by Eric Reed
***
Grace spent the morning and part of the afternoon patrolling the area, hearing complaints about looting—Stu had not been alone in his endeavors—exchanging words with emergency workers placing barricades around the more dangerous points, redirecting an occasional vehicle that wandered into the partly blocked streets, and generally “showing bobbies were on the beat,” as Wallace had put it.
The air, smelling of smoke and ash, seemed corrosive. She exchanged a few words with Mr. Elliott, who was gingerly picking through the remains of his church. His cardboard box so far held only a few severely twisted candlesticks.
All the time Grace couldn’t help worrying over what she’d found in Stu’s bedroom and what Wallace had been told by Sefton. They’d exchanged information before she left the station for her patrol.
Wallace was gratifyingly impressed at everything Grace had discovered, particularly the dead woman’s identity. According to Wallace, Ronny had been planning to set himself up as a black marketeer. What interested Grace more was that it appeared Phyllis had lied about not seeing Ronny, who had mentioned his intention to visit her in Gateshead.
Did all this new information put the solution of the cases nearer or only complicate them further?
Grace was asking herself that question when Wallace, looking agitated, unexpectedly joined her on the street and threw the situation into further chaos.
When he finished telling her about his confrontation with Sergeant Baines she stared at him, almost speechless. “How peculiar!”
“Peculiar? That’s one word for it. The dead woman turns out to be living with a girl from the area. Meantime Baines suddenly starts showing an interest in the case and takes the paperwork home to study after letting work slide so long and expecting us to cover up for him. And this after not bothering to send out a request for missing persons information. Then he loses the paperwork on the tram, or so he says.
“It’s suggestive, don’t you think?” Wallace continued. “If the woman came all the way over here, she must have expected to meet someone. It would have to be a regular and well-paying arrangement, though, given the distance to travel and in the blackout to boot.”
“And here’s another thing,” Grace replied, “why was he attending that séance under a false name to begin with? Could he be trying to find out if Mrs. Llewellyn charges fees? That would leave her open to obtaining money by false pretenses. So he concealed his identity and hoped no one recognised him as a policeman, given the group used to meet around the corner in the church hall.”
“None of those people would recognize him, Grace. Respectable persons never see the inside of a police station, unless they’re burgled and their silver tea service is stolen.”
They went around the barricades where the bombing had exposed a shop cellar to the sky.
“Regular Aladdin’s Cave down there for the criminally minded,” Wallace remarked. “I’ve been thinking, and it looks as if we may have another possible suspect in our first murder. Stu McPherson. You say he denied touching the woman. But can you believe him? He wouldn’t think twice about knocking her down to get her bag.”
“His mother says he’s only been like that since his brother was killed in the war.”
“She would, wouldn’t she? Did you ever wonder about Rob McPherson, Stu’s role model? He was a career criminal in the making. Knew Ronny, which is how Stu knew him. Ran errands for the Andersons. The war started and now he’s a dead hero. Otherwise he’d be alive and serving time.”
Chapter Thirty-five
Rutherford lay on his bed. His attempt to form an approximation of a cone of power had failed. If only the Luftwaffe hadn’t chosen last night to attack, who knows what might have happened. Then again, what remained of the temple had been spared. So perhaps, after all, the ritual had had some effect.
He had lain awake for some time. The concoction he’d prepared had not helped, nor had his attempts at self-hypnotism. The book he had consulted dated to the earliest days of mesmerism and had, perhaps, not been reliable.
Now he attempted to rest, draped in gently purring cats, pondering the fiasco at the temple.
Lucifer snored against his neck and kneaded his chest. Rutherford finally dozed.
A thud made him open his eyes
There was another.
Had the Luftwaffe returned?
He climbed off the bed, spilling cats everywhere.
He heard it again.
Going into the front room and peering around the edge of the blackout curtain he saw a man lift a sledgehammer and bring it down against the remains of a temple wall.
A knot of people had gathered. Several looked familiar, but Rutherford and the neighbors had little to do with one another so he could not connect faces with names, except for Agnes Cooper in her familiar tartan headsquare.
The group obviously intended to attack the temple and reduce its remains to rubble.
Rutherford threw on a coat, stumbling in his haste to cross the street.
“Stop this! What do you think you’re up to?” he cried.
“We’re removing an evil from the world,” Agnes Cooper informed him.
“This is public property!”
“It’s the devil’s property!” Agnes flourished a hammer at him.
Frantically Rutherford plunged into the group, grabbing the arm of a man to prevent him using his crowbar. The arm might as well have been a metal bar for all the effect Rutherford’s grasp had on it. “Harraway, man, or you’ll get yourself hurt,” the man growled at him.
“You’ll be sorry,” Rutherford yelled impotently. “You don’t understand, there’s power here that can save us!”
“Like it saved us last night? All it saved was itself. The Lord saves us, Mr. Rutherford,” Agnes Cooper shouted back.
“Then why did he allow Hitler to be born? Where is your god when you need him? The old gods, they will come if you summon them properly, not like yours!”
The man he had attempted to stop thrust his crowbar under the corner of an altar and heaved.
Rutherford felt tears filling his eyes. He tried to halt this ultimate sacrilege and felt a sharp pain in his shoulder blade. As he turned, another rock hit him in the chest.
The women were stoning him.
He lifted his arm barely in time to deflect a piece of broken brick from his face.
They’ve gone mad, Rutherford thought. They are going to kill me.
He saw Agnes Cooper bend down and reach into the grass to pick up another stone.
She let out a scream and began shaking her arm. Rutherford’s rat trap had fastened its jaws to her hand.
Demolition efforts and rock-throwing came to a halt as everyone stared at Agnes, who managed to extract her hand from the trap as Rutherford staggered away, shaken, certain his execution was about to resume.
But before it could, a familiar voice drew the group’s attention.
“What is going on here?” Mr. Elliott had come trotting down the street. “You have no business doing what you’re doing. And you, Miss Cooper, need to go inside and attend to that hand.”
He looked around at the gathering. “You’re all good Christians, aren’t you?” He fixed his gaze on the big man standing by the altar with a crowbar. “How many gods are there?” he asked him.
The man looked at his feet like an embarrassed schoolboy. “One, vicar.”
“That’s right. So this temple is of no account, is it? Whatever god its builders might have imagined they were honoring doesn’t exist. If you truly believe it would be best to tear it down, then you must believe that there are other gods who wield power in this world.”
At that moment, alerted by the commotion, Grace and Wallace arrived. Whether or not the crowd would have been swayed by Mr. Elliott’s theological argument, they took police orders to disperse seriously.
As they began to leave, Rutherford, furious and emboldened, shouted after them. “How can you be so ignorant, trying to destroy our only protection? Antenociticus will save us from the Germans if we approach him in the proper fashion!”
Then Rutherford, too, returned home. He resolved to make a suitable offering to the Egyptian cat goddess Bast. After all, his feline friends had saved him. If he had not set out rat traps to feed them, he would doubtless have been seriously injured before the vicar arrived.
He believed in the power of the old gods. As he had declared, they would come if you summoned them properly.
Chapter Thirty-six
Grace caught up to Rutherford as he opened his front door. “May I have a word with you?”
Wary, he invited her into his cluttered front room. From corners came the thump, thump, thump of cats leaving their perches to swarm around the master’s ankles. He lit the gaslight and Grace again noted how much her surroundings resembled a disordered museum full of antiquities.
“I attended the séance,” she told him. “It was interesting.”
“There’ll be time enough to chat with spirits when the Germans are defeated,” Rutherford replied, bending to stroke his furred acolytes one by one as if bestowing benedictions. He gave her a searching look as he straightened up
“Just now at the temple you said its gods would save us if they were approached in the proper fashion,” Grace said. “I hear you attempted to engage their aid last night without success.”
“The conditions were not exactly right, but I’m hoping we produced sufficient energy for the message to reach Berlin.”
“I know your former group wouldn’t assist you in the effort but could you approach these gods by yourself to ask them for help? Had you in fact already begun to seek their aid on your own?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Keep in mind, Mr. Rutherford, I also possess this kind of knowledge. To me it appears as if a plea for help was made with an offering at the altars.”
Rutherford’s stooped shoulders sagged. “I don’t understand.”
“An offering consisting of two bodies, Mr. Rutherford, each laid at the base of an altar with their limbs arranged as left-handed swastikas.”
Rutherford collapsed into the chair by his desk. Two cats immediately jumped into his lap. “I knew it,” he muttered. “When you kept knocking at my door, when you surprised me at my fire-watching post. The police want to make me the scapegoat for the murders.”
“Why would a murderer arrange his victims the way they were found? There had to be a reason for it, and how many people even know the significance of a reversed swastika? You told me yourself you thought being the opposite of theirs, such a symbol would be effective against the Germans.”
“To think that I trusted you.” Rutherford fell silent, the cats purring contentedly in his lap.
“You never trusted me, Mr. Rutherford. You don’t trust anyone. You thought with my background, my special knowledge, I might be of use to you.”
Rutherford laughed bitterly. “The old gods can be cruel and capricious, even when they are approached carefully. I didn’t kill either of those people, but it’s obvious you don’t believe me.”
“Both died from head injuries. Injuries easily delivered by surprise from behind in the blackout.”
“You have it all worked out, don’t you? I should have realized.” Rutherford pulled himself together. He gently removed the cats from his lap and stood. “You are going to have to leave. I have nothing else to say.”
Unaccustomed to waiting for their dinner, the cats were becoming restless. There were mewlings of complaint.
“How do you feed all these cats, Mr. Rutherford?”
He looked startled and suddenly defensive. “What do you mean?”
“It is against the law to waste food fit for human consumption. You could feed a family with what it must take to feed so many cats.”
“My pets eat rats. I set out traps.”
“You can’t possibly catch enough rats.”
“But I do. I leave traps along my route to work and check them coming and going.”
“I have the authority to have all these cats removed, Mr. Rutherford.”
Rutherford looked around at his milling charges. “You wouldn’t do that, would you?” His voice came out in a weak gasp.
“I can and I will, unless you are more forthcoming.”
There was another long silence during which the cats’ squalling became louder. “All right,” Rutherford finally said. “I moved the dead woman’s arms and legs. I admit it. She was lying there when I went over to see if my traps had caught anything before I set out for the waterworks. In fact, I tripped over her. But I’m not a murderer!” He put his hand on the desk to steady himself, then sat back down.
“Only someone who tampers with dead bodies and doesn’t report them to the police.”
Rutherford looked at her, his eyes shining with tears. “It was an opportunity. How could I ignore it? I believe it was an invitation from Antenociticus to call out to him for aid.”
He paused for a moment. “Who can say how the gods think? Do you suppose it was easy, moving the poor woman? It was horrible, horrible. I had to force myself to touch her. Before I got to the waterworks I vomited more than once.”
“I fail to see why you considered this arrangement a cry for help, Mr. Rutherford.”
“He is a purely local god. The arrangement of her limbs was a plea to Antenociticus that he defend us against those who are attacking his people under the banner of a perverted form of the sacred symbol, do you see?”
It made a certain amount of sense, Grace admitted to herself. At least for someone who thought like Rutherford. In his way the man was a patriot, if somewhat unhinged by normal standards. “But you didn’t notify the police as you should have done.”
“It wouldn’t have been a proper offering if I had. They would have had the woman removed immediately, wouldn’t they?”
“And what about Ronny Arkwright? Do you expect me to believe you didn’t arrange his body as well and failed to report it to the police, to boot? Even though you claim you didn’t kill him either?”
Rutherford shook his head violently. “You think I’m lying but I’ve told you the truth. I didn’t kill the woman but I did arrange her limbs. I never touched Ronny or his corpse.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
After leaving Rutherford, Grace returned to the police station. She considered going back to her lodgings but the moment Mavis arrived home she’d be playing foxtrots on the gramophone and what Grace needed was a less noisy place to think. The station was quiet except for the eternal laboured clicking of Constable Robinson at the typewriter.
Grace sat beside the shelves where the gas masks were kept and began making notes on a pad. Turning her thoughts into writing helped her think. She was confused. How could she believe Rutherford had tampered with one of the bodies at the temple but not the other, and had not murdered either one?
She began with the first victim, who had finally been identified as Mona Collingwood and who had been, strangely enough, the housemate of Phyllis Gibson. Or perhaps not so strange. Phyllis had moved to Gateshead from Benwell and may well have introduced Mona to one or more of her old clients.
Stu McPherson had confessed to robbing Mona after her handbag was found in his room but denied killing her.
Still, it wasn’t the only possibility.
Rutherford could have killed her for ritualistic use.
What about Ronny, who had planned to visit Phyllis upon returning to the area? Could he have had a dispute with his former lover’s housemate?
Grace penciled a dark line underneath her Mona Collingwood list and wrote down Ronny Arkwright.
The fact he’d also been found dead at the temple, his limbs arranged in the same fa
shion as Mona’s, pointed to Rutherford with his wild, necromantic schemes as the culprit, even if Rutherford wouldn’t admit it.
Then, too, Charlie Gibson had plenty of reason to hate Ronny. Impregnating his daughter, deliberately breaking his arm and crippling him. And he had got into a shouting match with Ronny the night Ronny died. He could have waited outside the pub for Ronny, followed him, and caught up to him near the ruins.
Phyllis, who had borne his child, also had a grievance against Ronny. Constable Wallace had mentioned her vicious temper.
So might Ronny’s widow. Despite Mavis’ denial, it was obvious to Grace it was Ronny who’d bloodied her nose.
What about Hans? Could he have been searching for Ronny that night trying to protect his friend Mavis? Hans had outbursts and Joop had wondered what he might do during one.
Then there were any number of unsavoury acquaintances. Ronny planned to move into the black market after he’d bribed a doctor to get a medical discharge. Had one of those acquaintances been afraid that Ronny might interfere with his business?
She heard Baines’ phone ring. A moment later Baines rushed out, pulling on his jacket, and was gone almost before the door’s bell stopped jingling.
Grace grabbed her coat, stuffed the pad in her pocket, and followed after Baines.
For a constable with barely a week on the job to be shadowing her superior was highly irregular, but some second sense had urged her to do so.
Despite a dying sun filling windows with blood, Grace felt dangerously exposed. All Sergeant Baines needed to do was look over his shoulder and he would see her.
Baines walked in the direction of the river. His progress was unsteady, reaching Scotswood Road as a tram was pulling up to the kerb. “Shop at Binns” advised the advertisement on the front of the tram.
Baines boarded the tram.
Grace had no time to think. She raced to the tram and got on as it started into motion.
Baines could hardly miss seeing her. “Miss Baxter, where are you going?”
