by Charles Todd
He put the map away and stood looking round the room. "If I were hiding something, where would I choose? It has to be safe from prying eyes sitting here waiting for Hens- ley to come back to his office. Or even a determined search by someone intent on finding where Hensley kept files or money. Where?"
Still favoring his ankle, Rutledge began a thorough search, starting at the top of the house and working his way down. It was hampered by the dark day, when lamplight let shadows fall in corners and made it difficult to judge if a board was askew or only appeared that way in poor light.
Hamish reminded him that the house still belonged to the Freebolds, and it wasn't likely that Hensley would choose a secret place they might already know existed.
Room after room, Rutledge examined every possible place where something could be hidden. The bedrooms, the bath, the stairs, the sitting room and dining room, the kitchen, the cellar where the coal bin filled one corner and old bits and pieces filled another. Digging through that, he came across a sled, a broken drying rack for clothes, a chair with a missing leg, a box of dishes with chipped edges and only one cup, a stack of old newspapers for starting fires, a carton of tools, and a doorknob that had been tossed in by itself.
"Ye're wasting time," Hamish told him. "There's naething to be found."
But he refused to give up.
He came back to the lone doorknob and stared at it thoughtfully. It looked to be a more recent vintage than the rest of the bric-a-brac.
And then he began to pull the litter out of the corner, working fast and stacking each item in the center of the earthen floor.
When he'd pulled an old trunk filled with clothing half a century old out of his way, he could just feel, rather than see, the rough edges of a door.
There was a hole that looked more like a knot in the wood than an actual cavity, but he thrust the doorknob inside. There must have been a matching knob on the other side, because he was able, gently, to pull the door open just far enough to bring it the rest of the way with his fingers.
The knob on the far side had been nailed in place, giving it stability. And as the door opened to the point that he could see in, he realized this cabinet was shelved as if once used for jams or preserves.
It was empty now except for a dark leather satchel and a collection of papers.
He was just about to draw them out, when he heard a voice over his head.
Swearing, he left the door where it was and hurried up the stairs as fast as his complaining ankle permitted.
Mrs. Channing was standing in the parlor office, calling his name.
"I've forgotten you!" he said contritely. "I should have come back before this."
"No, I expected to make my own way to the inn. But what have you been doing? Is that a cobweb in your hair?"
He realized that there was even coal dust on one sleeve and a smudge across the back of his hand. "Searching," he said, telling the truth. "I'd hoped that Hensley kept his more important files somewhere less accessible than this room."
"And were you successful?" she asked, no inflection in her voice.
"I was debating whether to shift a large pile of coal when you called me away. As far as I can tell, that's the only task I have left."
"Yes, well, I'll not keep you. But if I were you, I'd be careful, digging about in cellars with those cuts and scrapes on your hands. They're still open wounds, and easily infected."
"I hadn't thought of that. I'll just find my coat and see you to the inn."
"Nonsense. I'm perfectly capable of walking that far alone."
He waited until he was certain she was gone, sitting in the dark parlor for a quarter of an hour. Only then did he go back down the cellar stairs with his torch and look into the closet.
The satchel contained money, far less than he'd expected. And the papers were an odd assortment. One of them was a letter to the young woman who had been searching for the man, Sandridge.
It was straightforward, just as Hensley had told him, denying that there was anyone in Dudlington by that name, and suggesting that she had got the wrong Dudlington.
The only interesting thing about the reply was that it had been written on official stationery, giving it the stamp of authority.
The others were a collection of interviews in the days following the disappearance of Emma Mason. Rutledge took them to his bedroom, and in the course of the evening, read through them.
The first documented Mrs. Ellison's frantic summons one morning, reporting her granddaughter gone in the night.
The constable's notes were brief.
"She was very upset. Called Miss Mason to her breakfast, and when there was no answer, went up to room to wake her granddaughter. She was not there, and no indication of hasty departure. No letter left behind. Grandmother then searched rest of house, no sign of Miss Mason. I immediately organized a search party, calling in every available man. Spoke to everyone in village, house by house. Covered fields two miles in every direction, also barns and sheds…"
The next five or six pages were questions put to various people who had had some contact with Emma that last day. One of them was Martha Simpson. She'd heard words between Emma and Miss Letteridge that morning, and it had had to do with London, she thought. Betsy Timmons, Hillary's older sister, had remembered Emma crying in her room in the afternoon as she'd gone upstairs to begin her cleaning.
Hensley himself noted, "I saw Miss Emma at around six o'clock as she was leaving the baker's shop, and she was carrying a letter in her hand. When I spoke to her, she ignored me. I had the impression there was something on her mind." He had added, "Her lamp remained burning until late in the night. I can't say when it went out."
The next interview was with the rector. He said only that he'd seen Emma Mason at the church the day before her disappearance. He had found her sitting there in a pew- not Mrs. Ellison's, as he remembered-and she seemed to be crying. But when he approached her and asked if she was unhappy, she'd shaken her head and told him that she was praying for her grandmother. He hadn't known what to make of that, but it was clear that she didn't want to confide in him, and he had left her there.
There was an interview with Mrs. Lawrence. She had seen Emma as she was leaving the church, but Emma had turned away from her and instead walked out toward the fields. Mrs. Lawrence thought she might be meeting someone there, because Emma had seemed furtive.
The final report came from Mrs. Simpson. As she was looking out her window just at dusk, she had seen Emma arguing with a man, but she couldn't identify him in the poor light. The girl turned and walked into her grandmother's house, shutting the door "with some force." Mrs. Simpson was reluctant to describe the man, "for fear she might be mistaken," and Hensley reported that he hadn't pressed.
Rutledge couldn't be sure whether these were copies or the originals, which Hensley hadn't forwarded to Inspector Abbot in Letherington. Neither could he be sure whether the constable had kept them to use in his own investigation or was trying to conceal his own personal role in the girl's disappearance. Had he, for instance, been the man that Mrs. Simpson saw but couldn't name?
Mrs. Ellison was growing deaf-she might not have heard her granddaughter leave in the night. For that matter, she might not have heard someone come to the door and on some excuse lure the girl out of the house.
All in all, Rutledge hadn't found anything incriminating one way or the other. Not sufficient money to prove that Hensley had taken a bribe in London, nor any proof that he'd had something to do with the girl's disappearance.
What was odd was that the letter regarding Sandridge and the interviews regarding Emma Mason had been stored here together.
As if there was some connection.
Setting the interviews aside, Rutledge considered what he'd read.
Who had the girl been speaking with when Mrs. Simpson saw her at dusk? Was it Hensley? If so, he'd adroitly covered his tracks by admitting to encountering her on the street. And Mrs. Simpson had seen Emma walk into her grandm
other's house afterward. But whom had she met when she walked into the fields after leaving the church?
If the baker's wife had suspected it was Hensley on the street with Emma Mason at dusk, it would explain the rumors blaming the constable for her disappearance. A comment here, a remembered remark there, a lively imagination adding another bit of information, and before very long, suspicion would be rampant.
Hamish said, "Ye're forgetting yon woman with the rosebushes."
Grace Letteridge might easily have been the person to start a rumor about Hensley. For reasons of her own.
She'd quarreled with Emma. Was it an old jealousy between them rearing its head again? Over Robert Baylor?
He'd said once that jealousy was a crime of hot blood.
Something could easily have stirred it back to life again.
Emma Mason might not have walked out of her grandmother's house in the middle of the night to meet a man, but she could very well have come down to the door if a distressed Grace Letteridge had knocked.
It was an image he couldn't get out of his mind. Emma, her bedroom lamp burning late into the night, still awake. Grace Letteridge, watching from her own windows until Mrs. Ellison had gone to bed, then waiting for the older woman to fall asleep. The village quiet, only the sound of the church clock striking the hour. Grace standing in her doorway to be sure no one was watching, and then slipping across the street. Emma, answering her door, because Dudlington was a village where she knew everyone and feared no one. And Grace standing there, tears in her eyes, saying she couldn't sleep, that they had to make up their quarrel then and there. Then coaxing, urging Emma to come to her house, where they could talk without disturbing Mrs. Ellison. And Emma, vulnerable and easily led, following her across the street and into the house, the door shutting behind her…
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."
<
br /> "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."
