The Confession (27 page)

“You're very kind. Do you remember the man who came to see him?”

“I was in the dining room serving dinner and only caught a glimpse of him. It was Mr. Willet who told me why he'd be missing his dinner, and here I'd made his favorites. But I saved him a plate, in case, and when he got home he sat there in the kitchen with me and ate it.”

“Could you describe this visitor?” ”

“I had no reason to remember him, did I? I was only glad for Mr. Willet's sake that he'd come, hoping he might persuade Mr. Willet to go home and see his father and his sister after all. I tell you I cried when he walked out the door that last time. I was that upset.”

“The other man didn't come back with Willet?”

“Oh, no, he was alone. He told me the visit hadn't gone as he'd expected, and I was sorry for that. But here I've kept you standing at the door. Come in, Major, my dear, and we'll find those boxes.”

He followed her inside, and she led him to a tiny box room in the back of the house where there were odds and ends piled neatly to allow access, and to one side were two boxes marked with Willet's name.

“In a way I'm that sad to see them go,” Mrs. Hurley told Rutledge. “As long as they were here, I'd hoped for a miracle, and that he'd come back the way he was before the sickness came on him. I couldn't bear to hand them over to that constable who came for them. I was told to pass them to no one but the Major, and I keep my word when it's given.”

And he was grateful for her insistence.

“There. I've said good-bye,” she said as he lifted them to carry them to his motorcar. And she turned and walked swiftly back into the house, shutting the door, so that Rutledge wouldn't see her cry.

The Major was in Rutledge's flat, so he took the boxes to his sister's house. When he walked in carrying the first of them, Frances said, “Are you moving in?”

“Not precisely. I need to leave this and its mate with you after I open them. The study?”

“Yes, that will do very well.”

When he'd brought both boxes in, Rutledge set about opening each one.

Both contained sheets of paper neatly typed, and then others written in longhand.

“I wonder what became of his luggage?” he mused. “But I suppose it went into the Thames with him. I'd have done the same in his shoes.”

“Whose luggage? Whose shoes?” Frances asked.

“If I knew the answer to that I'd be ahead of the game.”

“Does this have to do with that awful village where you took me for tea? I still haven't forgiven you for that.”

“Furnham? Yes, that was rather dreadful, wasn't? In hindsight, I shouldn't have taken you there.” He lifted the first hundred or so pages out of the box.

But the pages he held were drafts of Willet's first two books, and he set them aside, disappointed. And yet he knew that to the dead man, these had been precious.

When he reached the bottom of the first box he retied the cords and set it aside.

It was in the second box that he found what must have been a draft of the unfinished third book. He took it out, sorted through the handwritten pages, and then came to the typed sheets.

A title had been written by hand above the first paragraph:
The Sinners
.

He began to read, sitting in a chair by the open window, his sister leaning her elbow on the back beside his head.

After half an hour she turned away.

“It's Furnham he's talking about, isn't it? And it must be true. The inn is called The Dragonfly.”

“I'm afraid so.”

“I wish you'd never taken me there,” she said, crossing the room, as if to put as much space as possible between herself and the pages in his hand. Rearranging a bowl of flowers, she said, “It was done, wasn't it? Luring ships into rocks and the like, bringing them aground so that they could be plundered. In Cornwall, they were called the wreckers.”

“I expect the people along the shore had done well when ships wrecked themselves in a storm or on a foggy night. And then someone had a clever suggestion. ‘If we could bring in more wrecks, not waiting on natural causes, we could prosper.”

They had had to kill the survivors, or else what had happened would quickly reach the ears of the authorities.

Furnham had no rocks on which to beach ships. Only a sandbar at the outer edge of the estuary's mouth that sometimes shifted in storms and caught an unwary pilot by surprise. As a rule ships were able to refloat with the next tide.

And so Furnham's story was very different from Cornwall's. They hadn't lured
The Dragonfly
ashore. It had struck the sandbar in the night and was still there at first light. One of the fishermen had noticed something odd about her, and several men decided to board her and ask what was wrong.

They found the ship empty. No crew. No passengers. It was decided to take whatever was useful on board, and then refloat her, jam the rudder, and let her break up elsewhere.

There were chests of goods in the hold, trunks of clothing, and barrels of provisions, leaving the impression that the passengers had been traveling as far as the New World. There was a box of Bibles, another of hymnals, and the log indicated that she had sailed out of Newcastle-on-Tyne, stopped briefly in Holland, and was expecting to put a few passengers ashore in Plymouth and then take on another half dozen for the remainder of their journey. Their destination was New England.

The man who discovered the log had read the final pages, and he quietly tossed it overboard through a stern window in the captain's small cabin.

It required close to four days to empty the ship of all that was useful. Men had stayed aboard, guarding the goods, and others came and went with the fishing boats and rowing boats from the village.

This was the background of a plot revolving around the rector, who told the fishermen and their cohorts from the village that the ship had been sailing on God's business and that everything taken from her belonged to the men who had funded the voyage.

He had railed against their greed and their covetousness, but no one listened. Every household had benefited from
The Dragonfly,
and no one wanted to return his share.

There was salt, flour, pork, tea, a cage of live chickens, and even a cow for milking. They'd had to build a sling to get her ashore. Boxes of nails and hammers and other tools, bolts of cloth, chests of bedding, wood for construction of huts until houses could be built—the list went on. It could all be put to good use.

The rector, in frustration, told his parishioners that they were doing the devil's work, and that the devil would exact his price.

Hear me. There is a curse on these comforts that have come to you.

And not even a fortnight had passed before the first of the men who had stayed on board for four days came down with the plague.

Rutledge put the pages aside. He'd asked about the mass burials, assuming that they must be plague victims, and no one had answered his question.

“Why is he writing such a story? This Edward Willet?” Frances asked.

“I don't know. His first two books were personal. One of them his war memoirs, and the other an account of a girl he'd seen once when his father took him to France and that he'd searched for during the war. It's not surprising that his third effort would be something in the past of his village. How much is true I don't know. But so far the facts are there. The name of the inn, the barrows I'd seen in the churchyard that were mass graves for plague victims. It takes place in the mid-1700s. Almost two hundred years ago.”

“I wish you would take it away,” she said, gesturing to the box. “I feel uncomfortable even knowing it's here.”

He smiled apologetically. “I'd forgot. I shall have to stay here for several days. Would you mind terribly?”

R
utledge spent the day at the Yard, then stopped by the flat to be sure that all was well. The nursing sister welcomed him, and he saw that she had been reading to Russell from one of the books on the shelf across from the bed.

The Major had more color this afternoon but no fever. Sister Grey told Rutledge he was a difficult patient, and Russell had smiled.

Rutledge said, “What do you know about a ship named
The Dragonfly
?”

“It's on a sign above the inn in Furnham.”

“Nothing more? No one from the village ever told you the story?”

“I didn't know anyone from the village well enough to talk about legends and the like,” Russell replied. “I don't believe Mother did. She never mentioned it.”

“It went aground on a sandbar by the mouth of the river. When the village men went out to see why there was no activity on board, they found the ship abandoned. The cargo was rich enough to salve their consciences. One of the villagers who could read saw what was written in the ship's log, then deliberately tossed it overboard. Then plague erupted in the village, and it must have run through it fairly quickly. I've seen the mounds in the back of the churchyard.”

“I've seen those as well. Many villages lost three-quarters of their population to some of the plagues. I don't think it's that unusual. ”

“Here it was considered a curse from God for taking the ship's goods.”

“Where did you discover all this? In Furnham?”

“Willet was writing a novel about what happened. I collected those boxes of his from his lodgings. They were filled with manuscripts. I expect that's why they were intended for Cynthia Farraday.”

“Good God. That history will set the cats among the pigeons, if it ever comes to light.”

“He told Miss Farraday that his next book would be a story of pure evil. I expect he was right. Tell me, how are you faring? Do you have everything you need?”

“I'm well enough. Sister Grey tells me I'm healing. It doesn't feel like it. My chest still hurts like the very devil.”

“I expect it does.”

“Does Cynthia know where I am? It's not all that far to Chelsea,” he said hopefully.

“Only Dr. Wade, Matron, and Sister Grey know you're alive. Only Dr. Wade was told where I was taking you.”

“Foolishness. I'd have been safe in the hospital.”

“I'm sure you would have been. On the other hand, are you willing to risk another attempt on your life? I'm using you as bait to draw out a murderer. The Yard would take a dim view of your dying while in our charge.”

“Yes, all right.” He closed his eyes. “Good hunting.”

Rutledge left him to rest and went to Frances's house. She had gone for the day with friends, and so he shut himself in the study and took out the manuscript.

It was close to eleven o'clock when she came through the door.

“Here you are. I saw your motorcar, but when I called you didn't hear me. Have you had dinner? I think there's a bit of cold chicken in the pantry. Shall I make you a sandwich?”

“I'd forgot the time,” he told her. “I'll come with you.”

“I see you've been reading more of that manuscript. I hope it's better than the part I saw.”

“It's not as interesting as I'd hoped,” he answered her. “I'm continuing from a sense of duty rather than pleasure.”

It was a lie. He didn't want his sister to know the truth about Furnham.

“I'm sorry. You'd said he appeared to be a talented writer.” And she began to tell him about her evening as she went to find a plate for him and bring in the cold chicken.

After he'd eaten, he went to bed so that Frances would also go up. And then when he was certain she was asleep, he quietly returned to the study and finished the manuscript.

Setting it aside, he considered what Ben Willet had done.

Was he exorcising ghosts—first the war, the French girl he looked for but couldn't find, and the past that still hung over the village where he'd lived most of his life? Was it what had made him want to leave Furnham in the first place?

Would his next work have been the story of Wyatt Russell's murder of Justin Fowler, out of jealousy?

Rutledge understood now why Jessup and Barber and others had not wanted the airfield to be brought to Furnham, for fear someone—bored, or clever, or simply looking to annoy the villagers in his turn—would stumble on a history no one wished to remember. It wasn't so much change they feared, but that the more people who came, the more likely it would be for Furnham, now only a backwater village of no importance, to find itself famous for the wrong reasons. What had Barber said? That Jessup didn't want Furnham to become notorious.

Did Jessup want that badly enough to kill Willet before the book could be published? Or had he thought he'd been in time? For all anyone knew, judging from these typed sheets,
The Sinners
was ready for publication, barring a final revision before it went to the printer's. Willet's arrival in France was all that was needed to carry on.

In light of what he'd been reading, Rutledge suddenly realized that the manuscript explained the missing luggage.

Whoever had come to see Willet at the lodging house must have known—or guessed—what Willet was carrying to France with him. The finished work. The man had to die so that he couldn't re-create what he'd written, and the manuscript couldn't survive him to be sent to Paris posthumously.

Was that what had happened?

Gathering up the pages he'd read, Rutledge set them carefully back into the box they'd come from, and rummaging in what had been his father's desk, he found a roll of twine with which to bind it shut. That done, he carried the two boxes into the attic and left them there until he could decide whether they were evidence or Willet's personal property, to be handed over to Cynthia Farraday as the man had wished.

Back in his room, he lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

Most of the facts had been there, and he'd failed to see them. Still, the few that had been missing made a whole of the story, and without them he had been unable to understand what was wrong with the village of Furnham-on-Hawking.