A Long Shadow (10 page)

"I remember hearing about Barstow. Hensley was involved with that?"

"Possibly involved in it, more to the point. It was rumored that Hensley took bribes to look the other way. Bribes he was supposed to share with his superior. But he stoutly denied any such thing and was rewarded with Dudlington, a quiet backwater. Markham, the old constable, had just retired and gone to live with his daughter in Sussex."

And Hensley's superior at the time was then Chief Inspector Bowles.

Hamish was reminding Rutledge what Hensley had said in the hospital ward.

"Was it Old Bowels who sent you?"

And Bowles had been furiously angry about the attack on Hensley.

It wouldn't do to bring his name back to the attention of either the police or the newspapers, if there was any hint of scandal attached to his departure.

"What became of the file on Emma Mason?"

"Damned if I know. There's a good bit in my office, but not the whole of it. My predecessor in Letherington wasn't what you might call compelled to put every detail down on paper. I'd have thought Hensley kept some records of his own interviews."

Cain got stiffly to his feet. "I don't know much more about Dudlington's skeletons than you do. I relied on Hensley's experience when there were problems. I have a good constable in Fairfield and an even better sergeant in Letherington now, who see me through. Any help you can give me here will be appreciated. Come back in five years' time, and if I'm still here—God forfend!—I'll know my turf like the back of my hand."

"Where is your carriage?" Rutledge asked him at the door. "I didn't see it as I came in."

Cain grinned. "My constable's at The Oaks. He's very good at gossip. I depend on him to tell me what's being whispered in the dark corners of the bar."

And he was off, favoring his left leg as he walked through the rain toward Holly Street.

Rutledge saw him out of sight, and then climbed the stairs to the bedroom.

The cartridge casing was still there, where Rutledge had left it.

Rutledge made a point to search out the house belonging to Grace Letteridge.

It was one of the few buildings in the village that boasted a thatched roof. Thatching had always reminded Rutledge of a woman wearing a marvelous hat and feeling slightly self-conscious about it. In the case of this particular house, the comparison was apt. It was set farther back from the lane and stood out from its neighbors in the fineness of its stonework. Someone had built a low wall around the front, creating a courtyard of sorts where roses, cut back for the winter and mounded over, like tiny graves, marched across the brown grass.

He ducked his head under the low thatched roof that covered the porch, and knocked at the door.

It was opened by a woman in her late twenties, her hair a dull gold and her eyes a very pretty amber in a very plain face.

"Miss Letteridge?"

"And you're the man from London. How is Constable Hensley?" There was a derisive note in her voice as she asked.

"He's expected to live," Rutledge answered, and waited for her response.

Miss Letteridge led him into the small parlor before answering. "I'm sorry to hear it. I never liked him, and I shan't be two-faced about it."

"That's rather coldhearted."

"Sit down. I won't offer you tea, because I don't care for it myself and don't keep it in the house. I do have some sherry ..." Her words trailed off, indicating that she would prefer not to offer him that either.

"Why don't you like Constable Hensley?" he asked again. The room was well furnished, with a number of watercolors on the pale blue walls that caught his attention. They had been done with great skill.

It clearly irritated Miss Letteridge that he appeared not to be giving her his full attention.

"For the same reason I don't particularly care for any policeman," she answered tartly. "They look after their own, don't they? Hensley was sent here under a cloud, and we weren't told of it. He wouldn't get into trouble here, would he? After all, we're very peaceable in Dudlington, and he only had to walk the streets and mind his own business until he could collect his pension. That was the theory, anyway."

"How did you know he was under a cloud when he came here?" Rutledge asked, intrigued.

"Why else would a London police constable be sent to an out-of-the-way village where nothing ever happens? Where he wouldn't attract attention? I'm not a fool, Inspector, I know something about the world outside Northamptonshire. I worked in London during the first two years of the war. There weren't enough able-bodied men to do half of what was needed. Women were pressed into service at every turn, and a police constable worth his salt would have risen quickly through the ranks as men enlisted. Instead his superiors banished him."

"That may well be the case. But so far I haven't heard that it affected the performance of his duties."

"No, I doubt if it affected his duties. You're right. But once a murderer, always a murderer."

Rutledge stared at her. "Do you know for a fact that Constable Hensley murdered someone in London and got away with it?" Even Sergeant Gibson hadn't told him that. Nor had Cain.

"He condoned arson. And a man was caught in that fire, so badly burned that even his wife couldn't identify him. I went to London myself and read accounts in the newspapers. They weren't very helpful, so I talked to his widow. She's bitter because the police swept it all under the rug. He didn't die straightaway, you know. Harold Edgerton. He lingered for nearly a month, but in the end the doctors couldn't stop the infections that overwhelmed him. By that time, there were rumors that he'd started the fire himself. All he'd done was to go back to his desk that evening to retrieve some papers."

"Constable Hensley knew all this?"

"Why else were they in such haste to get him out of London?"

"And what you're trying to say, then, is that you believe he killed Emma Mason."

It was her turn to stare at him.

"You already know about her!"

"I only know that her name comes up when people talk about Constable Hensley."

"As God is my witness, he killed her and buried her in Frith's Wood. I can't prove it, mind you, but there's no other explanation for her disappearance."

"Did you shoot him down with that arrow, out of revenge? One of Emma Mason's arrows, perhaps, as a sort of poetic justice?"

"Was it one of Emma's? How fitting! I gave that archery set to her, you know. For her birthday. But I wouldn't have missed my aim, Inspector. If I'd held that bow, Constable Hensley would have died where he stood."

The vehemence in Grace Letteridge's voice was chilling, and Rutledge, listening to her, realized that she could indeed have killed.

The question was, why?

Hamish said, "She was plain—and the other lass was pretty."

Rutledge asked, "Where is her archery set now?"

"Truthfully? I have no idea what became of it. Even if I did, I'd be mad to tell you, wouldn't I?"

"What was Emma Mason to you, that you'd have killed for her?"

She looked at him pityingly. "What was Emma to me? A mirror of myself. Motherless. Her grandmother living in a world of pretense and denial. Only in my case, it was my father who couldn't cope with the realities of life. My mother died in childbirth, and my father felt that God had cheated him. And so he drank himself into an early grave—the only reason he lived until I was twenty was an iron constitution that refused to give up as easily as he had.

Mrs. Ellison, on the other hand, saw in Emma a second chance. The perfect child who would make up for the loss of her daughter, one who wouldn't fail her the way Beatrice had."

"You're very frank about your own life."

"I've had to be. I grew up very quickly. It wasn't pleasant, but I refused to let it break me the way it had my father." She met his glance with her chin lifted, defiant.

Hamish said, "It didna' break her, but the hurt went deep."

"I was going to say," Rutledge commented, "that you're very frank. But was Emma as frank? Or did you read into her circumstances more than was there?"

"I didn't read anything. I didn't need to. Beatrice was amazingly pretty, and people made much of her, the way they do. She was talented as well—a wonderful pianist and a very accomplished watercolorist. She painted these—" Grace Letteridge gestured to the watercolors on the wall. "You've noticed them, I saw your eyes on them. She gave them to me, before she left Dudlington the first time. She didn't want her mother to have them, because her mother was against Beatrice going to London to study art. She saw it as a waste. Women got married and had babies. That was their duty and their purpose. Accomplishments were fine, as long as they enhanced the bride price, so to speak. But a woman most certainly didn't pursue a career among
artists.
Prostitution was only one step away, in Mrs. Ellison's view."

"But Beatrice Ellison married."

"Yes, of course she did, but she made a poor choice. He wasn't very good to her, and in the end, he left her with a child, no money, and no prospects. She had to swallow her pride and bring Emma here to live with her grandmother. I can understand why she didn't want to stay in Dudlington herself, but she knew what her mother was like, and I consider it very selfish of her to abandon the child like that."

She got up, restless, and went to the window to look out at the street. "She wouldn't talk to me when she came home. She was unhappy and unsettled. It was a difficult time. But Emma grew up to be prettier than her mother, and that was the trouble."

"Trouble in what sense?"

"Everyone made over Beatrice," she said, turning from the window. "But Emma had inherited her father's charm, and there was something about her that attracted the wrong kind of attention. It wasn't just old women cooing over her, it was men old enough to be her father or her grandfather watching her on the street, or stopping her to make comments. 'That's a pretty dress, young lady.' Or 'I like that hair ribbon. Did you know it was the color of your eyes?' It made Emma uncomfortable, long before she was old enough to understand why."

"Did you tell her grandmother what you'd observed?" She laughed harshly. "She told me I was jealous of the attention being paid to Emma. And my father punished me for bearing tales. I was sent to bed without my dinner for a week. People see what they want to see—or expect to see. So I took it on myself to be Emma's protector, and I was hardly more than a child myself. It wasn't a task I felt I could do, but I didn't have anywhere else to turn."

"And Emma accepted this—protection?"

She shrugged. "She appeared to be grateful for it. Or so she said. We more or less looked after each other."

"How old are you?" Rutledge asked bluntly.

Grace Letteridge bristled. "It's none of your business." But he thought he'd been wrong in his earlier estimate of her age. Young herself, vulnerable, and perhaps reading more into what she saw around her than was true, she might have made up the notion that Emma needed protection. It might, indeed, have been her own loneliness that made her seek out the younger child, and cling to her. Anything but coming home to a drunken father filled with his own misery.

"Why are you so certain that Constable Hensley killed Emma Mason?" he asked.

"He would stop and talk to her, tell her about London, and plays and concerts—which he'd probably never attended in his life—or describe an evening at the opera, watching the King and Queen step into the royal box, and how the Prince of Wales had spoken to him one morning as he rode his horse into the park. It was pathetic, an attempt to hold her attention, and he would lie in wait for her, ready with a new tale to spin, making London seem glorious, and she knew
—she knew
!—her mother lived there somewhere. I listened to her concocting schemes to go there as soon as the war ended, and find her mother and live in this fairy-tale world. He had no idea what harm he was doing, and it's possible he wouldn't have cared."

"More a reason for you to kill him, than for him to kill Emma."

"Ah, but what you don't know is that Emma fell in love! And that put a spoke in Constable Hensley's wheel. I believe he killed her in a jealous rage."

Try as he would, Grace Letteridge refused to tell him who it was that Emma had thought she was in love with. "It doesn't matter. He's dead, anyway. In the war."

But Rutledge could tell it did matter, a very great deal. As he left, Hamish was pointing out that very likely Grace Letteridge had been in love with this man herself. It might explain why she went to London—leaving Emma to her own devices—and why she came home.

"I canna' believe her father would let her go sae easily. Unless he was dead in 1914."

In 1914, Grace Letteridge couldn't have been more than nineteen. Which would make her four and twenty now. And Emma would have been a very impressionable fourteen.