A Cold Treachery ir-7

by Charles Todd

  W hen Chief Superintendent Bowles was summoned from his bed by a messenger from the Yard, he tied the belt of his robe around his thickening waist and ran a hand over his hair before going down the stairs to find out what was so urgent he had to be awakened from a sound sleep.

  He took the folded sheet the waiting constable handed him, and scanned it swiftly, then read through it more carefully.

  “Hell and damnation!” he swore under his breath. And looked up at the constable with the fierce glare of a man who needs spectacles and is too vain to wear them.

  “Sanders, is it? Any more than this, do you know?”

  “That's all Sergeant Gibson gave me, sir. He said we've got a man close by, sir, who could be there in a matter of hours, if you like. Inspector Rutledge has just finished his testimony in Preston and is set to travel back to London in the morning.”

  “Rutledge?” Bowles scowled. He disliked Rutledge with a fervor that time and various absences had not succeeded in reducing. Mickelson, on the other hand, was a man after his own heart. Careful, never stirring up the wrong people, deferential to his superiors, Mickelson was. Not always clever, but steady. It would take him twice as long to arrive on the scene, but he could be trusted.

  On the other hand, the Chief Constable who had sent to the Yard for immediate assistance was a man of parts, with connections-a brother in Parliament, and a wife whose father had a title. It would not do to let him discover that Chief Superintendent Bowles had not been as expeditious as he might have been, under the circumstances. Five dead-bloody hell!

  They were going to attract notice, these murders…

  He couldn't afford to dally.

  “Rutledge it will have to be, then,” Bowles agreed sourly. “Tell Gibson to get word to his hotel and stop him before he leaves Preston. I'll be in my office directly.” He read through the message a third time-and had second thoughts.

  “Yes, send Rutledge by all means,” he repeated. If anything went wrong in the North, it might be just as well to have a scapegoat available. “I'll speak to him myself as soon as I've been put in the picture.”

  T he telephone call that reached Rutledge shortly before dawn was from Sergeant Gibson, a gruff man with a good head on his shoulders.

  “A message from the Chief Superintendent, sir,” the sergeant said without preamble. “You're to stay where you are until he telephones you. There's been a good bit of trouble in the North. Place called Urskdale. And it appears you're the closest man we've got.”

  “I know the area.” Rutledge's voice down the line was wary. He was beginning to take the measure of his senior officer: There was often a whitewash of facts when Bowles sent Rutledge to handle an inquiry. And scant praise when Rutledge succeeded on his own in spite of unforeseen obstacles expected to defeat him. Bowles's cardinal interest was in fiercely protecting his own advancement and making certain his men reflected well on him. More than one ambitious inspector had learned to his cost that credit often found its way to the Chief Superintendent, deserved or not. And Rutledge had discovered in Kent to what lengths Bowles would go to destroy a threat. “What kind of trouble?”

  “Five dead. Shot, all of them. One missing. All in a single family, sir.”

  “Gentle God! Any other details?”

  “No, sir, not that I've been told. They'd just been discovered. The bodies. Late yesterday, as I understand it. The snow is hampering the local people, but Inspector Greeley has got parties out searching for miles in every direction. The Chief Constable agrees with him that the Yard should be brought in as quickly as feasible.”

  “Very well, I'll wait for the Chief Superintendent's instructions.” As Rutledge was about to put up the telephone, Gibson's voice came down the line in a last word.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, Sergeant?”

  “It's likely the Chief Superintendent will have other things on his mind, sir, and forget to tell you. But we've had a call, just last night, from Chief Inspector Blakemore in Preston. He was pleased with your discretion. That's how he put it, sir. Your discretion.”

  It was rare praise from Gibson, a man not given to unnecessary speech. But then Sergeant Gibson would do whatever lay in his power to irk Old Bowels, as the Chief Superintendent was known among the rank and file. And he always chose his methods with an unerring eye for what would succeed without bringing a reprimand down on his own head. If Bowles disliked Rutledge enough to withold praise, Gibson took spiteful pleasure in passing it on.

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” Rutledge replied, a wry smile in his voice, and this time hung up the telephone without interruption.

  Blakemore had been kind. But then the Chief Inspector hadn't understood, fully, the impact of the conviction that Rutledge had helped him win…

  B y ten o'clock that morning Rutledge was well on the road north, a frigid wind blowing through the motorcar and clouds sweeping in again from the west. He was pushing his speed, taking advantage of every empty stretch to make better time, taking risks where he had to, to gain a few extra miles. The towns and villages strung along the road like a haphazardly designed strand of somber beads often slowed him to the point of exasperation, and at one point he was out of the motorcar directing traffic like the rawest constable, sorting out a tangle of wagons in a narrow market square.

  A child out in this weather couldn't survive for long…

  The thought drove him like a spur.

  Hamish reminded him from the rear seat that the search parties were the boy's best hope. If he's alive, the men in the district will find him, no' us.

  It was true, but the urge to hurry was ever present. If a man had murdered five people, Rutledge knew, he would have nothing to lose by killing more. And what had become of him was as important as what had become of the lost child.

  He picked up the snow two hours later, at first a dusting that was already muddy and torn, and then growing deeper by the mile. Rutledge swore. A fresh storm on the heels of one that had already left the North buried would make the journey a trial, turning the roads into slippery, unpredictable ruts. It would hinder the search in Urskdale, as well. If they hadn't given it up… or already found the child's body. The sooner he got there, the sooner he would know the latest news.

  He was tired, and adding to his fatigue, the case in Preston still weighed heavily on his mind. The murderer had been a young man, Arthur Marlton, aged eighteen and mentally disturbed. Driven by voices to attempt to kill himself-and in the end driven to kill someone he had come to believe was stalking him. In his confusion and emotional distress, Marlton had lashed out to deadly effect. The man his wealthy family had quietly set to watch over their distraught son had been his unfortunate victim, allegedly striking his head on a curbstone as he fell and dying without regaining consciousness. The victim's version of the attack died with him. But the circumstances pointed to murder-and witnesses supported it. A tragedy compounded by tragedy.. .

  Rutledge wasn't convinced that an asylum was a kinder sentence than facing the hangman. He himself found the thought of being shut away out of the light and air for the rest of one's life an appalling prospect.

  But the young man's family had been in tears, grateful, watching their only son with inexpressible relief, striving to be patient in their need to touch and hold him. And the son, barely aware that his life had hung in the balance for a week, wore his chains in bewilderment as he listened to words they couldn't hear.

  Beyond the sweep of Rutledge's headlamps, darkness closed down, coming early this time of year. Gray stone villages lining the road had thinned to more open country; and the rising ground that would eventually lead up the fells still lay before him. The air already seemed colder as he pointed the motorcar's bonnet north.

  What troubled Rutledge as he had testified against the young man in the dock was that he himself heard voices. A voice. Not that of madness, where the mind tricked itself into believing the twisted commands of its own fabrication. Or-at least he prayed it wasn't! What he heard was more
fearful-a dead man. Corporal Hamish MacLeod pursued him like the Furies, following him through the last years of the war and into its aftermath as if the man were still alive. So real that the soft Scots accent created a presence of its own, as if Hamish stood just out of sight, where Rutledge would surely find him if he turned unexpectedly. A presence that was the embodiment of too much horror piled on horror. The product of shell shock. The legacy of war.

  For two days Rutledge had listened to the testimony of expert witnesses, aware of the difference between himself and the prisoner in the Preston dock. And yet at the same time Rutledge had known with a cold certainty that he was the only person in that courtroom who could fully understand what the doctors and the barristers were trying to describe: a haunting so real it was at times terrifying.

  He could even understand why the prisoner had wanted to kill himself. He, Rutledge, had in the depths of his torment walked into heavy fire as he crossed No Man's Land with his men and waited for the peace of death, and it had eluded him. When, against all odds, he'd survived the war, he had made a promise to himself: When he could see Hamish, when the day came that he could feel the dead man's breath on the back of his neck, or the touch of a ghostly hand on his shoulder, it would be finished. By whatever means.

  The revolver that had belonged to his father lay in a flannel cloth behind the books in his sitting room in London, where he could reach it at need.

  The legacy of war… It had left Rutledge so scarred emotionally that the blurred, ghostly faces of men he had led into the teeth of battle seemed to mock him, their useless deaths on his very soul. War, he thought, was madness of a different kind. And the final ordeal had been the death of Corporal MacLeod. Not by enemy fire, like so many others, but by Rutledge's own hand. The epitome of waste, a man who had broken under fire even as Rutledge himself was breaking-a man who preferred dying in shame to leading others into another futile massacre: the long, deadly slaughter called the Battle of the Somme. Hamish MacLeod's decision had left an indelible mark on his surviving officer. A good man-a lost man-who had perished on the unhallowed altar of Military Necessity. In bald truth, murdered.

  And yet Rutledge-and Hamish-had survived the trenches, after a fashion. Haunter and haunted, they had lived through the bloodiest conflict in the history of warfare. It was Peace that had made the presence of the young Scots soldier, invisible and at the same time more real than in life, an even more unspeakable burden for Rutledge to carry.

  “You were one of the lucky ones,” Dr. Fleming had told him not a fortnight ago. “But you can't see it as luck. In your view it's intolerable, your survival. You're punishing yourself because a whimsical God let you live. You think you've failed the dead, failed to protect them and keep them alive and bring them back home again. But no one could have done that, Ian. Don't you see? No one could have brought all of them through!”

  But Hamish had tried, Rutledge answered Fleming silently. And so I had had to try as well.

  Rutledge had come to the doctor's London rooms that fair and windy December afternoon before driving to Preston to ask when-if-his expiation would end. After concluding a particularly unsettling investigation where Hamish seemed to be on the brink of revealing himself at every turn, Rutledge was looking for absolution-hope-from a man he had once hated and slowly learned to respect.

  Only eight months before, sleep-deprived, goaded beyond endurance, he had lived in silence and despair, hardly aware of himself as a man. At Rutledge's sister's insistence, Dr. Fleming had taken him out of the military hospital, settled him in a private clinic-and forced him to speak. Reliving the trenches had nearly destroyed him, but out of the ruin of the barriers he had erected in his mind, he had found a way to return to Scotland Yard, slowly and painfully reclaiming himself. A long road, with no end in sight. It had been a hard eight months. And very lonely.

  Fleming had added cryptically, as Rutledge stood at the window, staring out at traffic in the street, “It really depends on you, Ian. I don't have an answer. I expect no one does. Time? Learning to forgive? To forgive yourself most of all? I can't cure you. But you may be able to cure yourself…”

  Rutledge had had to be satisfied with that.

  And now as he drove through the darkness, Hamish kept him company in the lonely silence.

  T his part of the Lake District was bounded on the east by the Pennines and on the west by the sea where the high country fell away to coastal plains. It was a land of farming and sheep, where damsons ripened in August but apples were gnarled and sour, where a man's nearest neighbor might live out of sight in a fold of the great fells, and such roads as there were often became impassable in winter.

  Urskdale was not one of the famous valleys of the lake country. It possessed no poetic views or famous prospects. It was, simply, a rough, lonely, and wildly beautiful place where ordinary men and their families eked an existence in hard soil and harsh conditions, and felt at home. Safe. Until now…

  What had turned a killer loose in their midst?

  H e'd had the forethought to add a Thermos of tea to the sandwiches the hotel had put up for him, and stopped only to refuel the motorcar or walk for five minutes in the snow while the wind brought him back from the edge of sleep. In the cold night air, there was only the warmth of the engine to keep his feet from numbness. There was no such help for his gloved hands or the back of his neck.

  How long would a child survive in this weather, lost in the open?

  No' verra long… Hamish, at his shoulder in the rear seat, had for miles been making comparisons with the Highlands, the poor ground and narrow valleys, streams that ran crookedly over stones and sang sometimes in the silence. It's no' the same, but it makes a man homesick, he added. In the trenches I sometimes dreamed about the glen. It was verra real. Wi' all my heart, I wanted to come home again.

  “I came to the Lake District as a boy, with my father. For walking holidays.” The words were whipped away by the wind, and Rutledge, concentrating on the road running before his headlamps, was unaware that he had answered aloud.

  They had driven through Kendal two hours before, one of the handful of small towns that serviced this part of the country. He had seen the bridge by the church, where he had stood with his father and leaned over the sun-warmed stone wall to watch for salmon in the Kent. Years ago. A lifetime ago.

  The road just outside Keswick was barricaded by police. Rutledge was stopped and questioned, his papers examined in the light of a torch. Then it swept the rear of the motorcar. Rutledge flinched as it passed over where Hamish sat. But the constable nodded and stepped back.

  The sergeant in charge, hands jammed into the pockets of his heavy coat, leaned into the open window and said, “Sorry, sir. Orders of the Chief Constable.”

  “Any news?”

  “None, sir, that we've heard. There's little enough traffic just now, seeing the state of the roads. At least no one's come out since we've been posted here.”

  “Or he got through long before that,” Rutledge answered. “Still, we can't take that chance. Carry on, then.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  He turned off the Buttermere road soon after, following what was little more than a well-traveled track that looped the flanks of some of the tallest peaks in the district.

  They loomed overhead, hidden by the swirls of snow, hulking shadows unseen but always- there. It was odd-he could feel them, their presence confining.

  Rutledge shivered, fighting a rising panic. Unexpected panic-almost as if it had been conjured up by the prison sentence handed down to the young man in Preston But it wasn't that. The heights above him, the encircling fells, once familiar and beautiful, were now watchful and malevolent, pressing in on him, smothering him.

  It was the first time he'd come here since the war. And in his concern for the missing child, his concentration on road conditions, it hadn't occurred to him that the very things that made the Lake District what it was-the high peaks and inaccessible valleys-would now threaten him as effective
ly as the heavy gates of a prison clanging shut at his back.

  He had been buried alive in that nightmarish dawn when Hamish was shot. He had felt the earth shift and tilt under his feet as the shell exploded, then he'd dropped far down in the pitch dark of the erupting hole as mud and bodies and debris thundered down on him. All that had saved him was the bloody tunic of one of his men, his face pressed against the still-warm cloth where a tiny pocket of air survived between the living and dead. Deaf and blind, his extremities pinned by the weight of earth, the taste of blood in his mouth, and slow suffocation setting in, he had seen the dying face of Hamish MacLeod. Eyes begging him for the coup de grace to stop the pain, a thread of a whisper that seemed to be burned in memory. Fiona MacDonald's name.. .

  By the time the frantic rescue party had dug down to him, the damage had been done.

  He could no longer endure a place from which there was no escape. A shut door, a small room, a crowded train carriage, a throng of people pushing against him. But he hadn't anticipated-he hadn't been prepared for the sense of walls around him here. Blinding snow and darkness and that nearly invisible presence above his head cutting him off from retreat.

  “Aye, there's only one way in,” Hamish reminded him mercilessly. “Ye saw the map for yourself.”

  The urge to turn around, to go away while he could, swept over him.

  Rutledge swore. He didn't need Hamish to remind him that he was a serving policeman. That there was duty to be done. God knew he'd done it in France. At what cost to himself and to others…