Hunting Shadows: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery

by Charles Todd

  “Inspector Warren has been thorough,” he said, looking up from the sheaf of papers in his hand.

  “I can’t see that it will help all that much,” McBride commented. “They’re not likely to confess when you walk in the door.”

  “If someone has a rifle hidden in the thatch of his roof, he’ll find it hard to deny it to my face. And that just might give him away.”

  “I doubt you’ll find him in Wriston.”

  “Possibly not. On the other hand, if he does live here, he knew the risk he was running, and he’s found a way to keep you in the dark.”

  It was clear McBride disagreed, and Rutledge let it go.

  They crossed to the police station. Rutledge sat down at McBride’s desk to make notes on the sheets while the constable paced restlessly, then left on his rounds.

  Finally satisfied that he’d narrowed down the numbers, Rutledge sat back, waiting for McBride to return.

  Hamish was saying, “It’s likely he lives alone, this man. Else, how has he kept the truth from his wife or his bairns?”

  “He could have a cowshed or some other—”

  He could hear McBride returning, and broke off, aware he’d answered Hamish aloud.

  “There’s a problem,” the constable said almost before he was through the door.

  “Another shooting?” Rutledge asked, quickly getting to his feet.

  “No. Monster fever,” was the sour reply.

  “What brought it on?”

  “Sam Turner was walking back from the pub last night. He swears he saw something moving out in the fields. Lights, he said. And it wasn’t a man with a lantern. It didn’t stand on two legs, it was up in the air. Leaping and turning, without rhyme or reason.”

  “How drunk was he?”

  “Fairly. He admits to it. His wife is a termagant, and he spends most of his evenings at the pub. Still, he swears it was real. He’s telling half the village to lock their doors.”

  “Someone searching for something?” Rutledge asked with interest. “Or merely stirring up trouble?”

  “Turner says spirits. A lost soul, looking for peace. He’s fairly clear about that. He claims it’s Burrows. That he’s dead.”

  Rutledge came around the desk, folding the papers in his hand in half. “No one has come in from the farm, bringing the news. We’ll have to drive out there and see for ourselves.”

  “It could be, no one’s found him yet,” McBride agreed.

  They hurried to the inn, where Rutledge had left the motorcar, and on the way McBride asked, “What do you think the chances are that something—or someone—was out there? That it wasn’t just the drink that made Turner see the lights?”

  “Fairly poor. But if they were real, I’ll wager whoever it was used stilts. Like those I saw in Mrs. Percy’s kitchen. There must be other old pairs lying about. If not, it would be easy enough to make new ones. It’s the most likely explanation. We could search for prints, but even if we found them, they wouldn’t tell us much more than we know already.”

  McBride whistled as he bent to turn the crank. “I never thought of stilts. My father had a pair when he was a lad. I could never get the hang of them.”

  Remembering the man in the mist, Rutledge asked as he drove over the bridge by the windmill, “There’s another possibility. What was he wandering about in the dark looking for? Or perhaps that ought to be who? Surely not Sam Turner.”

  “It won’t matter to Turner or to half of those he’s told. There are old tales about lights out in the Fens. Fox fire. Someone will remember them.”

  They fell silent then, and it wasn’t until they were turning in on the long track that led to the Burrows house that McBride brought up something that clearly had been worrying him for some time.

  “There will have to be another by-election. With Mr. Swift dead, the seat in Parliament won’t go by default to Mr. Johns, the other candidate. There’s been some talk. Most people think Johns won’t stand now, for fear of being shot in his turn. But if you ask me, he wasn’t all that eager to begin with. The party needed a name, and he was persuaded. Nor did he exert himself overly.”

  “Knowing that Swift was likely to win.”

  “I’d say that was his thinking. But who will stand in Swift’s place? I’m hearing whispers that no one appears to be that eager to fill his boots.”

  Inspector Warren had raised that question as well.

  “Who would be likely to come forward? Surely not Swift’s brother? Or Burrows?”

  “I doubt you could pry either man off his land. Certainly not for London.”

  “Then we’d better unravel this puzzle quickly.”

  They had reached the house now, and Miss Burrows must have seen them coming, for she was at the door, calling to them, “Has there been any more trouble?”

  “We’ve come to look in on your father. How is he?” McBride asked.

  “Well enough. Last night he was planning what had to be done in the fields. Today his face is hurting, and he’s using the wound as his excuse not to go outside. How long will that excuse hold up?”

  “There was a—rumor in Wriston today that he was dead. Your father,” Constable McBride said.

  “Started by whom?” she asked anxiously. As they joined her in the doorway she led the way to a sitting room. It was comfortable and well kept, but the furnishings were late Victorian, the wallpaper dark.

  “A man walking home from the pub said he saw lights out in the fields. He claimed they were the souls of the dead.” McBride was wishing he’d said nothing about Burrows having died. Shrugging uneasily, he added, “A silly business, but we can’t ignore the story.”

  “No. But who was out there in the field? Was it someone coming in this direction?”

  “He said the lights were just—there. Not that they were moving in a particular direction.”

  Rutledge added, “On the other hand, we felt it was a good idea to look in on you.”

  “I don’t like it,” she told them flatly. “It’s strange, all of this business. The monsters, the faces, the lights. I don’t believe in such things. But there’s got to be some truth to it. Some explanation that makes sense.”

  “Or—he was drunk. This man was walking from the pub to his house. McBride tells me he’d stayed until closing, as he sometimes does, and had to be turned out. Everyone else had already left. He was in the street alone. His imagination could have played tricks on him.”

  “And there’s a pair of owls that live in the church tower,” McBride put in. “Some people don’t care for them.”

  McBride was trying to ease Miss Burrows’s anxiety. But the best view of the fields was looking down Windmill Lane, past where Mrs. Percy lived, well before the churchyard. The power of suggestion? Rutledge wondered again. Or had the man actually seen something?

  They could hear someone moving about on the floor above, and after a moment footsteps on the stairs.

  “My father,” Miss Burrows said, adding quickly. “Please, say nothing about the lights. At least not until you know—” She broke off as her father came through the door.

  It appeared he’d been sleeping, his hair mussed and his face slightly flushed. The mark on his cheek was still inflamed, and Rutledge suggested again that a doctor should have a look at it.

  “I don’t want a fuss made,” Burrows said testily. “What brings you here? Is there fresh news?”

  “Nothing to report,” Rutledge said easily. “We thought it best to see how you were faring. You had a narrow escape.”

  “I don’t think I slept a wink last night,” Burrows said morosely. “The face burned like fire, and I woke with a start at every noise. But he didn’t come. I sent my daughter to a neighbor’s for the night. I didn’t want her here. And I didn’t want her coming in every half hour to ask me if I was all right and getting the shotgun in her face for h
er trouble.”

  And so he must have sat up, guarding the house, possibly from an upstairs window where he had a full sweep of the approaches. Rutledge knew that he should have sent McBride out to keep the man company, but he wasn’t convinced that the killer would return. And McBride was needed in Wriston. The danger—if danger there still was—would come later, when Burrows’s guard was down.

  Burrows had been the third choice on the killer’s list. Was that significant? Where was the pattern? Or was there a pattern?

  “Where are the two men who work for you?” Rutledge asked.

  “I sent them away home. I trust them, of course I do. But last night I didn’t want them lurking about.”

  But Rutledge wondered if it was a matter of trust after all. Burrows hadn’t seen the face of the man firing at him.

  “You could come into town for a few days,” Rutledge suggested. “Miss Bartram has extra rooms, she can put you up. It might be more comfortable for you and your daughter.”

  To his surprise, Miss Burrows added her own arguments to Rutledge’s.

  “It might be as well, Papa. What do you think?”

  “I won’t be run out of my home,” he said tightly. “Go if you like. I can fend for myself. I managed well enough for both of us after your mother died.”

  “I don’t want to leave you.”

  “I’ll take Miss Burrows back with me if you like,” Rutledge offered.

  “It will be all right after tonight,” her father answered. “Bill Waters is bringing me one of his dogs. A big brute, bark like a railway locomotive. No one can slip up on me if the dog is here. He’ll see him or smell him before I do.”

  But a man with a rifle could stay downwind and kill from a distance. It was a fragile line of defense.

  “I’ll come back tonight, shall I?” Rutledge asked. “To spell you. We can watch turn about.”

  Burrows hesitated, then shook his head. “If I’m alone, I know who’s out there. And I’ll shoot first, ask his business later.”

  “Not a good idea,” McBride began.

  But Burrows said stubbornly, “You’ve lived here all your life. Do people walk about out there in the dark? Not God-fearing souls. Only someone bent on trouble, and you know that to be true as well as I do.”

  Rutledge was reminded again of the man who had helped him in the mist. He’d appeared and disappeared like a wraith.

  McBride was saying unwillingly, “I’d have to agree with that. After midnight, the frogs have the ditches and the fields to themselves. But I don’t wish to come out here in the morning to find you with a body on your hands and a story that you thought it was someone else you were firing at.”

  “Never fear,” Burrows told him grimly. “If I fire that shotgun, I won’t miss. And I’ll have the right man.”

  Miss Burrows wouldn’t accept their offer to take her into Wriston. She was closer by at a neighbor’s house, could come in the morning to prepare breakfast for her father and the men who helped him in the fields.

  “I’ll be all right, it will be daylight and he’ll hear me walking up the track.”

  But the truth was, Rutledge thought, she wanted to be near enough to hear the shotgun go off in the night. Or the rifle . . .

  Rutledge and McBride left them to it and turned back toward Wriston.

  “Stubborn old fool,” McBride said under his breath.

  Rutledge was of the same mind.

  “What about the men who work for him? Were they in the war, are they on our list?”

  “The older one, Bill, was in the Navy. He’s not likely to be our man. Steady and quiet and never a troublemaker. I don’t see him shooting anyone. Besides, how was he to get to Ely to kill Captain Hutchinson? It’s quite a way.”

  “By bicycle?”

  “Possible, if he had all day to do the journey. No, my money would be on the younger one. I say young, he’s thirty-five if he’s a day. He’s a good worker, and to be trusted. But he’s a moody bastard, and about once every six months, he takes a day off and drinks himself blind. The next morning he’s back at work as if nothing happened.”

  “I doubt the killer did his work in a drunken stupor.”

  “No, there’s the rub. Besides, the two men share a cottage over by the cattle byre, and there would be no hiding a rifle in there. You’d stumble over it sooner or later.”

  “On the farm there must be a dozen safe hiding places.”

  “Still, it would come to light. And someone would ask whose it was. Bound to. No, I don’t think Burrows has anything to fear from his help.”

  Back in Wriston, Rutledge went to the little café for his lunch, the menu running to sandwiches, and then he set about interviewing the names on his abbreviated list of Wriston’s ex-soldiers.

  Seven of them had been in the square the night Swift was killed, and witnesses had verified their presence. That was made clear in the statements Constable McBride and Inspector Warren had collected. Two men had stayed home with their wives because they didn’t intend to vote for Swift. Three others had remained in the pub, not interested in what the candidate had to say. Another had a sick calf to watch over, and one had a teething child, walking the floor with it by turns with his wife.

  The last two on his list had no alibi and no apparent reason to do murder. Still, he put a question mark by their names.

  Conferring with McBride later, he learned that one of them was “too shiftless” to be troubled by revenge, and the other was courting a girl at one of the farms.

  The next day Rutledge set out for Soham and spent the morning looking up the ex-soldiers that Constable Peckham had included in his list.

  The cooper was on there, but Rutledge had already spoken to him. One by one he tracked down the others, and one by one he cleared them.

  Until he came to the rat catcher.

  The man lived down by one of the small streams that still crisscrossed the area. His house, if it could be called that, was hardly more than a hut, a single room that served for sleeping and eating. A narrow cot in one corner was his bed, a table in the middle of the room must be where he ate his meals, and he cooked over a small open fire just outside the door where boards had been nailed together to form a rough lean-to that kept out the rain. A tan and white terrier lay sleeping by the door, his muzzle on his paws.

  The man was tall and rangy, with long fair hair and a scruffy beard. His eyes were a light gray and never wavered from Rutledge’s face as he gave his name and why he had come.

  “A policeman,” Jeremiah Brenner said, looking him up and down. Then he added, “I haven’t been to Ely since the war.”

  “Then you’ve nothing to hide,” Rutledge said. “What did you do during the war?”

  “I don’t remember.” His gaze turned to the wall, and Rutledge realized that there was a large rat in the cage sitting on a shelf. “He’s tame. I call him Isaac. I found him when he was no larger than my thumb, pink and blind. So I kept him. He doesn’t judge me, I don’t judge him.”

  There was something about the man that put Rutledge off. He wasn’t sure whether it was the light eyes that seemed as cold as icy water, or if it was the rat.

  “Do you make a good living as rat catcher?”

  “Does it look like it? But my father was rat catcher before me. And it’s all I’m fit for now. I drink too much.”

  And yet Rutledge was sure the man was cold sober just now.

  “I drink to forget,” Brenner went on, as if he’d heard the next question in Rutledge’s mind. The cool eyes came back to Rutledge’s face.

  “What do you want to forget?”

  “Ah, that would be telling. Is there anything else?”

  “Did you know Herbert Swift?”

  “I know who he is—was.”

  “And Mr. Burrows?”

  “I’ve caught rats in one of his barns. T
wice the size of the barn cat, they were.”

  “Did you know the man who was shot in Ely?”

  Brenner smiled. “I knew of him. Only I wasn’t the one who shot him.”

  “Then who do you think did?”

  “Even if I knew I wouldn’t tell you. Whoever it was, he must have had his reasons. Some of us didn’t like our officers.”

  And that was all he could learn from Jeremiah Brenner. He put a question mark by the name. But if there was a rifle in the bare hut, Rutledge wasn’t sure where it could have been concealed. Still, the rat catcher answered to no one, and he could have found half a hundred places to keep the rifle safe.

  Rutledge drove next to Isleham. The day was hot now, the air heavy. He left his motorcar in the shade cast by the trees in St. Andrew’s churchyard, and walked to each of the addresses on his list.

  The first three names were easily eliminated. One had actually come to Wriston to hear Swift, “to make up my mind, once and for all,” he’d added. What’s more he had been seen to give Swift a hand when the man stepped up on the base of the market cross, just before he’d begun his speech.

  The other two had perfectly good alibis, one working behind the bar at the local pub, and the other playing cards with the brother of the Isleham constable. They had been together most of the evening.

  Numbers four and five had no alibi, but one had served in Egypt, well away from France where Captain Hutchinson had spent his war, and the other had been a conscientious objector and had served as an orderly in a hospital in Devon.

  Their names received a question mark, but after the interview he was inclined to think they were in the clear. And Hamish agreed.

  The sixth name lived just below the church in a house set back from the road. Rutledge’s first impression was that Lieutenant Thornton must be one of the more prosperous denizens of Isleham. There was a garden on either side of the steps, and the path leading up to them branched there to go toward a small folly, like a round Greek temple that must serve as a garden house. It reminded him vaguely of the Temple of the Winds he’d seen in a book on Athens. And one of the two small wings on either side of the house was mainly glass, a conservatory, he thought.