A Question of Honor: A Bess Crawford Mystery by Charles Todd

Author:Charles Todd [Todd, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Historical
ISBN: 9780062237156
Amazon: 0062237152
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2013-08-27T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

We talked of other things after that. But ten miles from home, I asked the Colonel Sahib, “Do you think we should tell Mother? About Lieutenant Wade?”

“We might as well,” he said, resigned to the inevitable. “She’ll find out sooner or later.”

Before I went to bed that night, I wrote to Mr. Kipling. I told him what I could about the death of Mr. and Mrs. Wade, and about the Subedar’s brother, and asked him if he could use his contacts in India to look into the matter.

Mr. Kipling had known so many people out there. In the newspaper business, in the Army, in the police. If anyone could discover useful information about that brother, it was he.

Simon was away, and so I spent several days enjoying being home, as much as I could, given what was happening in France, the war, the epidemic. Not to mention Corporal Caswell’s whereabouts.

My mother broached the subject of Lieutenant Wade one afternoon when we were in the kitchen, putting up jars of plums.

“I don’t know what to tell you about the man,” she said, setting aside the jar she had been working with and reaching for another. “I was content when he volunteered to see Mary Standish safely to England, and I wasn’t surprised that he took her all the way to the Middletons. That was a kindness.”

But was it? I asked myself. Was he merely trying to be sure little Alice had died of natural causes, or to see if whatever had happened to his own sister had happened to her? After all, it was not until he knew for certain that Mary Standish was not going to travel with him back to India that he killed the Caswell family. Would they still be alive if Mary Standish had decided to return to her husband? I couldn’t put that out of my mind.

My mother wiped her hands on her apron and stared out the window at the summer sunlight beating down on the gardens. “I’d always told myself that if I could have seen his face—Lieutenant Wade’s—as the MFP took him into custody, I’d have known whether he was guilty or not. But of course that never happened.” She picked up another jar and began to fill it with the fruit.

I had seen his face when I told him his parents were dead—and I hadn’t been able to judge anything. Whether he was lying about not knowing or if he thought I would have doubts about his guilt if I was convinced he hadn’t known about two of the murders.

“Well,” my mother said, as we finished the last of the jars, “we aren’t going to solve the puzzle of Lieutenant Wade this afternoon, are we?”

And we dropped the subject, walking out to the orchard to see how the apple crop was coming.

When Simon arrived at last, I had no chance to speak to him alone. It was the next morning before I could walk down to the cottage, just before breakfast.

He

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