A Long Shadow (3 page)

Reaching his flat, Rutledge couldn't stop himself from looking down at the front steps. There was nothing there. He walked inside, went up to his rooms, and turned on the lamp before going in search of the other cartridge case, the one from New Year's Eve. It was still in the pocket of his dress coat, and he examined it in the lamp's bright glow.

Poppies. Rows of them gracefully circling the casing, the petals of each bloom very beautifully etched into the brass alloy. But between the leaves and stems he could just barely see something hiding in the greenery. Was that an eye peering out? Or had the engraver's hand slipped? Hard to say. He'd have thought nothing of it, if he hadn't seen the latest example. Now the deliberately vague socket took on a more sinister air.

"By the same hand," Hamish pointed out, and indeed the skill of workmanship proved that.

The question was, Rutledge thought uneasily, what would have happened if he hadn't left the Browning house early that last night of the old year? Would the casing have been retrieved until another opportunity presented itself? Or left to be swept up along with the leaves and debris in the gutter, a malicious impulse that hadn't been successful? What had he set in motion by finding it? Worse still, what did this harrying have to do with his years in the trenches?

He remembered Mrs. Channing, the only guest he hadn't met before that night. Could she have guessed that he wouldn't stay for the séance if he could find a polite reason for walking out on Maryanne's party? Then how had she managed to step outside and leave that casing where he would find it? While he was drinking his port with the other men?

He hadn't served with anyone named Channing.

He searched his memory for the faces he'd seen in Belton, people quickly gathering out of morbid curiosity to learn how a man's murderous rampage ended. She hadn't been there, he'd have recognized her. Who else, then? Who of half a hundred people might it have been? Someone at the back of the crowd, surely, half hidden, wanting to see without being seen.

"Or none of them," Hamish retorted.

As for Beachy Head, it was open, without much in the way of cover.

I'm too good a policeman to have missed him!
he told himself.
If he followed me, I'd have seen him.

It had taken nerve to step out in the open, reach the motorcar, toss in the casings, and vanish again.
I could have turned at any moment, and caught him.

"You had ither things on your mind."

"I wasn't there that long!"

"Longer than ye ken."

Rutledge shook his head.

"He was in the trenches," Hamish went on. "Else, where did he come by
these
?"

Rutledge flinched, half expecting Hamish to lean forward to touch the cartridge casings. He scooped them up quickly and put them in the drawer of his desk, turning the key. "Why machine-gun cartridges?" he asked aloud, "or poppies?"

Hamish answered him. "That last night—before the firing squad. It was a machine gunner we were sent to take out. And in the spring, poppies bloom in Flanders. They're red, the color of blood."

A few days later, Rutledge was on his way to Hertford to give evidence at the trial of a man he'd apprehended some months before. He had stopped briefly for an early lunch at a pub in a village that lay some distance behind now, and he was trying to make up his time. With luck, he'd be in the county town in another half an hour, well before he was due to meet the KC.

The road had narrowed for a mile or more, shrinking now into a stretch that was barely wide enough for one vehicle, let alone two. To one side a winter-bare hedgerow ran up a slope and down again, giving him a feeling of being shut in between it and the flickering shadows cast by a copse on his right.

It was claustrophobic, reminding him of a magic-lantern show gone mad—light and dark, light and dark, the trees flitting by like irregular fence palings and without substance.

As he geared down for the bend ahead, Hamish said, "You'll have us both in the ditch—"

He never finished the warning.

A shot echoed, sending half a dozen crows flying up out of the trees, crying raucously in alarm just as the windscreen in front of Rutledge shattered, glass spraying like bright bits of water into his face. And he could feel the wind of the bullet passing his ear before thudding somewhere in the rear seat behind him.

Fighting to control the motorcar as it veered across the road and straight for the clumped roots and dried wildflowers at the foot of the hedgerow, Rutledge was swept by horror.

The shot had missed him—but it couldn't have missed Hamish, directly behind him.

The bonnet came perilously close to burying itself into the earth beneath the hedgerow before he had cut the motor and the vehicle rocked to a halt.

His face was wet with blood, but he was barely aware of it. What filled his mind was the silence in the seat behind him.

I dare not turn and look.

If he's badly hurt—what am I to do? I can't touch him—!

As the initial shock receded, he reminded himself that Hamish was already dead, buried in one of the muddy cemeteries in France.

The relief that swept him was followed by a cold, intense anger.

He was out of the motorcar, the door swinging wide behind him, racing toward a break in the hedgerow some twenty feet away.

The shot had come from a revolver, he was certain of it. He knew the range, and his ears had unconsciously registered the direction of the sound, even though he hadn't seen the muzzle flash. And the only thought in his mind now was putting hands on the man who had fired it.

"Ye canna' leave the motor here!" Hamish shouted behind him. "Yon bend—"

But Rutledge was scrambling up the stones, weeds, and packed earth at the foot of the hedgerow, ignoring the stubby twigs and branches that plucked at his clothes and scraped his hands. He found the thinning patch where one of the knot of trees had died out, pushed his way through it with a final effort, and plunged into the rolling pasture beyond.

He wasn't sure what he'd expected to see there. But except for a grazing horse at the far end, the pasture was empty.

His years in the trenches had taught him to pinpoint snipers in their lairs, and the skill came back to him with accustomed ease. He strode along the hedgerow, searching for crushed blades of grass, scuffed earth—any signs that pointed to where someone stretched out on the ground or crouched by the thick tangle of tree limbs and dead wildflower stalks, waiting to fire.

Underfoot the grass was a dull yellow and damp, quickly soaking into his leather shoes as he broke into a trot, following the line of the hedge. He knew the angle of fire. Less than fifty feet away from where he'd climbed the hedgerow, he found what he was looking for—a muddied patch and above it a single twig snapped in two. He squatted there on the ground, looking back toward the lane, and he could see there was a perfect field of fire from this spot toward where his motorcar had been passing as the windscreen shattered.

Not an accident, then. But what? He couldn't believe that boys had been trying out their father's war souvenir. The shot had barely missed his head. The question was, had it missed on purpose, or because the shooter wasn't skilled enough to hit his target?

Then as he straightened, he saw, shoved into a thicker part of the hedge not more than a foot away, three shell casings, in a length of belt.

His anger had drained out of him, and he turned quickly to scan the pasture again, suddenly aware of how vulnerable he was, if the man with the revolver took another shot. No one there. Nothing to prove anyone had been there.

It was as if it had all been a figment of his imagination. The horse was grazing peacefully, and the crows had settled again into the trees across the road. And yet there was the shattered windscreen, and here was evidence of someone lying in wait, taking aim—pulling the trigger. Not an accidental firing but a careful ambush.

And the shell casings left behind as a taunt.

I could have killed you. But I didn't. This time.

He spent nearly half an hour quartering the pasture for tracks, searching for any sign of how the shooter had come here, or left. At length, unsatisfied, he went back to lift the casings out of the hedge, and look at them more closely.

Behind him Hamish said, "Three."

Soldiers in the trenches were a superstitious lot. It was said German snipers waited for a man to light a cigarette, then pass the match to the men beside him. And as the third cigarette flared, the sniper had made his kill. Three.

Like the other casings, these were .303s, from a Maxim machine gun. It had been the most widely used weapon in the war, half of Europe copying its design for their armies. And the machine gun had been the most deadly weapon of the war, sweeping the stark, shell-pocked, wire-strung terrain called No Man's Land with a hail of bullets that could bring a man down and pass on in a matter of seconds to kill everyone beside him long before any of them reached the first line of enemy trenches. It had, Rutledge thought, caused more casualties than any other weapon. The gunner and his crew could hold off a hundred men, and there was no way to stop him.

Rutledge stood there studying the cartridge casings. Like the others he'd found before, these were clearly meant for him to examine.

Even in the gray afternoon light he could see the skull carefully set in the cup of a poppy blossom, nestled where the stamens should have been. The blossom was beautifully formed, the petals open and lovingly shaped, the death's head staring up at him with blackened eye sockets cut deep enough into the metal to give them a ghoulish realism.

Without thinking he touched his gloved finger to the dark sockets and then saw there was a smudge on the leather.

Rutledge could have sworn that it was blood. But whether his own, from the cuts on his face, or from something on the carving, he couldn't have said.

He found a man in Hertford who could replace the shattered windscreen, but there was nothing to be done about his own face, except to ask the doctor recommended by the garage owner's wife to pluck the deeper bits of glass out of his skin.

"I'd report this to Inspector Smith," Dr. Eustace told him. "We can't have silly fools running about the countryside with loaded firearms! This sliver could have blinded you, if it'd struck your eye instead of your eyebrow!" He held up a splinter of glass, bloody on the tip.

"It was an accident," Rutledge answered him, trying to infuse conviction into his voice. His face was stinging like hell. He wasn't about to discuss the shell casings with anyone, let alone a provincial inspector who would begin to ask questions he couldn't answer himself. But all the while Hamish was telling him that the shot had been a near thing. For both of them.

"And ye must ask why he didna kill you, when you were in his sights."

"On a public road?" he retorted silently as Dr. Eustace went on with his digging. "I'd rather know why he followed me to Beachy Head just to leave a warning. Why not shoot me on the cliff and simply roll my body off the edge and into the sea? I was an excellent target, standing there against the sky. It would have been the easiest way to be rid of me without a trace."

"Aye, but I canna' believe he wanted it to be sae easy." And after a moment, Hamish added, "He likes playing wi' you."

"He'd have had to be ahead of me," Rutledge responded grimly as the doctor probed for the last shard of glass and then handed him a mirror. "But how did he get clear so fast?"

"You'll have to put this powder on the wounds," Dr. Eustace was saying, reaching for a small packet on the table behind him, "else they're likely to fester. You won't look very pretty in the witness-box, in spite of my handiwork. But at least the worst of the damage is cleaned."

Rutledge stared at himself in the mirror. Tiny red wounds spotted his face, giving him the appearance of a man with measles.

"It doesn't matter," he answered the doctor. "The cuts will heal soon enough."

But he could remember the sound of shattering glass and the familiar whistle of the bullet rushing past his ear. Hamish was right: it had been damnably close! He had felt the wind of its passing. Either the shooter was a very good marksman, or he'd come closer than he'd intended.

It was rather like being stalked by someone who didn't exist. But the bruised grass by the hedgerow told Rutledge it wasn't a shadow following him.

He remembered too the uneasiness he'd felt at Beachy Head. He'd felt it again in that pasture, a tall target there by the hedgerow, a target even a poor marksman couldn't have missed.

He didn't like being vulnerable.

He didn't like a nameless, faceless pursuer at his heels, invisible because he couldn't be identified.

"Aye, he could be anywhere," Hamish told him. "Even in yon courtroom, staring down at you from the gallery."

It was a thought Rutledge carried with him into the witness-box.

But if this stalking had been an attempt to change Rutledge's testimony, it had failed.

He saw the prisoner in the dock convicted and walked out of the courtroom with grim satisfaction, even as he scanned the faces around him: five or six women, twice as many men, three ex-soldiers still wearing their army-issue greatcoats, one of them on crutches, and a baker's boy in his white apron, his face speckled with flour.