Anne Perry's Silent Nights: Two Victorian Christmas Mysteries (11 page)

Perhaps he should have turned to the stark outline of the church, or even to the carved and ornamental gravestones beyond, but he did not. Her grief filled the air, and he knew it was not only a compassion for Olivia but also an acute awareness of her own suffering and emptiness. He had never so intensely wanted to touch anyone, but he knew he could not, not even the cold, ungloved hand at her side. There was no comfort he could offer except his skill, and now he was increasingly afraid that what he might learn further of Barclay would prove uglier than she could imagine.

But he, too, had to follow the truth, wherever it led. This wide, clean land with its endless distances had awoken a disturbing awareness of his own deficiencies, the narrowness that Monk had so despised. Suddenly he wanted to change, for himself, not even for dreams of Melisande, however sweet or hopeless. He was aware of a gaping hole, of a loss he could feel but not name. The silence of the air was a balm, but something inside him ached to be filled.

“I’ll find him,” he said aloud to her. “But it will not be comfortable. It will show hatred you did not know
was there, and weakness you had not had to look at before. I’m sorry.”

“I know,” she accepted. “It is foolish, like a small child, to imagine it is something out there, a piece of madness that just happened to strike us. It comes from inside. Thank you for being so honest.” She hesitated a moment as if to add something else, then simply said good night, and with a brief smile, was gone.

He took a step after her, not knowing if he should walk beside her at least back to the gate of the big house. Then he realized the foolishness of such an act. She had sought him in the tumble of gravestones, and then the lee of the church, precisely not to be seen.

He turned and made his way back to Mrs. Owen, and something hot to eat and drink.

I
n the morning he reported again to Faraday, who received him with a look of hope that he had at last found some concrete evidence. His expression died as soon as he saw Runcorn’s face.

“I think you misunderstood me, Runcorn,” he said tartly. “There really is no need to keep coming here to tell me that you have learned nothing.”

Runcorn felt the chill and, for an instant, the thoughtless, ill-expressed temper he would have exhibited a year ago was hot inside him. He choked it down.

“I had a long talk with Kelsall, sir, and he clarified a great many things in my mind.”

Faraday gave him a sour look of disbelief, but he did not interrupt. His expression said vividly what he considered Runcorn’s mind to be worth, if a conversation with the curate could improve it.

Runcorn felt himself coloring. He knew his voice was tart, but it was beyond his control. “He asked the nature of motives for murder. They are generally simple: greed, fear, ambition, revenge, outrage …”

“Get to your point, Runcorn. What does that tell us that we did not already know? She was hardly threatening to anyone.”

“Not physically, sir, but in reputation or belief, in challenge to authority, in threat to expose what is
private, shameful, or embarrassing,” Runcorn explained.

“Oh. You think perhaps Miss Costain was privy to someone’s secrets? She would not have betrayed such a thing. If you had known her, you would not even suggest it.”

“Not even if it were illegal?”

Faraday frowned. “Who? Whose secrets would she know? I shall have to ask Costain.”

“No, sir!”

“Surely he is the most likely to know who … Good God!” Faraday’s eyes inclined. “You don’t think he—”

“I don’t know,” Runcorn cut him off. “But that is not the only kind of fear. There is the dread of humiliation, of being mocked, of having one’s inadequacies laid bare.”

“That seems a bit fanciful,” Faraday said, but the color in his cheeks belied his words.

“Newbridge courted her, and she rejected him,” Runcorn observed, making it a statement. “So, apparently, did John Barclay.”

Faraday chewed his lips. “Do you think he is capable of such violence?”

“Did she reject him also?” Runcorn continued.

“Yes, I believe so. Surely he couldn’t …” His eyes widened, the question already answered in his mind.

Runcorn saw it and anger burned up inside him for Melisande. This man was going to marry her, and yet in order to solve a murder he was willing to believe that her brother could be guilty. Or did it reflect a closer knowledge of Barclay than Runcorn had, especially during the time of his acquaintance with Olivia? Was he finally facing a grief he had tried to avoid, but could not any longer?

“You know him better than I do,” Runcorn said with a greater gentleness. “How did he accept her rejection? Did he love her deeply?”

Faraday looked startled.

It raced through Runcorn’s mind that what he dreamed of as love was not something Faraday even considered. There was no understanding of the passion, the hunger, the tenderness, the soaring of the heart or the plunge of despair. He was thinking of an arrangement, an affection. Runcorn was harrowed
up with a rage so intense he could have struck Faraday’s smug, bland face and beaten his assumptions out of him. He wanted to feel blood and bone under his fists.

Were these the feelings Olivia’s murderer had felt? Only they had used a carving knife? Why? Was the killer a woman? Someone with no physical power to strike, but the passion nevertheless?

“It doesn’t have to be a man,” he said aloud. “Who else did Newbridge court? Or John Barclay? Who could have loved or wanted them with such fierce possessiveness?”

“A woman?” Faraday was stunned. “But it was … violent! Brutal.”

“Women can be just as brutal as men,” Runcorn said tartly. “It happens less often, simply for opportunity and perhaps schooling, but the rage is just as savage, and when it breaks through the years of self-control, it will be uglier.”

“Jealousy?” Faraday tasted the idea. Now he was meeting Runcorn’s eyes and there was no evasion in him, no weariness. “Over Newbridge? I don’t think so. Although to be honest, I hadn’t considered it. I’ll
have Warner look into it more closely. John Barclay, that seems possible. He can be very charming, and he has a high opinion of himself. He would not take rejection easily.”

“I heard from Kelsall that it was he who rejected Miss Costain,” Runcorn corrected him.

Faraday shrugged with a slight smile. “That may be what she told him,” he replied. “They were friends. She might not wish him to think she had been rebuffed. She was a difficult young woman, Runcorn. If you intend to solve her murder, you must recognize that. She was a dreamer, impractical, selfish, very willful in certain matters. She steadily refused to be guided by her brother, a patient and long-suffering man where she was concerned, and I regret to say, not always best supported by his wife. John Barclay is much more fortunate, and I daresay wiser, even if he has a certain vanity.”

With the very reference to Melisande, Runcorn felt the iron vise close around her as if it were around himself. In his mind he stood with her again in the churchyard and heard her voice speaking of Olivia, the emotion trembling in it, and he knew this
fear was also for herself. But Melisande was a woman who obeyed necessity, understanding there was no choice. Olivia had rebelled. Were they connected? How? It still formed no pattern he could read to be certain of innocence or guilt.

“Thank you,” Faraday said briskly, cutting across his thoughts. “The fact that it might have been a woman would explain why Miss Costain was not at first afraid of her. Also, of course, all those we have questioned would have been thinking in terms of men.” His shoulders eased and he smiled momentarily. “Thank you, Runcorn. I am obliged for your expert opinion, and of course for your time.”

R
uncorn was unsatisfied. He had raised questions to Faraday; he had not given answers. How much was he seeing of the woman Olivia Costain had been, and how much was his picture of her colored by Kelsall’s feelings for her? How much was his feeling for Melisande? He was not doing his job. He had in the far distant past criticized Monk for emotions,
usually impatience and anger, and now he was guilty of them himself. How Monk would mock him!

And then with surprise, a lurch into freedom—he realized that he did not care. He could be hurt by other people’s opinions of him, but he could no longer be twisted or destroyed by them.

Moreover, he realized that he could learn more of Olivia Costain’s life from those less close to her, those who could see her with clearer eyes. And in doing that, he would also discreetly learn a great deal more about Alan Faraday as well. If there really was a violent and terrible envy, it could as easily be over him. And that might even mean that Melisande was in danger, too.

Should he warn her? Of what? He had no idea.

Just then, as he walked down the steep, winding road towards the town, he realized that in fact he did not believe it was a woman jealous of Olivia, so much as a woman afraid of her. She challenged the order of things. She was a disruption in the midst of certainty, the old ways mocked and the rules broken.

But who cared about that enough to kill the trespasser, the blasphemer? That could be a woman. Or
a man whose power and authority was vested in the rules that do not change. Whoever he was he could even feel himself justified in getting rid of her, before she destroyed even more.

The vicar, Costain? The chief constable, Faraday? Or Newbridge, the lord of the manor, with roots centuries deep in the land.

He paused before a house where he had never stopped before, then finally knocked. The woman who answered was white-haired and bent nearly double over her cane, but her eyes were unclouded and she had no difficulty hearing him when he spoke. “Miss Mendlicott?”

“Yes I am. And who are you, young man? You sound like a Londoner to me. If you’re lost, no use asking me the way, all the roads are new since I went anywhere.”

“I’m not lost, Miss Mendlicott,” he replied. “It is you I would like to speak to. And you are right, I am from London. I’m in the police there, but it is about the death of Miss Costain I want to ask you. You taught her in school, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did. I taught them all. But if I knew
who had killed her, you wouldn’t have had to come looking for me, young man, I’ve had sent for you. Don’t keep me standing here in the cold. What’s your name? I can’t go on calling you ‘young man.’” She squinted up at him. “Not that you’re so young, are you!”

“Superintendent Runcorn, Miss Mendlicott. And thank you, I would like to come in.” He did not tell her he was fifty. That made him twenty years older than Melisande.

She led him into a small sitting room with barely space for two chairs, but pleasantly warm. On the mantelshelf there was a small jug with fresh primroses and a spray of rosemary. Anglesey was always surprising him.

He told her without evasion that he wished to learn more of the men who had courted Olivia, and whom she had refused.

“Poor child,” the old lady said sadly. “Understood everything, and nothing. Could name most of the birds in the sky when she was fourteen, and had no idea how few other people even looked at them. Blind as a bat, she was.”

Runcorn struggled to keep up with her. “You mean she was naïve?”

“I mean she couldn’t see where she was going!” Miss Mendlicott snapped. “Of course she was naïve. Nothing wrong with her eyesight. Didn’t want to look.”

“Did Sir Alan Faraday court her seriously, do you know?”

“Handsome boy,” she said, staring beyond him into the winter garden with its bare trees. “Good at cricket, as I recall. Or so someone told me. Never watched it myself. Couldn’t make head nor tail of it.”

“Did he court Miss Costain?” he repeated the question.

“Of course he did. But she had no patience with him. Nice man, but tedious. She used to tell me about him. Came to see me every week. Brought me jam.” Her eyes filled with tears, and unashamed, she let them slide down her cheeks.

“She talked about Sir Alan to you?”

“Done well for himself,” she said, shaking her head a little. “Grew up here, then went south to the mainland.”