The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fic - By Mike Ashley Page 0,197

– a pattern of Chinese figures in blues and reds and deep gold, sitting in a formal garden. But it was stained now, and torn in places. A temporary wall, still there, divided the spacious room in half. If there had been any of the original furniture here, it had certainly now gone.

He made his way to the door, found himself in a passage, and began to explore. The stairs had been battered and bruised by the comings and goings of staff and patients, and the only furniture he saw were the remnants of cots in a few rooms, mostly with legs missing or springs broken. Not worth removing, he thought, when the clinic was closed. He wondered if Sir John had been aware of the state of the house, or didn’t care. He walked though the rooms, noting how they had been used, and how they had been left. A broken window on the ground floor had allowed leaves and rain to ruin the floorboards, and a desk in what must have been Matron’s office lay on its side, a nest of mice or squirrels in one half-opened drawer.

He found nothing of interest – except for signs that someone had been here before him, footprints in the dust, a bed of worn blankets and quilts by the coal stove in the kitchen, and indications that someone had also cooked there; a dented teapot still on the cast-iron top, and a saucepan on the floor.

Who had been in this house? A vagrant, looking for shelter against the winter cold and happening on it quite by accident; or someone who had come to this house because he knew it was there? A former patient? Or someone else?

Hamish said, “Look at the dust.”

And he lit a match, studying the pattern of footprints hardly visible in the pale light coming through the dirty window panes.

The person who had been here had left his mark. Two shoes, one dragging a little as if the ankle didn’t bend properly. And the small round ferrule of a walking stick. Or a lame man’s cane.

Rutledge knelt there considering the prints, hearing again Mrs Gravely’s description of how Sir John’s December caller had sounded coming up the walk to the door. These prints were not recent. He would swear to that. Fresh dust had settled over them, almost obliterating them in places.

He went back through the house looking for something, anything, that might be a clue to the interloper.

All he found was a crushed packet that once held cigarettes. It had been tossed into the coal stove and forgotten. He smoothed it out as best he could and saw that it was an Australian brand.

Giving it up, he went back to the door on to the terrace and stepped out, shutting it behind him.

Jesse was still sitting in his boat, smoking a cigarette of his own.

“Where can I buy Australian cigarettes?” Rutledge asked the man.

“Portsmouth, at a guess. London. Not here. No call for them here. Why? Develop a taste for them in the war, did you?”

“No. I found an empty box in the house. Someone had been living there.”

Jesse seemed not to be too surprised. “Men out of work in this weather take what shelter they can find. I came on one asleep in my boat a year back. Wrapped in a London newspaper for warmth, he was. I bought him a breakfast, and sent him on his way.”

“Any Australians in Dartmouth?”

“Up at the Royal Navy College on the hill, there might be,” Jesse told him, manoeuvring the boat expertly into the stream again. “But they’d be officers, wouldn’t they? Not likely to be breaking into a house.” The ornate red brick college – more like a palace than a school, and completed in 1905 – had seen the present king, George V, attend as a cadet. Jesse bent his back to the oars, grinning. “What do you want with a derelict old house?”

“It’s not what I want,” Rutledge said pensively, “but what someone else could very easily wish for.” He turned slightly to look up the reaches of the River Dart, already a broad stream here as it fed into the harbour. “It wasn’t always in disrepair.”

But to kill for it? Hamish wanted to know.

That, Rutledge answered silently, would depend on what Sergeant Gibson discovered in London.

He found a telephone, after Jesse had delivered him back to the old quay in Dartmouth. Watching through the window as the ferry plied the waters between the two towns,