Rather than answer, Sebastian reached for a volume of eighteenth-century Scottish sermons and opened the flyleaf to a scrawled, nearly illegible signature. Alistair Coombs. He looked up. “These books belonged to the village’s previous schoolmaster?”
Archie nodded. “Most everything you see here was his. He had no heirs that we knew of, so we just left it all for Flanagan. He was happy enough to have it.”
Sebastian closed the book and slipped it back into place before pulling out another, then another.
“What are you looking for?” asked Archie, watching him.
Sebastian opened a volume of John Donne’s poetry and turned the flyleaf to face the young Squire.
“Well, I’ll be,” whispered Archie as he stared down at the familiar signature written in a tight, cramped hand.
The Reverend Benedict Ainsley Underwood.
Chapter 55
In the end, they found nearly half a dozen books from the vicar’s library tucked in amongst those left by Alistair Coombs.
“What the devil!” swore Archie as Sebastian opened yet another of the vicar’s volumes. “I want Underwood clapped in irons! The sanctimonious, traitorous, murdering bastard.”
Sebastian calmly set the volume aside. “A moment ago you were convinced the killer was Major Weston.”
Archie stared at him, breath coming hard and fast enough to visibly jerk his chest. “You’re saying you don’t think Underwood is the killer? But his books are here!”
Sebastian studied the titles of the small stack of volumes. Old Alistair Coombs’s reading tastes had run mainly to histories and sermons. But the books borrowed from the vicar’s library were all poetry. “Think about this: Why would Underwood go through the trouble of killing Flanagan, yet not bother to remove his books from Flanagan’s shelves?”
“Maybe he forgot they were here. Or—or maybe he was interrupted before he had the chance to gather them up.”
“Perhaps. By all means, I think you should ask the good Reverend for an explanation.”
Archie went to stand in the open doorway, his hands on his hips as he watched Constable Nash and one of the cottagers load Daray Flanagan’s body into a cart. “When is this killing going to end?” he said after a moment, his voice less angry now, more shaken.
“When anyone who could possibly identify the killer is dead.”
Archie turned to meet Sebastian’s gaze, resignation mingling with a wild look of lost innocence in the young Squire’s eyes.
While Archie stormed off to confront the vicar, Sebastian quietly called for his curricle and drove out to the Dower House. Except he didn’t expect to find Major Eugene Weston there.
There were times when one simple piece of evidence, read wrong, could throw a murder investigation entirely off course. In this case, that bit of evidence was a short line of poetry from an Elizabethan play.
The rest is silence. Those four words, tucked into Emma Chandler’s dead hand, had suggested a killer who was not simply literate, but erudite. A killer who, in casting about in his mind for one more clue that might point to suicide, was educated and well read enough to come up with a Shakespearean quote. That, combined with the revelation of Emma’s search for the gentleman who’d raped her mother, had inevitably led Sebastian to focus on a narrow segment of the parish’s residents.
He wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him before, that there might be more than one killer at work here. Was it simply too difficult to believe that this small, seemingly peaceful village harbored not one but two murderers, even though he already knew its bucolic atmosphere to be deceptive? Was it really that simple? Two killers: one a new arrival to Ayleswick, educated, and so fond of poetry that he occasionally helped himself to volumes from the vicar’s library. And the other . . .
Who?
Virtually any one of the district’s “better sort” could conceivably be involved with Major Weston in his smuggling venture, and each could likewise have had a reason to kill Sybil Moss and Hannah Grant all those years ago. But the death of Daray Flanagan opened up an entirely new possibility, one Sebastian pondered as he drove through fields ripe with golden grain. Because if it was Flanagan who had tucked that Shakespearean quote into Emma Chandler’s hand, then the field of other suspects had just been thrown wide-open. There was no need for the second killer to be literary. He need not even be literate.
It was a realization that produced a significant shift in how Sebastian viewed everything he’d learned that past week. It forced him to reevaluate every assumption he’d made and each conclusion he’d reached. And when he stepped back from all he’d thought he understood and looked at the village and its troubled history again with fresh eyes, a different pattern emerged.
A pattern that was as compelling as it was profoundly, personally troubling.