Wings of Fire by Charles Todd Read Free Book Online Page A

stunned. “Oh, God, no! Susannah and Stephen couldn’t have killed either of them. And Daniel, what on earth for?”
    Rutledge smiled. “Where there’s murder, there’s usually a murderer.”
    “But not one of us!” she cried, alarmed.
    How often had he heard the same cry when he’d begun an investigation into suspicious death. Murder, possibly. But not one of us . A stranger. A madman. An envious neighbor or colleague. The woman down the road. But not one of us. Then the finger-pointing began, as suspicion and fear and uncertainty and old memories came to the surface.
    “Who, then?” he asked gently.
    “That’s why I called Henry and begged him to ask the Yard to come down here and look into the deaths. Someone who could be objective, someone with the experience to judge what had really happened. Not a village policeman who preferred the safest answer to embarrassing the family any more than it already was. I mean, suicide is unacceptable enough—murder would be, well, a family calamity.” She looked at him, seeing him for the first time. The thin face. The haunted eyes. Intelligence, too, but something more. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
    “There were no photographs upstairs. Do you have any of the family that I could borrow for a time?” He was mainly interested in Olivia Marlowe, the woman behind the poems. But it helped, often, to see the faces of the dead if you were late at the murder scene.
    “We’d taken them all. The house will be put up for sale soon, and we didn’t want to leave—I’ve just come to fetch the ships,” she said, flustered. “I—I haven’t had the courage yet to go in there. Where they—where it happened. There are photographs in my things, I’ll find them. Where are you staying?”
    “The Three Bells,” he said, curious about her reaction. “What can you tell me about Stephen FitzHugh’s death?”
    She shivered, not looking over his shoulder at the stairs, though her head had turned that way. “It was awful. He was lying at the foot of the steps, his eyes wide, a little blood—I couldn’t tell if it was from his ear or his mouth—smeared across his cheek. Cormac said he died as we watched, but I saw nothing change, didn’t hear a sigh or—or anything. And I was kneeling there, beside him, my hand on his chest, calling his name. It was—I’ve seen men die before. I was in London when the Zeppelins came over, I was there when they pulled people out of one of the buildings. But this was Stephen .” She collected herself with an effort and turned towards the open door. “I’d better leave now,” she said ruefully. “Men don’t like it when women start to cry, and I’ve found it hard sometimes…”
    He let her go, watching her slim figure hurry down the drive and turn towards the sea.
    So that was Lady Ashford, born Rachel Marlowe, and cousin to the people who lived here. Peter’s wife. Widow. He remembered Peter, tall and fast at games, level-headed and very good at whatever he did. He’d had a gift for languages, he could pick them up with apparently no effort, and speak them like a native. All that wasted in an obscure action on the flanks of a mountain whose one claim to fame was that Queen Victoria had had two mountains in East Africa, and had given Kilimanjaro to the Kaiser, next door in Tanganyika, who’d had none. Bloody silly thing to do in the first place. And Englishmen had died trying to retake it from the Germans under that master strategist, Von Lettow-Vorbeck, who knew how to pin down men who would otherwise have been fighting in France.
    Rutledge turned and went back up the stairs to the sitting room, standing there with his eyes roving the furnishings, the books, the wooden ships that Nicholas Cheney carved. He had left more of himself here than the poet, after all…
    Two people who died together for no apparent reason. No expression of regret, no apologies to the living. No explanation of the deed, no excuses, no last