The Red Door

Then, satisfied, he said, “He’s one of our brighter lads. Never been in trouble. Comes of a good family. I’ve seen his father visit a time or two. A doctor, I’m told.” He hesitated. “And what’s he done, if I may ask, to draw the attention of the Yard?”

“He’s helping us with an inquiry.”

“I would expect no less of him. Very fine young lad, is Larkin.” Rutledge digested this as he drove west and then south toward Dorset.

He found Sedley in the middle of the county, a village with houses directly on the road, some of them whitewashed, others of local stone. There was a small but handsome church, a pub, and a green where geese swam in the warm waters of a shallow pond. In the pub, he paused for a late lunch and information.

“Mistletoe Cottage,” the man who brought his meal repeated. “It’s just on your left as you go out of Sedley.”

“Does A. P. Repton still live there?”

“A. P.—oh you’ll be meaning Alice Preston. Not Repton. She died in the summer of 1918 and is buried along there in the churchyard. A strange old bird. She came into money some years ago and told Rector she had only to receive and mail letters to earn it. Rector thought she was going dotty, but she traveled to Shaftesbury every week on the baker’s cart, to the post office there. Faithfully, rain or shine. If you want the truth, I expect she was just having us on.”

“What else did she do? To earn this windfall?”

“That was it.”

Then how did this woman in Dorset come to know Peter Teller?

“Did she have a son or nephew in the Army, by any chance?”

“Not that any of us knew about,” the man told him.

“What did she do with her free time? When not traveling to the post office?”

“She knitted for a missionary society. She’d collect odd bits of yarn around the village, and then she’d make these scarves and gloves and hats for children in faraway places. Quite colorful, some of them. She said foreign children liked bright colors.”

“Which mission society, do you know?”

“One in Oxford, I think it was.”

“Not Kent?”

“No, I’m sure it was Oxford. They have missions amongst the Eskimos.”

A dead end. Circumstantial evidence with no way to learn if she was the same woman the postmistress had described. Likely, yes, but that was as far as it went. All the same, when he’d finished his lunch, Rutledge went to Shaftesbury and inquired at the post office there. But all the postmistress could tell him was that Miss Preston sent and received letters sporadically, although she didn’t recall the name Peter Teller. “I remember her only because she was eccentric,” she told him apologetically.

And then, just as Rutledge reached the post office door, the postmistress said, “Oh—there’s something else. Alice told me once she was nursery maid in the household of Evelyn Darley. My mother remembered Evelyn and her twin sister when they came out. She said they were the prettiest girls she’s ever seen. I asked Alice if it was true, and she said it was.”

Rutledge stared at her in disbelief, then smiled and thanked her.

This was the connection he’d hoped for and very nearly missed.

Evelyn Darley’s twin sister was Gran, the Teller grandmother.

Peter Teller had paid Alice Preston, onetime nursery maid to his great-aunt Evelyn, long since retired to Sedley, in Dorset, to act as go-between, so that Florence Teller never wrote directly to him through his regiment. And his letters back to her never gave away whether he was on leave or with the Army. He’d told her, according to the post-mistress in Thielwald, that it was the safest, surest way to reach him.

And when Alice Preston died in the summer of 1918, Peter let this only link to Florence die with her.

Lieutenant Teller never came home from the war.

Rutledge went to find a telephone.

He could just see the mellow stone of the church from where he was standing in the hotel lounge, asking to be connected to the Yard. When Gibson was brought to the telephone, Rutledge asked if there was any more news about one Lieutenant Burrows, whom Susannah Teller had told him about.

“It’s true enough, he was killed in the war. The only son. Widowed mother lives in Worcester, off the Milton Road. The family’s well connected, Army and politics. I’ve also had the Army looking for another Peter Teller. They move like treacle, but they searched the regimental records where our Captain Teller served, and he’s the only one of that name they could find, going back a generation.”

“Any reason to believe that a widow turning up would distress the Burrows family?”

“That’s the interesting bit, sir. The lieutenant married on his last leave and leaves a widow. No children. She has married again and now lives in Scotland.”

Hamish said, “It wouldna’ signify. Yon lass didna’ ken how to find her husband’s family.”

But Rutledge was prepared for anything. He thanked Gibson and put up the receiver.

No stone unturned . . .

Hamish said again, “It doesna’ signify.”

“It was important enough for Susannah Teller to bring it to my attention.”

“Aye, with lies. To throw you off the track of her ain husband.”