by Charles Todd
It was time to mention Mrs. Percy.
“I’ve been told that at least one of the onlookers described our man.”
McBride pushed aside his newspaper. “Mrs. Percy. I don’t know who spoke to you about her. But I’d discount what she said, if I were you, sir.”
“Why? She saw something. It wasn’t what you expected from a witness, perhaps. But it was information we have to investigate.”
“Sir, I can’t see how we can explore what she described. She’s an elderly woman whose eyesight is not the best. I mean to say—a monster.”
“The question is, was she the only one who looked up just as the shot was fired? There may be other witnesses who don’t want to come forward. We need to find them.”
“There’s nothing in the statements we collected that show information has been withheld.”
“I’d like to question her, all the same.”
“She’s still that upset, sir, I doubt she’ll make any sense.”
“Then I’ll go alone. She might speak more freely. Tell me where to find her.”
Mrs. Percy lived in the last cottage on the lane called Windmill Row.
There was no windmill now. Instead the fields began not twenty feet beyond her door, and a bulwark of earth separated them from the end of her lane. He could just see the darker green of late season crops growing several feet below the level of the higher ground on which her house sat.
She was snapping beans in the kitchen when Rutledge tapped at her open door. “Come,” she called, and he stepped inside, following the sound of her voice. She was a small woman, gray hair pinned up on her head, blue-veined hands working with the beans in a large earthenware bowl. He didn’t think she even looked down at them, her fingers busy on their own.
“Who are you?” she demanded, peering at the tall stranger who’d just appeared in her kitchen. “I was expecting the butcher’s boy.”
“My name is Rutledge, Mrs. Percy. London has sent me to Wriston to find out what I can about the death of Mr. Swift. I understand you were by the market cross that evening, when he was shot.”
“I was. It was a warm evening, no clouds, and I felt like walking up to the cross to see what the shouting and those torches were all about. When I got there, the smoke made my eyes water. I pushed my way around behind Mr. Swift, where it was a little better, and just then he started to speak. I’d hardly got settled when he dropped like a stone.” She shuddered, her hands pausing in their work. “I wish I’d never gone up. I wish I’d decided to do my mending instead.” Her fingers found their rhythm again.
“Had anyone else moved around behind Mr. Swift, to get away from the smoke?”
“Paul Ruskin was there—he’s the cooper from Soham. I knew his father. But most everyone wanted to be out in front, of course.”
Another name. So much for McBride’s pessimism.
“Anyone else?” Across from where he was sitting, a pair of worn wooden stilts were standing in the corner, and on a shelf just above them, a pair of wooden skates for use on ice. A hundred years or more ago, men had walked the fields on stilts, and they’d been quite good at it, striding out boldly and swinging across ditches, fording streams.
Mrs. Percy considered his question, then shook her head. “No, I think it was just Paul and me. Mr. Ruskin and me.”
It was time to ask the question that had brought him here. There was no way to soften it, to draw her out. But he tried.
“Scotland Yard was very pleased to learn there was a witness to the shooting, someone who could describe Mr. Swift’s killer.”
Mrs. Percy lips thinned to a tight line. “Well, they’re wrong,” she said after a moment, when he didn’t press.
He listened to her fingers snapping the crisp flesh of the beans.
“Have they made light of what you told them? The constable and then Inspector Warren?” he asked gently.
“I didn’t see anything. I told you. The smoke was making my eyes water. All I saw was smoke.”
The damage was done. Rutledge couldn’t shift her. And that he laid at the door of those who had questioned her in the beginning. A monster was not evidence. And in their own desperation, they had hounded her to make sense of the senseless. Now she was refusing to acknowledge her own statement, denying she had seen anything after all.
She rose, the beans half filling the bowl, the sack that had held them empty now.
“I have to cook my dinner,” she said, dismissing him. “There’s the door.”
Rutledge swore to himself. He needed her testimony, he needed to watch her face as she described the monster she’d seen. But he would have to come back—as often as necessary until she relented.
Meanwhile, there was still the man in Soham.
Thanking her, he turned and found his way back to the door where he’d come in.
The question, he thought as he made his way back to the market cross to stare up at the dormer window once more, was how much he could discount the monster as part of her shock or as part of her eyes watering. He squinted, distorting the window as much as he could, but the circumstances were very different here on this sunny day.
And it was possible that someone else besides Ruskin had had a similar vantage point, but what had been done to Mrs. Percy would have been a warning that the truth would be rejected out of hand. And so any hope of locating those witnesses—if they actually existed—was small.
He drove on to Soham, finding the High Street and the square, then asked a man crossing it toward the shops how to find the cooper.
The man nodded. “Out that way to Fox Lane. You can’t miss it.”
And he didn’t. The front of the shop was open, and the scent of fresh-cut wood filled the air. He found Ruskin in the yard, gathering staves together one by one in a raising hoop, frowning as he worked. Perhaps in his late thirties, he had graying hair and a strong face. He looked up, nodded to Rutledge, and without stopping what he was doing, he asked, “Help you, sir?”
“I’m looking for Paul Ruskin.”
He straightened. Behind him in the shed was a shelf with the tools of his trade, and beyond them against the far wall was a row of his finished goods. Butter churns, coal scuttles, a firkin and a bucket, dwarfed by a pair of hogsheads.
“You’ve found him, then.”
“I’ve come from Ely. My name is Rutledge. Scotland Yard sent me to help Inspector Warren find the man who killed Captain Hutchinson and Mr. Swift. I understand you were in Wriston the evening Swift was shot.”
Ruskin set the staves aside and considered Rutledge. “Who told you I was there?”
And Rutledge realized that this man hadn’t been questioned by the police. That somehow in the chaos, he’d left Wriston before McBride could collect all his witnesses. If Mrs. Percy hadn’t recognized him, he’d have been in the clear.
Rutledge sat down on a finished barrelhead. “Someone saw you and reported it to me. Why? Did you have anything to hide?”
“No.” But there was a wariness in the man’s voice. When Rutledge said nothing, he added, “I saw no purpose in hanging about. The man was dead, and I’d had aught to do with it.”
“Sensible of you,” Rutledge said affably. “What brought you to Wriston?”
“I’d delivered a half-dozen barrels for one of the farmers. Burrows, his name is. I stopped off at The Wake after delivering them. There was talk that Swift was planning to speak. He came in just after that, walking around, having a word with everyone. And I decided to hear what he had to say. It’ud been a long day for me, but I wasn’t ready to go home. My wife and I’d had words that morning, and I didn’t want to open up the quarrel again.”
“So you followed the torchbearers and the others to the market cross?”
“I did. But I’m not a Wriston man. I didn’t care to draw attention to myself, like. Not that I didn’t have every right to be
there, you understand, more a question of not wishing to push in.”
It was something Rutledge had heard many times before. A village only five miles away could be as foreign to its neighbors as if it were fifty or five hundred miles distant. This was a Wriston rally.
And so Ruskin had moved away from the main body of Swift’s followers and found himself next to Mrs. Percy, behind the market cross.
“Did you see Swift fall?”
“I couldn’t help but see it. One minute speaking, the next pitching over, and half his head missing.” Something changed in Ruskin’s face. “It brought back the war. I can tell you that. I thought I was done with the dead falling at my feet and the sound of gunfire. I’d put it behind me, and it all came rushing back. So I left. I saw no need to stay. There must have been forty some people who could talk to the police. They didn’t need me.”
That explained his leaving. It was something Rutledge could understand. And Hamish as well, stirring in the back of his mind.
“What did you see?” Rutledge asked quietly. “Up there in the dormer window?”
“God knows. It happened so fast, I thought it was a flashback to the war.”
“Describe it for me.”
Ruskin shook his head. “No. I don’t want to remember. It made my blood run cold. I told myself I was wrong, and that I’d imagined it. And so I set it aside.”
“Did you see the rifle?”
“No. No, not that.”
“Then what?”
He shook his head.
“You must tell me. I can’t find this killer if I don’t know what I’m searching for.” He waited. “Ruskin, I can have you arrested for refusing to cooperate with the police. Don’t make me take that step.”
The man looked directly at Rutledge then, his eyes haunted. After a moment he said, “Will you go away and leave me alone? I don’t want the police here, hounding me. I don’t want to dredge it up again and again.”
“I won’t tell Inspector Warren. Or your own constable. No one knows I’m here anyway. I came on my own.”
Barely satisfied, Ruskin searched Rutledge’s face. And then, against his will, Ruskin stood up.
“A helmet,” he said. “I saw a German helmet. I know, it’s impossible. But that’s what I saw. ”
And with that he walked away, disappearing into the back of his shop.
Rutledge sat where he was for a moment.
Hamish was saying, “He saw what he feared to see. Only that.”
Taking a deep breath, Rutledge got up and walked back to his motorcar. Across the rooftops facing him, he could see the elegant tower of the village church. He bent to turn the crank and got into the motorcar.
Had Ruskin imagined the helmet? He must have done, Hamish was right. Shocked by the rifle’s report and the dead man almost at his feet, he’d reverted to what he knew, the war and the trenches. Who else would be shooting at him but his German foes?
Still, the fact remained. He had seen something.
“Will ye tell the ithers?” Hamish demanded. “Ye gave your word.”
“Warren and McBride? The constable here? No. We’ll see what comes of it.”
Reversing the motorcar, he added, only realizing too late that he’d spoken aloud. “Who’s behind this business? Who is using the war to exact his revenge?”
If he was to remain in Wriston for several days, he needed somewhere to stay. Rutledge wasn’t certain that Priscilla Bartram would accommodate him. It was one thing to take in a stranger lost in the mist. Quite another to go to all the trouble of opening her inn to someone who might spend only a night or two there. Still, he hadn’t seen any other lodgings in the village. The Wake Inn was small, more pub than hostelry.
Then he remembered something Miss Trowbridge had said. She needs the money.
Leaving the motorcar by the police station, he walked down the High Street to The Dutchman Inn.
Hamish said, “She willna’ be pleased ye didna’ tell her who you were.”
There was that. But he rather thought Miss Bartram would choose company in the evening over turning him down out of pique.
Whether she would talk as freely once she knew he was Scotland Yard was another matter.
When she came to the door, it was clear she was happy to see him again, telling him almost in the same breath that his room was still available.
“Have you finished your business in Ely?” she asked, urging him toward the sitting room. “Well, then, you’ve earned a bit of time to yourself. Not that spending it here in the Fen country is anything special, when the waterfowl aren’t coming in.”
Her face, however, changed when he told her who he was. She wasn’t best pleased.
“Scotland Yard, then. You could have told me when you were here. I’d have said nothing, you know, not even to Constable McBride, if you’d asked me not to. As it was, I may have said too much. About the people here. Mr. Swift.”
“I had yet to report to Inspector Warren in Ely. It was proper to do that first. In fact, it was happenstance that I came here first at all. It wasn’t where I intended to be.”
“You told me you’d come from Cambridge. Not London.” There was an accusing note in her voice now.
“And so I had come from there. I thought at the time you might prefer someone from Cambridge to a stranger from London.”
“Did Miss Trowbridge know? What brought you here?”
“She never asked,” he said carefully. “After all, if it hadn’t been for her cat, I’d have likely stumbled over the ruins of the mill keeper’s house and broken my neck.”
That mollified her, but she said stiffly, “What brings you back here now?”
He told her the truth. “I came to confer with Constable McBride. And to speak to Mrs. Percy. Although she appears to have withdrawn her remarks about a monster. She now claims she saw nothing at all.”
“Yes, well, who can blame her?” Finally satisfied, Priscilla Bartram relented and invited him to join her in the kitchen. “I was just about to put the kettle on.”
Rutledge followed her and sat down where he’d had his dinner the night of the fog. It had been a very different evening. Now the sun came through the windowpanes in golden shafts of light that fell across the well-polished floor, and the door to the yard was standing open. The light breeze carried in a sweet scent from the cut-flower garden just outside.
“Well now. Scotland Yard. My heavens. I never thought I’d be speaking to Scotland Yard,” Miss Bartram went on, the kettle filled and beginning to boil, the tea things set out.
“I remember looking at the waterfowl in the glass cabinets. Which reminded me of the reason this inn is here. Was there any hunting with a rifle?”
“My grandfather and his father owned a flat-bottomed boat, with a screen made of reeds raised above the bow. The hurdle maker made a new one each season. There was a duck gun hidden in it, only the barrel visible. A great noisy thing. One shot from that could bring down a dozen or more birds, and their dogs were hard-pressed to bring them in. But that was for market, you understand. In my father’s day, he’d take out guests in his boat and they’d wait for the birds to come in of an evening. A shotgun was all they required. There was nothing in the Fens of a size to warrant a rifle.”
“Perhaps someone used to do a little deer stalking in Scotland? Or shooting in Africa? Bringing his gun along to show the other guests.”
She smiled as she turned to the teakettle. “None of our guests had such lofty ambitions. They were shooting for pleasure and for the table. Mostly they’d come up from the south. London, some of them, and the Home Counties. One man was writing a book on migrating waterfowl. He drew the birds he brought back, then used watercolors to fill in the outlines. Quite lovely, the drawings were. Very clever. He’d pin the birds up into position against a painted backdrop, then start to work. Every feather in its p
roper place. When he’d finished with them, his wife plucked and cooked them.”
Not a very fitting end for the man’s models, Rutledge found himself thinking.
“How well did you know Mr. Swift?”
She went to the pantry and brought back slices of meat and bread, and the chutney he’d liked before. “Of course I never had any need of his advice. My father’s solicitor was in Burwell. Still, I’d met him here and there, but more a nodding acquaintance than knowing him. When he returned from Scotland and reopened his law business after the war, he kept to himself.”
“What was his background? Was his father a solicitor as well?”
“His father was a farmer, and he married more acres. There was money enough to send the two sons to university, but Swift chose the law, while his brother wanted the farm. They had words when the father died over what to do with the land. Swift wanted his share of the inheritance.”
“Trouble?” He took the sandwich she’d made up, and realized how hungry he was.
“In fact they came to an amicable agreement. I’ll tell you where there might be jealousy, though. There was a third boy. Wild oats, before the elder Mr. Swift was married. Still, he acknowledged the lad, paid for his education and the like, but he wasn’t legitimate and there was nothing for him in the will. He was apprenticed to Ned Miles. The barber. And the day the father died, Anson left Wriston and has never came back.”
“Was he in the war? This Anson Swift?”
“If he was, nobody knew of it. He didn’t join with the local men, if that’s what you mean.”
She brought the pot to the table and poured Rutledge’s cup.
He thanked her and then said, “No one seems to think that the Swifts were acquainted with the first victim, Captain Hutchinson.”
“Well, you never know,” she said, considering it. “Stranger things have happened. But on the whole, I’d say it’s not likely. Did you know that the Captain was here in the Fen country some months ago?”
Rutledge nearly choked on his tea. “What? Are you sure?”
