by Charles Todd
Kneeling there, his weapon beside him, he was fairly sure he was invisible from the ground, but to be safe, he pulled an old dark gray hood out of the scissor sharpener’s blouse and draped it over his head and shoulders. It was, he knew, almost exactly the same color as the stone around him.
Once more, he settled down to wait.
It was ten minutes to the hour when he saw his quarry alight from a motorcar that had just pulled up. Another man and a woman arrived with Hutchinson, chatting quietly as they turned toward the Cathedral. He could see the man’s face clearly now, smug and satisfied with himself, a slight smile lifting his lips as he spoke to the woman beside him.
The angle was excellent. The target unsuspecting. He let the Captain come a little closer across the greensward, just clear of where the motorcars were stopping, steadied his breathing and emptied his mind of any emotion. Then he took careful aim, almost without thinking adjusting to the man’s measured pace and the light wind. Old habits die hard.
And calmly, slowly, he squeezed the trigger.
The echoes against the stone were deafening, but he took no notice, his scope still trained on the quarry as Hutchinson’s body reacted to the hit before he could even flinch from the sound of the shot. Without a word, he crumpled to the ground and did not move. Only the red stain spreading across his stiff white shirtfront showed that he had been struck.
The woman, her hands to her face, was screaming, and everyone at the barricade turned to stare in her direction, then looked wildly around for the source of the shot. The other man was kneeling, frantically trying to loosen Hutchinson’s cravat and open his shirt. But it was useless. That had been a heart shot, there was nothing to be done. Still the man kept working, unable to believe that it was hopeless.
Satisfied, the scissor sharpener ejected the single cartridge casing and began to disassemble his rifle, taking his time, ignoring the screams and cries below. He knew what was happening, he didn’t need to look. Some were running to the assistance of the fallen man, others fleeing toward the street behind them, toward The Lamb Inn, out of range for fear there would be a second shot. A few would be scanning the rooftops and windows of buildings on either side of the grass, looking in vain for the shooter. The greeters at the door had rushed into the sanctuary, crying havoc. He could hear the unnerved guests as they hurried out to see, and all the while, the organ music went on, as if in the loft the organist was unaware of what was happening below in the nave. Then the last notes trailed off as he must have realized something was wrong.
The scissors grinder made his way to the stairs and started down them, taking his time, careful not to lose his footing. When he reached the bottom step, he peered out a crack in the door, then opened it wider. No one. Either they were cowering in the nave or already outside. The bride’s motorcar was just arriving, adding to the chaos.
He began that long walk again, taking his time, reaching the Galilee Porch and the open doorway. Appearing bewildered and afraid, he stared vacantly around. No one paid him any heed. He inched sideways, making his way to his left. His bicycle was where he’d put it, but he didn’t mount it. Instead he walked it down the quiet street, back the way he’d come, toward the school. Several people from there were running toward the Cathedral, and one or two called out to him, asking what had happened.
He shook his head. “Terrible,” he said, “terrible.” His voice was shaking, he looked as if he might fall down from the shock, and they ran on. He continued his slow, painful way to the arch by the school. There just as the police were passing, he mounted his bicycle and pedaled sedately off, a graying scarecrow with a lined face and bony knees.
The police spent five hours searching the streets around the Cathedral, searching inside it despite the anxious wedding guests waiting to have their statements taken.
A constable reached the church tower, walking out into the narrow space around the battlements. He was an older man, staying on because the men who should have replaced him had long since rotted in the graveyards of Flanders or had come home without a limb or with other injuries. He looked down from this height at the target area and felt his stomach lurch as a wave of dizziness overcame him. Swiftly concluding that it was impossible to make such a shot from this position without being seen, he hurried back to the stairs, staring anxiously into the dim abyss, and nearly lost his dinner. By the time he’d reached the last step his heart was jumping in his chest.
“Nothing up there but the bats,” he told another constable on his way to climb to the Lantern tower over the crossing where the transepts met.
When it came time to take statements from those by the barricade, everyone’s attention had been focused on the arriving guests. They had seen nothing. As one constable put it, “A herd of green pigs could have come by, and if they were dressed to the nines, no one would have taken a bit of notice.”
In the end, the wedding went off at six o’clock, the bride red-eyed from hysterics, the bridegroom grim-faced. Captain Hutchinson had been in his family’s party. It was generally accepted that only a madman could have done such a thing, with so many people to witness it.
Wherever the madman was, he had cast a pall over the day, and more than one guest leaving after the ceremony had felt his hackles rise as he skirted the place where Hutchinson had fallen, expecting to hear the report of a rifle once more.
Two weeks after the murder, the police had made no progress at all. It was then that they called in Scotland Yard.
But not before the killer had struck again.
Chapter 3
The by-election was scheduled for the next week. The popular Tory candidate, Herbert Swift, arranged a torch-lit parade down the High Street, to end with a speech at the market cross. It was Medieval, the cross, the last seven feet missing. But the base was still intact, and Swift was to stand on it so that he could be seen as well as heard.
All went according to plan. The parade began at the pub named for Hereward the Wake, the eleventh-century hero of the Fens, and some thirty supporters followed their candidate down to the cross, chanting his name, their torches smoking and leaving a reeking trail behind them. The constable, a man named McBride, walked along with them, with an eye to keeping the peace, but the marchers were orderly and in good spirits.
It was all very dramatic, Swift thought, enjoying the spectacle. His rival, the Liberal candidate, was a dour man with no sense of style in his dress, his voice rough and his language rougher, and his meetings in a hired hall were enlivened only by the occasional snore from one of his audience.
Swift reached the plinth of the cross and prepared to step up on the base. He looked at the gathering crowd, many of them villagers come for the show, and felt a sense of satisfaction. It was a better turnout than he’d expected.
The torchlight flickered in the darkness, casting lurid shadows up and down the street and across the eager faces waiting for the speech to begin. The shops on either side of the two village Commons had closed for the day, their windows unlit and blank. Above the shops most of the shopkeepers or their tenants had already drawn their curtains. And the trees by the pond were dark sentinels at the far end of the second Common. This had been an ideal setting to hold his rally, and broadsheets had announced it for three days.
Swift savored the moment as he took his place on the broad footing of the cross and turned toward his supporters, his back to the pond. He was a student of history, and he thought that the scene before him could have taken place a hundred—two hundred—years earlier. It added a sense of continuity to what he was doing: standing for a seat in the House of Commons. A long line of men stretching back in time who were prepared to serve King and Country to the best of their ability were in the shadows of those trees, he thought, watching this twentieth-century descendant, judging him, and with any luck at all, approving of him.
He raised a hand for silence.
“The war is over,” he began, h
is voice carrying well, as it always did, giving his words added power. “And we are embarking on a peace that will last through our lifetime and that of the generations following us. Their children will not know what war is. Men have gathered at Versailles to hammer out the terms of that peace, and we here in England have paid a very high price for it. We are still paying. Even now our families don’t have enough to eat, work is hard to come by, and what work there is doesn’t bring a man enough in wages to keep his—”
His face vanished in a spray of blood and bone, and before anyone could move, he crumpled without a sound into the startled crowd just as the single shot rang out and seemed to fill the night with endless, mindless reverberations.
Chapter 4
London, September 1920
Rutledge stepped into the office of the Acting Chief Superintendent with some trepidation.
He had had a loud and vituperative argument with Markham at the end of his last case, accused of following his own instincts rather than official direction. The fact that in the end Rutledge had been proved right had added to Markham’s displeasure. He was a hardheaded, straightforward man who viewed intuition with suspicion and put his faith in the obvious. The dressing down had been personal as well as professional.
Keeping his own temper with an effort, Rutledge had drawn a deep breath, asking himself if every inquiry in Yorkshire, where Markham had come from when Chief Superintendent Bowles had had his heart attack, ended in a tidy packet tied with righteous ribbons. He had grimly withstood the storm, and then Markham had calmed down sufficiently to ask him if he was absolutely convinced of his facts.
He was. And said as much. Markham had thanked him and then dismissed him.
This morning Markham was finishing a report as Rutledge crossed the threshold, and looking up, he nodded in greeting.
“Cambridgeshire—the Fen country. Know it?”
“Around Ely? Yes, a little.”
“Someone’s walking around up there with a rifle, and so far he’s killed two people. A Captain Hutchinson who was about to attend a wedding, and a man named Swift who was standing for Parliament—just as he was beginning a speech.”
“A rifle?” Rutledge frowned. “They were turned in before we left France.”
“Then someone failed to do as he was ordered.”
“Are the two victims related in any way?”
“If Hutchinson was his intended target, no. If he got Hutchinson by mistake, we don’t know. The wedding that afternoon was to be attended by prominent churchmen, members of the government, a number of the aristocracy, and military men. If his target was one of them, it will take weeks to interview them and find a connection.”
“Was Swift a wedding guest as well?”
“He was not.”
“Are we certain the killer was a soldier?”
“We’re certain of nothing but the fact that we have two men dead, and too little to go on. Which is why the Yard has been asked to take over the inquiry.” He paused, considering Rutledge. “It would not do to hear of a third murder by this madman.”
In short, a swift conclusion to the inquiry was expected.
“I’ll remember that,” Rutledge said, not smiling.
Two hours later, he’d cleared his desk, packed his valise, and set out for Cambridge in his motorcar.
He spent the night there and the next morning headed north.
The sunny weather of yesterday had changed to damp, lowering clouds that obscured the unmade road, and the motorcar’s powerful headlamps bounced back at him from the soft, impenetrable wall of mist. At the crossroads, the narrow boards giving the names of villages in each direction appeared and disappeared like wraiths, and sound was muffled, confusing. At one point he could hear a train’s whistle in the distance but had no idea how far the tracks might be from where he was.
He drove with care, for the country could be treacherous. Lose one’s sense of direction in this flat, featureless landscape and the motorcar could plunge into one of the many drainage ditches that ran arrow straight across the Fens. A missed turn could land him into a field of soft black earth, miles from the nearest house. For that matter, he hadn’t seen a dwelling, much less another vehicle, for nearly half an hour.
The sounds of the train faded, then vanished altogether. It was, he thought, as if everything he knew, all that was familiar to him, even his senses, had been taken from him, leaving him to cope in a silent emptiness that had no yesterday or tomorrow, only the obscure present. Rather like death . . .
It was beginning to aggravate his claustrophobia.
Some time later, when he thought surely he must be nearing Ely, out of the mist came a strange sound, a clacking that he couldn’t place. A hay wain? No, because he couldn’t hear the jingle of harness or the familiar thud of hooves on the hard-packed roadbed.
Slowing, he peered through the windscreen, then stopped altogether. The last thing he wanted was to hit someone or something. Getting out, he walked forward a step at a time. He could see fewer than three paces ahead.
In the back of his mind, a voice was warning him to beware, but he had to know whether he was still on the road—or not.
Out of the gray mist, something stirred, then disappeared. He waited. In time it stirred again, creaking. He frowned, listening before going forward. But now there was silence.
What the hell was out there?
He moved on. Suddenly there was grass beneath his boots, where there had been road before. He turned and realized he couldn’t see his motorcar.
In the same instant, the creaking seemed to come from directly above him. His immediate reaction was to duck.
A breath of air touched his face, and it pushed aside the veil of the mist for a few seconds. Something loomed just above his head, and he tensed.
He stood stock-still, waiting for whatever it was to reveal itself. And again there was the faintest rift in the white curtain, and he realized that he was standing only a matter of feet from a windmill. Its sails, laden with damp, were creaking as if complaining of the weight.
A few more steps and he’d have collided with the nearest sail.
But where the devil was he? Surely he’d already passed Soham. Many of the windmills had been replaced with steam pumps, ugly black fingers of chimneys reaching skyward. But Soham’s still stood.
The sail above his head creaked again. Listening, he thought he could hear a pump somewhere in the distance.
A voice came through the mist.
“Who’s there?”
“A visitor,” Rutledge answered. He couldn’t make out the accent. “I think I’ve lost my way.”
“Do you need help?”
“Only to be told where I am. What is this mill?”
“Wriston Mill.”
And how the hell had he got to Wriston? It lay south of Ely, and a little west. Where had he missed his turn?
The voice said, “Are you walking? On a bicycle?”
“I have a motorcar. I left it back there. I didn’t know what the creaking sound was, and I got down to investigate.”
“Yes, well, you’d be better with a horse out here. They know what they’re about.”
“I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I’m—from Cambridge.”
“Schoolmaster or don?” the voice said, and from the tone of it, either occupation was equally to be despised.
“Neither. I’m trying to reach Ely. On a matter of business.”
“Well, you won’t make it alive in this. Foolish to have tried.”
“That may well be,” Rutledge answered. “But here I am.”
There was silence for a moment, and then Rutledge heard footsteps walking away.
Swearing to himself, he stood where he was, peering through the fog, trying to find something besides the windmill to serve as a landmark. This kind of mill stood by water, a pu
mp, and he dared not choose the wrong way.
And then he heard the footsteps returning.
“Your motorcar is safe enough where it is. Follow me.”
But Rutledge couldn’t see him. All he could do was walk in the direction the footsteps were taking now, and that was a risk. His hearing had always been acute, not as sharp as Hamish MacLeod’s had been in the trenches, but more than sufficient to serve him now.
He couldn’t go wrong if he watched each stride, looking no more than one or two ahead. And so he followed the sound and soon was off the grassy sod, back to a road that seemed to be no better than a lane. They were walking along it now, he could hear the difference in the footsteps leading him. When he had gone some thirty paces, he knew he couldn’t possibly have returned to his motorcar again. He stopped and said, “Where are you leading me?”
“Just along here. Another twenty or so feet. There’s a house. You can shelter there until this passes.”
The voice was odd in the mist. Distorted. He wasn’t sure he could recognize it again in more ordinary circumstances. All he could do now was to trust it.
Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. He’d gone the twenty feet. He stopped.
The footsteps ahead of him stopped as well.
“To your left. There should be a gate.”
Rutledge turned, reached out. His hands touched nothing. He put out a foot. Ah. There was indeed a fence here—iron, he thought. Leaning forward, his groping fingers found an iron picket, the top shaped like a flower. As he moved closer, he could just make out more of them. And there, just beyond, was the gate. His ghostly guide had been right on the mark.
Rutledge called, “Thank you.”
But no one was there. That sixth sense so many people possessed told him so, and yet he hadn’t heard the man leave.
He walked up what appeared to be a short path and found himself at a blue door. There was a knocker with a brass footplate. He lifted it and let it fall.
