by Eric Reed
“But you hadn’t before Constable Baxter arrived?”
Wallace doubted any little brunette could have handled Ronny on her own. Mavis certainly hadn’t succeeded very well in the past.
“What did you do after Constable Baxter left?”
“I sat down and had a good cry.”
“And after you sat and cried what did you do?”
She gave him a grim smile. “Why I got up, went to bed, had a few more tears. Then I went to sleep.”
“You didn’t leave the house after Ronny left?”
Mavis shook her head.
Wallace persevered. “You like going out? You like the dances?”
Mavis looked surprised.”What does that have to do with anything?”
“The neighbors wouldn’t think it odd if you left the house at night.”
“Oh, they notice everything. Tongues wag, all right.” The kettle whistled. Mavis had been preparing tea. She brought cups to the table and sat down across from Wallace.
“I meant they might not notice on any particular night, it being a common occurrence.”
“Been listening to gossip, have you? If you’re suggesting I followed Ronny—”
“So you didn’t go out after he left?”
“Actually, I did, to use the netty. Is that against the law now?”
Wallace ignored the remark. “And Mr. van der Berg, the Dutchman…” He paused and sipped his tea. It was part of the ritual when a constable came calling. “The neighbours, as you say, talk and since they see this man who visits often and then your husband turns up dead the very night he arrives on leave, well, certain questions must be asked and—”
“Hans wouldn’t hurt anyone!” Mavis interrupted angrily “Hans and I aren’t having an affair, if that’s what you are thinking. Grace can tell you that.”
Wallace made another note and pondered a moment, tapping his teeth with his pencil.
Mavis struggled to control her temper. “I think I’ll have a tab,” she said and offered one to Wallace before lighting her own.
He refused.
Mavis took a long drag and tapped the ashes into her saucer.
Wallace asked her what Hans did and she described his work with refugees.
“Why isn’t he with the merchant navy? I understand he was a fisherman?”
“He’s never told me why he does that particular work and, though we are friends, it never occurred to me to ask. Mind, living in a strange country as he does, it must be nice for him to hear his native language.”
“Did he bring you those oranges as a friend?” He indicated the fruit in a bowl beside the makeshift Christmas tree. “Haven’t seen oranges in the shops myself. Nice Christmas present, oranges.”
“He’s not involved in the black market, if that’s what you’re hinting at.”
“No? That would put him in a minority. It isn’t polite to ask where a gift came from, is it? Still, a foreigner…”
Mavis had looked Wallace straight in the eye the whole time he’d been questioning her. She is a tough little thing, he thought. But then she’d have to be to have survived marriage to Ronny. He persisted. “Ronny didn’t let you know he was coming home on leave?”
“No.”
“According to the report of an investigating constable, a witness claims to have seen Ronny in the city a few days ago.”
“Oh? Last night was the first I knew he was back.”
“Any idea where he might have been before coming home?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.” She abruptly stubbed out her cigarette, almost knocking over her empty cup.
Wallace could see her cheeks reddening. “We both know Ronny was a swine, Mrs. Arkwright,” he said gently. “But even swine are entitled to justice.”
Chapter Seventeen
In the deepening twilight, Rutherford carefully closed the door to his maisonette and looked up and down Chandler Street to make sure he wasn’t observed. He made a shushing sound at the cat that bounded onto the front step to brush his ankles and gently nudged it away with his foot before crossing the street.
Darkness was pooling in the open space around the remains of the temple. Rutherford bent and pushed aside a patch of thick grass growing against part of the ancient foundation. He smiled with satisfaction seeing the trap hidden there had been sprung.
Straightening up, he tried to suppress a cough. Coming out into the cold always set it off. He wiped watering eyes. The cold affected them badly too. He would have preferred to stay indoors, but it was necessary for him to do what was expected of him. He must be careful not to draw unwanted attention to himself.
He looked at the altars. As the remains of sunset drained from the sky, they resembled pale gravestones.
In his imagination Rutherford could still see the corpse lying in front of an altar. Had the police he observed as he peered from his window noticed the body’s positioning? Did they understand what it signified?
There was evil at work in the world. Evil that needed to be dealt with in its own way. The body made that clear, didn’t it? Yet who would understand? Even those he had considered his friends, who should have assisted in his efforts, had shuddered and turned away from doing what must be done.
Rutherford felt a prickling along the back of his neck. It was more than the chilly breeze. Power lingered here where offerings had called to the old gods who abandoned their temple centuries ago. He looked to the sky but the night was overcast. No stars showed. The city might as well have been buried in a cavern beneath the earth.
Muttering a scrap of Latin, Rutherford forced himself to continue on his way. He didn’t want to be late.
The darkness embraced him. He felt, as he always did when he was out at night, as if he wore a cloak of invisibility, protecting him from prying eyes. But tonight his skin continued to tingle and he felt something had followed him from the temple.
When he stopped to check a trap where a brick was missing at the side of a step, the follower caught up with him. Or so it seemed. He sensed a presence, yet risking a surreptitious glance over his shoulder, saw nothing stood behind him.
He didn’t dare to stop again. Whatever it was kept pace. He could sense it at his back, could feel the gap between it and himself, could feel a skeletal finger poised an inch above his shoulder, ready to touch it.
It was too dark now for him to go more quickly without risking falling over an unseen object or walking into a lamppost. Moving to the centre of the street, he resolved not to turn around again.
After a journey that seemed much longer than usual, Rutherford arrived at his destination. Before going inside, he put his hand in his coat pocket and fingered an Egyptian ankh, over which he had uttered certain protective charms.
By the time he reached the flat roof of the building he sensed he was, finally, alone. Up here the wind was stronger. His eyes teared up until he could barely see the structure at the roof’s edge, an oversized oil drum with a conical top, a door at the back, and slits at eye-level.
Rutherford entered the contraption. It was claustrophobic, a metal coffin. He didn’t like it, but he had to do what was necessary. Out of the wind he was suddenly flushed from exertion. Through the slits he could see the Tyne, lined by Vickers’ works on this side of the river, and Gateshead on the opposite shore. Or rather he could see them in his mind’s eye where he knew them to be. Between the cloudy sky and the blackout he might have been staring into the Stygian depths of Hell.
There was a ringing knock at his metal door.
***
Agnes Cooper undid her tartan headsquare, laid it on the corner table, and lit a candle in front of a plaster Jesus. Only a stub remained and the shadows cast upwards by the flame made the Son of God’s beatific face faintly monstrous, as when children hold a torch under their chins to scare one another in the dark.
&
nbsp; Agnes knelt to pray. Her knees hurt from kneeling before her doorstep, scrubbing away the cloven hoofprints that were there every morning. Often, in the night’s darkest hours, she was awakened by the scraping of those cloven hooves on the steps downstairs, the scratching of claws at the door. That no one else noticed the prints did not surprise her.
Each day, as soon as the sun was up and it was safe to go outside, she cleaned away the traces of those nocturnal visits. The harder she plied her stone the harder he squeezed her heart in his talons. Although she implored the Lord for protection, her chest continued to hurt.
She rose and gingerly moved her left shoulder, trying to work the pain out. Had Satan got inside? Surely not.
From the moment it was built near the Roman wall, the vile temple had served as a gateway between Earth and Hell. Strange she had not realized that when she moved into this home as a young woman. Perhaps it was because the evil had strengthened over the years, as the evil abroad in the world had strengthened until it was now a howling black cloud ready to swallow all of God’s creation.
Though a wardrobe blocked most of the window looking toward the temple, she was able to peer out when frightened by noises. Many times she had watched the fiend Rutherford cross to the shrine at sunset, no doubt waiting to commune in the dark with whatever demons were there. And she also saw shadows dancing around him, following him when he left.
There were always shadows in the street where they shouldn’t be. And voices whispering unintelligibly in infernal tongues. They got into her head. At times she felt she was about to grasp what they were babbling. But she feared if she did, she would certainly go mad.
Now Rutherford and his demons had begun to make blood sacrifices to whatever pagan deity the Romans had worshiped there.
She had found certain evidence of sacrilege being performed in the ruins—a thing so blasphemous she barely dared think about it.
Hands shaking, she had wrapped what she found by an altar in thick brown paper and hidden it in her chest of drawers. She knew she must tell the vicar. But she was afraid. If she alerted him, would his prayers be powerful enough to protect her?
***
A guard at the civil defense centre at the Benwell Waterworks directed Grace to the stairs to the roof. Constable Wallace had had the sense to check the records and discovered why the man was always out at night.
He served as a fire watcher.
Grace rapped at the door to Rutherford’s metal roost again. The windy darkness all around was unnerving, the infinite deep in the hour before the world’s creation.
Finally the door squeaked open. In the light from her torch Grace saw a pale, unhealthily thin man with the stooped shoulders of a scholar. His metal helmet was too big for him. Grace wasn’t sure what she had expected, but certainly not this beaten-down old man.
“Mr. Rutherford? Cyril Rutherford? Constable Baxter. I need to have a word with you.”
Rutherford stepped out onto the roof with obvious reluctance, eyes downcast, as if he expected to be whipped. “That was you following me?”
“No.”
He appeared distressed by her denial.
“Have you been followed, Mr. Rutherford?”
“No. It must have been my imagination.”
“I’m sorry to have missed you at your home earlier. It’s quiet right now. While it is, could you answer a few questions?”
A coughing spasm rattled in his lungs on a deep baying note. “Right now? On the roof in the dark?”
“If you would. It took me long enough to find you! Now about the woman found dead in the—”
“Don’t ken owt about that,” he cut in, but his voice quavered.
“Is that why you’ve been avoiding me? Because you know nothing? Usually it’s the other way around. You saw nothing? Heard nothing? You live right across the street from those ruins and you’re always out and about after dark. Surely you—”
“I’m a fire watcher. I must be out of a night. People will gossip about owt, as if nobody else went out at night.” Another bout of coughing gripped him.
“You sound terrible.” The poor man looked so frail, and if the neighbors were inventing malicious tales about him, he might be justified in hiding indoors and avoiding callers. Being a recluse wasn’t a crime. “I suppose these damp nights make that cough worse?”
“Coming in from the cold or going out into it will set me off.”
Grace had begun to feel sorry for the man. “Horehound tea’s what you want. My grandmother swore by it for colds and coughs. Works a treat, it does.”
“Your grandmother had herbal knowledge?” Rutherford sounded surprised. “I have a great interest in such remedies. The concoctions wise women made are as effective as anything chemists offer.”
His interest in the subject had immediately overruled his evident fear of her, Grace noted.
“Here, Rutherford, stop blathering to the bonny lass!” The voice was that of a man emerging on the roof with a bucket, carrying it over to where Grace and Rutherford were standing. “Take no notice of him, miss. Always talking nonsense about cures for this and that, and dancing about under the moon. He was carrying on the other night as how his rheumatics were playing up again. Pity his herbs don’t help them, isn’t it?”
Grace glared at the intruder, annoyed at being interrupted as she was starting to gain Rutherford’s trust.
The short, round fellow took it for a questioning look. “Bringing up buckets of sand to put out any incendiaries, see? Got more below, like.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, you fool,” Rutherford snapped.
The short man looked bewildered. “You plan on putting out them incendiaries with spells?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Rutherford managed before starting to cough again.
“Dancing under the moon?” Grace asked.
The other answered for Rutherford, who was now loudly sucking a cough sweet, happy enough to resort to a chemist’s offerings, despite his professed interest in more effective herbal remedies. “We got to cracking on about bombers’ moons the other night. Cyril here reckoned the moon had seen many strange sights and let on he tried to organise a nocturnal event, as he put it—” he leered at Grace “—but the people in his study group were so outraged at the idea they kicked him out of it. Isn’t that right, Cyril? Serves the old goat right, begging your pardon, miss. Dancing under the moon in the altogether in this weather, I ask you. Bats in the belfry…” He tapped his forehead significantly and left the roof.
Rutherford looked sideways at Grace and lowered his voice. “I was extremely disappointed to find out the Tyneside Scientific and Literary Circle had only academic interest in what we studied. Oh, they were quite happy to talk about Roman curse tablets or the worship of Hecate, but would they take an opportunity to use certain knowledge to perform a service for their country? Ha!”
Grace realised the circle must have been the group Mr. Elliott had mentioned to her during their conversation in the church. “They refused?”
Rutherford nodded. “Now, you’d think they’d leap at the chance to help the war effort, wouldn’t you? But no, every time I suggested we go up on the moors to raise a cone of power and direct its full force toward breaking that swine Hitler, what did they do? Said as soon as they lit a bonfire an air raid warden would appear from nowhere and tell them to put that light out! As if any would be out there in the middle of the night. Or else the weather was too cold or wet or windy, and anyway they were too old to dance sky-clad. And then they voted me out of me own group!”
“Cone of power?”
“Aye. You wouldn’t have read about it in the papers but there was one last year down south for a similar purpose.”
“How do you know about it if it wasn’t in the papers?”
“Don’t forget the abdication crisis not so long ago. All o
ver the country bairns were singing about a certain American divorcée stealing the king instead of the real words to “Hark, The Herald Angels Sing.” They never got that from any paper! But it’s a wonderful demonstration how fast and far word of mouth travels, and that’s how I heard about last year’s attempt to mess up Hitler’s plans. I thought it was well worth trying again, since desperate measures are needed for desperate times.”
“True enough. I’m surprised the group didn’t agree.”
“They were afraid. They confine their efforts now to séances. No doubt there is knowledge to be gained by contacting the spiritual realm, but in times like these what is needed is action.”
“I should say so. Where does this group meet?”
Rutherford’s expression changed. His lips tightened. “They’ll have nowt good to say about me. I’m saying nowt else.” He stepped back into his shelter and clanged the door shut.
Chapter Eighteen
“You don’t think Rutherford has anything to do with the murders do you, Wallace?” Baines removed his eyeglasses, set them on the kitchen table in the middle of assorted stacks of papers, rubbed his eyes, and stared wearily up at the stained ceiling.
He looked unhealthy, drawn and pallid. At least he’d arrived at the police station on time.
“No, sir. The old man’s belfry’s full of bats, if you ask me, but our Miss Baxter has him pegged as a person of interest.”
“Miss Baxter.” Baines let the name out in a long sigh and squeezed his eyes shut. “A country girl. Brought up with too much rustic wisdom, I gather. Talked to Constable Harmon at Craven Arms before she arrived. He spoke highly of her abilities. Apparently her grandmother fancied herself a witch and Noddweir was in thrall to an old stone circle on the hill looking down on it. Superstitious lot, villagers.”
“It’s true Rutherford does seem to take an unholy interest in the ruins.”
“Better her wasting time on the fool than you, Wallace. What interests me more is this business about Ronny being back in the city for a while before he showed up at home. Do you think it’s true?”