The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

Taylor rose from behind the desk. “Yes, all right, the dog was dying when I got there. Sir John was kneeling on the floor beside it when I opened the door and called to him. He told me he was in the study, and to come quickly. Still, the damned dog growled at me and got to its feet as I struck the first blow. I had to get rid of it because Sir John was still alive and I needed to hit him again. The cold finished it off, I expect. It’s breathing was shallow, laboured.” He moved to the hearth. “My wife has just been diagnosed with colon cancer. I’d already asked Sir John if I could borrow the reliquary. To give her a chance. He told me it had done nothing for his wife, dying of childbed fever. But I didn’t care. I was ready to try anything. I just wanted to try. But he was afraid that, if my wife recovered on her own, Mumford would be swamped with the desperate, the hopeless, believers in miracles. He said it would be wrong. Time was running out, and yet that afternoon he begged me to do something for his dog. It was obscene, I tell you.”

He reached down, his fingers closing over the handle of the fire tongs. Lifting his voice, he shouted, “No, no — you’re wrong! Put them down, for God’s sake.”

And, before Rutledge could stop him, he raised the tongs and brought them down on his own head, the blow carefully calculated to break the skin but not knock him down. And as blood ran down his face, he dropped the tongs and cried out, “Oh, God, someone help me … Mrs Dunne …

he’s run mad.”

And in a swift angry voice that only reached Rutledge’s ears, Taylor said, “She’s ill, I tell you. I won’t be taken away when she needs me. Not by you, not by anyone.”

He rushed at Rutledge, grappling with him.

The door burst open, Mrs Dunne flying to the doctor’s aid, pulling at Rutledge’s shoulders, calling out for him to stop.

Rutledge had no choice. He swung her around, and she went down, tripping over the chair he’d been sitting in. He turned towards the hearth, to retrieve the fire tongs as Taylor reeled against the far wall, calling, “Stop him — ”

Mrs Dunne, scrambling to her feet, must have thought Rutledge was about to use the tongs again, and she threw herself at him, carrying him backward against the hearth, stumbling over the fire screen.

Her screams had brought patients from the waiting room, pushing their way through the door, faces anxious and frightened as they took in the carnage, drawing the same conclusions that Mrs Dunne had leapt to. A woman in a dark green coat gasped and went to the doctor’s aid, and he leaned heavily against her shoulder. Two men put themselves between Rutledge and his perceived victim, one of them quickly retrieving the fire tongs from where they’d fallen, as if afraid Rutledge could still reach them.

It was all Rutledge could do to catch Mrs Dunne’s pummelling fists and force her arms to her sides, so that he could retrieve the situation before it got completely out of hand. Hamish in the back of his mind was warning him again, and there was no time to answer.

In a voice used to command on a battlefield, he said, “You — the one in the greatcoat — find Constable Forrest and bring him here at once.”

Taylor said, stricken, “He’s trying to arrest me … for murder … I’ve done nothing wrong, don’t let him lie to you. For God’s sake!”

They knew Taylor. Rutledge was a stranger. The man in the greatcoat hesitated.

The doctor swayed on his feet. “I think I’d better sit down.” The woman helped him to a chair, and his knees nearly buckled under him.

She said, “I’ll find your wife.”

He gripped her arm. “No. I don’t want to worry her.” Taylor took out his handkerchief to mop the blood from his face. “Just get him out of my office, if you will.”

Rutledge crossed the room, and the man with the tongs raised them without thinking, as if expecting Rutledge to attack him. But he went to the door and closed it.

“You’ll listen to me, then. I’m Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard.” He held up his card for all of them to see. “I’ve just charged Dr Taylor with the murder of Sir John Middleton. As for those tongs, he himself wielded them, I never touched them, or him.”

“I think you’d better leave,” Mrs Dunne snapped. “He’s a good man, a doctor.”

“Is he? I intend to order Sir John’s dog exhumed. I expect to find shreds of cloth in his teeth.” Hamish was reminding him that it was only a very slim possibility, but Rutledge ignored him. “What’s more, I intend to ask a doctor from Cambridge to examine Dr Taylor’s limbs for healing bites. And the clothing he was wearing the day of the murder will be examined for mended tears.”

He saw the expression on Mrs Dunne’s face. Shock first, and then uncertainty. “I mended a tear in his trousers just last week. He’d caught them on a nail, he said.”