Hunting Shadows: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery

by Charles Todd

  The middle-aged woman who answered his knock wore the uniform of a housekeeper. He gave her only his name, asking to see Lieutenant Thornton.

  “I’ll see if he’s receiving visitors, sir. A moment, please.”

  He waited several minutes for her to return.

  “Mr. Thornton will see you now,” she said. “This way, if you please.”

  He followed her into a central hall and down a passage that led to a very masculine sitting room, framed maps on the wall and a large globe on a stand in one corner.

  Thornton was standing by the cold hearth. A tall slender man with fair hair and blue eyes, he greeted Rutledge pleasantly and offered him a chair.

  “Is this about the Memorial Fund?” he asked. “I’ve been intending to send in my contribution. I’m sorry someone had to come all this way on my account.”

  “I’m from Scotland Yard, sir. I’m here in connection with the murders of two men, Captain Hutchinson in Ely and Mr. Swift in Wriston.”

  Thornton frowned. “Yes, a tragic business. I’ll help in any way I can, but I don’t precisely know how I can be of service.”

  “Had you ever met the Captain? While you were serving with the Army during the war? Or perhaps afterward, in London.”

  “I may have met him somewhere in France. If I did, I don’t recall it. But I never served under him, if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t often go to regimental functions and the like.” He smiled grimly. “My rank is a battlefield commission. I joined as a private soldier and was promoted more or less against my will.”

  Rutledge gestured to the room they were in, indicating the house in general. “You could have trained as an officer.”

  “I didn’t want the responsibility for the lives of others. Rather selfish of me, perhaps. I killed Germans when I had to, but sending other men out to die on my orders was something I couldn’t face. Were you in the war? Yes. Then you’ll know what I mean.”

  Rutledge did. All too well.

  With Hamish rumbling in the back of his mind, he answered, “No one did that by choice. Only by necessity.”

  “Very true. Still, I was happy to serve under someone else.”

  “I understand Captain Hutchinson was in Burwell for a funeral several months before traveling to Ely for a wedding. A Major Clayton’s services.”

  “I knew the Major, of course. I served under him. But I make it a point not to attend funerals. There have been too many. Men are still dying, although the war is nearly two years over. I didn’t know the Major’s sister very well—I’m sure my absence wasn’t noticed.”

  “And Mr. Swift?”

  “I’ve heard him speak, of course. But I’m not interested in politics. I do my duty, I vote. I don’t mean that. Still, I haven’t seen this better world we were told we were fighting for. If you want the truth, it’s something I try to avoid thinking about. The future.” It was his turn to gesture to the room at large. “I stay in the past, where it’s safely, unemotionally over.” A wry smile accompanied the remark. “I can do nothing to change the past and I have no responsibility for it.”

  “If you were in the ranks, you were given a rifle. What became of it?”

  “My rifle? I daresay I had more than one whilst in France. The last one I turned in with the greatest relief when I was given my commission. That was in the last days of the war. I don’t think I shot anyone after that. I tried not to. There were rumors of Armistice. It was all about to end, and I couldn’t see any reason to kill another man whose only hope was to live a little longer and then possibly go home.” He shrugged. “Not that they didn’t do their best to kill us.”

  “Do you have any idea who might have wanted to see these two men dead? Or who shot at Mr. Burrows the day before yesterday, narrowly missing him?”

  “Burrows? The farmer? My God,” Thornton said blankly. “As for the other two, I don’t know enough about the matter to do more than hazard a guess. And that would be someone who hasn’t finished his war. For whatever reason. Rather frightening to think about. I have my own nightmares, God knows.” His eyes were suddenly different, his features twisting with pain. “Mostly about the machine guns. I can’t hide from them, and I know I’m going to die. The doctors told me this might pass. So far . . .” He shook his head, unable to finish. Getting up, he walked to the window and stared out at nothing until he could turn to face Rutledge again.

  “Is there anything else?” he asked. “I’d rather not talk about the war any longer.”

  “Are you married? Do you have a family?”

  “Sadly no. I thought I was engaged once. And then the war came along. I don’t think there’s anyone now who would wish to share this life. How do you explain to a woman who hasn’t been to war what it was like, and why you have changed so much?”

  Rutledge had no answer to give him. He’d carried his love for Jean throughout the war as a promise of happiness when it was finished. And instead he’d had to find the courage to set her free, rather than tie her to the shambles he had become. To add to his pain, he could see how relieved she had been, how happy to walk away and not have to deal with what she didn’t understand and didn’t want to face. Very soon thereafter, she’d married someone else.

  And there was Meredith Channing, who had also left him to find the man she was married to, and whom by her own admission, she hadn’t loved.

  The room around him seemed to close in, and he made his escape before he could say or do anything that Thornton could recognize. Shell shock. Disgrace and cowardice and lack of moral fiber . . .

  Outside he walked on to the churchyard, tree-shaded and quiet, avoiding the memorial to the war dead. It struck him that this island of tranquility was only a matter of miles from the hustle and bustle of Newmarket, the center of horse racing.

  Someone was coming in through the lych-gate, carrying a pot of flowering plants and a small trowel, walking toward a fresh grave he could just see near the apse. Avoiding the woman, he turned and went into the church.

  It was lit by the small but elegant clerestory illuminating the dark framework of the magnificent hammer-beam roof. He stood there and stared up at it, letting the conversation with Thornton fade. The emotions the man had roused were always too near the surface, like exposed nerves, sensitive to the touch, even to the air. No matter how many times he might tell himself he had begun to heal, he could see that Thornton had not, and it was a reflection of his own guilt.

  And then, concerned that the woman planting the flowers might well come into the church to say a prayer for the dead—remembering how the Rector in Wriston had come upon him unexpectedly—he hastily turned to leave.

  Taking with him, unwittingly, the thought that there had been no Green Man here, only angels decorating the ceiling above his head.

  It was tempting to go to the rambling old Red Lion pub for a drink, but Rutledge had other calls to make.

  Finishing those, he walked around the village a little, looked at the old priory that had become a barn, and then made his way back to the motorcar. And still Hamish was there in his mind, refusing to go, reminding him again and again of his encounter with Thornton.

  Giving up, he drove back to Wriston. Had it been a mistake to interview the ex-soldiers? But where else was he to turn for answers, if not to men who had handled rifles, knew them intimately, and could probably still shoot as well with them as they had in the trenches.

  Priscilla Bartram was on the lookout for him, and met him at the door, for all the world like a wife awaiting her husband’s return from the fields or the shops. Her life was a lonely one, and he could understand that his presence was at once comforting and comfortable. But there was nowhere else in the village to stay.

  She offered him a drink, but he was no longer interested in a whisky. Instead he told her he would work in his room, writing up the day’s report for Inspector Warren in Ely.

  �
��You’ll be down later for dinner? I found a nice bit of beef at the butcher’s.”

  “In an hour, then.” He smiled and went up the stairs.

  But not to work. He stood by the window for a time, then sat down at the desk to take out the stationery there, imprinted with the same scene that was on the iron sign outside.

  He wrote a note to his sister, Frances, telling her where he was—she had not been in London when he left—and adding that it would probably be a longer inquiry than he’d expected. He asked her to collect his mail and then could think of nothing else to say.

  In the end, he balled the note up and tossed it aside.

  Thinking better of leaving it for Miss Bartram to find, he collected it from the floor and put it in his luggage instead.

  It was while he was putting his valise back in the armoire that he had the thought.

  And Miss Trowbridge had unwittingly given it to him.

  The Green Man.

  A face, often smiling without real humor, in a circlet of leaves, as if the man were poking his head out of them to see what was happening around him. Sometimes the leaves grew from his head or his face, half concealing it, like a man’s hair and beard. A pagan symbol, yet popular in churches or in the names of pubs in a few places he’d been. Something so commonplace and conventional that he’d missed the significance.

  And now, suddenly, it had triggered what must have been in the back of his mind from the start, but locked away in his other memories of the war.

  Chapter 11

  How many times had he and Hamish worked with a sharpshooter, turning him from a British soldier into a tree or a mound of straw or a ragged edge on the trench wall, creating their own Green Man, so to speak, but with deadly intent? Changing his face, disguising his body, wrapping his rifle so that it was invisible to the enemy?

  It had taken patience and ingenuity, and the Germans were quick to see through whatever scheme they’d come up with. It was an ever-changing battle of wits.

  But then the Germans had had snipers—sharpshooters—from the very start of the war. Trained men who were very good with a rifle and equally good at concealing themselves. Some would lie in wait for days, or from the middle of the night to midday, invisible in bits of straw or sacking, using whatever came to hand. Shell-blasted trees or stumps, the ruins of a building, or even the rim of a shell hole. Their targets were any head that popped up above the top of the trench—in the beginning the British soldiers had worn soft caps, not helmets—to see what was happening on the opposite side. Making the British and the French keep their heads down also left them blind.

  In fact, the German telescopes were so good that sharpshooters were ordered not to let them fall into enemy hands.

  It was an old concept, sharpshooters, not new to the Great War, but the British had been reluctant to employ such tactics. Sharpshooters had been used in the Second Boer War, but the British had had to begin all over again when they finally saw the necessity of fighting fire with fire in 1914. Even so, it was thought to be not quite the thing. Not sporting to take out a chap who didn’t even know anyone was there, who didn’t have an equal chance to kill as well as be killed.

  And the men who did this work were often shunned, generally considered beyond the pale. They seldom boasted about their skill, passing themselves off outside their own companies as regular foot soldiers. But sometimes when the truth did leak out, they were pariahs. Even back in England they told no stories, never bragged about their best kills, and often kept to themselves . . .

  “Like Thornton?” Hamish asked.

  That jarred Rutledge. He hadn’t considered the possibility. Yes, Thornton was reclusive, but he was also a very different sort of man from the sharpshooters Rutledge had dealt with. Scots, most of them, and often retainers on an estate where deer stalking was popular in the autumn, and for the rest of the year, they were more than a little feared by poachers. They possessed the eye of an eagle, one Highlander had told him, and steel nerves. It was all that was needed to take such a skill to war.

  But now someone had brought that skill home with him, and for some reason had begun to shoot again.

  It wouldn’t be the first time Rutledge had dealt with a sniper. Then he himself had been the target.

  The question now was, had the war returned to this man, or had he found his former skill useful when he decided to commit murder?

  Hamish said, “It doesna’ matter which came first.”

  And Hamish was right. It didn’t. But to know might make it easier to find a killer.

  Those lists of ex-soldiers he’d asked Inspector Warren to draw up were useless now, Rutledge could see that. Finding out who among them had served as a sniper would mean searching the War Office records. What’s more, he himself had often enlisted the help of the best marksman in his company, unofficially putting him to work when faced with a German sharpshooter who was pinning his men down. That had seldom gone into any records, a tacit agreement when the request was made. But they had got their man, and he’d been grateful.

  Still, it hadn’t hurt to let these village men know that they were under scrutiny by the Yard, whether one was the killer he was after or not. Somewhere on the lists was the name he was looking for, and if he was getting close—whether he knew it or not—it might force his quarry to keep a low profile for a while.

  “Ye ken,” Hamish went on, “that he’s verra’ guid. He didna’ copy what he’d seen in the trenches.”

  That was true. This killer could think for himself. He could plan, he was patient, and he was willing to risk everything when he saw his opportunity.

  And that made him all the more dangerous.

  Rutledge considered whether or not to speak to Inspector Warren or possibly even Constable McBride. It was information that could be valuable.

  And yet, if what Rutledge suspected ever became common knowledge, his advantage would be lost.

  But he had his explanation now for the monster Mrs. Percy had seen. And it had been real enough. Only she hadn’t known how to interpret it . . .

  He wondered if the cooper in Soham had suspected the truth. It could explain why Ruskin had quietly left Wriston without giving McBride a statement.

  Better to hunt the shadows alone, as long as he could.

  Downstairs, he waited until his dinner was nearly finished. And then he said, “Tell me about the housemaid Herbert Swift dismissed after his wife died. Susan, her name was.”

  “Well, he was leaving for Scotland, of course, and Susan’s roots are here in the Fens. She didn’t want to go north. Nor did he want to take her. She’d been his wife’s maid, she reminded him every day of his loss. I can’t think she felt ill done by. And she’s been such a help to the Rector.”

  “Perhaps she’ll remember something that might be useful.”

  “It was so long ago, of course. Water under the bridge since then. But then Mrs. Swift came from Ely, didn’t she? As I remember, she was a Phillips before she married.”

  That name hadn’t come up in connection with the wedding guest list, not as far as he knew. He made a mental note of it.

  “I was just a girl when she came to Wriston, and I thought her the most fashionable person imaginable.” Miss Bartram smiled at the memory. “I looked forward to seeing her Sunday morning, and I tried sometimes to copy her hats.” The smile turned wry. “But of course it wasn’t very successful. She was one of those women who could wear pretty hats, and I’m not. Still, it was a pleasure for me. And I expect for my mother as well. But it had an unhappy ending, didn’t it? I don’t think Mr. Swift ever looked at another woman after his wife died. Mrs. Prescott asked him how he expected to entertain in London, if he didn’t take a wife. She’s Teddy Prescott’s widow, you see, and hopeful. But he told her he was intending to serve his constituents, not set himself up as a Londoner.”

  “Then after dinner I think I’ll walk
to the Rectory and have a word with Susan.”

  It was a quiet evening, and Rutledge stood for a moment, watching the ducks floating on the pond, gliding above their reflections and finally climbing out to waddle toward wherever it was they roosted at night. One of the dogs outside a house on the far side of the Green gazed after them with bored interest, then rested his head on his paws again with a drowsy sigh.

  He had put it off long enough. It was time to face the Rector.

  But March gave no indication that he mistook this call as a cry for help. He listened with courtesy to Rutledge’s request, called to Susan to come down and speak to the Inspector, and then left them alone in the small Rectory parlor.

  She was older than he’d expected, her reddish hair threaded with gray, but her face was still smooth and her eyes were a bright blue.

  “I’m trying to find something in Mr. Swift’s life that may have led to his death,” Rutledge began easily. “You worked for him for some time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d kept up a kindly interest in his well-being in the years that followed.”

  Susan Tompkins smiled. “He was a good man, you know. He had a love of history, and he was concerned about his clients, always looking out for those who needed his help but couldn’t pay his fees. Once he took a pig in place of what he was owed, then he never had the heart to butcher it after it’ud grown to a good size. He said he couldn’t bear to touch the meat.”

  “By history, do you mean the history of the Fens, the background of the people who lived here?” It was always possible that Swift had stumbled onto something that could mean trouble for a family or its holdings. Even if he kept it to himself.

  “I can’t count the times I dusted his bookshelves. There were books on Rome, six or seven, and weighty ones, you’d not dare drop one on a foot. And then there was Egypt. He bought all he could find. He told me once he’d have liked to go there. But of course there was no money for such a journey. Not for a country solicitor. I don’t recall any books about the Fens.”