Anne Perry's Silent Nights: Two Victorian Christmas Mysteries Page 9

  “I am not sure,” he replied honestly. “Miss Costain was not afraid of whoever killed her, until the very last moment, when it was too late. That suggests it was someone she knew, possibly even cared for. And it was a crime of great violence, so profound emotion was involved.” He watched her face and saw the pain in it, so deep that guilt twisted inside him.

  “You are saying it was someone who knew her well, and hated her.” She stared out at the bare, winter garden and the tangled branches of the trees outlined against the sky. “She did awaken strange feelings in other people, sometimes unease, and a sense of loss for the unreachable. She was not content to be ordinary, but is that a sin?” She turned now to look at him, searching his eyes for a response. “She reminded us of the possibilities we have not the courage to strive for. We are too afraid of failure. Does one kill for that?”

  “One can kill for safety,” he answered, surprised at his own words. “Did she threaten someone’s comfort, Mrs. Costain?”

  She walked to the farther side of the window. “Not at all. It was a foolish thing to have said. I’m sorry. I don’t even know what she was doing outside at that hour on a winter night. She must have quarreled with someone.”

  “Over what?” he asked. “Who would she meet in the churchyard? He came with a knife, as if he intended harm.”

  She winced and shivered, holding her arms around herself. “I have no idea.”

  He had a sharp sense that she was lying. It was nothing obvious, only a subtle tightness in her shoulders, an altered tone in her voice. Was she protecting her husband? Or even herself? Was the threat that Olivia posed far closer to home than anyone had previously thought? Had Olivia, in desperation, tried to force her brother into keeping her for the rest of his life, and had he found the endless, draining expense too much to endure? Had his tortured self-control broken, and had he seized a terrible escape? This situation answered every fact they knew.

  But what secret? What did this quiet, sad, seemingly conventional house hide?

  “I think you have an idea, Mrs. Costain,” he told her. “You knew your sister-in-law as well as anyone did. You cared for her, and you understood her. You also must know the expense of her remaining unmarried, and refusing offer after offer for no reason she was prepared to give, unless it was to you?”

  She turned around to stare at him, anger flaring in her eyes, her mouth hard. “If I knew who murdered Olivia, I would tell you. I do not. Nor do I know anything that would be of use to you. I have admitted that she was a disturbing person, and hard for many to understand. I can tell you nothing new. Please do not waste any more of your time, or mine, in asking me such things. Good day, Mr. Runcorn. The maid will show you out.”

  How dare you behave with such crass insensitivity?” Faraday accused him that evening when he answered his summons to the big house. They were standing in the library. The gas lamps were lit and a good fire roared and hissed in the grate.

  “You will not approach Mrs. Costain on the subject again,” Faraday went on. “If anything should be necessary to ask, I will do it. Have you no sense at all of how the poor woman must be feeling?” His face was red and his features pinched with anxiety and perhaps a sense of panic as failure crept closer around him. They knew nothing more than they had the morning after Olivia was found. Every thread they pulled came loose in their hands. But this was not Runcorn’s jurisdiction, no one was going to blame him if Olivia’s murder went unsolved. Faraday was the only one with something to lose.

  “She is lying,” he said aloud. “She knows something that could have provoked the kind of rage we saw in that murder.”

  “Dear God!” Faraday exploded. “Tell me you didn’t say so to her!” He closed his eyes. “You did! Don’t bother to deny it, it’s in your face. You oaf!” Suddenly he was shouting, his voice raw. “This may be the way it is done in the alleys and brothels you usually police, but these are decent people, gentry, people of class and Christian values. Runcorn, the man’s a vicar! Have you really no …” He drew in his breath and let out a heavy sigh. “No. I suppose you haven’t. It was my failure that I even let you in at the door.”

  Runcorn felt as if the fire had burned out of the grate to scorch him. Perhaps Faraday was right. He was clumsy, and had always lacked the grace of someone gifted like Monk. He had achieved his rank by plodding patience, determination, the will to succeed, and perhaps now and then a flash of understanding of how the poor and the frightened had found ways of retaliating. He kept his word, so people trusted him, but he was not a gentleman; he had never known how to be.

  “I did not tell her she lied,” he said quietly. “I said I believed she knew something relevant that she had not said. I think she is complaining so hard because that is true.”

  “Don’t make it any worse!” Faraday begged. “Man, you are like a cart horse in the dining room. Just get out of it! God alone knows who killed Olivia Costain, but we aren’t going to find out your way.” His voice was rough with the edge of defeat. He must be hot standing in this room, so close to the fire, wearing his beautifully tailored jacket. It was of the best tweed, and cut with the casual elegance of one who does not need to impress.

  And yet he did need to. The whole island was watching him, waiting for him to take away the burden of fear and tell them it was over, and justice would be done. And he had no idea how to do it, that much was clear to Runcorn, even if not yet to anyone else.

  And begrudgingly, Runcorn felt sorry for him. Not much is expected of ordinary men. There is room for failure. It costs, but it is a familiar part of life. In the extraordinary, the men of Faraday’s privilege and office, it was crippling. The chief constable would not know how to deal with it. Nothing had prepared him for the bitterness or the shame of defeat. Probably all his life he had been expected to fill a certain mold, to win, to take pain or loss without complaint.

  Did Faraday imagine that Melisande needed him to be faultless or she would not love him? Was that some legacy from his love of Olivia, or was it woven into his life and upbringing, inherited from his father, and his father before him? Did he think that if someone close to him, like a wife, were to know his weaknesses as well as his strengths, then they would use them to some kind of advantage, to manipulate or mock him?

  No one can always be right. Every man has his flaws, the places where he is desperately vulnerable. Never to attempt anything that may cause pain, or defeat, is to be a coward at life. One loves those brave enough to try. Runcorn had seen women sometimes love the defeated far more tenderly, more passionately than the victor. To love is to protect, to nurture, to need, and in turn be needed.

  How did he know that, and Faraday did not?

  The silence had lengthened and Runcorn had not yet even tried to defend himself. “Then you had better look into the Costains yourself, sir,” he said aloud. “Because there is much that she knows but will not tell me.”

  “Nonsense,” Faraday replied. “Thank you for your help, but it is not proving of any use. You are free to leave Anglesey whenever you wish. Good day.”

  Runcorn was beyond the gates of the drive and into the road when Melisande caught up with him.

  “Mr. Runcorn!”

  He turned. They were level with the hedge now and hidden from the windows of the house. Maybe he would not see her many times more, certainly not alone. He stopped and faced her, trying to imprint on his mind every line of her brow, cheek, lips, the color and light of her eyes, so he would never forget.

  “I heard Alan tell you to go,” she said anxiously. “He does not realize how his voice carries. Please don’t listen to him. He is frightened that none of us will solve this murder, and he will be blamed for that. He takes his responsibility very hard.”

  “He doesn’t wish me to stay,” he pointed out.

  “Does that matter?” she asked. “He needs you to, we all do. Someone killed Olivia and we cannot turn away from that as if it were some force of nature, and not one of us. We will suspect each other, until we k
now.”

  “Do you know anything about the explorer she met about two years ago?” he asked. “Could she have loved him?”

  She thought about it for several moments. “She never said anything to me, but then why should she? We spoke often. I liked her right from the first time we met, but we talked more of books, ideas, places, far more than of people we knew, and never of men.”

  Another darker thought occurred to Runcorn, but he could not mention anything so indelicate to Melisande, much less suggest it of a woman who had been her friend. He felt the heat on his skin even as he pushed the idea from his mind, although he could not dismiss it altogether.

  “Do you think it is something to do with Reverend Costain?” Melisande asked. “Is that why you spoke to Naomi so bluntly?” She was trying to read Runcorn’s face, perhaps judge from it what he was unprepared to say.

  “I think Mrs. Costain may be trying to protect both her husband and Olivia,” he replied, navigating a tenuous path between truth and lie. If Olivia were one of those rare women who prefer their own sex to the other, then it was an excellent reason why she would not wish to marry, and at the same time, it would be impossible for her to admit to it to anyone.

  But what if someone had learned? Any man might feel unbearably betrayed to be rejected for another woman. It would be seen as the final insult. It would be unendurable if anyone else found out. Was that what the quarrel with John had been?

  “Oh,” she said softly, sensing the movement of his thought. “You do not need to be so delicate with me. I am aware of such things, in women as well as in men. But I had no sense that it was so with her.”

  Now the blood scorched up his face and he felt ridiculous. If Faraday, not to mention Barclay, knew that he had even entertained such a thought in Melisande’s presence, let alone discussed it with her, they would be appalled.

  She was smiling, a flicker of real amusement in her eyes. “I liked Olivia,” she told him. “I felt comfortable with her, and very free to be honest, perhaps not only with her but with myself. And that is not always true for me. If I can bear the way she died, and think of the brutality, and the passion that caused it, then surely I can look at a little human frailty without turning away with thought only for myself? She deserved better than that of me. Moral queasiness is rather a cheap escape, don’t you think?”

  He looked at her, and for a moment the pity and the honesty in her face made her infinitely beautiful to him. Faraday, with his lumbering imagination and his simplistic judgments, was a clod, bitterly unworthy of her.

  He wondered again if she knew that Faraday had once courted Olivia also? Should he tell her? Was it just a grubby and horribly obvious attempt to spoil her happiness because he envied any man who could spend time in her company, let alone marry her? Or was it the only real honesty, because Faraday might be involved in Olivia’s death?

  He had no idea. The only answer would be to learn more about Faraday and then judge what to say. It must be the truth, and it must be fair. It was Melisande’s safety that mattered, not whether she liked Runcorn’s actions and certainly not whether Faraday did.

  His face was still hot as he crafted his reply. “I don’t like finding weaknesses in people, even if they help to solve a crime, but I can’t afford to ignore them or lie to myself or others. I would like to have protected you from having to think of this.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Runcorn,” she acknowledged. “I do not wish to be protected from life. I think we might miss a great deal more of the good, and the bad would find us anyway. At least the sense of emptiness would. I think I would rather eat something unpleasant now and then, than perish of starvation sitting at the table because I was afraid to try. Please find out what really happened to Olivia.” She turned and walked away before he could find the words to answer her, and repeat his promise.

  He had no choice now but to look more deeply into Faraday’s life and character. He began where Miss Mendlicott had ended and, through conventional methods, was able to look up the man’s days in Cardiff University where he was moderately successful in gaining a degree in history, even though he did not need to earn his living by it. He had traveled in Europe on and off for a year or two in all the expected places. He did not see Venice or Capri. He did not venture as far as Athens, which Runcorn had read about, and would have leapt at the chance to see. He did not visit the beautiful city of Barcelona, named after Hannibal Barca, who had crossed the Alps with elephants, to attack Rome, before the days of Julius Caesar. That was one history lesson from school days that had fired Runcorn’s imagination and he had never forgotten it.

  Runcorn left the library in Bangor and walked out into the wind with his mind in a whirl. He had visited a different world where all the privileges of class and money did not buy the magic he had assumed. If Faraday had dreams at all, they were not of legendary places and the ghosts of the past. They seemed to be of the good opinions of others, perhaps domestic certainty and investment in the next generation of all that he had been bequeathed by his forebears.

  As Runcorn walked down to the railway station he felt a sad, strange closeness to his subject. Faraday was in his early forties, and yet he wanted only safety, peace, and things to remain as they were.

  Runcorn took the train to Caernarfon and continued his inquiries. He knew from long experience how to be discreet, to ask one thing while appearing to ask another. All he learned about Faraday confirmed the opinion that he was a decent man, but pedestrian, a man of likes and dislikes rather than of passions.

  Runcorn remembered with a jolt that this was exactly how Monk had described him: half-hearted, lacking the fire or the courage to grasp for more than he could safely reach, a man who never dared the boundaries or stepped into the unknown as his bridges crumbled behind him. And Monk had despised him for it.

  Did he now despise Faraday? Oddly, he did not. He pitied him and felt as if he were looking into a distorted mirror. There was something of himself in the man he saw, a man imprisoned in the expectations of others, too afraid of being disliked to follow his own vision, not hungry enough.

  Did it take the face of one woman to stir a man deeply enough to abandon comfort and follow impossible dreams into the cold infinity? Then why was Faraday half-heartedly in love with Melisande, not absurdly and hopelessly as Runcorn was?

  The following day he stayed in Beaumaris and asked more questions, seemingly idling his time with local gossip and trivial pieces of information about the past.

  To aid in this, he pretended to have come originally to Beaumaris to look at property, inventing a brother who had done well in trade in order to seem wealthy enough to do so.

  He was shown a house in the neighborhood of Faraday’s handsome home, which added little to his knowledge, but he learned more of Newbridge, since his house was within view across a stretch of sloping valley.

  “Can’t see it so well in the summer time,” the estate agent, a Mr. Jenkins, pointed out.

  “Yes. I see what you mean,” Runcorn agreed. “Looks like quite a decent place. Might that be for sale, Mr. Jenkins?”

  “Oh no, sir. That belongs to Mr. Newbridge. Been in his family for years.”

  “Big family, has he?” Runcorn asked innocently. “Good place for children, I imagine.”

  “No, not married yet,” Jenkins replied.

  “Betrothed, then?”

  “Not as I know.” Jenkins was keen for a sale. “Courting the vicar’s sister, the poor young lady that was killed.”

  Runcorn looked skeptical. “Do you think Mr. Newbridge might sell, if the offer were good enough?”

  “No sir, I don’t. Money isn’t everything.”

  “Looks like a lot of land for one man to handle, and in none too good repair.” Runcorn squinted across the valley, the wind in his face. “Cause resentment, will it, if an outsider buys old land?”

  “Yes sir, it could,” Jenkins said candidly. “Newbridges’ve been here since the Civil War. Big thing to keep up, a position like this,
being the last in the male line of the family an’ all, but he’ll soon find the right wife, and then there’ll be sons to carry on.”

  Runcorn was struck with a sudden horror at the weight of such responsibility, the need to marry, the burden of expectation. Too many people cared what he did, were watching and needing him to produce sons and fill the demands of the future.

  Was some of that why he responded badly to Barclay, and why he had taken Olivia’s rejection with anger as well as disappointment? Had she said something about him that might make it even harder for him to find a wife who was willing and able to take up this enormous responsibility? Newbridge had no title, no hereditary office, not even great wealth—just a family name and land he was tied to by history. Was he always trying to keep up with other men he felt had more to give, more charm, more heritage, more hope of office in the future?

  It would make him an easy mark for Barclay’s cruelty.

  “I think I’ll wait until I’ve been in touch with my brother, thank you,” Runcorn said to Jenkins. “I’ll let you know.”

  Faraday sent for Runcorn that evening. He looked tired and disappointed, and even though he had demanded Runcorn’s presence, he paced the carpet in front of the fire and seemed reluctant to broach the subject.

  They spoke of trivialities. Outside the rain lashed at the windows and the wind was rising steadily, roaring in off the great sweep of the Celtic Sea.

  Runcorn grew impatient. “If you’ve learned something, sir, and I can be of help, perhaps you’d tell me what it is.”

  Faraday winced at Runcorn’s lack of polish, and instantly Runcorn felt gauche. He had a hideous vision of doing something appalling that he did not even understand until too late, and Melisande being ashamed of him. Except that that was absurd. She might be disgusted. But to be ashamed one had to care, to feel some kind of kinship with the one at fault.

  Faraday was still pacing back and forth, lost in his own inabilities.