by Charles Todd
When he’d finished the pie, Miss Bartram brought out a cake baked with sultanas and offered him a slice. She was an excellent cook, and he rather thought that her culinary skills, not the long-dead waterfowl, had brought her regulars back year after year.
“Was Swift married?” he asked, returning to the earlier subject.
“A widower. His wife and the babe died in childbirth. Late 1914, early 1915? That sounds about right.” She sighed as she began to collect their dishes. “I don’t remember the last murder here. I wish I hadn’t seen this one.”
Miss Bartram failed to hide her disappointment when Rutledge said good night after the meal ended, and went up to his room. A lonely woman, she would have enjoyed passing the rest of the evening in the sitting room with her guest. But it had been a long day, and the next would be even longer.
He worked at the table desk for a time, making notes on what he’d been told and adding questions that had come to him as he listened to Miss Bartram. Satisfied that he’d overlooked nothing, he went to bed. Later he would compare her remarks to the statement she’d made to the police.
But he couldn’t fall asleep. The bed was comfortable enough, but the small room seemed close, and the mist wrapping the house beyond his windows was oppressive—a solid, impenetrable wall where even sound was trapped, for he could hear nothing out there. Not a dog’s bravado bark or the hooves of a passing horse. He had the feeling that nothing existed beyond the wall of his room, and tried to laugh at such a fanciful notion.
Hamish didn’t laugh. “That’s what death is like. Nothing. Not sight nor sound nor friendship nor love.”
And Hamish ought to know, Rutledge thought grimly. For he was lying buried in a grave in France, dead since the summer of 1916 and the Battle of the Somme. Rutledge shivered at the memory of that dawn. For as he had looked down at the still body of his corporal, he himself had nearly been killed by a shell landing too close to the trench and covering the living and the dead with unspeakable black earth that reeked of everything that had rotted in it. When he had finally been pulled out, more dead than alive, he had brought Hamish with him. Not just the man’s body, taken up by the burial detail, but the young Scot’s presence. Not the man’s ghost—he could have understood a haunting—but an unwavering sense of guilt over the circumstances of Hamish’s death. It had seemed easier at the time to accept the voice than to exorcise it by facing why Hamish had refused a direct order, and why he, Rutledge, had had to make an example of Corporal MacLeod, one of the best men who had ever served under him.
He had brought the voice back to England, an unbearable burden. He had toyed with the idea of killing himself to be rid of it. But to do so was to kill Hamish as well—a second time. And he couldn’t bear to do that.
One night—one agonizing dawn—he might still find the courage or the strength to do what the Germans had failed to accomplish. If they’d killed him that week—the next month—even the next year, it would have been all right. He could have accepted that death. It would have been fitting, lifting from his soul the weight of guilt for taking his own life. Instead he’d come through four years in the trenches with little more than flesh wounds, seemingly invulnerable, and the bitter irony was, his men had thought him extraordinarily brave when, in fact, he was courting death.
Rutledge abruptly shut down the stream of memory. It wouldn’t do to frighten Miss Bartram out of her wits by screaming the house down. She didn’t deserve that.
And so he lay there, holding on to his wits by sheer will and refusing the dreams that would start whenever he shut his eyes.
When as last he did drift into sleep, his nightmares overtook him. He awoke with a start, his body cold with sweat, on the brink of shouting to his men to put on their masks as he clawed his way through the heavy ground-hugging fog of gas.
He was never sure afterward what had disturbed him. The dream or something more than a dream. The house was quiet, he’d heard nothing from downstairs, yet he felt a distinct sense of unease. He turned toward the window, and as he did, he saw that the moon had broken through and was shining across the floor of his room in bars of bright light. He got up and went to look out.
Between the two cottages across the way, he could see for what seemed like miles across the flat landscape. Except for the village itself there was no sign of habitation, no light in a farmhouse window, no headlamps as a motorcar made its way along the thin ribbon of road. And the street below was just as empty. He found himself thinking that even the companionship of the white cat—Clarissa?—would have been welcome. A living presence sharing the night with him.
Instead of what had walked in the fog.
Shaking off his mood, he went back to bed and slept quietly for a few hours.
After breakfast, he settled his account with Priscilla Bartram and thanked her for taking him in without any warning.
“I was glad of the company,” she said. “There’s no knowing what’s abroad on such a night as we had. I haven’t seen a mist that heavy in some time.”
But someone else had been abroad last night. He was sure of it. Trained by four long terrible years in the trenches of France, he’d survived by knowing such things. By intuition and quick thinking, by experience and by the driving need to protect his men where he could.
Whoever it was, he must have stood outside the inn for a time, but Rutledge was nearly sure he hadn’t come inside.
As Miss Bartram closed her door behind him, Rutledge turned to look up at the house where he’d spent the night. There was a sign above his head, made of iron. It bore a silhouette of geese in flight and beneath them, on what appeared to be water, was the name, THE DUTCHMAN INN. And he realized that unlike its neighbors, the inn looked more Dutch than English with its stepped gables. He’d seen paintings of Holland with just such fronts to the houses. He wished he’d thought to ask who had built the inn. But above the door there was a stone set into the facing of the lintel, and he could just make out the date, 1647, although he was fairly certain the inn as it stood now wasn’t that old.
He’d intended to go directly to search for his motorcar. Instead he turned to walk down the street into the village proper.
Fen villages tended to be either new and without much character, thanks in part to the railway, or quite old. Wriston was one of the latter. Like Ely, it had been built on higher ground, an island of dry land rising above the once-waterlogged Fens. Some of them, like Ely or Ramsey, had begun with a church or abbey. Others were home to the fiercely independent men who eked out a fair living here and who had fought long and hard to stop the draining by the Dutch engineers hired for the purpose centuries ago. They had wanted no part of newcomers bringing in new ways. An independent and contrary lot they were, according to one historian he’d read, and content to be left alone.
In fact, long before the Dutchmen were brought in by an English king, Hereward the Outlaw had defied William the Conqueror’s Normans in this watery landscape of the Fens. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time that the inhabitants had gone their own way.
The question was, what had stirred them to murder in 1920? As far as he, Rutledge, knew, there were no new drainage plans, but it would be worth looking into. Was Swift contemplating changes that his future constituents would object to violently enough to turn to killing the man? And where did Hutchinson come into the picture?
Wriston spread out along the ridge of its high ground, a ridge too narrow to have been chosen for an abbey or even a small priory. What must once have been a small meandering stream had been forced into a channel on one side of the village, while fields encroached on the other, defining it for all time.
To Rutledge’s surprise as he walked toward the stump of the market cross, he saw there were two elongated greens stretching to either side of it. The second one possessed a pond occupied at the moment by a dozen or so gleaming white ducks. Cottages and shops huddled together, facing the open
space, many of them roofed with a distinctive thatch, very different in style from the beetling brows of the West Country. Here it was more like Cromwell’s Puritan crop.
The small church appeared to have been added as an afterthought—he could see its tower beyond the second green at the far edge of the village—although Miss Bartram had indicated that it had Saxon roots. Ely and Peterborough cathedrals had been thriving houses long before the Normans took them over. At the far end of the village, where the road turned toward distant Ely, he could see the pub where the rally had begun.
He wondered which of the religious houses claiming Wriston had set up the market cross. What had been brought in for sale in those days? Eels for a certainty, fish and waterfowl, and whatever subsistence farming they’d been able to wrest from the wet land. It was, he thought, an ideal space in which to set up a market. Or a political gathering.
He stopped within a few feet of the cross, and turning in a circle, he began to study the nearest rooftops.
As Swift had begun speaking, all eyes would have been on him. And the shot therefore must have come from behind most of his audience. But which direction had he been facing? Surely toward the first green, his back toward the one with the pond. He had come from the pub, after all.
Very well, he asked himself, weighing each possibility in turn, if I were stalking that man with a rifle, where would I choose to wait? And from how far away could Mrs. Percy have seen me and called me a monster?
Hamish was on the point of answering him when a voice from just behind Rutledge said, “There’s nothing to stare at. Move along, if you please.”
He wheeled to find a constable standing there. He’d been so absorbed in his own thoughts he hadn’t seen the man come up behind him.
This was not the time to introduce himself.
Rutledge said, “Thank you, Constable,” and walked on. But he’d seen the dormer above the ironmonger’s shop, and it offered both the clearest view and the best protection. Mrs. Percy had been right. But he’d wanted to see the setting for himself.
And it had brought home another truth.
Whoever he was, the killer was not suicidal. On the contrary, he’d planned his murders with an eye to disappearing as soon as possible after he’d dropped his man.
Rutledge walked on as far as the duck pond before turning around. The morning was fair and there were any number of people on the street now, going in and out of shops, stopping to chat with one another. Some of them cut their eyes to look at the stranger in their midst, and he caught the ripple of uncertainty, of wariness, as he passed.
Just beyond Miss Bartram’s inn, on the other side of the road, he could see Miss Trowbridge’s cottage ahead of him, the black iron pickets around the front garden distinctive. It was most certainly not as far away as it had seemed last night, and yet he’d have been lost a dozen times over if he’d attempted to find the inn himself.
The tiny space marked off by the fence was lavish with flowers, unlike its neighbors, whose seedy grass sometimes reached from the road to the door. Compared to Kent or the West Country, there was a noticeable lack of flowers, as if the rich black soil were too precious to be wasted on anything that didn’t bring in pounds and pence.
A small sign on the gate—invisible in the mist last night—identified the cottage as THE BOWER HOUSE. Rutledge smiled. Miss Trowbridge had said that her father bought the cottage for his widowed mother. Who had named it, tongue in cheek, for a hideaway? Situated as it was at the bend of the main road?
Miss Trowbridge had been right about the mill. It was not very far away, and she must have grown up listening to the sails turn whenever she visited her grandmother. It was a squat mill, tall enough to allow the arms to sweep almost to the ground, clearing the high grass at its base by inches rather than feet.
The remains of the mill house were beyond as well, and Rutledge realized how perilously close to them he’d come in the mist. The blackened timbers were gone, of course, but the ragged foundations were a trap for unwary feet. Closer to he could see what appeared to be the traces of rooms, raised footings where the walls had once met the foundations. He winced at the thought of breaking a bone tripping over them in the fog. Even in the dark it would be far too easy to stray in their direction and take a nasty fall.
In the sunlight the mill was ordinary, its sails turned to catch the light wind. Painted black with white trim, it stood at a bend in the road. And behind it, as far as the eye could see, were those long flat fields, far lower than the ground on which he stood.
He remembered reading somewhere that as the Fens drained and the peat that made them so dark and fertile dried, the surface had sunk lower and lower with each passing year, until it reached a point where it stabilized. And the early practice of burning the peat to clear the land had enriched the soil but also left it vulnerable to east winds off the stormy North Sea. Indeed, some of the fields must be four and five feet lower than the road he’d been traveling. Only the embankments designed early on to hold back the water protected the unsuspecting traveler from stumbling into a field or, even worse, into a ditch.
He walked on and found to his chagrin that his motorcar had been as near to disaster as he himself had been. For the road he’d been traveling rose over an arched stone bridge across a pitch or waterway. And on the near side of the bridge, instead of continuing in the direction he’d expected, the road curved sharply to the right, skirting the strategically placed mill and the cottage where Miss Trowbridge lived, before running straight for the village, cutting it in half. He could easily have crashed into the ruins of the mill keeper’s house, injuring himself and doing considerable damage to the motorcar.
To reach Wriston instead of Ely, somewhere he’d missed an important turning.
Looking out across the fields, he could see a stand of trees in the far distance, and rising above them was a church tower. Closer to but still some distance away, a line of pollarded willows marked another track. A third wandered off to his right.
Hamish said, in the back of his mind, “It was foolish to go on.”
It was true, in hindsight. But he’d expected to run out of the mist eventually, or to find his way into Ely.
The motorcar seemed to be just as he’d left it, but then he noticed that his valise, which had been in the rear seat, was not precisely where he’d remembered setting it. If he hadn’t been looking for it, he’d have never noticed the difference, but he’d suspected that the man who had rescued him had gone to have a look at the motorcar—and perhaps its contents.
He snapped the latches and scanned his possessions. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed, and everything seemed to be there—his gold cuff links were the only thing of real value that he’d packed, and they were under his shirts, where he’d put them. Still, someone had searched his belongings. He was fairly sure of it.
“Ye canna’ be certain it was the man in the mist,” Hamish pointed out. “It could ha’ been anyone. The moon came oot in the night.”
Hamish was right, of course, but someone had been curious about a strange motorcar abandoned in the middle of the road.
Still, there was nothing in the vehicle or the valise to indicate that he was from Scotland Yard. He carried his identification in his pocket.
Cranking the motor, he got in and reversed. Shortly thereafter, he found the turning he wanted, which must have been all but invisible last night, and was well on his way to Ely once more. The road ran true for some time, until it reached Soham, and there it headed north.
Now he could see the profile of the massive Cathedral across the flat landscape, rising above it like a great mirage floating on a flat green sea. It must have been, he thought, quite amazing in Medieval times to see it there, a wonder to behold in such a wet landscape. The Isle of Ely it truly was. And in the haze of sunlight, it was still quite magnificent. The town surrounding it seemed not to exist at all.
&nb
sp; Inspector Warren looked up as Rutledge was ushered into his office.
“You’re a day late,” he said, rising to greet his visitor, noting the dark stubble of beard and the unpressed suit. “Did you sleep rough?”
“Near enough. I was caught in the weather yesterday. But that put me close enough to Wriston to have a look at the market cross this morning.”
Warren raised his eyebrows. “Wriston? You were well and truly caught out, weren’t you? All right. Sit down.”
Rutledge took the empty chair by the desk. The other was piled high with paper. Statements, he realized, with a sinking feeling. Days’ worth of work before any progress could be made. That was, unless Inspector Warren was prepared to sort them for him.
Warren wore a harried air. A tall man, stooped and fair, his hairline only just beginning to recede, he had a strong face, with laugh lines that crinkled at the corners of his eyes.
But the Inspector was not in the mood to laugh at the moment.
“Since you’ve been to Wriston, I’ll start there. Did they tell you half the village had followed the victim to the market cross, where apparently they were met by the other half? We interviewed every one of them. Not all of them were constituents, mind you, but Swift usually gave good value at his rallies, and the curious had come to hear him as well. I expect there were a number of hecklers in the crowd, but he was dead before they could interrupt him. We searched the buildings nearest the cross, but of course by the time we reached the scene, there was nothing to find. We settled on two vantage points. The roof of the ironmonger’s shop has a dormer. He and his wife live above the shop, but both of them were in the street.” He gestured to another stack of papers. “A dozen people saw the ironmonger and his wife. They’re in the clear. Nobody locks anything, worst luck, and the killer could have helped himself to half a dozen vantage points. Cheek by jowl to the ironmonger’s, there’s a fine pair of chimneys. The greengrocer’s shop. But if he’d chosen them, he couldn’t have got away unseen. My money is on the dormer window.”
