by Charles Todd
Not that the design mattered. He was more interested in how such a thing came to be here, in front of the house where he'd been a guest.
Hamish was saying, "It doesna' signify. It fell from the pocket of someone passing by."
"I heard it fall. So would whoever was carrying it. Why not look for it?"
"It wasna' of great value."
"Who could have known that I'd leave early . . ." It could as well have been Dr. Gavin, he told himself. Called to a deathbed. Or Mrs. Channing, séance over, leaving Maryanne's guests to talk behind her back about the evening's entertainment.
Neither of them had been in the trenches.
"I wouldna' make sae much of it."
"It's out of place."
"Aye. That doesna' make it sinister."
Yet in a way it did. It was as if in an unexpected fashion the war had reached out to touch him again.
"Yon woman has unsettled you."
Perhaps that was all it was. But the casing in his fingers was real. He hadn't imagined it. Where had it come from? Hamish was silent, offering no answers.
After a moment, Rutledge slipped the casing into his pocket. Then he turned away from the Browning house and began the long walk home.
Rather than settling his mind, the walk had given Rutledge too much time to dwell on other matters. The letters on his desk. One of them from his godfather, David Trevor. And that reminder of Scotland, of what had happened there months before, had stirred Hamish into grumbling activity. David had written in haste . . .
Young Ian has measles and I've left him to Morag and Fiona. I'm banished to my club in Edinburgh, and thoroughly miserable at missing his first Christmas with us. Much as we've looked forward to your visit, the doctor advises no excitement. I've promised the lad a pony if he stays in his darkened room without fuss. That's all I'm allowed to do. You might search out a saddle, and have it shipped north for Boxing Day, if you like...
It had been a visit intended to mend fences.
Rutledge had last seen his godfather in September, just before Fiona and the child had come to stay with Trevor. He'd found it hard to face the young woman Hamish might have married, the woman whose name he'd spoken as he died. Harder still to greet her as a friend, when Rutledge knew himself to be responsible for Hamish MacLeod's death. It was a shadow that lay heavily between them, even though he'd never confessed the truth to her.
Yet he'd told himself, as he had left behind the snowy fells of Westmorland barely three weeks ago, that perhaps the time had come to return to Scotland to face the tangle he'd made of his life and find a little peace. It had seemed possible then. A fair-haired woman in a wheelchair had made anything seem possible. Even confessing his nightmares to those who cared about him. Clearing his conscience so that he could feel something again besides despair.
But his good intentions had been swept away by another letter that had arrived hard on the heels of the first. It had stripped away hope. Now he was glad not to travel north. Glad to be spared what would have been a futile errand. He'd convinced himself that love would make a difference. He'd have ended up making a great fool of himself instead.
But such protests rang hollow in his ears, and all the while Hamish called him a coward.
Even after Rutledge had retired, the soft Scots voice kept him awake, taunting and accusing by turns, raking up memories, driving him like a spur.
He lay there, counting the hours as the clock struck each in turn, his thoughts shifting from one unsettling image to the next. A narrow track of road twisting through the heavy drifts. A child's face. A woman standing in the cold snow light of an open door, her hands on either side of the frame and the room behind her dark as the grave. The sound of a weapon being fired, so loud in the confines of the kitchen that it seemed to ring in his head even now.
Shifting again, he tried to find a more comfortable position—a drowsiness that might lead to sleep.
Instead he remembered Mrs. Channing's expression as she greeted him only hours earlier—that fleeting pity, a sense of understanding in her face, as if she'd read his thoughts.
Or had known him somewhere before.
France?
He stared at the barely visible walls of his bedroom.
Why had she reminded him so strongly of the war and the trenches? Or was it only that bloody shell casing he'd never taken out of his coat pocket?
By the time he'd drifted into uneasy sleep, he began to dream of the war, as he so often did, jerking awake as the whistle blew to send his men over the top—he could smell the trenches, he could smell the cordite, the sour sweat of fear that bathed his men even in the cold air. He could feel the rough wood of the ladder, the terror of anticipation, waiting for the soft thunk! as a bullet hit its target and someone at his elbow went down. He could hear the yelling, the deafening sound of steady machine-gun fire as they walked out into the barren hell of No Man's Land, moving quickly toward the unseen enemy—
And then he was truly awake, the noise and smells and drenching anguish of counting his dead fading into the darkness of the familiar room.
His gaze fell on the second letter lying on his desk by the windows, the paper faintly white in the ambient light. He knew the words by heart, now.
"Don't come back to Westmorland—"
The desolation he'd felt when he first opened the single sheet swept him again.
How do you learn to live again, he thought, where there is no hope, no warmth, no laughter?
He lay there, trying not to think or dream or remember, until first light.
Meredith Channing was also awake until dawn, her mind unwilling or unable to settle into peace.
So that was Ian Rutledge, she thought, that tall, handsome, haunted man.
Not at all what she'd expected. Maryanne Browning had said, discussing her guests each in turn, "He was in France for four years, and doesn't often attend parties now. Such a shame! He and Peter were better at charades than any of us, and it was always great fun. But his sister has promised to persuade him."
"Was he severely wounded?" she had asked.
"He was in hospital for several months, I'm not sure why. Frances never said. But nothing serious, apparently. He's returned to the Yard. Of course the woman he was to marry broke off their engagement as soon as he came home, and wed someone else. That must have been a crushing blow. We were all so heartbroken for him, but I never liked Jean, myself. I thought he could do much better!" And then the first of her guests had arrived, and Mrs. Browning had gone to greet them.
Mrs. Channing saw no reason to tell her hostess that she'd seen Ian Rutledge before, once, but only at a distance. She hadn't needed to include him in that silly business at the table to know his secrets.
War, she thought, is such devastation for the living—for the dead—and for those who are not sure any longer where they fit in.
But that brought her little comfort. There were some things that one couldn't explain away.
Grace Letteridge lay awake as well. The woman who cleaned for her on Tuesdays had told her she had seen Constable Hensley coming out of Frith's Wood.
"I was taking the Christmas bells to the attic for the rector. The window was all dusty, and I took out my rag to clean away the worst of it. And I could just see him, hurrying away on that bicycle of his, for all the world like a hunted man. I can't for the life of me understand why he goes there. You'd think he'd stay away, like everyone else." She shook her head, considering the constable's foolishness. "But then he's not one of us, is he?" she added. "Else he'd know."
A guilty conscience, Grace thought now. It makes people do foolish things. Betray themselves, even.
She turned on her side, not wanting to think about Hensley—or Emma.
Emma was dead, and yet she might as well be alive. What was it the Romans believed? That a spirit wandered if the body wasn't given decent burial? Emma's wandered. Grace was certain of it, and it gave her no peace.
Someone knew the secret of what had happened to
Emma Mason. And Grace was convinced it was Hensley.
Why else had he failed to find Emma's murderer?
3
Mid-January 1920
Rutledge stood on the cliffs above Beachy Head Light. Below him the gray waters of the Atlantic moved in angry swirls, clawing at the land. All around him the grass seemed to sway and dance, whispering in the echoes of the wind like disturbed voices.
He had come here after a difficult twenty-four hours forcing a would-be murderer to give himself up and release the hostages he had taken in a small cottage outside the village of Belton. The man, tired and unshaven, unrepentant and silent, offered no explanation for stabbing his wife. He went with the constables without giving them any trouble, and the local man, Inspector Pearson, had said only, "I was convinced in the end he'd kill all his family. It's a miracle he didn't. In for a penny, in for a pound. We can only hang him once."
"He had nowhere to go," Rutledge pointed out. "And whatever anger was driving him, it had finally burned away." He could still see the eyes of the man's mother-in- law, staring at him in undisguised relief, something in her face that was old, as if twenty-four hours had aged her. Her daughter, trembling with exhaustion and pain, allowed the doctor to wrap her in a blanket and take her away in his carriage to his surgery. Blood had soaked through her dress, and her hands were clenched on the blanket's folds as if to hide the sight. Her mother had followed in a second carriage with an elderly aunt, a thin, pale woman who appeared to be in shock. Even the ex-soldier standing near the horses mirrored her numbness, his face turned away.
As soon as the affair had been dealt with and he was free to go back to London, Rutledge had driven instead toward the sea, leaving his motorcar and then walking down to the cliffs. Beyond lay France. It was said, during the war, that the big guns could be heard here along England's coast. But they were mercifully silent now. Had been for a year and two months.
Looking back over that year, he could recognize his own long struggle to survive. The strain, the tension, the constant badgering of Hamish in the back of his mind had taken their toll. Jean's defection .. . The still unsettled business with his godfather in Scotland. And now the letter from Westmorland.
Had he really fallen in love, there in the north? Or had he been beguiled by those easy domestic moments in the kitchen, when life had seemed so simple and comfortable? A lonely man could have mistaken such brief respites for feelings that weren't there—on either side.
He couldn't be sure anymore. Even though he'd gone over and over his own emotions.
Elizabeth Fraser's letter had ended:
It is better for me to live as I am, where I am, than to imagine I could fit into any other world. I have a history in London. It would do no good to pretend I haven't. And I don't want to reawaken the memories there. They would be too painful. Don't come back to Westmorland, Ian. I beg of you. I am safer alone...
He was too tired to try to work it out. As long as Hamish was there, in the shadows of his mind, he'd be mad to love anyone. It was reckless even to consider the possibility. He had nearly got Elizabeth killed, after all. He shuddered. What would he have done then? Mourned her as his lost love? From guilt?
He could hear Hamish's derisive laughter.
A small stone, dislodged by his shoe, ran down to the cliff's edge and tumbled over, out into space. He watched it spin out, then disappear into the sea far below.
It would be easy to step over the face of the cliff after that stone and end the struggle, end the uncertainty, silence the voice, crush out the ghostly faces of men he had led and failed. It was tempting. It was in some ways the answer he had postponed in the hope that somehow he would heal.
"It's no' so simple," Hamish said. "Leaping o'er the edge willna' change the past. And it canna' change what you are. Ye'll be dead and so will I. Ye'll ha' killed me twice. That too will be on your soul."
The voice was clearly Scots on the wind, coming from nowhere, and it was steel. After a moment, without answering, Rutledge turned back the way he'd come, to where the motorcar was waiting.
He had already turned the crank, heard the engine ticking over, and was climbing in, when something on the driver's seat caught his eye.
It was another shell case. In fact, a pair of them, linked together in a short length of a machine gun's ammunition belt—collected and thrust there, because the casings were normally ejected from the weapon as it fired. He picked up the pair and stared at them. The same size and caliber of the one he'd found in London. And this time he was in no doubt—they'd been left where he alone would find them.
There was a pattern around the metal perimeter of one casing, and he turned it around to examine it in the pale light of the winter afternoon.
An odd pattern, a delicate staircase of poppies that curled around the brass surface, but where there should have been blooms, there were tiny skulls with hollow eyes staring up at him.
Death's heads.
Hamish said, "A warning."
The same thought had crossed his own mind. "But why on only one of them?" Rutledge asked, curious, still examining the workmanship.
"May be he thinks ye ken why, well enough." After a moment he added, "There was a private soldier in one of the companies doon the line. I didna' know him well, ye ken, but his sergeant found one of his carvings with a death's head on it, and the next time o'er the top, the sergeant died of a bullet in his back."
Rutledge had never reexamined the single casing he'd found outside Maryanne Browning's house. He'd been far more interested in why it was on her doorstep than in what was cut into its surface. As far as he knew it was still in his dress coat pocket.
He looked around the headland, tasting the salt on his lips as the wind turned and blew off the sea. There was no one else out here. No one at all.
Yet the cartridge casings hadn't been in the seat when he left the motorcar to walk out to the cliff's edge. That was a certainty.
If anyone had followed him here from the village— where was he now? Lying flat somewhere in the scrubby grass or long since gone on his bicycle, making a silent retreat?
Turning slowly in a circle, Rutledge scanned the landscape once more, as far as he could see.
The emptiness around him seemed filled with something malevolent.
He couldn't shake off the sense of being watched. But there was not even a gull in the sky overheard.
There hadn't been anyone in the square in London either.
After a moment or two, Rutledge tossed the casings onto the passenger seat and put the car in gear. All the way to London, he reminded himself that while someone might have known he was going to the Brownings' party— Sergeant Gibson had tracked him down, after all—no one could have guessed that he would drive out to this godforsaken headland late on a cold and windy January afternoon. He himself hadn't expected to come here. It had happened on the spur of the moment, a whim dictated by a need for silence and peace. Someone would have to be a mind reader . . .
He was nearly certain that there was no reason for anyone to follow him from the village where the hostages had been taken. It was far more likely that someone had tracked him from London.
But why?
4
Reaching his flat, Rutledge couldn't stop himself from looking down at the front steps. There was nothing there. He walked inside, went up to his rooms, and turned on the lamp before going in search of the other cartridge case, the one from New Year's Eve. It was still in the pocket of his dress coat, and he examined it in the lamp's bright glow.
Poppies. Rows of them gracefully circling the casing, the petals of each bloom very beautifully etched into the brass alloy. But between the leaves and stems he could just barely see something hiding in the greenery. Was that an eye peering out? Or had the engraver's hand slipped? Hard to say. He'd have thought nothing of it, if he hadn't seen the latest example. Now the deliberately vague socket took on a more sinister air.
"By the same hand," Hamish pointed out, and indeed the s
kill of workmanship proved that.
The question was, Rutledge thought uneasily, what would have happened if he hadn't left the Browning house early that last night of the old year? Would the casing have been retrieved until another opportunity presented itself? Or left to be swept up along with the leaves and debris in the gutter, a malicious impulse that hadn't been successful? What had he set in motion by finding it? Worse still, what did this harrying have to do with his years in the trenches?
He remembered Mrs. Channing, the only guest he hadn't met before that night. Could she have guessed that he wouldn't stay for the séance if he could find a polite reason for walking out on Maryanne's party? Then how had she managed to step outside and leave that casing where he would find it? While he was drinking his port with the other men?
He hadn't served with anyone named Channing.
He searched his memory for the faces he'd seen in Belton, people quickly gathering out of morbid curiosity to learn how a man's murderous rampage ended. She hadn't been there, he'd have recognized her. Who else, then? Who of half a hundred people might it have been? Someone at the back of the crowd, surely, half hidden, wanting to see without being seen.
"Or none of them," Hamish retorted.
As for Beachy Head, it was open, without much in the way of cover.
I'm too good a policeman to have missed him! he told himself. If he followed me, I'd have seen him.
It had taken nerve to step out in the open, reach the motorcar, toss in the casings, and vanish again. I could have turned at any moment, and caught him.
"You had ither things on your mind."
"I wasn't there that long!"
"Longer than ye ken."
Rutledge shook his head.
"He was in the trenches," Hamish went on. "Else, where did he come by these?"
Rutledge flinched, half expecting Hamish to lean forward to touch the cartridge casings. He scooped them up quickly and put them in the drawer of his desk, turning the key. "Why machine-gun cartridges?" he asked aloud, "or poppies?"
