by Charles Todd
The road had narrowed for a mile or more, shrinking now into a stretch that was barely wide enough for one vehicle, let alone two. To one side a winter-bare hedgerow ran up a slope and down again, giving him a feeling of being shut in between it and the flickering shadows cast by a copse on his right.
It was claustrophobic, reminding him of a magic- lantern show gone mad-light and dark, light and dark, the trees flitting by like irregular fence palings and without substance.
As he geared down for the bend ahead, Hamish said, "You'll have us both in the ditch-"
He never finished the warning.
A shot echoed, sending half a dozen crows flying up out of the trees, crying raucously in alarm just as the windscreen in front of Rutledge shattered, glass spraying like bright bits of water into his face. And he could feel the wind of the bullet passing his ear before thudding somewhere in the rear seat behind him.
Fighting to control the motorcar as it veered across the road and straight for the clumped roots and dried wild- flowers at the foot of the hedgerow, Rutledge was swept by horror.
The shot had missed him-but it couldn't have missed Hamish, directly behind him.
The bonnet came perilously close to burying itself into the earth beneath the hedgerow before he had cut the motor and the vehicle rocked to a halt.
His face was wet with blood, but he was barely aware of it. What filled his mind was the silence in the seat behind him.
I dare not turn and look.
If he's badly hurt-what am I to do? I can't touch him-!
As the initial shock receded, he reminded himself that Hamish was already dead, buried in one of the muddy cemeteries in France.
The relief that swept him was followed by a cold, intense anger.
He was out of the motorcar, the door swinging wide behind him, racing toward a break in the hedgerow some twenty feet away.
The shot had come from a revolver, he was certain of it. He knew the range, and his ears had unconsciously registered the direction of the sound, even though he hadn't seen the muzzle flash. And the only thought in his mind now was putting hands on the man who had fired it.
"Ye canna' leave the motor here!" Hamish shouted behind him. "Yon bend-"
But Rutledge was scrambling up the stones, weeds, and packed earth at the foot of the hedgerow, ignoring the stubby twigs and branches that plucked at his clothes and scraped his hands. He found the thinning patch where one of the knot of trees had died out, pushed his way through it with a final effort, and plunged into the rolling pasture beyond.
He wasn't sure what he'd expected to see there. But except for a grazing horse at the far end, the pasture was empty.
His years in the trenches had taught him to pinpoint snipers in their lairs, and the skill came back to him with accustomed ease. He strode along the hedgerow, searching for crushed blades of grass, scuffed earth-any signs that pointed to where someone stretched out on the ground or crouched by the thick tangle of tree limbs and dead wild- flower stalks, waiting to fire.
Underfoot the grass was a dull yellow and damp, quickly soaking into his leather shoes as he broke into a trot, following the line of the hedge. He knew the angle of fire. Less than fifty feet away from where he'd climbed the hedgerow, he found what he was looking for-a muddied patch and above it a single twig snapped in two. He squatted there on the ground, looking back toward the lane, and he could see there was a perfect field of fire from this spot toward where his motorcar had been passing as the windscreen shattered.
Not an accident, then. But what? He couldn't believe that boys had been trying out their father's war souvenir. The shot had barely missed his head. The question was, had it missed on purpose, or because the shooter wasn't skilled enough to hit his target?
Then as he straightened, he saw, shoved into a thicker part of the hedge not more than a foot away, three shell casings, in a length of belt.
His anger had drained out of him, and he turned quickly to scan the pasture again, suddenly aware of how vulnerable he was, if the man with the revolver took another shot. No one there. Nothing to prove anyone had been there.
It was as if it had all been a figment of his imagination. The horse was grazing peacefully, and the crows had settled again into the trees across the road. And yet there was the shattered windscreen, and here was evidence of someone lying in wait, taking aim-pulling the trigger. Not an accidental firing but a careful ambush.
And the shell casings left behind as a taunt.
I could have killed you. But I didn't. This time.
He spent nearly half an hour quartering the pasture for tracks, searching for any sign of how the shooter had come here, or left. At length, unsatisfied, he went back to lift the casings out of the hedge, and look at them more closely.
Behind him Hamish said, "Three."
Soldiers in the trenches were a superstitious lot. It was said German snipers waited for a man to light a cigarette, then pass the match to the men beside him. And as the third cigarette flared, the sniper had made his kill. Three.
Like the other casings, these were.303s, from a Maxim machine gun. It had been the most widely used weapon in the war, half of Europe copying its design for their armies. And the machine gun had been the most deadly weapon of the war, sweeping the stark, shell-pocked, wire-strung terrain called No Man's Land with a hail of bullets that could bring a man down and pass on in a matter of seconds to kill everyone beside him long before any of them reached the first line of enemy trenches. It had, Rutledge thought, caused more casualties than any other weapon. The gunner and his crew could hold off a hundred men, and there was no way to stop him.
Rutledge stood there studying the cartridge casings. Like the others he'd found before, these were clearly meant for him to examine.
Even in the gray afternoon light he could see the skull carefully set in the cup of a poppy blossom, nestled where the stamens should have been. The blossom was beautifully formed, the petals open and lovingly shaped, the death's head staring up at him with blackened eye sockets cut deep enough into the metal to give them a ghoulish realism.
Without thinking he touched his gloved finger to the dark sockets and then saw there was a smudge on the leather.
Rutledge could have sworn that it was blood. But whether his own, from the cuts on his face, or from something on the carving, he couldn't have said. He found a man in Hertford who could replace the shattered windscreen, but there was nothing to be done about his own face, except to ask the doctor recommended by the garage owner's wife to pluck the deeper bits of glass out of his skin.
"I'd report this to Inspector Smith," Dr. Eustace told him. "We can't have silly fools running about the countryside with loaded firearms! This sliver could have blinded you, if it'd struck your eye instead of your eyebrow!" He held up a splinter of glass, bloody on the tip.
"It was an accident," Rutledge answered him, trying to infuse conviction into his voice. His face was stinging like hell. He wasn't about to discuss the shell casings with anyone, let alone a provincial inspector who would begin to ask questions he couldn't answer himself. But all the while Hamish was telling him that the shot had been a near thing. For both of them.
"And ye must ask why he didna kill you, when you were in his sights."
"On a public road?" he retorted silently as Dr. Eustace went on with his digging. "I'd rather know why he followed me to Beachy Head just to leave a warning. Why not shoot me on the cliff and simply roll my body off the edge and into the sea? I was an excellent target, standing there against the sky. It would have been the easiest way to be rid of me without a trace."
"Aye, but I canna' believe he wanted it to be sae easy." And after a moment, Hamish added, "He likes playing wi' you."
"He'd have had to be ahead of me," Rutledge responded grimly as the doctor probed for the last shard of glass and then handed him a mirror. "But how did he get clear so fast?"
"You'll have to put this powder on the wounds," Dr. Eustace was saying, reaching for a sma
ll packet on the table behind him, "else they're likely to fester. You won't look very pretty in the witness-box, in spite of my handiwork. But at least the worst of the damage is cleaned."
Rutledge stared at himself in the mirror. Tiny red wounds spotted his face, giving him the appearance of a man with measles.
"It doesn't matter," he answered the doctor. "The cuts will heal soon enough."
But he could remember the sound of shattering glass and the familiar whistle of the bullet rushing past his ear. Hamish was right: it had been damnably close! He had felt the wind of its passing. Either the shooter was a very good marksman, or he'd come closer than he'd intended.
It was rather like being stalked by someone who didn't exist. But the bruised grass by the hedgerow told Rutledge it wasn't a shadow following him.
He remembered too the uneasiness he'd felt at Beachy Head. He'd felt it again in that pasture, a tall target there by the hedgerow, a target even a poor marksman couldn't have missed.
He didn't like being vulnerable.
He didn't like a nameless, faceless pursuer at his heels, invisible because he couldn't be identified. "Aye, he could be anywhere," Hamish told him. "Even in yon courtroom, staring down at you from the gallery." It was a thought Rutledge carried with him into the witness-box. But if this stalking had been an attempt to change Rut- ledge's testimony, it had failed. He saw the prisoner in the dock convicted and walked out of the courtroom with grim satisfaction, even as he scanned the faces around him: five or six women, twice as many men, three ex-soldiers still wearing their army-issue greatcoats, one of them on crutches, and a baker's boy in his white apron, his face speckled with flour. There was no one among them he recognized. But did one of them know him?
5
Constable Hensley was not a glutton for punishment, but he was not a man of self-discipline either. When the note came, he stared at it for a moment and then crumpled it in his fist. There was no salutation or signature. Just the words "I saw you there in the wood." He'd have sworn that he'd taken every precaution. Who had been out in the fields, or for God's sake, along the road that afternoon? Why had they been spying on him? What did they know? Did they have any idea how often he'd gone to the wood? That he was unable to stop himself from searching it over and over again, looking for any sign that the ground had been disturbed? Where had he-or she-been, this watcher? How many times had he been watched? He remembered that strong sense of someone else in the wood. The sound of a footfall somewhere behind him. Now that he considered the possibility, he was sure that he hadn't imagined it after all. Frith's Wood was always intimidating, with that ominous feeling of something there that was not natural. Not even human.
But this time it must have been a human agency. And he had been so locked in his own fancies, he'd mistaken it for ghosts. He swore.
"If I'd had my wits about me, I'd have had him!"
For the rest of the day he went about his duties with only half his mind on what he was doing or saying. All he could think about was what had taken someone else to the wood. Was it only to watch him? Or had this person been up to no good and interrupted by Hensley's unexpected arrival?
Then why send the message? Why give himself-or herself-away by admitting to being there?
That was a question that muddied his thinking to the point that he began to imagine nuances in conversations or sly glances caught out of the corner of his eye. Even the rector, for God's sake, had pounced on him, wanting to know if he'd heard any news of twins born to a second cousin in Letherington, where he'd claimed to be. He'd wormed out of that one by saying he'd forgotten to ask. Then he'd wondered who had put the old fool up to it.
For more than a week, Hensley resisted the gnawing mystery of the note shoved under his front door. In the middle of Friday night, he'd come wide awake, remembering that he'd left the wood first. What had happened there after he was gone?
Which appeared to him to explain the note-it had been sent to frighten him into staying away. I saw you…
A man with a guilty conscience would take that as a warning and not risk going back.
Hensley, on the other hand, was eaten up by worry. What had the writer found? And why, after all this time, had he been poking around there? What was worse, once he'd got the wood to himself, what had he done?
The constable took every precaution. He rode out of Dudlington, traveled three miles north of the village, and left his bicycle well hidden behind the stone wall that ran along the road, shutting in the stock that in good weather grazed in Long Meadow. Then he walked another mile before turning back to the wood.
He'd been a right fool the last time to leave his bicycle where anyone on the main road could have glimpsed it. He was sure that that was what had betrayed him.
The wood lay on the north side of Dudlington, beyond Church Lane, in a fold of the land where the Dower Fields ended. This time Hensley kept the trees between himself and the village, using it as a shield. Approaching it now, he wondered what it was about this one dark place in a landscape of open fields that seemed so evil.
Why hadn't the Harkness family, who'd owned this land for generations, cut it down centuries ago and set the land to the plow? He'd have had it done in a fortnight, in their shoes.
He'd been hardened in London; he'd seen death in many forms. He was a policeman, for God's sake, hardly likely to be moved by nonsense about old bones. And this was just a stand of trees, the undergrowth just a tangle of briars and vines and fallen boughs.
But then countrymen were a superstitious lot. It was their stories that had set Frith's Wood apart from the beginning. Passed down from father to son, over centuries. "Don't go in there-the dead walk there. Restless, because they'd had no time to pray before they were cut down. Shun the wood, if you know what's best for you."
In spite of his bravado, the closer he got to the trees, the harder his heart seemed to pound. Still, the note had been real enough. Ghosts didn't put pen to paper.
But what if he was walking into a clever trap?
He stopped at the edge of the wood.
In for a penny, in for a pound, he told himself, bracingly. And he stepped into the shelter of the trees, grateful for the respite from the cold wind that had pursued him across the bare fields.
He walked slowly, studying the ground as he always did, poking at briars and the dried stalks of shrubs to see if the matted tangle beneath had been disturbed.
He was only some thirty feet into the trees when the hairs on the back of his neck seemed to stand stiffly against his collar.
Stupid sod! he scolded himself. There's nothing here but your own wild fancy. The sooner you do what you came here to do, the sooner you'll be away again.
He walked on, catching himself on the verge of whistling. He was nearly through the wood now, and he'd found nothing suspicious-no one had been digging here or shifting rotted logs-nothing that could explain what had brought someone else here.
Had this been a wild-goose chase? Then what had that damned note been about?
There was a sound behind him, and he whirled, not sure what he was going to see.
Nothing.
Another five yards. Ten… Fifteen.
God, he'd looked back four times already! It was the wind, rubbing dry branches together. Flicking the dry heads of dead wildflowers against one another. He should have thought about the wind.
Another twenty feet. Not much farther, now. But he'd have to go back the way he'd come, back through the whole damned wood.
This time the sound was nearer. He turned quickly, listening for the shuffle of feet in the dead, wet leaves.
Instead he heard a bird in flight, feathers riffling through the air.
Something struck him in the back, a blow like a fist, piercing his body, tearing into him like a hot poker jammed hard into his ribs. His breath went out in a frosty gust and had trouble sucking in again.
Even as he realized what it was-even as he knew for a certainty that it was a human agency and not a phantom t
hat was intent on destroying him-he could feel his knees buckle and a terrifying sense of doom sweeping through him.
He'd been shot by an arrow. His fingers could just reach it, the shaft round and smooth. And he'd be found here, in Frith's Wood, with all the village knowing he couldn't stay away.
He mustn 't die here!
But he knew he was going to. It was his punishment.
He sank to his knees and then fell forward, blacking out before the pain touched him.
6
Inspector Smith, dining with Rutledge at The Three Feathers in Hertford after the court had adjourned, said, "While you were waiting for the verdict, we caught your assassin." His voice was smug, as if he enjoyed showing this man from London that provincial policemen were every bit as good as those at the Yard. Rutledge, looking up quickly from cutting his cheese, said, "Who is it? Anyone I know?" "Hardly an acquaintance-a local boy. He came forward of his own accord, I'd no more than got my question out before he was telling me he'd done it." "Did he tell you why?" "Just that he thought it was a good day to go out shooting." "Why did you question him in the first place? Has he shot at people before this?" And where, Rutledge added to himself, had a boy found those cartridge casings, to hang them so conveniently at the scene? Smith, not liking the direction Rutledge's questions were taking, frowned. "We went to him because he's generally roaming about the countryside in fair weather. He's particularly fond of the Massingham grounds-they include the pasture you described. Mrs. Massingham is kind to Tommy, and he sometimes takes advantage of that to go hunting."
"With a revolver?" Rutledge asked, eyebrows raised.
Smith shook his head. "Slingshot. He couldn't tell me where he'd got the weapon. Not very bright, is Tommy Crowell. Never a troublemaker before this, you understand, but there's a first time for everything, and he's old enough to get into mischief you'd forgive a younger boy. My guess is, he found the weapon somewhere-in a house or barn-and simply helped himself to it, without a thought of asking permission. He's always had a weak grasp of private ownership. Not thievery so much as just 'borrowing for a bit,' as he'd put it."
