Free A Dreadful Murder by Minette Walters Page B

September.
    Was he fleeing Kent to avoid a murder charge? Had the Chief Constable realised that he couldn’t protect his friend for ever?
    * * *
    Taylor looked up in surprise when Henry Warde was shown into his office on the afternoon of 17 September. He had spoken to the man by telephone only the day before and Warde had made no mention of a trip to the city.
    He stood up to shake the Chief Constable’s hand. ‘There’s nothing to add to what I told you yesterday,’ Taylor said with regret. ‘London’s a big place. If Blaine and Farrell are here, no one’s seen them.’
    Warde lowered himself into a chair. He looked tired and depressed. ‘That’s not why I came.’ He took a folded piece of paper from his breast pocket and handed it to the Superintendent. ‘Charles Luard killed himself this morning. He left me this letter.’
    Taylor stared at him in shock. ‘
Killed
himself?’ he echoed. ‘How? Why? I thought he was staying with your brother.’
    ‘He was. He wrote some letters during the night then left early this morning to throw himself under a train.’ He gestured towards the folded paper. ‘He explains it in there.’
    My dear Henry,
    I am sorry to return your kindness and long friendship in this way, but I feel it is best to join Caroline in the second life at once. I am tired and I do not want to live any longer.
    I thought I was strong enough to bear up against the terrible letters that arrive every day. But I find I am not. The dreadful murder of my wife has robbed me of all my happiness.
    The sympathy of so many friends kept me going for a while but in this last day something seems to have snapped. The strength has left me and I care for nothing except to be with her again.
    So goodbye, dear friend,
    Charles
    Taylor rested his forehead in his hands. ‘We let him down. We should have realised he was as much a victim of the murder as his wife was.’
    ‘He told my brother he’d lost hope of anyone being convicted.’
    With a sigh, Taylor opened his bottom drawer and took out a bottle of brandy and a couple of glasses. ‘What about the Luards’ son?’ He filled the glasses and pushed one across the desk. ‘Didn’t you tell me his ship was due to dock in Southampton this afternoon?’
    Warde nodded. ‘Poor fellow. He’s barely had time to come to terms with his mother’s death, and now he has to learn of his father’s.’ He reached for his glass and downed the contents in a single gulp. ‘If Charles had waited, the lad might have persuaded him out of it.’
    Taylor lifted his own glass and warmed the liquid between his hands. ‘It’s kinder this way. If your friend had killed himself anyway, his son would have had to bear the guilt.’
    ‘Perhaps.’
    ‘Was one of the letters addressed to him?’
    Warde nodded. ‘The others are to Caroline’s family in Cumberland and the staff at their home at Ightham Knoll. There was also one for my brother.’ Warde nodded to the page in front of Taylor. ‘It said similar things to mine.’
    A picture of the Major-General, writing letters by gaslight, sprang into Taylor’s mind. It was a sad and lonely image. An old man quietly doing a last duty by his son and friends before he killed himself.
    ‘You have to make this public,’ Scotland Yard’s Taylor urged, pushing the page across the desk. ‘If you don’t, his enemies will claim he killed himself out of guilt. Or worse, that he left a confession which you and your brother have suppressed.’
    Warde reached for the brandy bottle. ‘They’ll claim it anyway,’ he said bitterly. ‘Publishing what he wrote won’t convince them he was innocent. The only way to do that is to prove someone else was guilty.’
    But, as both men now feared, that would never happen.

Epilogue
    The final inquest into Caroline Luard’s death ruled that she’d been murdered by ‘person or persons unknown’. The verdict on her husband’s death was that he had committed suicide while ‘temporarily