The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

A cane. The murder weapon hadn’t been found, the likelihood being that the killer had taken it away with him. A cane could have done the damage to Middleton’s head and face, if wielded with enough force.

“Do you remember his name?”

“He didn’t give it, sir. He said, ‘Tell Sir John it’s an old comrade in arms.’ And I did as he asked. Sir John went to see for himself, while I took the old dog into the kitchen with me.”

Was that why the dog had been put outside? Because he knew — and disliked — the killer?

Rutledge thanked her and went back to his search of the house. There was money in a wallet in the bedside table, but it had not been touched. Nor had the gold cuff-links in a box on the tall chest by the bedroom door. What had the killer been after, if not robbery?

Trafalgar? A property in Dartmouth?

The deed.

Rutledge left to find a telephone, and had to drive into Cambridge before he was successful. He put in a call to Sergeant Gibson at the Yard, and gave him a list of what he needed.

“I’m driving to Dartmouth,” he said. “I’ll find a telephone there as soon as I arrive.”

“To Dartmouth?” Gibson repeated doubtfully. “You know your own business best.”

“Let’s hope I do,” Rutledge replied. He left a message with the Cambridge police, and set out to skirt London to the southwest.

It was early on the third day that he arrived in Dartmouth, having spent two nights on the road after running short of petrol near Slough. Colourful houses spilled down the sides of the high ridge that overlooked the town and the water. Most of them were still dark at this hour. Across the harbour was the town of Kingswear, just as dark. He found a hotel on a quiet side street, a narrow building with three floors, its façade black and white half-timbering. The sleepy clerk, yawning prodigiously, gave him a room at the front of the hotel with a view of the harbour. He stood by the window for some time, looking down towards the quay and the dark water, dotted with boats silently riding the current.

The Dart River opened up here to form the harbour, and castles — ruins now — had once guarded the entrance to this safe haven. It was deep enough for ships, and wide enough for a ferry to convey passengers from one side to the other. Just whereabouts the house called Trafalgar was situated, he didn’t know. He hoped the hotel clerk might.

In the event, the man did not. “Before my time, I daresay. You could ask at the bookshop on the next corner,” he suggested later that morning. “Arthur Hillier is the person you want. Oldest man around. If there was a house by that name, he’ll know of it. But I doubt there is. You’ve come on a wild goose chase to my way of thinking.”

Rutledge found the bookstore just past the shoemaker’s shop. It possessed a broad front, the tall windows displaying books on every subject, but mostly about the sea and Dartmouth itself, including works on the wine trade with France and fishing the cod banks. A bell jingled as he opened the door, and an elderly man looked up, brushing a strand of white hair out of still-sharp blue eyes.

“Good morning, sir,” he said cheerfully. “Here to browse, or is there something in particular you’re looking for?”

“Information, if you please,” Rutledge replied. “I’m trying to locate a dwelling that was here some years ago.” He had brought with him the volume on the Barnes family history, and opened it to the frontispiece. “This house, in fact.”

Hillier pulled a pair of eyeglasses from his cardigan pocket and put them on. “Ah. Trafalgar. It isn’t called that any more. For a time it was a home for indigent naval officers and, after that, it was a clinic during the war. Now it’s more or less derelict. Sad really.”

“Do you know anything about the former owners?”

“Well, you do have the Barnes history, don’t you? But I knew the last of the family to live there. Not well, you understand. Fanciful name for the house. It was called that after an ancestor was wounded the same day Lord Nelson was killed. Quite the fashion to commemorate the battle with monuments and the like. Trafalgar Square in London was one of the last to do so; I expect they didn’t know what else to do with that great patch of emptiness. At any rate, the house was River’s End before that — just where the Dart opens into the harbour, you see.” He gestured to the door. “Come with me, and I’ll show you.”

Rutledge followed him out of the shop, towards the harbour. “There’s a boat,” Hillier was saying, “that will convey you to the mouth of the River Dart. Where it broadens into the harbour, you can just see the rooftops of Trafalgar over that stand of trees. They weren’t there in my day, those trees. You could see the gardens then. Quite a sight in the spring, I remember.”

He could see where Hillier was pointing, but the morning sun hadn’t yet reached that part of the harbour, and he had to take the man’s word for it that the house was behind the trees. But then he looked a little farther along. There, just visible over the treetops, was the line of a roof.