Hither Page (Page & Sommers Book 1) Read online

  “Precisely,” Templeton said, and Leo felt something embarrassingly like devotion stir in the dustier reaches of his heart. “I knew you’d understand.”

  Chapter 2

  Leo stepped off the train into a scene that would have made a decent picture postcard in almost any other weather. If there had been leaves on the trees or snow on the ground, Wychcomb St. Mary might have presented an inviting, if slightly predictable, prospect. But now the trees reached up from barren ground to wave naked, spindly branches in the leaden sky. The buildings he could see from the station platform were made of Cotswold stone that ought to have been a warm honey color, but had deteriorated to an ashy gray after years of exposure to soot and damp. The world was brown and gray, and even the people milling about the station platform were clad in faded shadowy hues.

  Good, he thought. It was meet and proper, a fitting backdrop for the sort of work he had to do. Anything more cheerful would have made him feel like the grim reaper at a village fete.

  But as he walked down the high street toward the inn, he was brought up short by the sound of a Christmas carol playing on the wireless inside one of the shops. Oh, hell. He knew it was December, but in the midst of his irritation with Templeton and his rush to outfit himself for this case, he hadn’t quite taken stock of the fact that he’d be in England for Christmas. There were going to be mince pies and mulled wine; he was going to have to be jolly, heaven help him. Maybe he’d be lucky and have this case wrapped up before people really got into the thick of the season.

  He scanned the street for any further evidence of yuletide cheer, as warily as he might search for enemy snipers. A paper chain hung inside the window of the stationer’s, interlocked loops of red and gold. Leo suppressed a mad urge to walk into the shop and tear it down, announcing that Wychcomb didn’t deserve festive paper. There had been a murder here, or at the very least a suspicious suicide. This was a place of death; no different from all the other places Leo had been sent over the past decade.

  On the train, he had familiarized himself with the witness statements. The late Mildred Hoggett had been a charwoman who lived with a pair of spinsters on the outskirts of the village. The two old ladies, Miss Pickering and Miss Delacourt, didn’t have enough work to keep the charwoman busy, so she spent her mornings cleaning other houses, including those of the doctor, the vicar, and the colonel. On the night of her death, she had been hired to work an extra few hours at the colonel’s house, Wych Hall, to help his housekeeper and maid with a dinner party. Guests to this party included the two spinsters the victim lived with, their teenaged ward, the vicar, and the vicar’s wife. The colonel’s secretary, who lived at Wych Hall, also attended. The doctor had been present in the drawing room before the meal but was called away to a lying in, to which the colonel’s housekeeper also went, as the new mother was her sister. Dinner proceeded without event. At the end of the meal, when the guests were leaving the table and progressing toward the drawing room, the victim’s body was found at the base of the stairs, newly dead. All the guests claimed not to have seen anyone slip away alone, but all agreed that nearly any of them had the opportunity to go up the stairs under the guise of using the upstairs washroom, and that such an absence might have passed unnoticed. During the post mortem, it was discovered that the victim had recently consumed more than twice the usual dosage of a commonly prescribed barbiturate. She also had several contusions that were consistent with a fall down the stairs, but the coroner could not rule out a blow to the head from the proverbial blunt object.

  None of the witnesses could suggest a possible motive, nor did any of them think Mrs. Hoggett had enemies. Leo had actually laughed out loud at that, drawing a sharp look from the other man in his train compartment. Walking along the high street, he wondered how many of the people he passed had loved ones who would cheerfully murder them given half a chance. He generally operated on the assumption that the only factor holding people back from widespread slaughter was fear—of the gallows, of damnation, of being thought not quite nice by one’s neighbors.

  Wychcomb St. Mary had a single inn, the Rising Sun. Leo gave his own name to the buxom woman who was stationed by the front door. It was, after all, only a watching brief—if one interpreted “watching” to include “watching someone down the barrel of a revolver”—and it was best to make occasional use of his own name so all traces of Leo Page didn’t drop off the map entirely. Anyone who inquired into his background would discover a minor functionary in one of the less notable offices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with an unremarkable war record and an interest in bird watching that led him to take holidays in odd places. Leo felt a sort of affectionate embarrassment for this version of Leonard Page.

  Alone in the room, Leo unpacked his valise, hiding his spare revolver on top of the wardrobe and neatly placing Middlemarch on the bedside table. Then he changed out of his town clothes and into a pair of secondhand corduroy trousers and a tweed coat he had bought yesterday in London after being briefed, tucked his favorite pistol into his arm holster, and went back outside to find a murderer.

  MRS. HOGGETT HAD BEEN dead for over a week before they had the funeral. First, there had been the inquest, then some confusion regarding whether Scotland Yard or the local constabulary had jurisdiction. That scuffle had ended in neither body doing anything at all, which was just as well as far as James cared. He was acutely aware that the rest of the village was in a state of delighted curiosity regarding whether the woman’s death had been an accident, suicide, or even—here the gossips’ voices dropped to a thrilled whisper—murdered. This was by far the most excitement the village had seen since the sheep-stealing incident of 1935.

  James supposed he ought to want to see justice served, that if indeed Mrs. Hoggett had been deliberately harmed, he ought to want her killer found and punished. But his moral compass seemed to be poorly calibrated—he could add that to his list of invisible war wounds—and he couldn’t see any use in looking too closely into the matter. If Mrs. Hoggett had been killed, then perhaps it was because she had learned something dangerous in the course of her snooping. Surely, it was for the best that such a dangerous secret remain deeply buried, that way everyone could go back to their regular lives. He knew this was his mind grasping desperately at the status quo, but knowing this didn’t make the urge any less intense.

  The delay had the result that everyone was more or less over the initial shock by the time they gathered around the freshly dug grave, listening to the vicar say all the usual things. As James glanced at their faces, he thought they looked more bored than mournful. This was the tedious part of death, after all, standing about in the cold, water seeping into one’s shoes from the damp earth. Perhaps they simply hadn’t cared for Mrs. Hoggett enough to grieve her passing—she was hardly a beloved figure. Or maybe it was just that they had all become resigned to death over the course of the war; everyone had lost people in battles and air raids and sunken ships. Even Edith Pickering and Cora Delacourt, who had lived with Mrs. Hoggett, didn’t seem terribly moved, but then again they had a good deal of practice in losing people, having lived through the last time the world decided to kill off a generation.

  Next to Cora and Edith was Wendy, their ward, who seemed even more of a ragamuffin than usual in somber clothes and a hat that looked older than she was. Colonel Armstrong was there and beside him Edward Norris, his secretary. The vicar’s wife was somewhere behind James, half-heartedly attempting to contain her children.

  The wind whipped across the graveyard and James wrapped his muffler more tightly around his neck. He thought Mrs. Hoggett might have been gratified to see the great and good of Wychcomb St. Mary all freezing themselves like this. She would have liked the attention.

  These uncharitable thoughts were interrupted when three things happened at once. Polly Griffiths, the vicar’s daughter, wrenched free of her mother’s grip and scampered helter-skelter across the graveyard. Colonel Armstrong, who for the past quarter hour had looked bored and
distinguished, very much as if he were confident that his presence elevated the tone of the gathering, suddenly stood up straight and sucked in a breath of air that James could hear even over the hiss of the wind. And James caught sight of a stranger perched on a gravestone, sketch pad and pencil in hand, evidently drawing the church. The stranger’s hat was pulled low over his forehead, but James had the creeping sense that he might have recognized the stranger if he were anywhere other than a country churchyard. This resemblance made it hard for James to remember that he was in Wychcomb St. Mary, not a blood-soaked field hospital. He could almost smell gunpowder and disinfectant instead of crisp cold air and smoke from the nearby vicarage chimneys.

  This experience was far from uncommon. He knew this as a provable, scientific, medically sound fact. Every week he reassured patients that these lapses did not indicate unsoundness of mind. But at the moment his mind felt pitifully unreliable. He was clutching onto reality with his fingernails. He filled his lungs with clean, cold air and let it out slowly.

  Wendy came up beside him and shoved a cold metal flask into his hands. The unexpectedness of the gesture jolted him back to the present. “You’re fifteen years old,” he hissed. “This’ll make you go blind.”

  She raised a dark eyebrow. “Is that so, doctor? Besides, I’m not really drinking. I found it on Mrs. Hoggett’s dressing table when I was clearing out her room. I thought I ought to take it away before Edith felt inspired to give the household a lecture on the wages of sin and the evils of strong drink.”

  He looked at the flask in his hands, and indeed he recognized it as the battered steel flask from which Mrs. Hoggett was wont to take covert sips when she thought nobody—especially her employer, Miss Pickering—was looking. “Surely you don’t need to do that already. Clear out her room, I mean.”

  “Emptying it isn’t any stranger than knowing it’s just sitting there, and she’ll never come back to it. Besides, I didn’t go through with it. I took the flask and left almost everything else alone.”

  As she spoke, her brow furrowed. It occurred to James that during the year they had lived side-by-side at Little Briars, Wendy and Mrs. Hoggett had become if not friends then at least used to one another, despite the difference in their ages.

  “Seemed I ought to bring it and properly pay my respects, as it were,” Wendy was saying, sniffing the flask skeptically. “She always said it did her a world of good, but it tastes like what you gave me when I had worms.”

  “How much did you have?”

  “Just a nip before we left the church. Come on, everyone’s leaving. We don’t have to stay any longer.”

  “Who’s that fellow over there?” James asked. “The one sketching the church. I can’t place him, but he looks familiar.”

  Wendy tipped back the brim of her hat and squinted at the man. “The fellow behind Mr. Marston? I’ve never seen him before.”

  “That’s what I thought.” But the more James thought about it, the more certain he was that he had indeed seen this stranger before. He took a step nearer to get a better look. Even beneath the bulk of his overcoat, the man was visibly thin. He had dark hair and tawny skin that suggested a recent holiday someplace sunny.

  “Funny that Mr. Marston came,” Wendy said. “I can’t remember the last time I saw him out and about. I think he trimmed his beard for the occasion. Mrs. Hoggett would have been touched.” She took another pull from the flask and winced, then gestured with her chin toward the man with the sketchpad. “Your stranger is getting kidnapped by Mary.” Indeed, the vicar’s wife was shepherding the man toward the house. “Looks like he’s being carted off for tea and stale biscuits at the vicarage with the rest of us. So you’ll get a chance to see if you know him after all.”

  LEO HAD HOPED THAT by loitering in the churchyard he’d get taken up by the vicar or his wife, and his plan had worked better than he expected. He gladly let himself be swept along from the churchyard into the vicarage along with the funeral-goers.

  “Daniel,” Mrs. Griffiths said, “This is Mr. Page.” She brought Leo to a man of about fifty who wore rumpled clerical garb. His gray hair stood up in improbable angles on one side of his head, and it looked like he had shaved with neither a looking glass nor the slightest interest in the results. “He’s writing a book on—what was it, Mr. Page? Owen, put down that cat or it’s straight to bed for you!” She scurried off to rescue the cat from the arms of a small boy.

  “Stone tracery in the Cotswold wool churches. More of a pamphlet, really.” He held up his sketchpad. “Likely not very thrilling except to fellow students of church history,” he said with a sheepish shrug. He had deliberately picked a topic too dull to inspire unwelcome questions and too obscure to have his ignorance challenged. Usually, he relied on bird watching as a cover story for why he was poking around, but for a bird watcher to come to Worcestershire in December strained credulity.

  “You’ll want to talk to Dr. Sommers, then,” the vicar said, shaking his hand distractedly and jutting his chin in the direction of the man Leo thought he had recognized in the graveyard.

  Leo most definitely wanted to talk to the doctor. Having been called away from the dinner party to attend a patient, Sommers was the only person connected with the dead woman with a halfway decent alibi. Also, if Sommers was who Leo thought he was, then he was responsible for a tidy little scar on Leo’s right arm. Likely Sommers had sewed up many a bullet wound during the war and had long since forgotten the faces of his patients, but there was a chance that Sommers would remember the encounter as well as Leo did. If that were the case, he wanted to find out sooner rather than later.

  “Sommers, there you are,” the vicar said. “Mr. Page is writing about those bunnies of yours.”

  Leo turned in time to see Dr. Sommers blush a lovely shade of pink. He was every bit as handsome as Leo remembered: broad shoulders, wavy hair the color of caramel, warm brown eyes, and a mouth that gave Leo very distinct notions. He looked younger than he had when he spent that night in Caen fishing a bullet out of Leo’s bicep, but everyone seemed younger when they weren’t in the middle of a war. He supposed it was regular sleep and not being shot at that worked the magic, which meant he wasn’t about to find out firsthand any time soon.

  “Leo Page.” He put out his hand. “Your bunnies?” he asked, arching an eyebrow. Sommers’ hand was chilly from the outdoors. Leo let the handshake go a moment too long, watching the blush creep back into Sommers’ cheeks. Well, well. Perhaps this case would not be entirely tedious.

  “He means the three hares, our most notable church window, of course.”

  “Of course,” Leo echoed, trying to sound like he knew this already. He really ought to have stuck with the bird watching excuse.

  “My uncle was the vicar before Griffiths here. He made quite a study of that window.”

  That didn’t explain why Griffiths called the window your bunnies, but Leo wasn’t going to press the point. He’d happily let the conversation drift away from this window he ought to have known about. “You grew up here, then?”

  That shouldn’t have been a difficult question, but Sommers furrowed his brow. “I lived with my uncle during school holidays,” he said. Then he tilted his head a bit and squinted his eyes as if trying to place Leo.

  “I’m so sorry to hear about your Mrs. Hoggett,” Leo said.

  For some reason, Sommers fell silent. “It was kind of the Griffiths to do this,” he finally said, with a faint air of defensiveness, as if Leo had wondered aloud why they were all standing about awkwardly. “Nobody wanted to send Edith and Cora—that’s Miss Pickering and Miss Delacourt, over there on the sofa—home directly after the funeral. Mrs. Hoggett lived with them.”

  Leo murmured his assent and regarded the two older ladies. They had been mentioned in the dossier, so he knew who they were. The fluffy one in the fashionable hat was Miss Cora Delacourt, who had figured prominently in the scandal sheets of nearly half a century earlier. The other lady, an almost wraithlike presence
with iron-gray hair and an ensemble evidently cobbled together from several decades’ worth of mourning attire, had to be Miss Edith Pickering, a native of this village.

  “Who’s that large man standing behind them?” Leo knew from the dossier that it was Armstrong, but he wanted to get Sommers talking.

  “That’s Colonel Armstrong, and the fellow beside him is his secretary,” Sommers said. “Edward Norris.”

  “That fellow is a secretary?” Leo couldn’t help but stare at the young man. The photograph in the dossier hadn’t done him justice. Blond hair, chiseled jaw, easily six feet tall. He looked like he belonged in the pictures—or rather he would if he didn’t have the air of a man trying to fade into the wallpaper. It wasn’t every day one saw a man so handsome look so damned rabbity. “Shouldn’t he be in advertisements for shaving soap or hair tonic or something?”

  Sommers’ soft chuckle made Leo absurdly proud of himself. “The ladies are properly appreciative,” Sommers murmured.

  “Only the ladies?” Leo asked easily, casual enough that he could pretend he hadn’t said anything indiscreet, but enough of a hint that a like-minded man wouldn’t miss it.

  Leo expected the doctor to blush, but instead, he bit his lip and gave Leo that inquisitive look again. Leo would have wagered that he was wondering if he had seen Leo in the sort of club that catered to men of their pursuits. Lord, what must it be like to have a face like that, to have all your thoughts and feelings written there for all the world to see? Such a liability.