Murderer in Shadow

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  “Do you think so? Really?”

  “Given that we’ve searched everywhere else, I hope so.”

  “Very well.” She stepped up her pace, causing the detective and the constable to lose their grips and jog to keep up. “If Harold is out there, heaven help the man who refuses to help me search.”

  The crowd menacing the cottage noticed Mildred Drinkwater’s removal by Ware and Stark. Their murmurs of discontent became a roar of disapproval. Half of them started after the trio, the others surged toward the cottage.

  “Stay where you are!” Ravyn did not shout, but the sharpness of his tone cut through the crowd’s yammering. “Quiet now.”

  “Says who?” A ruffian held a rock plucked from the cottage’s garden. He bounced it on his palm, as if considering both its heft and the distance he might throw it. “Don’t know you, mate.”

  “I’m DCI Arthur Ravyn, Hammershire Constabulary.” He held his warrant card aloft.

  “Don’t mean nothing to me.” His fingers tightened on the rock.

  “Throw that stone and I’ll nick you, sure, Danny Tailor.”

  Tailor, startled at his name in this stranger’s mouth, dropped the rock. He started to retrieve it, then thought better of it.

  “The same goes for you, Carny Thorne.” Ravyn pointed at the object of his threat, then turned toward the other side of the mob. “You, also, Oscar Brandt and young Freddie Priat.”

  The named men stepped back, but the crowd moved away from them, denying any chance at anonymity. They looked at Ravyn, at each other, and at the man who had egged them into action.

  “I see your recent stay at the Hammershire nick hasn’t made you any smarter, Lebbie Rodgers.” Ravyn smiled as he turned his clear blue gaze upon a man who no longer looked so sure of himself. “Disturbing the public peace, wasting police time, incitement to riot, interfering with an investigation—all that ought to keep you off the streets for five or six months, or more.” He swept his gaze slowly around the already-dissipating crowd. “Same for anyone foolish enough to follow your lead.”

  “You’re protecting the likes of him?” Rodgers demanded.

  “From the likes of you, yes.”

  “He’s odd, he is,” Rodgers said. “Queer like.”

  “Back Alley Sally Fry had a few things to say about your own oddities last year, didn’t she?” DI Furnac had had Ravyn glance at the statement given by the battered tom, hoping to eliminate his usual quota of spelling errors before sending it to Heln. “According to her, after you put on the domino mask you…”

  “Shut your gob!”

  “Well, perhaps this isn’t the place,” Ravyn agreed. “And we seem to have lost our audience.”

  Lebbie Rodgers whipped around, one side, then the other. The villagers he had provoked to violence had drifted off, fearing Ravyn might know their names as well. He scowled stormily when he saw that his mates, too, had scarpered, heading back to the safety of the Broken Lance. He turned to Ravyn.

  “Think you’re a wise-owl, do you?”

  Ravyn shrugged.

  “You’re not doing anyone no good by keeping us from getting the truth out of Weirdo Winsell.”

  “And what is the truth, Lebbie?”

  “That he has something to do with Harold going missing.”

  “You have proof of that?”

  “He doesn’t belong here,” Rodgers said. “He only goes out at night when it’s foggy. Sneaks around. Ain’t normal.”

  “Should we ask Sally about what constitutes normalcy?”

  Lebbie Rodgers clenched his fists, nails digging deep into his palms. His face reddened. The tendons in his neck stood in sharp relief. His jaw clenched with teeth-shattering pressure. Another time, another place, he might have charged Ravyn with unbridled rage, ready to cleave him from skull to groin, just as Celts did to Roman travellers who appeared vulnerable. Unlike those warriors, however, Rodgers knew Ravyn was protected by invisible armour, the might of a society intent upon law and order. To attack Ravyn was to beg retaliation from a dispassionate legal system that would rob him of freedom and power.

  “You’ll regret crossing me, making me the fool.” His voice was low, animalistic, barely understandable. “Stay out of my way, Mr Ravyn, else you’ll hear your doom come on the wind.”

  Ravyn watched Rodgers storm up the empty lane. No doubt his mates would get an earful for deserting him, likely a good cuffing as well. Ravyn considered his threat. Was it at all possible Rodgers walked the elder ways of magic? Along with his brutish aggression, was there also a ruthless intelligence? Ravyn hoped the man was, as were so many, merely a poseur.

  Reasonably satisfied there would be no immediate repetition of violence, Ravyn turned from the lane. The bottom left pane of the window near the door was shattered. A curtain corner drifted in and out. The cottage door opened a crack at Ravyn’s approach.

  “Are…” The thin voice faltered. “Are they gone?”

  “Yes. At least for now. May I come in?”

  “I just want to be left alone.”

  He held up his warrant card to the unseen occupant. “I’m…”

  “Yes, a chief inspector from Stafford. I heard what you said.”

  “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “I don’t know anything about the boy. I don’t know him. Don’t know anyone here.” He paused. “I haven’t done anything.”

  “I’d still like to talk to you.”

  The door started to close.

  “Here or in Stafford. Your choice.”

  The door stopped. “All right. Come in.”

  Ravyn entered. Passing from the brightness of day into gloom, he saw nothing and no one. A little light washed in, but only enough to limn the edges of old furniture, the faded design of a carpet.

  “Shut the door.” The unseen speaker paused. “Please.”

  A single lamp lit the parlour, so dim Ravyn did not at first see Henry Winsell well back from the door. Early fifties, he was thin, mushroom pale and wore wire spectacles. Glass crunched beneath Ravyn’s shoes. He bent down, picked up the larger pieces and set them on a side table.

  “I’ll have to get that fixed, I suppose.” Winsell’s voice was a soft whisper. “It’ll mean someone coming in, invading my space. It’ll mean getting…” His voice again faltered. “Oh God.”

  Winsell’s pallor deepened as he thought of what he would have to do, whom he would have to call. In a village as small as Knight’s Crossing there was little choice when it came to necessities.

  “I’ll have someone come over from Denby Marsh,” Ravyn said.

  “Pity, Chief Inspector?”

  “A message, Mr Winsell, to Rodgers and his mates.” After making arrangements with a handyman he knew over in the larger village, he returned his mobile to his pocket. “An hour.”

  “Thank you, Chief Inspector, but I will pay…”

  “Yes, of course, unless you prefer charges.”

  Winsell looked confused. “No. I won’t. For a moment…”

  “My friend will no doubt stop at the Broken Lance after the job,” Ravyn said. “He will give them something to think about.”

  “I see, I think.” Winsell nodded, faintly. “Please be seated, Mr Ravyn. Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “No thank you.” He sat and motioned for Winsell to sit across from him. “Just a few questions.”

  Winsell started to protest, but Ravyn silenced him with a raised palm. The man sat stiffly, hands flat on his knees. His breaths were shallow. He was a man unaccustomed to the company of his fellow beings. Seeing a hint of dust, Ravyn knew that Winsell’s isolation extended even to ‘doing’ for himself, eschewing the brigade of widows, single mothers and workers’ wives who brought in money by cleaning the cottages of others.

  “I…I suppose I should thank you for stopping that crowd.”

  Ravyn let his gaze slide around the room. The furniture had been new when Victoria was a girl, the walls were adorned with frames more valuable than the mediocre
prints they cradled, and the porcelain bric-a-brac were neither collectable nor beautiful. There were, he noticed, no books in the room, an oddity, he thought, for a man with such a scholarly air. The corridors and rooms off the parlour were too shadowed to reveal anything.

  “I was surprised they took flight.” Winsell cleared his throat when Ravyn did not reply. “You knew them, I gather?”

  “Before today I had not met any of them,” Ravyn said.

  “But…their names…you called them by…”

  “They’ve all been arrested or cited at one time or another.” The chief inspector daily reviewed routine reports. He had recognised others in the crowd, but they were no longer the fractious youths they had been. “Some cross paths with the law only once, but others give in often to their lawless natures. Them, they bear watching.”

  Winsell nodded, again uncertainly.

  “Why are you here, Mr Winsell?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You are not from Knight’s Crossing.”

  “No, I lived in London for many years.”

  “In the City,” Ravyn said, referring to the square-mile that was the economic heart of England and the Commonwealth. “A banker.”

  “Yes, but how…” In the gloom, the pallid man paled further. His hands trembled upon his knees. “You’ve investigated me?”

  “Venture Cottage,” Ravyn said. “You renamed it when you took possession. No one but a former banker would choose it.”

  A relieved sigh escaped Winsell’s lips. “Yes, I worked for one of the largest venture capital banks, responsible for millions of pounds of other people’s money. I was very good at it.”

  “And yet…”

  “And yet, here I am,” Winsell said after a moment. “Far from the lights of London, hiding in the dark, in a village few people even know exists, keeping separate from the locals.”

  “Which brings me back to my original question.”

  “I suppose you’ve been told I am…reticent about going out?”

  Ravyn nodded. “Agoraphobia?”

  “Yes, quite.” Hearing the chief inspector say the word brought him a surprising measure of relief. “You’re familiar with it?”

  “I’ve read of it.” The psychology book he devoured as a youth had been donated to Oxford with the rest of Aunt Winifred’s library when she passed away in his teens, but the text remained with him, as fresh as this morning’s newspaper. “A morbid fear of open places. Like the more well known anxiety disorder, claustrophobia, it is often brought about by a traumatic incident.”

  “Are you familiar with the Tower Bridge Attack?”

  “Of course.” The terrorist attack resulted in thirty-seven deaths and hundreds of injuries. “You were there?”

  “There was confusion after the attack,” Winsell said. “The dead, dying and wounded were being removed, but no one noticed me. When the white van exploded, I was thrown off the bridge, but held on below.” His eyes widened. “I was suspended in space for more than an hour before I was rescued. No one heard me.”

  “How long before the agoraphobia manifested itself?”

  “I was in a coma for three days,” Winsell said. “When I came out of it, they kept me in hospital two more for observation, then released me. As I left the building, I was assailed by the crushing openness.” He chuckled nervously. “I was in the heart of London, surrounded by millions of people, and all I was aware of were the terrible spaces around me. Time went on, it got worse. The only times I could go outside without panicking were foggy nights, when the mist closed so heavily about me I saw nothing.” He calmed as he thought of enveloping, embracing fog. “Therapy. Drugs. Nothing worked.” He shook his head. “I gave up.”

  “And moved house here.”

  Winsell nodded.

  “Again, why? Why Knight’s Crossing?”

  “I figured people here would be more prone to leave me alone.”

  “Because…” Ravyn let the question hang.

  “Because… Because they might think me a wizard.”

  Ravyn smiled. “For all they know.”

  Winsell returned the smile. “Yes, for all they know.”

  “A mystery man might evoke old traditions, and fears?”

  “It did cross my mind.” He looked to the broken window. “It seems to have to worked to my disadvantage though.”

  “Did your agoraphobia exacerbate your xenophobia?”

  Winsell’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I’ve always been wary of strangers, but I wouldn’t term it xenophobia.”

  “How did you learn of Knight’s Crossing and its ways?”

  “May I ask what any of this has to do with the missing boy?”

  “Routine questions. Merely eliminating you from the enquiry.”

  “I already have been.” Winsell’s tone was frosty. “I let that girl have a look around my cottage. I didn’t have to do that. I invited her to have a look. Anything to get these people to leave me…”

  His voice trailed away as he considered the results of allowing the invasion. He sighed, seeming to shrink as he did so.

  “I just want to be left alone, Chief Inspector.”

  “Do you mind if I look around?”

  Winsell threw his hands up in resignation.

  Ravyn stood, waited a moment, then went on alone. The other rooms, like the parlour, held old furniture and bric-a-brac. The kitchen had few electrical appliances. In the bedroom were a narrow bed, a pine bureau, a stand with pitcher and basin, and a side table. No clock. A back room, its window overlooking an ignored garden, held a desk with a laptop at its uncluttered centre, a divan, and a table stacked with magazines, albums and the paraphernalia of a dedicated philatelist. Under the widow was a wide bookcase that ran the length of the wall.

  A man could say anything about himself, but his goal was ever to support the mask he wore in public. In books, however, a man revealed the face behind the mask. But Winsell’s shelves contained cheap editions of once-popular novels, self-help books, several psychology textbooks, monographs on stamp collecting, and well-worn copies of English classics.

  Ravyn sighed. Nothing to indicate Winsell’s nature was deeper than his public mask – introverted, self-contained, shuttered against the present, fearful of what lay beyond his door, interested only in the mysteries of his own mind and in postage stamps issued by monarchs of other eras. Looking down, Ravyn frowned. The books on the lowest shelf, almost lost in shadow, protruded just a bit further than did the books above.

  He removed them, revealing a second row. Pulling out a pocket torch, he swept the beam along the spines. Magic, demonology, sorcery, alchemy, mysteries of the kabbalah, rituals of summoning and dismissal – it was clear Winsell did not use his computer solely to order groceries and stamps. There were also several thin volumes on local history and folklore.

  “I’ve always been interested in the unknown, in the magical universe,” Winsell said from the doorway. “I saw it as the flip side, so to speak, of the mundane, ordered life I led in London.”

  Ravyn replaced the books. “You learned of Knight’s Crossing and its preoccupation with magic from your studies?”

  Winsell bit down on his lips. “I might as well tell you. You’ll find out anyway. I was born in Denby Marsh. A few people know it, but I’ve kept it as close as anything else about myself.”

  Ravyn raised his eyebrows quizzically.

  “Wouldn’t make me anymore welcome, would it? As far as London or as close as Denby Marsh, still a strapper. I thought of settling there, but it really is true, you can’t go home again. After near a quarter century, there wasn’t anything the same.”

  “So you decided to settle among magicians and wizards?”

  “When I was a lad, Knight’s Crossing seemed as magical as Avalon, maybe much the same way nippers now see Harry Potter’s world in those books, except Knight’s Crossing was real.”

  “Ah, but is the magic real as well?”

  Winsell opened his mouth slightly.
His eyes took on a dark cast and the creases in his wide brow deepened. Before the conflicting emotions behind eyes and brow could resolve into a coherent reply, Ravyn’s mobile chimed.

  He looked at the screen. “Excuse me. I must take this call.”

  Winsell nodded, uncertainly, then stared out the window. The chief inspector moved toward the doorway.

  “What is it, Stark?” He listened. “Yes, as settled as possible. I know the Stryker place.” Out the corner of his eye, he saw Winsell start, then recover quickly. “Yes, an extra hand will do more good there than here. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

  “A development, Mr Ravyn?”

  “The search continues; I must take my leave.”

  “Did you say something about the old Stryker farm?”

  “I’m joining my sergeant and Constable Ware. You know it?”

  “Yes.” He paused. “Well, as a local story, mentioned in books.”

  “Goodbye, Mr Winsell.”

  “Ah…”

  Ravyn turned.

  “May I…” Winsell choked on his words. “May I join you?”

  Ravyn stared.

  “I thought…” He steadied his breathing against the terror of going out the door. “I thought if people see me… I mean, if they see me looking for the boy… It might help calm things down. That might help, don’t you think?”

  Ravyn let Winsell consider his own thoughts. He noticed beads of sweat on the man’s brow, a slight tremor in his hands.

  “I’ll be okay, Mr Ravyn.” The agoraphobic’s voice was almost inaudible in the vastness of an empty universe. “I’ll be…fine.”

  Ravyn hesitated. “Come along then.”

  Chapter 4

  Stryker Farm

  They turned off a single-lane road onto a path unfit for foot or hoof. Stark grit his teeth to prevent upper and lower from crashing. Despite the restraining belt and his death-gripped shoulder strap, he expected to be ejected from Ware’s vehicle at every lurch.

  Glancing at the constable out the corners of his eyes, he thought he detected a tight, thin-lipped smile. But it might be, he decided, nothing more than a grimace of determination. After all, he thought, what could possibly motivate the constable to derive any mirth from his discomfort?