The Red Door by Charles Todd Read Free Book Online Page B

constables coming in or going out.
    They studied the photograph, but no one had seen anyone resembling Teller. And as a rule, constables on the street could be counted on to remember the faces of people not normally seen on their patch, keeping an eye out for troublemakers and strangers alike. Even a well-spoken, well-dressed man like Walter Teller would be noted for future reference.
    One constable, shaking his head, said to Rutledge, “It’s more likely that he found a cab soon after leaving the clinic, well before the search began. He could be anywhere now. He could have taken an omnibus, a train, or cadged a lift from someone.”
    But Rutledge had already sent a man from the Yard to speak to any cabbie who had taken up custom near the clinic at four o’clock on the afternoon in question. No one remembered seeing Walter Teller or even someone who looked like him.
    “Ye’re searching for a needle in a haystack,” Hamish told Rutledge.
    “Or for one man when there might well have been two, if someone had come for him, or was there to help him dress and leave.”
    The clinic had had no record of visits to Walter Teller, other than the immediate family. Still, it was possible to use another patient’s name to pass the porter and gain access. But that led him nowhere, either.
    Rutledge had even driven to Essex, to the house of Dr. Fielding, arriving there just as Fielding was preparing for his first patient of the afternoon.
    The man reluctantly put aside the pipe he’d been smoking and addressed himself to Rutledge’s questions about Walter Teller.
    “I can give you a brief sketch of his background. Missionary for many years, and then he married Jenny Brittingham. Rather than returning to the field, he chose to write a book about his experiences.”
    “And this was . . . ?”
    “Just a year or so before the war—1911? 1912?”
    Rutledge thought how the war had defined time—before the war—after the war. As if that great cataclysmic event that had interrupted and ended so many lives was still with them like a personal watershed.
    “And of course there is Harry, the son. Quite a nice child, and not at all spoiled, as you’d expect with doting aunts and uncles surrounding him. Jenny—Mrs. Teller has seen to that. She’s a very good mother.”
    “Did Teller serve in the war?”
    “As a matter of fact he did. Chaplain. But he was struck down with malaria in that rainy spring before the Somme and was sent home to recover. It was decided not to send him back to France, and so he worked among the wounded here.”
    “Was there anything in his war years that might have affected what happened to him last week?”
    Fielding raised his eyebrows. “Not to my knowledge. In fact, I remember Teller commenting that he’d seen death in so many guises that he’d lost his fear of it long before going to France. There was something about a famine in West Africa—people dying by the droves. And of course in China death was as common as flies, he said. No, you’re barking up the wrong tree there.”
    “Then what caused his illness?”
    “That I can’t tell you. Which is why I sent Teller to the Belvedere Clinic. And the last progress report I received was rather grim. He was showing no improvement, and in fact was beginning to feel paralysis in his arms and hands as well as in his legs.”
    “Do you think this paralysis was genuine?”
    Fielding said, “Are you asking me if his illness was feigned? No, of course not! I’d take my oath on that.”
    “Then how would you account for the fact that three days ago, Walter Teller got out of his sickbed while his wife was resting, dressed himself, and walked out of the clinic?”
    “He did what? You’re saying there was a full recovery? And what did his doctors make of that?” Leaning forward, Fielding stared hard at Rutledge.
    “They had no better understanding of events than you do. But Teller is missing, and there’s been no word from him since he walked