The Red Door

“I came back to speak to the two women while Cobb was shouting something at them and at me. Mrs. Blaine claimed he’d read too much in Mrs. Teller letting him help her about the gardens. He must have said something to her, and Mrs. Teller told him he was a married man and she wanted nothing to do with him.” Satterthwaite paused. “So he killed her.” He examined the Thermos as if it had just appeared on his desk and he’d never seen it before, avoiding Rutledge’s eyes. “I’d have liked five minutes alone with him. It would have been worth it.” Then he looked up. “I could never understand Peter Teller walking away from her at the war’s end. That’s if he wasn’t dead. She was sure he was. We all believed it. So it made sense that he’d come back, finally, to make his peace and tell her his reasons. His lame leg, for one. And she sent him away with a flea in his ear, because she had a pride of her own, did Florence Teller.”

He set the Thermos aside and moved a little in his chair.

“She must have told Cobb when he came to do a little work what had happened between herself and Teller. And he killed her then, because he knew that whatever she was saying now in the heat of anger and hurt, in the end Florence would go back to her husband.” Looking away at the square of window, seeing the darkness no longer pitch-black, he went on. “I didn’t want her killer to be one of us. I wanted it to be Teller. But it wasn’t.”

“That’s a very good reconstruction,” Rutledge said after a moment. “It makes a strong case for Lawrence Cobb as the murderer. But it doesn’t explain the cane.”

“That must have been what Cobb saw as he came up the walk. How he knew Teller had been there. Where Teller had dropped it when she cast him off. And she must have left it there, in the event Teller came back for it. She wouldn’t have to see him again.”

“And what does Cobb have to say to this? Does he still deny he killed her, or has he admitted what he’d done?”

“By the time his wife and her mother had left, he was in a state. He demanded I send for you, but I told him it was no use, the evidence was there, and we had to go forward. The truth was, I couldn’t bear the sight of him, I wanted him out of Hobson where I couldn’t lay hands to him. I think he must have seen that in my face, because when I told him he was going to Thielwald, he came quietly and gave me no trouble.”

A silence fell.

Rutledge was trying to test the information that Satterthwaite had given him. Had all the evidence pointing to Peter Teller been circumstantial? The man was on the scene. He’d been spotted by an independent witness. His cane had been used as the murder weapon. But there was an equally strong case now against Lawrence Cobb. Furthermore, it fit the facts—that Teller had indeed come to Hobson and spoken to Florence Teller. His cane had been missing since then. And he’d left in a hurry, according to the witness, Benjamin Larkin. It also explained why Lawrence Cobb had possession of the cane’s knob.

He knew the decision that Chief Superintendent Bowles would come to: charge Cobb and leave the Tellers out of it—they’d suffered enough, and Peter Teller was now out of reach of the law. Guilty or not. If a jury found Cobb guilty, then he was.

But Florence Teller deserved to have her killer punished. And not a surrogate.

Rutledge took a deep breath. Somehow he’d been very sure of Cobb’s innocence.

As if the constable had heard his thoughts, he said, “Remember? Larkin heard no shouting, no one crying out when the Teller motorcar was there.”

“Because by the time Larkin came down the hill, she was already dead.”

“I never could understand why Teller broke up that cane,” Satterthwaite went on. “If he’d taken it with him, we’d been none the wiser. Two minutes under a pump or dangled in a stream, and it would have been clean. But I can see Cobb killing her and then destroying the cane afterward. The cane was Teller’s, and he’d have liked to break it over the man himself. But he couldn’t. So he took his frustration and anger out on Teller’s possession. And Cobb is strong enough, he could have snapped off that knob.”

And that was the irrefutable fact. As Hamish was pointing out, even if Teller had hated himself for what he’d done, even if he’d broken his own cane out of self-loathing, he’d surely have had the sense to take the head of the cane with him. Even the drunken Peter Teller was far from stupid.

“Ye said yoursel’, it’s damning,” Hamish told him.

He should have been satisfied. But he wasn’t.

“Why did Cobb leave the rest of the cane for us to find?”

“To protect himself, if suspicion fell on him.” Satterthwaite stood up, collecting his own cup, intending to wash up. “I’ve had hours to think, waiting for you to come back. Hours.”

Fighting a rearguard action, Rutledge said, “And the box of letters?”