A Cold Treachery

by Charles Todd

  She took a shaky breath. “His parents supported his decision at first. But then something rather odd happened. Have you heard of the Angel of Mons?”

  He stared at her. “Yes. Some of the men fighting in Mons in the first days of the war swore they'd seen an angel one night. They were being forced back. The angel seemed to cover their retreat. It meant different things to different men. Many of them refused to talk about it.”

  “Yes. Well. Ronald's brother died at Mons. And his parents turned against Ronald, then, telling him that God was surely on our side. That Ronald was going against the will of God. It was nonsense; they were grieving. I'm not sure they realized what their constant barrage of criticism did to him. He took it to heart, and I watched him suffer as he tried to come to terms with what they wanted. And then . . .”

  She faltered, her voice refusing to go on.

  Rutledge waited, his back to her, until she could speak again. Finally she said, “I stopped at his flat after a friend's birthday party. Sometime in the evening he'd turned the gas on and killed himself. I'd seen him at tea, and he'd tried to be cheerful for my sake. He hadn't expected me to be the one to find him, but I'd been given a book I thought he might enjoy. I'd hoped it would pick up his spirits, as it had mine.”

  Her voice changed. “I was so angry—angry with myself for not seeing his desperation, angry with his father for being so heartless and refusing to understand, angry at his mother for her stupid comparisons with his brother. All I could think of was protecting Ronald from this last indignity. ‘A coward to the end,' his father would have said. ‘Couldn't face the Hun, the way our Willie did. A disgrace to Willie's memory!' And so I took the blame.”

  “What do you mean?” He had turned from the window, a dark silhouette against the light. Her knuckles were white on the arms of the chair, her face drained of expression.

  “I wrote a note. In it I said that I'd watched Ronald suffer the indignities of others, and I couldn't go on. And so I'd ended it for both of us. But I was afraid if we died together, it would appear to be a double suicide. I went out, shut the door, and let myself be struck by a lorry coming down the road.”

  “My God,” he said quietly.

  “Melodramatic, wasn't it? Foolishness in the extreme. But I couldn't think of anything but the fact that he was dead and I wanted to die too. Instead, I woke up in hospital with the police by my bed.” She sighed. “My friends at the birthday party—it didn't occur to me that they might be asked—could prove that Ronald was alive earlier when they met me at the flat. The woman who owns the building had seen him on the stairs half an hour after I'd gone. He'd put the cat in the back garden. She swore she hadn't smelled gas then. But of course, she wasn't happy with a murder in her house. The suicide of a coward gave her some standing on the street. And so—his parents learned the truth after all. They were in the gallery at the trial. I could almost see them gloat. And I couldn't walk. They felt God had punished me sufficiently, too.”

  “Did you kill him?” he asked her bluntly.

  She lifted her face to look at the candlesticks about the hearth, ornate Victorian silver with twining ivy running up the shaft to form the cup for the candle. “I loved him so dearly. I could have done it, I think. But I didn't.” She took a deep breath. “And when Harry asked me to come here, away from London and the gossip, where no one knew—I thought I could forget. But you don't, do you? The past stays with you, like a shadow.”

  “And Gerald?”

  “Ah, yes, Gerald. He wasn't at all like Ronald, and yet if I watched, sometimes I'd catch a glimpse of Ronald in him. His fairness, the way he walked, that sparkle in his eyes when he was excited about something. I took such pleasure in that! Even, sometimes, Gerald's laughter would catch me unprepared. I would hear it in a shop, and turn quickly— Have you never lost someone, and then looked for them in other people?”

  He'd lost Jean, even though he'd come back alive from France. She had been terrified of him, sitting irrational and suicidal in hospital. And he'd seen her only once afterward, in London just before her marriage to someone else. Had he looked for Jean in other women? Or found in other women the traits that he had missed in her? In Aurore—or Olivia Marlowe? Even Fiona . . .

  “I don't know,” he answered simply. “I expect I haven't loved as deeply as you did.”

  Elizabeth Fraser smiled, but it was more with sadness than humor. “I never want to love anyone again. It hurts too much. Am I free to go now?”

  “Yes—”

  But when the door closed behind her, Hamish said, “Did you believe her, then?”

  Rutledge found he couldn't answer the voice in his head.

  The screams brought Maggie up out of a deep sleep. For a moment she lay stock-still, disoriented and uncertain. Then she found her shawl and threw it around her shoulders, hurrying to her father's room without stopping to light the lamp.

  He was sitting up in bed, on his knees, his eyes wide but unseeing.

  She stood there for an instant, then awkwardly put her arm around the boy's heaving shoulders.

  But her touch was shocking to him and he whimpered as he curled himself into a ball in among the bedclothes, his screams rising in pitch as if afraid of what she would do to him. Yet she thought he didn't recognize her in the middle of whatever nightmare held him in its grip.

  “Sybil!” she called to the dog, but it was already on the floor by the bed, hunched and whining.

  She could hear words now, incoherent but terrified.

  “What is it?” she asked him, her own voice shaking. “Tell me what's wrong!”

  He lifted his face out of the coverlet and stared at her, and she thought this time he was wide awake, no longer in the throes of his dream.

  “I killed them,” he whispered. “I watched them die. There was so much noise. And then I ran. I didn't want to hang.”

  He pointed his finger as if he held a gun. “Bang! Bang-bang, bang! Bang! Bang—”

  She had to reach out and shake him to stop the sound, recognizing it for hysteria.

  Afterward he just sat there and cried.

  Sybil jumped on the bed then and tried to comfort him.

  Sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, staring at nothing, Maggie could feel the cold settling in. The stove had been banked for the night, and she didn't have the energy to make herself a cup of tea.

  “What am I going to do?” she asked the shadows. “Papa, what am I going to do?”

  But her father was dead and buried on the hill.

  After a while, when her feet felt half frozen and her head had begun to ache along with her leg, she heard a voice saying aloud, “Nothing has changed. I don't see that anything has changed.”

  She was startled to realize that it was her own voice.

  Soon after that she got up and went to her bed. But it was hours before she finally fell asleep again.

  The next morning he didn't seem to remember anything about his outburst in the night.

  And when he was washing up the dishes, she surreptitiously took out the gallows drawing he'd made and burned it in the stove.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  That night, Rutledge drove down the Urskdale road towards South Farm, where the Petersons lived. Leaving his motorcar on the road, he walked partway up the lane, and found a bare patch of rock where he could stand and watch the long outline of the ridge that rose to The Knob and then leveled off as it fell to The Long Back and dwindled towards the south. It was cold, wind whipping down the lake and scudding clouds sailing overhead, obscuring the stars.

  From here he was invisible to anyone on high ground, and he could still reach the village faster in the motorcar than anyone on foot. The question was, would this be another nightwatch that failed to bring him any answers?

  Turning to look across the mere, he could just see the ragged outline of the fells blotting out the sky. Somewhere in the distance to his right, the clank of a bell told him where sheep were on the move. He could hear his own breathi
ng. And then a rock, dislodged by a careless hoof, rolled and bounced for what seemed to be twenty feet or so.

  “If I cough,” he thought, “it will be heard for miles . . .”

  The feeling of claustrophobia settled around him again. Pinned where he was by the fells, isolated and lonely, he was one man in a wilderness of stone that seemed to press in on every side. He couldn't push it aside and escape, he couldn't choose his way out. Not without wings.

  Shaking off his bleak mood, he pulled his collar up against the wind, and shivered in his heavy coat.

  After a time, he had to stamp his feet to keep them warm, and the stars swung across the sky with silent precision that measured the minutes. He kept time by them instead of his watch as the hours crept by.

  And then, faintly, across the Saddle, he could see the pinprick of light as a lantern bobbed slowly across the ground.

  There was no way to intersect the path the walker had taken. But Rutledge was, this time, perfectly positioned to track the small glow as it moved.

  For a long time it seemed to follow an erratic course, and with the map in his mind, Rutledge could tell when it veered off to stop at the sheep pens, the deeper crevices, and the old ruins.

  Searching for what? A revolver? A child? Or perhaps some other bit of evidence that the police were not aware of?

  But Rutledge wanted to find out.

  Hamish, standing watch with him in his mind, kept up a running commentary, reminding him that time was short and that Mickelson could arrive the next morning, or in the afternoon. “Better to finish what needs to be done, before the wrong person is hanged.”

  “I'm doing my best—”

  “You havena' used your eyes, they're too blinded by the woman.”

  “I tell you, there's no key!”

  “Aye, but there is. Think, man, you're no' this puir a policeman!”

  “All right, then. Tell me what I've missed!”

  “Go back to the woman!”

  “She's not a suspect. She was acquitted.”

  “Aye, and you're too blind to see what I'm saying—”

  The disembodied lantern had come some distance from town now. Rutledge swiftly retraced his own steps to the motorcar and cranked it. Getting in, he heard Hamish say, “The headlamps.”

  But Rutledge hadn't turned them on. Driving blind in the darkness, praying not to plow into a ewe on the roadside, he pushed his speed as much as he dared. For a moment Urskwater shimmered in a white sheet, before the moon raced under another bank of clouds. He could understand, he thought, why the Norse and the Danes had woven Nature into their stories, giving it a sinister life of its own. He'd been told on one of his visits to the region with his father about the Old Man who haunted the fells of Urskdale, and he wondered how many people like Mrs. Haldnes kept their shades lowered at night and never looked out. If Henderson hadn't been driving his son to the doctor's surgery—

  The village loomed ahead, dark and quiet. Long before he reached the hotel, he stopped the motorcar and left it standing, striding quickly the rest of the way. Once he stumbled in a rut left by a cart, and cursed under his breath.

  He made his way around to the back of the hotel, letting himself in the kitchen door, as he'd come out.

  Elizabeth Fraser was there in the darkness.

  “Dear God,” he said, startled.

  “I heard you go out,” she said softly. “I thought you'd like something warm to drink when you came in.”

  “There's—business I must attend to first. But thank you.”

  He went past her chair into the passage. When he reached Hugh Robinson's room he stopped to listen to the low roll of snores inside. Opening the door silently, he looked into the room. Robinson was sleeping on his side, his face turned away towards the only window. But there was no mistaking him.

  Rutledge went on to Janet Ashton's door. He couldn't hear anything beyond the panels and gently opened it half an inch. She lay with her face turned to a long streak of moonlight coming through the window. As he watched, the light faded and there was only the slim shape under the blanket and a pale oval framed in dark hair.

  He shut the door again, and made his way silently out of the house to where he'd left the motorcar. He drove it into the hotel yard and left it there. Then he walked down through the town. There was a lamp lit in the doctor's surgery as a night-light, but the rest of the house was dark. Shops were shuttered, and the streets were empty. The ghostly shape of the church tower was lost against the bulk of the mountain behind it. Across Urskwater, a dog barked, and the sound traveled to him clearly. Another answered closer to the village.

  He might have been the only man left alive in this alien world, he thought. But try as he would to walk softly, his boots crunched on the ridges of dirty snow and icy mud under his feet, and anyone lying awake could hear the sound of his footsteps echoing in the night. The last thing he wanted were lights coming on as curious heads lifted shades to see who was about.

  The Ram's Head was dark, but he tried the door. Locked. In Urskdale, until the murders, almost no one locked his door. Either Paul Elcott was cautious, or he'd made certain no one would be able to find him gone, his bed empty.

  Rutledge crossed the street to where a baker's shop offered some shelter against the wind. He pressed into the frame of the door, making himself all but invisible.

  It was a long wait. From time to time the creaking of the sign over The Ram's Head could be heard, and he thought, “Rusty and uncared for.” It was in a way, a description of Paul Elcott's view of himself and life.

  Stiff from the cold and from standing so still, he shifted his position finally and nearly betrayed himself when his heel struck the lower part of the door with a resounding thud.

  A light came on in the floor above his head, shining out into the street. The window sash went up. A voice, angry and hard, called, “Who's there? What do you want?”

  Rutledge stood stock-still. It was impossible for the man in the window to see him where he was. After a time he heard the voice saying to someone inside, “It's the blasted wind. Nothing more. I can hear it rattling the door.”

  The window shut with a bang, and the street was once more quiet.

  A cat walked by, carrying a mouse in its mouth. The moonlight, fitful at best, played tricks with shadows, and Rutledge thought of the nights in the trenches when tired eyes could read movement in the wire when there was none.

  Hamish said, “Whist!”

  Rutledge listened. A crunch of steps. He thought it must be nearly five o'clock. Time enough for whoever had been out on the heights to reach Urskdale again—before an early rising farmer saw the silhouette of an intruder in his pasture or sheep run and came out with his shotgun.

  The lonely figure walking down the street kept to the center, as if fearful of ambush. It moved wearily, as if burdened by its thoughts as well as lack of sleep.

  Rutledge stood where he was, waiting.

  The figure was perhaps five shops away, and still coming towards him.

  Even though he knew for a certainty that he couldn't be seen, Rutledge kept his breathing light and shallow.

  If it was Paul Elcott, he would soon turn towards The Ram's Head.

  Two shops away now . . .

  And then the unknown night walker was even with the licensed house that stood as a monument to Elcott's failure in life.

  But to Rutledge's surprise, he didn't go in. He kept on walking.

  After a time he was lost in the shadows of the churchyard yews. Rutledge could hear the church door open, the heavy wood dragging on its iron hinges.

  Who the hell— Rutledge cut short the thought and strained to listen.

  “Ye'll lose him if you wait here!”

  “I'll lose him if I walk to the church. I can't open the door without making noise.”

  “He may no' come back this way.”

  And after ten minutes, it appeared that Hamish was right.

  Rutledge stepped out of the baker's shop doorway a
nd, keeping to the shadows, moved on to the church. He walked softly, watching his way.

  And still no one came out of the building.

  When he reached the door, he hesitated, but this was a small church with only the one entrance. There was no other way in—or out.

  For another ten minutes he waited on the church porch, and in the end did his best to open the door silently, only wide enough to allow him to pass through.

  Inside he let his eyes adjust to the deeper gloom, for the stained glass window let in very little light.

  No one stirred. He began to wonder if his hearing had betrayed him and the church was empty. Or had it been a trick all along, and the walker had only opened and closed that door before vanishing in the direction of Drew Taylor's house?

  Taking out his torch, he swung it from side to side, slowly and quietly making his way down the aisle. He had to be certain.

  It wasn't until he had reached the front of the church and the altar rail that he found his quarry.

  Paul Elcott lay on the floor, where he had fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion as he prayed—or waited in vain for peace.

  Rutledge took Elcott by the shoulder, and the man all but leaped to his feet, shocked and terrified, lashing out as if to drive away a ghost.

  “It's Rutledge. Wake up. This place is cold as the tomb. Come back to The Ram's Head. I want to know what you were doing out there on the fell tonight.”

  “I swear, you nearly gave me an apoplexy!” He was still breathing hard. “Good God.” And then, “What the bloody hell are you doing here at this hour!”