Wings of Fire by Charles Todd Read Free Book Online

now. Sir Henry. Did he tell you that Lady Ashford wanted to reopen the investigation? How very like him!”
    “You’re Peter Ashford’s widow?” Rutledge asked, surprised. “I was in school with him.”
    “Peter died in the war. Trying to take Mount Kilimanjaro, out in Kenya.”
    “I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard.” So much for Bowles’ “titled old bitch.” But it was a shock, Peter’s death. Another name added to the long list of friends gone. More than once he’d felt the guilt of surviving. As if it was somehow obscenely selfish, when so many had died. After a moment, he made himself go on. “And you believe the investigations done by Inspector Harvey and Constable Dawlish were mishandled?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why?”
    “Because—oh, because of intuition, I suppose.” She made a wry face at him. “And I can’t help but feel that coincidence can only be stretched so far. Three deaths in the same family in little more than a month? I—I knew Livia and Nicholas, they weren’t at all what the papers say, an invalid and her devoted keeper. It’s wrong, the notion that they could have killed themselves because of ill health!”
    “I understood that Olivia Man—Marlowe—was crippled. And that Nicholas Cheney had been gassed in the war.”
    “Well, yes,” she said defensively, “certainly that’s true, since you put it so baldly. Olivia lost the strength of one leg in childhood, from the crippling disease. She used a chair for a long time, then Nicholas carved a brace for her, and after that, she could move about as she pleased. It was wonderful! I can still hear her laughter when she first tried it—we were all outside her bedroom door, while Nanny put it on—and she began to laugh, and Nicholas was jumping up and down beside me, shouting encouragement, and Rosamund was crying, and Richard was pounding on the door, he was so beside himself with excitement…” Her voice faded and she looked up the stairs defensively, as if afraid she’d hear the children’s voices again. “If she killed herself,” Rachel continued after a moment, “it wasn’t because of her leg! She accepted it, shelived with it, she’d come to terms with the pain—it wasn’t something that drove her to despair and suicide.”
    The sunlight pouring through the open door failed to reach them or warm the vastness of the hall. But he could hear birds somewhere, singing.
    “If she had wanted to kill herself—for whatever reason—” Rutledge said, “why would she allow Nicholas to join her in death? Why not see that he survived, and got on with life. However hard it might seem to be at first? Why not kill herself in her bedroom, with no one to see?”
    She pressed her fingers to her eyes, as if they still hurt from crying. Or to hide them from him. “I’ve asked myself that a hundred—a thousand—times since then. They were very close, Olivia and Nicholas. I’d have said, if anyone had ever thought to ask me, that she would have jumped into the sea in the night, rather that let him die with her. It doesn’t mean that perhaps in the first shock he might not have wished to follow, but Nicholas had a cool head, a clear mind, he wasn’t the dramatic, overly emotional sort of man who could leap into the sea himself the next morning. When she was already dead.” Dropping her hands, she said painfully, “If you understand what I’m saying?”
    He did, though Hamish was grumbling that it made no sense. “Yet they died together.”
    “Yes, and that’s what put me off in the very beginning. I didn’t say much to the others; they wouldn’t have wanted to hear me worrying over what couldn’t be changed. Or making it worse by starting a fuss over it. But the more I thought about the circumstances, the more I was convinced that something was very wrong, very—unusual.”
    “Do you think one of your cousins—including Stephen—could be capable of murdering Olivia and Nicholas? For whatever reasons?”
    She stared at him,