A Long Shadow (28 page)

After a moment Baylor turned to him and said, as if the words were pulled from him, "How is she?"

He didn't pretend he didn't know.

"I should think she's wondering what went wrong. I found her crying, after you left that night."

Baylor swore with feeling.

"It's hopeless. But I won't shame Joel by telling her that. I shouldn't have told you as much as I have. Sometimes the words seem to spill out, and I can't stop them. It was wrong."

"Have you talked with the rector? He seems to be a man of great understanding."

"That's why I can't talk to him." He looked at Rutledge. "He'd understand too much. I just have to soldier on, and get through it."

"What happened to Joel in the war?" Rutledge felt himself tense, knowing what the answer would be. Shell shock. But Baylor surprised him.

"He was gassed. At Ypres. His lungs are rotted out. I listen to him at night and I curse them all, the generals and the Germans and the wind blowing his way that morning. He said it smelled of violets. Odd thing for a city man to tell you. But that's what he said."

"Yes, I've heard the same thing."

There was silence between them. The church clock struck the half hour. Finally Baylor took a deep breath and prepared to go back inside his house. "You have a gift for listening. If I didn't know better, I'd say you tricked me into talking. But there's been no one since Rob died, and it's been building up. I'd ask you to forget what you heard, if I didn't think it was impossible."

"Go back to your brother. I won't add to the gossip mill." He left Baylor standing there and walked back the way he'd come. The odor of smoke was still strong. He'd made a promise to Baylor, but he knew Mrs. Melford was waiting for news.

By the time he reached the lane, he knew what he was going to say to her.

Mrs. Melford was standing at her front window, just behind the lace curtains. The sun touched them and gave them an opaque quality that would have concealed her, if she hadn't moved as he came toward her door.

She opened it and invited him in.

"A lamp fell over. No harm done, just a small fire quickly put out. I expect it was alarming at the time."

"Did you tell him I was worried?"

"Should I have?"

Mrs. Melford shook her head. "No, certainly not. The worst fire I can remember in Dudlington was in a cattle barn. I'm glad it was not that."

She stood there for a moment longer, as if hoping he would give her more details, a verbatim account of what had been said. Then she nodded, saying, "Good morning, Inspector."

Rutledge drove into Letherington to send a telegram to Gibson at the Yard.

Cain, crossing the street, saw him and came to speak to him. "News, then?"

"A request for information, that's all."

He finished his telegram and then turned back to Cain. "Do you know anyone by the name of Sandridge?"

"Sandridge?" He shook his head. "Means nothing to me. Any particular reason for asking?"

Rutledge said, "In Hensley's files there's a letter requesting information about the man. He kept it in his files. I wondered why. Sometimes the most obscure fact can turn out to be useful."

"True. How is Hensley, by the way?"

"Feverish. I couldn't be sure how much of it was pretense for my sake, and how much was real. Infection, he said."

"You've not made much progress," Cain commented. "So far, the best evidence is that the attack had to do with Emma Mason's disappearance. But the village is silent about her. They think she's buried in that wood, and there's the end of it."

"Is she?"

"I don't believe she is. I've looked at the ground. Digging there would be a major venture. There're the roots for one thing, and a deep layer of leaf mold. Any disturbance would be obvious."

"You're thinking of a real burial. Put a body out there under a bed of leaves and let the animals dispose of it. Where you have cattle and sheep, there's feed. And if you have feed, there're bound to be mice, if not rats. And the wood is an ideal habitat for creatures that eat bones. Rats don't know about the Saxons."

"Then why didn't the first searchers find her?"

"Do you really think they made a careful search of the area? There's no certainty they looked beyond the surface. A clever man could have made the ground appear untouched."

"You're the devil's advocate."

"No. I'm simply offering possibilities."

Hamish was not impressed. "Ye ken, he's ambitious, with an eye for London."

Rutledge said, "Then bring me a dozen men who aren't superstitious, and let's begin quartering the wood."

"Where are you going to find them? Not in Letherington or even Fairfield. Ask Chief Inspector Kelmore in Northampton."

"Come with me now," Rutledge said, "and we'll make a beginning. There should be shovels and rakes in Hensley's shed."

Cain laughed. "Is this a challenge, old man?"

"Just an eagerness to test your theory before we inconvenience the Chief Inspector."

"Where is she buried—assuming she's dead—if she isn't in the wood?"

"Someone's cellar," Rutledge answered him, and turned to walk back to his motorcar.

Cain followed him. "Beneath the floor of a cattle barn is more likely. Considering the stench there, a decomposing body would hardly be noticed."

Rutledge drove back to Dudlington with his mind on more than the road.

As he made the turn by The Oaks, he saw Mrs. Channing standing in the drive, looking up at the sky.

Keating, beside her, was pointing out a flock of geese flying over. She looked absorbed in what he was saying, and Keating appeared to be enjoying himself as he talked about the birds.

She had a knack, Rutledge thought, of seeming all things to all people. He wondered if she gave a damn about birds, but her face showed only interest, as if she had spent her life studying the habits of wildfowl. His last glimpse of her as he drove down Holly Street was of the burgundy coat snapping around her ankles in the wind, and one hand holding hard to her hat.

She must have noticed his motorcar, because she appeared on his doorstep not a quarter of an hour later.

"Did you hear about the fire?" she asked him as she walked into Hensley's parlor. He had taken the time to stop at the greengrocer's for a packet of tea, and the kettle was already heating. She could hear it whistle from the door.

"It was the latest gossip over my breakfast."

She followed him into the kitchen and watched as he searched for sugar and tinned milk, then took down the cups and saucers. "Did you see the geese fly over?

They're such a pretty sight, calling encouragement to one another, changing places in the lead to keep from tiring. I'm impressed."

"You didn't come here to talk about birds," he said, waiting for the tea to steep. "But yes, I saw you."

She quoted, There's a beauty in birds on the wing, That stirs the heart and makes earthbound creatures Long for flight, but the larks above the battlefield Are silenced by the sounds of war.

I have watched birds out at sea, Catching the wind, And longed to follow them, To some safe place far from here.

He stopped short. It was O. A. Manning's poem "Safe . . ."

"Yes, I thought you might know those lines," Mrs. Channing said comfortably, as if she had discovered a fellow enthusiast. "Mr. Towson is fond of the poems as well. We had an interesting conversation about them."

He had investigated the death of O. A. Manning, and it had left a deep scar on his soul. Had she known that too? "You're a woman of many talents," he said neutrally. She took her cup and sipped appreciatively. "There's nothing like a good cup of tea on a wretchedly cold day. Why are you so suspicious of me?"

"Am I?" he parried.

"You have been since the night we met. I've told you. I've no reason to wish you ill."

"I wish I could believe that. You have an uncanny ability to make people like you, but there's that undercurrent of knowledge that you shouldn't, by rights, have."

"Do you think I wouldn't have warned you, if I'd known about the lorry?"

"I wish you could tell me who it was who shot Constable Hensley with a bow and arrow in Frith's Wood."

She frowned. "Are you asking me to help you?"

"It was a rhetorical question. Nothing more."

"I can't call up visions at will, you know. If I could, I'd have done a great deal of good in this world by warning others of their imminent danger. But sometimes I find myself uncannily accurate, and that's frightening. I don't want to know the day of my death. Or your death. Or any other sad thing that's better off hidden from all of us."

"Could you put your hand on patients in the aid stations and know which would live and which would die?"

"I didn't need to. I could look at the doctors' faces and read the answer there. But yes, in time, you come to have a sixth sense about such things. I didn't like it, and I fought against it. I even tried to distance myself, not allowing my emotions to be touched. It didn't work."

Mrs. Channing finished her tea and set the cup aside. "Thank you, Inspector. That was very good. Do you wish me to go back to London, and leave you to it?"

She had a way of interjecting a complete change of thought into an apparently innocuous remark.

"I don't know," he answered her truthfully. "I wish I knew what it was you wanted."

She stood there, looking down at him. "If I hadn't— alarmed you with my pretense of a séance, you wouldn't have left Mrs. Browning's party early. Someone else might have seen that shell casing, and thought nothing of it. Instead, you found it, and it has brought something frightening into being. I feel responsible, in a sense, you see."

"You're saying that whoever came out first—myself or Commander Farnum—whoever set up the casing would have decided that man was his victim?"

She didn't answer him.

"What if it was the doctor? He hadn't been in the war."

"Then it would have been someone else on another day."

It was a very interesting possibility.

But she didn't wait to discuss it. He got to his feet to help her into her coat, and with a smile she was gone.

The quiet room seemed to close in on him. He got up and walked to the door, looking at the lock that had no key.

He wasn't certain whether it was worse to think of himself as the target of someone with a grudge against him, or to see himself as a target of opportunity. A man with a grudge was at least comprehensible, could even be tracked down and stopped. Someone who had chosen him at random was like smoke in the dark, invisible until his victim stumbled into it.

It was late, and the afternoon light was waning when Rutledge found a rake and a pitchfork in the shed behind Hensley's house, just where he'd expected them to be. There was also a shaded lantern and a sturdy pair of boots.

The wind was still very cold, but dropped with sunset. By seven o'clock the shops were closed and the streets all but deserted. He put the spade and shovel into the motorcar, tested the shaded lantern in the kitchen, found his torch, and as soon as his dinner was over, he drove out of Dudlington.

He left the car very close to where he'd found Hensley's bicycle, then climbed the wall on the far side of the road and made his way across the fields toward Frith's Wood.

Hamish, a good covenanting Scot, kept up a grumbling monologue in Rutledge's head, reminding him that daring the devil in the dark of night in a haunted wood was little short of madness. "It isna' wise to open doors that have no business opening."

"I'm here to close one," he answered.

Somewhere a fox barked, twice. He walked on, grateful that there was no moon to pick him out, a lone figure on the brow of the rolling pastures.

When he reached the wood he stopped to take his bearings. He could see lighted windows here and there in the village, and even the weathercock on the top of the church spire reflected their glow.

There was no one in the pastures, no one following him from the road, no one ahead of him in the wood. All the same, for a moment he wished he could tell Hamish to set a watch, as he had done so many times in the trenches.

Three years, he thought. A long time for a body to lie among the trees, but there were a few bones that might survive even now, if he knew where to look for them.

He began by working through the brambles and vines, using his hands where he could, bringing up the rake or the pitchfork for areas he couldn't reach.

The shielded lantern was used sparingly, for as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see more than he would have believed possible.

He thought, this is how an archaeologist must feel, exploring one small square at a time, unveiling what lay below the surface—or didn't lie there—with great care.

Rotted trunks and fallen branches had turned into crumbled wood, and there was layer after layer of well-rotted leaves. The rake was deep into one corner when a skull came to light, small and with a pointed muzzle. A fox, he thought, crawling in here to die in peace. He buried it again and kept going. There was the scurry of mice in another place, and he overturned a nest of fur-lined leaves and four tiny white shivering bodies. Setting it back in place, he thought he heard something behind him, like the bones of dead fingers clacking together, but it was only the boughs and bare branches rubbing together in the wind.