The Red Door

He took her to the Yard, left his motorcar there, and then accompanied her to the river, where a slight, cooling breeze moved across the water.

She paused to look at the river, and he realized she was not more than five feet from where Bynum had been murdered.

“Shall we?” he said, and gestured in the opposite direction.

It seemed that whatever she had to tell him was weighing on her mind, but she was not certain how to begin, or possibly where to begin. He kept in step with her and let her take her time.

Finally she said, “My husband—Peter has told me about this poor woman—in Lancashire, is it? The one who was murdered. And he told me as well that you can’t seem to find her husband’s family. He was from Dorset, I believe?”

“Apparently, yes. It’s what we were told in Hobson.”

“Yes, well, I may have an explanation for this mystery.” She paused again and watched a small boat pulling upriver. “There was a young subaltern in my husband’s regiment. Burrows was his name, and he was from a good family. He had connections to Dorset, but I believe his family lived outside Worcester.”

She glanced up at him and looked away again.

“He was a very nice young man. We saw a good bit of him. And I’m afraid my husband and I made fun of him behind his back. It was unkind, but Thomas admired my husband no end. He had no older brothers, and I think he saw Peter as a role model, in a way. And he emulated Peter at every turn. When Peter showed an interest in golf, it became Thomas’s enthusiasm. When Peter bought himself a pair of matched blacks to pull his carriage, the next month Thomas sported a pair that was almost identical. Peter grew a mustache, and Thomas must have one as well. Peter shaved his, and soon after, so did Thomas. It would have been very trying, except for the fact that we knew it was harmless.”

“And what has this to do with the dead woman in Hobson?”

“I don’t know anything at all about Hobson,” Susannah Teller said. “But I should imagine it was a very small place, and that the dead woman—”

“Her name,” he said, “was Florence.”

“—Florence, then. That Florence was not from a wealthy, influential family, however nice she might have been?”

“If you are trying to say she wasn’t of his class, she was a school-teacher and not an heiress, although she had property of her own.”

“Oh.” Her face flushed. “This is difficult enough for me, Inspector. I’m not trying to disparage this—Florence Teller. But I wonder if perhaps Thomas fell in love with her and married her under a false name. Or perhaps felt obligated to marry her, and knew his mother and father would not approve of the match. In fact, they might well have cut him off without a penny. I have no way of guessing his reasons. But he might have been desperate enough to marry her not as Thomas Burrows, the nephew of a member of Parliament and the grandson of a baronet, though the title went to his mother’s brother, but as the man he most admired. Peter.”

It was, Rutledge thought, as likely to be true as the possibility that her own husband was a bigamist. And possibly a murderer as well.

“I’ll look into it. Where is Thomas Burrows now?”

“Lieutenant Burrows died in the war. He was shot leading his men across No Man’s Land. Peter saw it happen. By the time Lieutenant Burrows could be brought in, he was dying and never reached an aid post.”

“And he never told his family about his marriage? I find that difficult to believe.”

“I don’t know whether he did or not. But if he did, they surely disowned him. All I can tell you is that Thomas Burrows was a very different man when the war began. The brash young subaltern striving so hard to please ten years before was by that time a very good officer, but he had lost his illusions. About the Army and about himself. He seldom spoke of his family, nothing more was said about the Army as a stepping-stone to his uncle’s seat in Parliament.”

Her voice rang true, and yet he found it interesting that Susannah Teller had come to tell him this story, and not her husband. But sometimes women were more perceptive than men. They caught undertones and nuances that were lost to male ears, and drew conclusions that depended as much on intuition and instinct as on solid fact.

“Does your husband know that you’ve come to give me this information?”

She blinked. “You can ask him if you like. About Thomas Burrows. He’ll tell you that Thomas did all those things, and perhaps more than even I can recall. But I think he will be less willing to accept the fact that Thomas could have married without his family’s knowledge and consent. And yet Peter had to fight for me. I was his cousin on his mother’s side, you see. The family was against it from the start. It was very likely that my children would have the same blood disorder that afflicts Edwin. They were right, actually. We lost two before we gave up. It might color his feelings about Thomas, you see. The fact that he never fought for that—for Florence.”

And there he knew she was telling the truth. But how much of it?