The Red Door

“She would do anything for anyone,” Satterthwaite went on, when Rutledge made no comment. “She stayed up three nights with the Burtons’ little girl when she had typhoid, and the mother was too ill to nurse her. All of us knew what sort of person she was. So where was the need to kill her?”

“What was her maiden name?”

“Marshall. Her parents lived in Cheshire. The father was originally from Cheshire as I recall.”

The village had straggled along the High Street and then, as if tired of trying to grow any larger, it simply stopped. Beyond Hobson, the land spread out in a carpet of early summer green, rising a little to show where plowed fields and pastures intersected, and flocks of shorn sheep cropped the grass.

Save for the sheep and a man on a bicycle passing them, there was no other sign of life. Yet the emptiness was friendly, not like the great haunted barren sweeps of the Highlands. Rutledge could hear Hamish making the comparison in his mind.

“Where is Mrs. Teller’s body?”

“Over to the doctor’s surgery in Thielwald. It was a single blow, he says, delivered with some force from behind. Looking at her face, you’d never guess she’d been killed. I was that surprised to see a peaceful expression, as if she had been put out of her pain, like. That’s an odd thing to say, but it was my feeling.”

“Yes, I understand.”

They made two more turnings and came up a slight rise to meet a hedge that surrounded the front of a two-story white house. The land continued to rise about fifty yards behind it but sloped away from the road at the front, giving a long view across a high stand of grass down toward what to Rutledge appeared to be a distant line of the bay.

“That’s the cottage,” Constable Satterthwaite told Rutledge. “You can see how isolated it is, from the point of view of finding any witnesses. There’s a farm just down this road a bit, but the owner was trying to save a sick ram, and he doesn’t know if anyone passed this way or not. And just over the shoulder of the rise is where the Widow Blaine lives. Mrs. Blaine still keeps the farm but has given up running sheep and planting corn. A small dairy herd is all that’s left. She’s short and square, with a temper to match her red hair. If the killer had gone there, she’d have taken her broom to him. Or her.” He smiled at Rutledge. “Village gossip says she’s twice the man her husband was.”

“And she saw nothing unusual here either.”

“No, sir. She has to milk the cows twice a day, and muck out the milking barn, but she comes into Hobson once a fortnight, for whatever goods she wants. That’s how she came to find the body. She stopped to ask Mrs. Teller if there was anything she needed.”

“There appears to be a good bit of fallow land around the cottage. Did Mrs. Teller farm it?” They had come to a white gate set into the hedge. It led up a grassy walk to a painted door, weathered a soft rose. Rutledge drew up just past the gate.

“She hasn’t since the war years. No help. Not with all the men we lost. And probably no heart for it either. She didn’t need the money.”

They left the motorcar and opened the gate.

Rutledge noted the sign on the front of it, with the name: sunrise cottage. Then he stood there, looking up at the house. It was typical of farmhouses out in this rolling country, tall and square and open to the buffeting of the wind, as if daring it to do its worst. There were no trees to shelter it and no fuss about the architecture. Guessing the age of Sunrise Cottage was nearly impossible, built as it was to withstand whatever the seasons or the years brought. A hundred years old? Fifty?

He followed the constable up the path, taking in the flowers that gave the walk and the door a little touch of color, a softness that belied what had happened here.

“There was no indication of a struggle? Or that Mrs. Teller had tried to run from her killer?”

“Nothing to tell us anything. She was just lying there, face to one side, as if she had decided to have a little nap. There wasn’t much blood. She must have died very quickly.”

“And no sign of the murder weapon?”

“He must have taken it with him. A walking stick? There are enough visitors in the summer on walking holidays. A hammer or tool from a motorcar?”

“If it was a summer visitor, he had his walking stick with him. If the weapon came from a motorcar or a lorry, the killer carried it to the door with him, with the intent of committing murder.”

“That’s very likely,” Satterthwaite agreed.

They had reached the door.

“It’s not locked. We never lock our doors.”

“She might still be alive if she had.”

The constable said, “She opened it to whoever was on the doorstep. She was never afraid out here. I’ve wondered, you know, if he had stopped for a drink of water or the like, and recognized her. But that would mean she had a past, and that’s not in the character of Florence Teller.”

“What did she do before she married?”