The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

“My good Lord,” she said fervently. “I’d have never guessed.” She paused, measuring out the tea. “But why didn’t he say so? Why tell me he was an old comrade in arms?”

“Perhaps he thought Sir John might refuse to receive him, if he used his own name.”

Frowning, she shook her head. “I expect that was so. Still …” She left the word hanging, and busied herself taking down cups and saucers, retrieving the sugar bowl from the cupboard, then walking into the pantry for the jug of milk.

“You’ve cleaned for Sir John these many years. Did he have anything in this house worth stealing? I don’t count money. Or gold cuff-links. Something of great value. Something that would make killing him worthwhile?”

Because Dr Barnes hadn’t the money to restore Trafalgar, whatever he might claim about time.

“I can’t think that there was. Some of his books? I don’t know about such things, but someone else might.”

“It didn’t appear that there were books missing.”

“That’s true,” she agreed. “I’m used to dusting them. They’re all there save one.”

Rutledge took the Barnes family history from his pocket. “My doing, that. I needed to show someone the photograph in the front.”

“I’ll see it’s in its rightful place,” she said, moving the book aside and setting down his cup of tea. “There’s a bit of chocolate sponge cake, if you’d like that,” she told Rutledge. “I made it for my dinner.”

He thanked her, but refused. After a moment she sat down across from him. “There are the weapons between the photographs, in the study. But none of them was taken.”

Not even all of them would raise the sum needed to restore Trafalgar. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “If it were robbery, it would be for something worth thousands of pounds. Not a few hundred.”

She nodded. “I worry, sometimes,” she said, looking away as if embarrassed. “If I’d been here that day — or come back from the greengrocers a little sooner — could I have prevented what happened? I know you told me I might well have become a victim too. But it weighs on my mind, you see. I needn’t have gone into Mumford that day. His dinner would have been all right without that onion.”

“I doubt it,” he told her bracingly. “Most killers would wait for their chance. If you hadn’t left that day, you would have left on another.”

Hamish said, “It’s a kind lie.”

He went through the study and the parlour again, looking for something missing — some explanation for why a man had to die — knowing very well that Mrs Gravely would have noticed and brought it to his attention long ago.

It was all as he’d seen it the first time. The tidiness of the soldier, used to Spartan conditions. The collector of books, most of them on warfare, Cambridge, even India. The husband, who loved his second wife and kept her portrait where he could see it, but who bore no grudge against his first wife, headstrong though she may have been. The fastidious man who was always freshly shaven and carefully dressed, judging by the body.

Rutledge went back to the bookshelves, and ran his finger down the line of titles. Nothing out of the ordinary. Several volumes: William the Conqueror, Henry II, Edwards I and III. Soldiers all — in the days when kings led their men into battle. The tactics of the American general Robert E. Lee. The strategies of Napoleon.

He stopped and pulled out one of the books at random. As he opened it, something fell out and drifted lightly to the floor.

Stooping to pick it up, he saw that it was an article cut from a newspaper, yellowed and thin.

It was about the destruction of the Great Mews of Whitehall Palace. The stables of Edward I and his predecessors. This had been done early in the eighteenth century, when the ramshackle mews was more of an eyesore than it was useful. Rutledge glanced at the spine of the book and saw it was a biography of Edward I. The cutting was well before Sir John’s time and, turning to the end covers, he saw that the name inscribed there in an ornate bookplate was that of Sir Robert Middleton. Father? Grandfather? Uncle?

He set the book aside and picked up the Bible. Searching the list of births and deaths, he realized that Sir Robert was a great-grandfather of Sir John’s. Not a contemporary of the destruction of the royal mews, but Sir Robert had been alive in the first part of the nineteenth century when various architects, including the famous Nash, had taken on the task of creating a square that would fit into the overall view of a new and spacious London. The name given to the finished square came from the column bearing the statue of Admiral Nelson: Trafalgar Square. But as Hillier, the Dartmouth bookseller had said, it had been among the last of the memorials to Lord Nelson.

Interesting; but it was, as Hamish was reminding him, decades in the past. Hardly pertinent to a murder in 1920.