Charles Todd_Ian Rutledge 08

by A Long Shadow

  He wondered if Hensley had been standing at his own darkened window, watching Emma in her room pacing the floor, his field glasses offering him a clear view of her face as she moved back and forth across his line of sight. And then, tired, he put up the glasses and went back to his bed, Emma’s light still burning. Unaware that in five minutes—ten—Emma would be lured to her death.

  If this was true—any of it—then why had Grace or anyone else shot Hensley with an arrow? Why stir up the past by reminding people of Emma and the suspicion that she was buried in Frith’s Wood?

  What had happened that had forced Grace Letteridge to act?

  25

  The rain had been swept away by first light, the wind heralding clearing and colder weather. Rutledge went down to the kitchen and blew the fire into life to heat his shaving water.

  Hamish said, “The men shaved in the trenches in cold water.”

  “Yes, well, our gas masks had to fit smoothly. I’m not in France now.”

  “You havena’ thought of Westmorland for some time.” The voice in his head had a hard edge this morning, turning from one harrying to another.

  But it was true, he hadn’t.

  “Hostages to fortune,” he said aloud, taking the kettle upstairs with him.

  He knew himself, he was the sort of man who would have been happier settled into a good marriage, with children coming in a few years. If the war had never happened, if he’d married Jean in 1914, he might already have a child of three clinging to his hands or asleep on his knee, and another due in the spring. A very different world, that.

  Instead he’d gone to France, had fought in the trenches for four horrific years, and then come home damaged by what he’d seen and what he’d done. He shuddered to think how a child might view Hamish. Children were quick to grasp the subtleties of emotions around them, to see through evasions and quickly identify prevarication. He couldn’t explain and he couldn’t explain away—how do you tell a child that its father is haunted?

  There must be a way—other men had done it.

  But that was a lie. And he was beginning to understand that whatever he might have felt for Elizabeth Fraser if he’d been free of his guilt and shell shock, he had nothing to offer her now. She had been right to tell him not to come back to Westmorland, even if she didn’t understand the reasons why he would accept her decision. He must quietly shut that door and never open it again.

  He stood there, looking in the mirror, damning the war, damning the men who began it and the officers who plotted each battle.

  As he began to shave, Rutledge remembered one of the charges leveled against the highest-ranking planners and tacticians at General Headquarters, that they had lost touch with the reality of war on the battlefield and had ordered charge after charge into the teeth of the machine guns, as if they were facing an inferior enemy who would break at the sight of sheer numbers. Officers far from the carnage of No Man’s Land, for whom casualties were regrettable numbers on a morning report, weren’t faced with the bleeding bodies one stepped over in a broken retreat to the lines.

  What had these men brought back from France? How had they slept at night with their blunders and stubbornness and their guilt?

  “They didna’ suffer any guilt,” Hamish told him bitterly. “They didna’ see what they had done.”

  What of the hundreds of faceless men on the streets looking for work, trying to pick up the threads of family life, hoping that the dying had made a better Britain, and finding they were lost in it. Faceless men…People stepped around them now, ignored the brave boy who’d marched away to glory and now begged on the street because a one-armed man couldn’t work. He thought sometimes, in the dark corners of his mind, that the dead were the lucky ones. They hadn’t been disillusioned.

  He was still in a dark mood when he went to his breakfast. Mrs. Melford was in the kitchen, he could hear her moving about. How did she feel, cooking meals for strangers, to make ends meet in the aftermath of war?

  That train of thought took him to Mrs. Ellison, who had lost her daughter and her granddaughter but had held on to her pride in her name.

  Mrs. Melford brought his tea and said, “There was a fire this morning, did you know?”

  “A fire?” he repeated, trying to bring his mind to bear on this news. “Where?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me what had happened. Mrs. Simpson said something about the Baylor house.” Barbara Melford had avoided using Ted Baylor’s first name.

  She didn’t add that that was the one place she felt barred from going. Any word would have to come to her secondhand.

  “I’ll look into it,” he said. “Was there much damage?”

  “I don’t know—Mrs. Simpson did say that no one was hurt.”

  “That’s good news.”

  He finished his breakfast, paid his account, and walked down the lane in the cold sunshine. The heavy odor of charred wood reached him on the wind when he turned into Church Street, but when he came nearer, he couldn’t see any signs of fire in the front of the house.

  He knocked at the door, and an angry Ted Baylor answered it. “Another vulture come to gawk?” he asked.

  “I’m a policeman,” Rutledge responded.

  “Well, I can tell you, it was nothing that would involve Scotland Yard. My brother had nightmares in his sleep and knocked over his lamp. It burned a good part of the table, the cloth over it, the carpet under it, and scorched the floor before I smelled smoke and smothered the flames.”

  “He’d fallen asleep with his lamp burning?”

  “Is there a law forbidding it?”

  Rutledge himself had slept with his lamp burning for the first weeks after he’d left the clinic, in a vain attempt to keep the nightmares away. Before he’d left for Warwickshire, he had slept sitting in his chair more often than lying in his bed.

  “There’s no law forbidding it. But I understand the need for it.”

  “I don’t see how you could,” Baylor said, his anger draining and his face lined with exhaustion. “Unless you were in the war.”

  “I was on the Somme,” Rutledge told him simply.

  Baylor pulled the door closed behind him and stood on the step with Rutledge. “It’s been hard, dealing with the screams. I don’t sleep much myself. He’s all right when he’s awake. He’s been to London, to the doctors. They haven’t helped. Sometimes I find myself thinking he would have been better off dead.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “I don’t know whether I do or not. Joel has always been a trial.” He looked out over the fields. “This land is in my blood, but not in his. He wasn’t born here, he doesn’t have the same feeling for it. Maybe you have to be bred to it. Robbie was. He reminded me of my grandfather, an easy understanding of what animals need. Even a stray cat would come to him for petting. And he was thrown away in the war, his life wasted. Joel is city bred, he likes the crowded streets, the smell of the river when there was fog coming in, the way the nights were never really dark. First time he heard an owl, he was petrified.” A smile lingered at the corner of his mouth, but he was unaware of it. “I told him it was a demon, out in Frith’s Wood, searching for the damned. The night it screeched outside his window on that tree over there, he climbed in bed with Robbie and pulled the sheet over his head. And the next morning my father took his strap to me for frightening my brother. Well, half brother. We weren’t as kind to him then as we could have been. He was a fish out of water, and we should have made it a little easier than we did. I’ve tried to make it up to him.”

  He had been talking like a man deprived of human companionship, spilling out his frustration and his guilt and his strong sense of duty.

  Hamish was saying, “And how did yon brother see it?”

  Baylor said, as if answering him, “I expect he forgave us after a bit. But we didn’t know what to make of him when he came to live with us after his grandmother died. She was always partial to him, probably because he had no one else. But we were j
ealous, Robbie and I, for no reason other than the fact that he was different from us. Rougher around the edges, arrogant sometimes, generally off-putting when we least expected it. A trial at school, as well—better at football than we ever were, faster in his reactions, stronger.”

  He shivered as he stood there in the cold wind in only his flannel shirt, and yet he seemed reluctant to return to the warmth of the house.

  Rutledge could sense that Baylor was ridden with guilt yet again, for wishing that Joel had died in the fire in his room, his lungs filled with smoke. But the man had saved his brother, and there was nothing the law could do about wishes.

  After a moment Baylor turned to him and said, as if the words were pulled from him, “How is she?”

  He didn’t pretend he didn’t know.

  “I should think she’s wondering what went wrong. I found her crying, after you left that night.”

  Baylor swore with feeling.

  “It’s hopeless. But I won’t shame Joel by telling her that. I shouldn’t have told you as much as I have. Sometimes the words seem to spill out, and I can’t stop them. It was wrong.”

  “Have you talked with the rector? He seems to be a man of great understanding.”

  “That’s why I can’t talk to him.” He looked at Rutledge. “He’d understand too much. I just have to soldier on, and get through it.”

  “What happened to Joel in the war?” Rutledge felt himself tense, knowing what the answer would be. Shell shock. But Baylor surprised him.

  “He was gassed. At Ypres. His lungs are rotted out. I listen to him at night and I curse them all, the generals and the Germans and the wind blowing his way that morning. He said it smelled of violets. Odd thing for a city man to tell you. But that’s what he said.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard the same thing.”

  There was silence between them. The church clock struck the half hour. Finally Baylor took a deep breath and prepared to go back inside his house. “You have a gift for listening. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you tricked me into talking. But there’s been no one since Rob died, and it’s been building up. I’d ask you to forget what you heard, if I didn’t think it was impossible.”

  “Go back to your brother. I won’t add to the gossip mill.”

  He left Baylor standing there and walked back the way he’d come. The odor of smoke was still strong. He’d made a promise to Baylor, but he knew Mrs. Melford was waiting for news.

  By the time he reached the lane, he knew what he was going to say to her.

  Mrs. Melford was standing at her front window, just behind the lace curtains. The sun touched them and gave them an opaque quality that would have concealed her, if she hadn’t moved as he came toward her door.

  She opened it and invited him in.

  “A lamp fell over. No harm done, just a small fire quickly put out. I expect it was alarming at the time.”

  “Did you tell him I was worried?”

  “Should I have?”

  Mrs. Melford shook her head. “No, certainly not. The worst fire I can remember in Dudlington was in a cattle barn. I’m glad it was not that.”

  She stood there for a moment longer, as if hoping he would give her more details, a verbatim account of what had been said. Then she nodded, saying, “Good morning, Inspector.”

  Rutledge drove into Letherington to send a telegram to Gibson at the Yard.

  Cain, crossing the street, saw him and came to speak to him. “News, then?”

  “A request for information, that’s all.”

  He finished his telegram and then turned back to Cain. “Do you know anyone by the name of Sandridge?”

  “Sandridge?” He shook his head. “Means nothing to me. Any particular reason for asking?”

  Rutledge said, “In Hensley’s files there’s a letter requesting information about the man. He kept it in his files. I wondered why. Sometimes the most obscure fact can turn out to be useful.”

  “True. How is Hensley, by the way?”

  “Feverish. I couldn’t be sure how much of it was pretense for my sake, and how much was real. Infection, he said.”

  “You’ve not made much progress,” Cain commented.

  “So far, the best evidence is that the attack had to do with Emma Mason’s disappearance. But the village is silent about her. They think she’s buried in that wood, and there’s the end of it.”

  “Is she?”

  “I don’t believe she is. I’ve looked at the ground. Digging there would be a major venture. There’re the roots for one thing, and a deep layer of leaf mold. Any disturbance would be obvious.”

  “You’re thinking of a real burial. Put a body out there under a bed of leaves and let the animals dispose of it. Where you have cattle and sheep, there’s feed. And if you have feed, there’re bound to be mice, if not rats. And the wood is an ideal habitat for creatures that eat bones. Rats don’t know about the Saxons.”

  “Then why didn’t the first searchers find her?”

  “Do you really think they made a careful search of the area? There’s no certainty they looked beyond the surface. A clever man could have made the ground appear untouched.”

  “You’re the devil’s advocate.”

  “No. I’m simply offering possibilities.”

  Hamish was not impressed. “Ye ken, he’s ambitious, with an eye for London.”

  Rutledge said, “Then bring me a dozen men who aren’t superstitious, and let’s begin quartering the wood.”

  “Where are you going to find them? Not in Letherington or even Fairfield. Ask Chief Inspector Kelmore in Northampton.”

  “Come with me now,” Rutledge said, “and we’ll make a beginning. There should be shovels and rakes in Hensley’s shed.”

  Cain laughed. “Is this a challenge, old man?”

  “Just an eagerness to test your theory before we inconvenience the Chief Inspector.”

  “Where is she buried—assuming she’s dead—if she isn’t in the wood?”

  “Someone’s cellar,” Rutledge answered him, and turned to walk back to his motorcar.

  Cain followed him. “Beneath the floor of a cattle barn is more likely. Considering the stench there, a decomposing body would hardly be noticed.”

  Rutledge drove back to Dudlington with his mind on more than the road.

  As he made the turn by The Oaks, he saw Mrs. Channing standing in the drive, looking up at the sky.

  Keating, beside her, was pointing out a flock of geese flying over. She looked absorbed in what he was saying, and Keating appeared to be enjoying himself as he talked about the birds.

  She had a knack, Rutledge thought, of seeming all things to all people. He wondered if she gave a damn about birds, but her face showed only interest, as if she had spent her life studying the habits of wildfowl. His last glimpse of her as he drove down Holly Street was of the burgundy coat snapping around her ankles in the wind, and one hand holding hard to her hat.

  She must have noticed his motorcar, because she appeared on his doorstep not a quarter of an hour later.

  “Did you hear about the fire?” she asked him as she walked into Hensley’s parlor. He had taken the time to stop at the greengrocer’s for a packet of tea, and the kettle was already heating. She could hear it whistle from the door.

  “It was the latest gossip over my breakfast.”

  She followed him into the kitchen and watched as he searched for sugar and tinned milk, then took down the cups and saucers. “Did you see the geese fly over? They’re such a pretty sight, calling encouragement to one another, changing places in the lead to keep from tiring. I’m impressed.”

  “You didn’t come here to talk about birds,” he said, waiting for the tea to steep. “But yes, I saw you.”

  She quoted,

  There’s a beauty in birds on the wing,

  That stirs the heart and makes earthbound creatures

  Long for flight, but the larks above the battlefield

  Are silenced by the sounds of war.r />
  I have watched birds out at sea,

  Catching the wind,

  And longed to follow them,

  To some safe place far from here.

  He stopped short. It was O.A. Manning’s poem “Safe…”

  “Yes, I thought you might know those lines,” Mrs. Channing said comfortably, as if she had discovered a fellow enthusiast. “Mr. Towson is fond of the poems as well. We had an interesting conversation about them.”

  He had investigated the death of O. A. Manning, and it had left a deep scar on his soul. Had she known that too?

  “You’re a woman of many talents,” he said neutrally.

  She took her cup and sipped appreciatively. “There’s nothing like a good cup of tea on a wretchedly cold day. Why are you so suspicious of me?”

  “Am I?” he parried.

  “You have been since the night we met. I’ve told you. I’ve no reason to wish you ill.”

  “I wish I could believe that. You have an uncanny ability to make people like you, but there’s that undercurrent of knowledge that you shouldn’t, by rights, have.”

  “Do you think I wouldn’t have warned you, if I’d known about the lorry?”

  “I wish you could tell me who it was who shot Constable Hensley with a bow and arrow in Frith’s Wood.”

  She frowned. “Are you asking me to help you?”

  “It was a rhetorical question. Nothing more.”

  “I can’t call up visions at will, you know. If I could, I’d have done a great deal of good in this world by warning others of their imminent danger. But sometimes I find myself uncannily accurate, and that’s frightening. I don’t want to know the day of my death. Or your death. Or any other sad thing that’s better off hidden from all of us.”