Where Nicholas had been carving his fleet of ocean liners, there were scraps and curls of wood, the fineness of sawdust from sanding, the small splashes of paint from finishing touches put to bow and portholes and the funnels. He hadn’t put them away, swept and dusted, before swallowing the laudanum. It was as if he’d expected to come back to them tomorrow.

But where the poet worked there was only the shawl-covered typewriter. No balled up sheets of paper, no pen or pencil lying where she’d scribbled a line to think about it, or tried a rhyme and found it weak. She had known she wasn’t going to sit there ever again and write. She’d prepared for her death.

His hand came down hard on the embossed leather cover, hard enough to sting the flesh as he swore aloud. Inventively.

Olivia Marlowe had bequeathed O. A. Manning—all her papers and letters and contracts—to her half brother Stephen. And Stephen was dead.

Where were these papers now? And what was in them?

Chapter 9

9

But neither Rachel nor the rector could tell Rutledge what had become of Olivia Marlowe’s papers.

“I—I think Olivia’s will is still in probate. And Stephen’s as well,” Rachel said. “I really wasn’t interested in the papers. I mean, I was, in the sense that they were important for a study of Livia’s poems, but not in any personal sense. If you’re asking me if there was box sitting in the middle of a room, marked Papers for Stephen, or something, there wasn’t. I just assumed—well, if she’d left them to him, he must have known where to look for them.”

She was standing in the doorway of the cottage where she was staying, and Rutledge could hear someone moving about inside, and then a bird singing from a cage. It was a pretty place, with vines swallowing the narrow little porch and hollyhocks leaning against the walls between the windows.

“Which firm is handling the wills?”

“Chambers and Westcott for Olivia and for Nicholas. I don’t know about Stephen. He had a friend in the City who was a solicitor.”

It would be easy enough to find that out in London.

He thanked her and walked on to the rectory, expecting Smedley to be tending his garden, but the grim-faced housekeeper announced that he was having a nap and she wasn’t about to disturb him.

Rutledge was just turning away when Smedley came down the stairs into the hall, his hair standing up in the back and his shirttail on one side hanging out of his trousers.

“Good afternoon, Inspector,” he said, voice still thick with sleep. “Give me two minutes, and I’ll walk in the garden with you.”