting him to the fact that Franklin might be returning to England. Franklin was using the name Tom Barnes, but had no passport in that name, claiming that the Picardy police had kept it. Somewhere outside Calais, either Franklin had grown suspicious or was already covering his movements, and he tried to knife Vermuelen. They fought, and Vermuelen was stabbed several times. He managed to make it back to Langville, but by then he had lost track of Franklin.
The ports were watched for one Tom Barnes. But the man never arrived. It was likely that he hadn’t left France at all. That he had used Vermuelen. The trail had then gone cold.
And Vermuelen’s leg, refusing to heal, had continued to drain. In the end it had turned septic before he could go after Franklin.
Small wonder Vermuelen had feared that Franklin might track him instead.
Had Franklin crossed to England after all? Using another name?
And why would he come to Walmer? A small town where strangers would be noticed?
Unless he had been there once before . . .
Why had Haldane, listening to Rutledge’s request for the names of all the men posted to the airfield, connected that with Franklin? Did he have a reason to think that Franklin had served there during the war? Or was it simply the way Haldane’s mind worked, when Rutledge had said he needed those names in connection with an inquiry?
But there had been that wisp of wool that Dr. Wister had found on Patricia Lowell’s clothes, and the possibility that it had come from a military greatcoat . . .
A down-on-his-luck ex-soldier looking for work? Or a murderer looking for a place to go to ground?
The ferry across to Dover pulled in to the port, and it was time to leave it.
Hamish said, “Aye, it fits together. But is it true?”
“Hamilton will know if someone has come to Walmer recently, or is looking for work. That’s where I’ll begin.”
But when he walked into Hamilton’s office, he was greeted with an angry, “Where the hell have you been?”
“Chasing a possible lead.”
“Yes, well, it might have saved a good deal of aggravation if you’d told me how to find you.”
That hadn’t been possible. Hamilton couldn’t have reached him in Langville, if the police station itself had burned to the ground.
“It wouldn’t have helped if I had. You have no telephones here. What’s happened?” He kept his voice level with an effort. Hamilton had resented having the Yard thrust into an inquiry he’d dismissed. And now he resented not being kept informed.
Hamilton took a deep breath. “For one thing, someone burned down the hut where Mrs. Lowell was killed. There was wind, we were concerned about the house.”
“Had you searched it carefully?”
“Of course I had. There was nothing to be found.”
“I’ll have a look.”
“Too late. You’ll find nothing but ashes. By the time Lady Benton got here and the fire brigade went out, there was nothing left. She’s talking about having a telephone installed. But who would she call? Chelmsford?” he answered sourly.
“Lady Benton is all right?”
“You know how she is. Unflappable. I got an earful from Mrs. Hailey.”
“I’m going out there now.”
“I’m serious, Rutledge, if you leave again, I’ll see the Chief Constable is told.”
“Which reminds me,” Rutledge said, “are there any new people who have come to Walmer recently?”
“New people? As in a family—a man—a woman?”
“It doesn’t matter. Anyone.”
“No. It’s not a village that’s famous or popular. We make salt and Thames barges, hardly a draw for workers. Besides, that sort of work often runs in the family. I can’t think of the last newcomer.”
“What about someone who had served here during the war?”
Hamilton shook his head. “A few men and several grieving families have come from time to time. I don’t know that any of them stayed longer than a day or two.”
Rutledge thanked him and left.
He drove directly to the airfield, and walked down to where the blackened ruins of the hut lay, tiny wisps of smoke still stirring in the sunlight as the wind blew.
