A Lonely Death (31 page)

He had sworn, once, that he would never set foot in France again. And here he was, not on police business after all but to support a friend.

Friend.

He ignored that thought and instead considered the letter that had come into Chief Inspector Cummins’s possession.

What sort of man would have a flint knife sitting on his desk, what kinds of interests would he have? Historian, schoolmaster, world traveler, expert in ancient weapons, geologist, even a collector of oddities.

It would take hundreds of man-hours to find likely men in those fields and interview them.

Schoolmaster . . . Hadn’t it been a schoolmaster who had brought the latter-day Druids to Stonehenge for the summer solstice?

He was above suspicion, Cummins had said when Rutledge asked about him. But where had he taught? And were there other masters in that same school? Had Cummins interviewed any of them? But of course at the time Cummins hadn’t had the benefit of Rutledge’s find of the flint knife. He had been completely in the dark about the murder weapon.

Hindsight seldom caught murderers.

He walked along the deck, watching the white cliffs of England recede, the castle a gray mass on the top of the highest cliff. France was still a blue smudge on the horizon. The wind striking his face was warm, and sometimes laden with salt spray. Skirting the busy crew coiling ropes, stowing gear, and seeing to the general running of the ferry, he paced for a few minutes, deep in thought.

If the killer considered the victim’s murder well deserved, what had the man done to earn it?

Rutledge recalled studying the photograph of the dead face and thinking that the victim looked far more intelligent and of a better class than Harvey Wheeler was said to have been.

There was only a small window of time when the body could have been carried to Stonehenge—or the living man brought there to be dispatched. After all, this was the shortest night of the year. And the situation was complicated by the latter-day Druids celebrating the Summer Solstice.

He could have been there when the Druids arrived, depending on what route they had taken to cross Salisbury Plain to the site. In fact, he must have been put there as soon as it was completely dark. Too much activity by the heel stone after they’d reached the stone ruins, and the killer could have been discovered in the act of tying his victim there. But had the killer and his accomplices known about the celebrants? Or had they left the body there because it was an isolated place and it was unlikely to be discovered for several days?

The letter writer hadn’t mentioned the Druids.

But the Druids had been drinking mead and chanting. To distract them from what was happening just out of sight?

He must write to Cummins again and open a new avenue to explore.

Pausing by the railing, he could just make out the coastline of France now.

Someone stepped to the rail beside him, and he turned to see that Meredith Channing had come on deck.

Staring at the landfall in the distance, she said, “I shouldn’t have come. I should have listened to my better judgment. This won’t be Mark. None of the others were. I shouldn’t have brought you into this. But I was afraid this time. I don’t know why. Very cowardly of me.”

Her shoulder was touching his, her unconscious need for human comfort overcoming her reticence.

“I’m glad you did,” he said, and wondered if it were true.

“When it seemed that you weren’t at home, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go to Frances, or to the Yard, and ask where you might be.”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“I’ve known for a very long time where you lived. I’d just never had occasion to go there. Until last night.”

They were silent for a time. He could feel her shivering, whether from the wind or from nerves, he didn’t know. After a moment, he put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into him until the shivering stopped.

When the boat had docked, and they had cleared the formalities, they turned north, on the road to Ypres and Belgium. To make conversation, Rutledge said, “I lost a murderer to France this week.” And he told her how the dog had been found, and what the French had had to say about Mr. and Mrs. Summers.

“Do you think she was just ill from the crossing? Or had he given her something to make certain she didn’t say anything untoward?”

“She was probably given something. I can’t see how she would have let her husband leave the boat without bringing her dog to her. Most certainly she’d have created a scene. And why get rid of the animal, unless he intended to do away with her as well?” He slowed to pass a procession of villagers carrying the small statue of a saint and bouquets of flowers. They appeared to be on their way to the church on a slight rise.

“He needn’t, you know. Rid himself of her. There used to be these little convents scattered about, where the nuns took in the ill or the mad, and if there was money to pay for her board, she could stay indefinitely in their care.”

It was an interesting thought.

They were driving now on what had been the road where the German Army and the small British Expeditionary Force sent to stop their progress had clashed. Roofless ruins, shattered walls, toppled church towers still marked where the fighting had been most intense, and some fields lay fallow and torn. Villages and towns were striving to rebuild, life was struggling to return to normal, but as Rutledge looked around him, he felt a surge of tension, of memory. This was what he’d lived with for four bloody years and had hoped never to see again. But night was falling, covering what they didn’t want to see in blessed darkness.

Rutledge stopped just before the Belgian frontier for dinner and found a small pension that smelled of new mortar and paint, as if it had just been refurbished, where they could spend the night. The food was not up to French standards, but they had very little appetite. Rutledge saw Mrs. Channing to her room, and she wished him a good night. He waited until her door had been locked from the inside before going on down the passage to his to sit by the window instead of going to bed.

They reached Bruges the next day, and found their way to the old city inside its ring of canals. In the southern part, on a side street not far from the Begijnhof, a large house had been turned into a hospital that cared for the human detritus left behind by war.

It was a tall building, and broader than most. Rutledge thought it must have once been the town house of a wealthy merchant family. Even here were the scars of war—bullet holes in the facade, a niche statue of the Virgin by the door decapitated, the hasty repairs of damage from shrapnel still visible. Someone had repainted the door, to hide the nicks and scratches in the wood.

As he reached for the brass knob, Meredith Channing stopped him, putting out her hand. “Ian. I must do the rest myself. Will you wait?”

He agreed, and went to sit in the motorcar. After a moment, she resolutely turned the knob and disappeared inside.

An hour passed, and then the second. He walked for a time but never out of sight of the motorcar. Hamish was his constant companion, the voice dinning in his ear, the war seeming to crowd in on him.

And then she was coming through the door, her face so pale he went to her at once, and took her hands. She had left her pretty hat somewhere. “Was it very bad?” he asked.

“Worse than—oh, Ian, you should see him. He’s lying there looking at nothing, his poor face so scarred I hardly knew him.”

They were in a very public place, people passing on the street around them, faces turned to stare. He led her to the motorcar and put her inside.

She said as he got behind the wheel, “I was told there was a little church near the Gruuthuse Palace. Could we walk there, do you think?”

He found it for her after going astray near the Begijnhof, where the Benedictine Sisters lived in their little white cottages in a tree-lined courtyard. Two or three were sitting in the sun, warming themselves, a small cushion on their knees, weaving the fine webs of their lace, bobbins flying in nimble fingers. There Meredith bought a small handkerchief to cover her dark hair in the church.

The Church of Our Lady was known for its tall, striking tower. It soared above the surrounding buildings, and Rutledge found himself thinking it was an ideal mark for German artillery firing on the town.

Down a side aisle was a chapel with a small but perfect white marble statue standing on the altar. It was, he realized, Michelangelo’s
Madonna and Child
. She was seated, the child at her knee, the smile on her face movingly sweet. Rutledge’s godfather, the architect David Trevor, had traveled in Europe on a Grand Tour as a young man, and he had told Rutledge that this face, young, serene, without shadows, was the same as that of the Virgin in the
Pietà
in Rome’s St. Peter’s, only there it was marked by sorrow and loss. The comparison, he had said, was heart-wrenching.

Rutledge stood in the back of the chapel, staring up at that face while Meredith knelt near the altar, head bowed, but not, he thought, in prayer. If she was looking for anything here, it was strength. Or courage.

Hamish had been there in the back of his mind ever since the night Meredith Channing had come to his flat. A dull, unceasing monologue of despair, the words nearly indistinguishable, but he knew them by heart.

Fiona
. He could hear that whisper as Hamish lay dying before the blessing of the coup de grâce.
You took my happiness from me. I’ll take yours.

Rutledge had tried to shut out all feeling after Jean had walked out of his life in the spring of 1919. He hadn’t wanted to feel again. He didn’t want to feel anything now.

But he watched Meredith come to grips with what she had seen, and he wondered if she had wanted this man to be her husband. Or if he was. Either way, here was her chance for atonement.

After a time, she rose and walked toward him. There were no tears now, just the resolve he was dreading, and she said, “Will you take me back to the hospital now?”

It was too short a distance to say anything important, and so they walked in silence. When they reached the hospital with its frivolous roofline of chimneys, she asked that he carry her valise to the door. “They’ll find somewhere for me to stay. Close by. I can visit every day.”

He did as she asked, numbly, knowing he had already been shut out.

As he set the valise down with a click on the marble step, she said, “I’m so sorry. But this is something I have to do.” Her voice was steady, but only just. A little deeper in note as well, from the tears she was holding back.

“Duty is bitter company,” he said quietly.

“I don’t know how long he will live. Months. Years. But I’ll close the London house and live in Bruges for now.”

“Meredith—”

“I wish I had met you then. I wouldn’t have been so foolish as to marry without love.” She rose on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “Good-bye, Ian.”

Someone opened the door, as if he or she had been waiting to admit Mrs. Channing. She stepped inside, and it swung shut again behind her.

He stood there for a moment longer, as if hoping she would change her mind. And then he went to the motorcar.

France was just miles away, and he knew where Hamish had died. His service revolver was in his valise.

It was time to end it.

22

R
utledge crossed the frontier between France and Belgium and soon after found a deeply rutted road through devastated countryside that led in the direction of the River Somme, approaching it from what had been the German lines. The land was healing, after a fashion, grass and weeds struggling to reestablish themselves. Nature seemed to find a way to cover up the scars of tragedy. But men had marched down this road to kill other men, and the land was rough and desolate, as if no one cared to live here where so many had died. He couldn’t blame them. If ghosts walked anywhere, surely they did here, and he felt that nothing grown in such bloody soil would ever prosper again.

He could see across the twisted landscape to where he and so many others had fought, and yet he found his sector of that fateful night hard to recognize. Rains had washed down trench walls, the stench had gone, and somehow it all seemed so much smaller in scale now. Without the men who had served here among the wire, the hellish pits of shell craters, and the tools of war, whether guns or tanks or trenches, it seemed to have changed. He stopped the motorcar at one point and got out, listening. There should have been shouts and the cries of men, the whistle of shells and the chatter of machine guns, the deafening roar of battle, the deeper throb of aircraft overhead. Instead, there was only a light wind, hardly stirring the ridged and torn landscape.

He could still name the men he’d led to their deaths here. As he walked, he thought he could see their faces, but it was only the tightness in his throat and the tension across his shoulders that made him light-headed.

It wasn’t long before he found the place he’d been searching for. He’d always had a good sense of direction, and even without markers he knew it was here.

Looking down, he saw the lace of a boot sticking through the soil next to a struggling clump of grass, and he felt ill. How many times had a heel or a buckle marked all that was left of a man who had been living and breathing seconds before? He’d been told that farmers in some places still dug up the dead with their plows. He’d seen them lying rotting in the sun, shrouded with the first snowfall, twitching in the pelting rain.

The revolver was heavy in his coat pocket, well oiled and loaded. He was not likely to miss. And Hamish, he realized, had been silent since he left the motorcar, waiting.

He took the weapon out and held it in his hand. Its feel and its weight were familiar, comforting.

He was raising the revolver, his head bowed for the shot, his eyes closed, when the image of that single boot lace came to him.

It would be obscene to kill himself here, he realized. To add one more body to the thousands upon thousands who littered this land. A desecration to fire a revolver here in this stillness.

Even France had failed him. After a time, the revolver still in his hand, he turned back toward his motorcar, and then drove back the way he’d come.