“And so there was no need for him to play the organ that evening, after his return?”
Heller sighed. “No need. But of course he did. The windows were open, I could hear him from my study. He wasn’t playing my selections. It was tortured music. Unhappy music. I did wonder if it was his own composition. And it ended in a horrid clash of notes, followed by silence.” He looked back at the rectory, as if he could find answers there in the stone and glass and mortar. “He’s a wretched man. He wants more than life has chosen to give him. He plays perfectly well for us during services. We are fortunate to have him. Why should he feel that he needs to reach for more? If God had intended for him to be a great organist, he wouldn’t have brought him to us at Cambury, would he have? There is much to be said for contentment. And in contentment there is service.”
Rutledge stood up, without answering the rector.
Heller said, “You mustn’t misunderstand. Michael Brunswick’s music isn’t going to drive him to kill. It’s eating at him, he’s the only victim.”
Rutledge said, “Perhaps his music is the last straw in a life full of disappointments. What time did he finish playing?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps it was twenty past ten. If you remember there was a mist coming in. Hardly noticeable at that time, but an hour later, it was thick enough that strands of it were already wrapping around the trees in my garden. I was worried about Michael, and looked to see if his house was dark. It was, and so I went to bed myself.”
“If there had been lights on?”
“I’d have found an excuse to go and speak to him. To offer comfort if he needed it. Or if not, to assure myself that he was all right.” He took a deep breath and examined his gardening hat to avoid looking at Rutledge. “You mustn’t misconstrue what I’ve told you. It would be wrong.”
“It would be wrong to let someone else take the blame for Quarles’s death. Mr. Jones has already suffered for his daughter’s sake.”
“Yes, I heard what had happened at the bakery. Mr. Padgett believes it was boys acting out of spite, but I think someone is grieving for Quarles. A woman, perhaps, who cared for him and believes the gossip about Mr. Jones. You warned me once, Mr. Rutledge. You told me someone might come to me frightened by what they’d done and I must be careful how I dealt with them. In return I warn you now.
Rumor has always maintained that Harold Quarles had a mistress in Cambury. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but if it is, she’s not one of the women he flirts with in public, she’s someone he visited quietly, I suspect, when no one was looking. If she exists, I say, she’s had no way to grieve openly while everyone in sight is gloating over Quarles’s death. Alone, lonely, she must be desolate, and it will turn her mind in time. Just beware.”
It was an odd speech for a man of the cloth to make to a policeman.
“Surely you can guess—”
“No. I’ve never wanted to know whose wife or sister or daughter she may be. I can do nothing for her until she comes to me. This is just a friendly warning.”
“Thank you, Rector. I’ll bear it in mind.” But he thought that Heller was intending to turn his attention away from Michael Brunswick by using village gossip to his own ends. He was a naïve man in many ways. And he might consider a small white lie in God’s cause no great problem for his conscience.
“Ye ken,” Hamish said, “he doesna’ want to lose his organist. It’s why he defends him sae fiercely.”
He turned to walk away, but Heller stopped him. “I told you that I refused to judge, lest I be judged. It’s good advice, even for a policeman.”
But the fact remained, Rutledge told Hamish in the silence of his mind, that there was proof now that Michael Brunswick could have crossed paths with Harold Quarles.
To test it, he stood on the street just above Michael Brunswick’s door and looked toward the High Street. The angle was right, as he’d thought it might be. Coming home from St. Martin’s, Brunswick would have had a clear view of Minton Street and the corner that Quarles would have turned on his way back to Hallowfields.
The mist hadn’t come down then. And Brunswick, needing someone or something on which to expend his anger and frustration, might have watched Quarles walk up the High Street alone. He could have cut across the green without being noticed, followed at a distance, and let the trees shield him on the straight stretch of road that marched with the wall of the estate.
“Why did the dead man no’ go through the gates and up the drive?”
“Because it must be shorter to come in by the farm gate and cut across the parkland.”
Rutledge went to fetch the motorcar and drove out to Hallowfields, leaving it by the main gate. Then he paced the distances from there to the house, and again from the Home Farm lane to the house. Because of the twists and turns of the drive, allowing for vistas and specimen trees set out to be admired, it was nearly three hundred yards longer.
If he was tired, it would have made sense for Harold Quarles to choose the shorter distance.
Brunswick might have called to him, or challenged him. And if Quarles had turned away in rejection of what he wanted to say, that act could have precipitated the murder.
“Listen to me . . .”
“I’m tired, I want my bed. You have nothing to say to me that I have any interest in hearing . . .”
Those white stones stood out—Brunswick needn’t have thought to bring a weapon—and in a split second, without a word, Quarles would have been knocked down. It was the second blow that mattered. Had Brunswick intended it as the death stroke? Rutledge could see him still caught up in that fierce need to hurt as he’d been hurt, stepping back too late, shocked by the suddenness of death.
It would have been easy to convince himself that Quarles had brought on the attack by his callous indifference. To feel no responsibility for what he’d just done.
And then the slow realization that the man had got off too lightly, a quick death compared to Hazel Brunswick’s drowning, must have triggered his next actions.
The facts fit together neatly.
Then why, Rutledge wondered, was he feeling dissatisfied, standing there on the lawns of Hallowfields, looking for holes in his own case?
He walked on to the house and this time knocked at the door, asking for Mrs. Quarles when Downing opened it.
“She’s with her son. Come back another day.”
“If she could spare me a few minutes, I’d be grateful.” His words were polite, but his voice was uncompromising.
She went away, and in a few minutes conveyed him with clear disapproval to the formal drawing room. Mrs. Quarles came in after him, dressed in deep mourning. She was very pale, as if the ordeal of breaking the news to her son had taken its toll.
Against the backdrop of the drawing room, pale blue and silver, she was almost a formidable figure, and he thought she must have intended to impress him after his impudence in demanding to see her.
“What is it you want to know, Mr. Rutledge? Whether I’ve turned into a grieving widow?”
“There are some questions about your husband’s past—”
“That could have waited. I bid you good day.”
He stood his ground. “I think you’re probably the only person who knew your husband well. With the possible exception of Mr. Penrith.”
“I have no idea what Mr. Penrith thinks or knows about my late husband. I have never asked him. Nor will I.”
“There are some discrepancies that I’d like to clear up. We’ve learned that Mr. Quarles removed the remains of his family from the village where they lived and died to another churchyard. But no one who lived in the old village has any recollection of him as a child.”