A Cold Treachery ir-7

by Charles Todd

“You think you're on to something, then?” Miller's face was alert, intrigued.

  “Possibly. Yes. Will you do it?”

  As if indulging a superior's whim, Miller answered, “I'll just get my coat, sir, and we'll be off.”

  W hen Miller had left him at the farm, Rutledge looked up at the still, silent house, and felt a chill.

  He was not superstitious, and yet the horror of what had happened here had left its mark.

  The odor of fresh paint met him as he let himself into the dark kitchen, and he flicked on the torch he was carrying to make his way across the floor.

  Hamish had been arguing incessantly with him for hours, and Rutledge found himself on the brink of a headache.

  He climbed the stairs up to the small room where Hazel Robinson had slept.

  It looked out across the yard and up the fell. He walked to the window, pulled up the only chair in the room, and settled down to watch. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Rutledge began to pick out details. The path he'd taken earlier. The sheep pen. The hut. And looming over them was the fell, massive and dark and somehow sinister.

  Around him the house creaked and stirred in the cold night air. He could imagine people walking about downstairs, the way the floorboards groaned in the dark. Or someone on the roof above his head, moving stealthily.

  War had inured him to the stirring of the dead. He sat there and waited.

  The hours seemed to drag by. Watching the stars, he could see that time was passing. He had scanned them in the night at the Front, when all was quiet. The silence before an attack, when it wasn't safe to light a match for a last cigarette, and faceless men coughed or stamped their feet, their nerves taut as they pretended to sleep. The unrelieved tension had been telling.

  Hamish was reminding him of the sniper who had crept forward, invisible, deadly, eyes sweeping the English lines for any indication of where a careless man might be standing, where the tension might drive a soldier to peer across No Man's Land and think anxiously about tomorrow.

  “There will be no sniper here,” Rutledge answered him aloud, startling himself as his voice filled the small room.

  It was well after two when he thought he heard the trot of a horse coming down the lane.

  His eyes told him nothing was there, that the night was still empty.

  Hamish was intent behind him in the darkness; Rutledge could feel it. How many nights had they stood shoulder to shoulder in the trenches, patient, alert, and yet drowsing as only a soldier can…

  Yes, it was a horse. He could see it now, moving up the lane, a stark outline against the whiteness of the snow. The figure on its back was an uneven bundle of dark clothing, head and shoulders hunched together against the cold.

  Man or woman? There was no way of knowing.

  He waited, and the horse slowed as it approached the house, reined in and guided to the shadows cast by the barn.

  It stood there for a time, not moving except for the swish of its tail and the occasional nod of its head as it chewed at the bit.

  There was no saddle.

  Rutledge could see that now.

  After a time the figure stirred and dismounted. Holding the reins, it stared up at the house, and Rutledge almost had the feeling that whoever it was could see him, back from the window though he was. He kept very still.

  Finally, as if convinced there was no one about, the intruder began to climb the track that led up from the yard. Easily seen, silhouetted against the snow, even without the torch that was flicked on to guide feet through the ruts that Rutledge and Drew and the searchers had made, it was not difficult to follow.

  In time it reached the sheep pen and then moved on to the hut.

  Rutledge, with only Hamish for company, waited.

  The light seemed to lose itself in the hut's thick walls. He could see that whoever had come in the night to search was being thorough.

  And it was a long time before the figure turned and made its way down the long treacherous slope.

  Rutledge had already slipped out of the house and was standing in the deep shadow cast by the shed where sheep were brought down to be bred or birthed.

  He could hear the crunch of snow even before he saw the beam of the torch. Tired footsteps, making no effort to hide their approach, came nearer with every breath.

  And then, as the torch's light grew brighter in the churned snow, Rutledge stepped out of the shadows. Dark and half seen against the house.

  A cry of alarm was cut off as the intruder realized that a man, not a ghost, stood in its way.

  Then it turned and tried to run back the way it had come.

  Rutledge, faster, was at its heels, and as it missed its step on the stony track, he caught up to it and brought it down.

  The bundled figure writhed in his grasp, crying out in pain.

  “No-my ribs -”

  He rolled off Janet Ashton and swore.

  “What the hell are you doing out here at this hour of the night?”

  She answered, “I could ask you the same thing! God, but you frightened me!”

  She was shaking.

  “Come on, up with you.”

  He gave her his hand and helped her to her feet.

  “Back to the house,” he ordered, “where I can light a lamp and see you.”

  But she pulled away from him in a fierce effort to free herself. “No! I won't go in there! You'll have to carry me, fighting all the way!” Her voice rose as she struggled.

  “The barn, then,” he said roughly, catching her arm and dragging her with him.

  The barn was marginally warmer. With the stock taken away to be cared for elsewhere, there was none of the comforting security of animals in their stalls. He took her into the depths of the cavernous darkness and shone his torch into her face. Tears streaked her cheeks, but she stared defiantly back at him.

  “What brought you here?” he asked.

  “I was afraid whatever it was you thought you'd discovered here would distract you. Josh lived on this farm! He might have used a candle up there in the hut any time. You don't understand him, the way he worried about his mother, the way the twins changed his life. I can imagine him slipping out of bed and running away for an hour or two, to get his head together again. But that's no proof he's a murderer. I don't care what Hugh says, I knew Josh just as well-better, probably-and he isn't a murderer!”

  “It was a foolish thing to do. To come here-alone-at night.”

  “Yes, but I found something up there-look!”

  He expected her to show him the cuff link he'd concealed hours earlier.

  But in the palm of her gloved hand was something entirely different.

  He turned the torch to see it clearly.

  It was the black button from a man's coat.

  Hamish mocked, “She's as clever as you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  J anet Ashton closed her fingers over her find. “All you have to do is look for a coat with a missing button-”

  “I don't believe you found it there!”

  “Why not? Because you overlooked the button earlier? It's sheer folly for me to play that game. Oh, I know you think I was as likely to have killed them as Paul-or Josh. But you can't have three murderers in a family, can you? If you have to choose, who will it be-?”

  She broke off as the horse gently blew, as if it had picked up a scent it didn't like.

  “Shhh-” Rutledge said, turning off his torch and stepping swiftly to the barn door.

  There was someone above the shed, on the hill.

  Rutledge slipped to the shed and laid his hand across the horse's nose, to keep it quiet, all the time talking to it in a low voice as he urged it out of sight.

  Janet Ashton was beside him. “Who is it?” she demanded in a fierce whisper. He could feel her shaking as her hand came to rest on his arm. “I could have run into him!”

  “Shhh-” he said again. “Here, hold on to the horse. Don't let him make a sound!”

  And he was gon
e, out of the shed and into the starlit yard.

  Above him he could see movement, but the line of sight here wasn't as good as it had been in the upper floor of the house.

  But the figure didn't seem to be moving towards the hut. Instead he seemed to be looking at the house from the fell. Searching for a better angle.

  What was it he wanted? A man, surely-not a boy.

  Hamish said softly in his ear, “Taylor, the escaped prisoner.. .”

  Was it? Rutledge waited, silently urging whoever was there to come down the hill and into his line of sight.

  But he stayed high, watchful as an animal. His attention was focused on the house still, and Rutledge realized that he would be hard to see from Hazel Robinson's bedchamber. The line on which he seemed to be moving was bare rock, brought to the surface by the rain and the sun's warmth. A shadow on a shadow, he thought, like a fish in a pool.

  And then, finally, he was coming down.

  Rutledge ducked out of sight, and said to Janet Ashton, “Stay here with the horse. Whatever happens. If he's armed, he might fire at anything that moves.”

  “Don't leave me here,” she begged. “I don't want him to find me!”

  “He won't. You're safest here.”

  He was back at the shed door, listening.

  The crunch of boots could be heard indistinctly. All at once, the sound stopped. And then turned away, moving fast.

  Rutledge swore under his breath.

  A good soldier could sense danger. Could sense the shift in the silence that told him someone else was there, concealed and menacing. Whatever alerted the man on the slope, he was taking no chances. By the time Rutledge started up the track, the man was lost in the darkness.

  He could crouch down and stay unseen, like a rabbit outwaiting the fox. It would be impossible to spot him until one was nearly on top of him…

  Nevertheless, Rutledge thought, I've got to find him.

  But it was useless. After an hour of trying, Rutledge was forced to give up.

  When he came back to the shed, he discovered that Janet Ashton was gone.

  But who was the other shadow up there on the hill? Where had he been heading, the house or the hut, before something had alerted him to his own danger? What would he have done, left to his own devices?

  I t was just before dawn when the sound of the motorcar roused Rutledge from an uneasy sleep.

  Sergeant Miller, square and sensible behind the wheel, said, “I hope it was worth missing sleep over, this wild scheme of yours.”

  “It was a quiet night,” Rutledge answered him.

  Miller grunted. “That's as may be, sir. You were lucky. Anything could have happened out here, and you had no way of summoning help.”

  W hen he got to the hotel, Rutledge stepped into the barn and looked at Harry Cummins's mare. She was standing in her stall, asleep.

  When he touched her neck, he could tell she'd been ridden, the sweat still stiff there in the hairs.

  That explained how Janet Ashton had come to and returned from the farm-bareback, because with her sore ribs she couldn't have tossed a saddle over a mount's back.

  Then how did the other night stalker get there? And what had brought him, if not the lure of the candle purportedly found in the hut?

  W hen Rutledge came down to the kitchen for hot water to use to shave, Janet Ashton was sitting in the predawn darkness, holding a cup of tea.

  “I suppose you intend to arrest me now. Returning to the scene of my crime.”

  “You could just as easily have run into the murderer as you did me. And he could well have circled back while I was out there on the fell.”

  She inadvertently shivered. “That never occurred to me, or I'd have stayed here. Are you going back today to look for tracks?”

  “That won't do much good. The search party made it impossible to tell who was coming or going.”

  “And so now you can't decide whether to take me into custody or trust your judgment that the other idiot out there in the night was the man you want.”

  “I'm prepared to arrest both you and Elcott and then let the courts make sense of it!”

  She caught the edge in his voice. “You haven't thought, have you, that Paul and I might be in this together…”

  He took the candle stub from his pocket. And the cuff link he had kept.

  “The boy broke this, either by accident or in a fit of temper. Do you know who gave them to him?”

  She didn't need to look at it. “Hugh gave them to Josh on his birthday. Grace let him keep them in his own room. It was a mistake, I can see that now.”

  “Why would he want to destroy them?”

  “I expect he felt Hugh had deserted him. By not coming here and taking him back to London. Perhaps Hugh is right, Josh was unhappy and vengeful. But that doesn't make the child a killer.”

  R utledge's loud knock at the door woke up Paul Elcott well before eight o'clock.

  He came to the door of the licensed house with his hair tossled and his pajamas shoved into his trousers. Rutledge looked down. His feet were bare.

  “What is it? What's wrong?”

  “I want to have a look at your boots.”

  “ Boots? Good God, man, are you mad? It's barely morning!”

  “Nevertheless.”

  Elcott led the way up to his quarters and opened the door to the wardrobe. “There they are. The other pair is by the bed.”

  In the close quarters of the room, Rutledge could smell the gin. It permeated the bedclothes and Elcott himself.

  He lifted each shoe and examined it.

  Dry, clean except for paint smears on one pair, and not newly polished.

  “Are these all that you have?”

  “I'm not a rich man!” Elcott said defensively. “That's the lot.”

  “I'd like to look at the coat you were wearing at the funeral.”

  “Search the wardrobe and be damned!”

  Rutledge found the dark cloth coat and ran his hands down the side where the buttons belonged.

  One was missing.

  How had the coat fit at the church? He tried to bring back the image of Elcott standing there beside Belfors and his wife. Could the button have been missing then? In the rain, streaking coats and hats with long dark shafts of wet, such things would have been difficult to note.

  But he made no issue of it, putting the coat back where he'd found it.

  “When did you start drinking?” he asked instead.

  “If it's any of your business, it was after I had my dinner. Such as it was. I don't have the heart to cook these days. And precious little appetite after working in that cursed kitchen. I'd sell High Fell, if I thought my father wouldn't come back from his grave and devour me. Instead I'll have to learn to live there. Call it Dutch courage, the gin. It's left over from last summer's stock.”

  Rutledge stood in the middle of the room, noticing that it was warmer than usual. “Have you had your breakfast?”

  Elcott swore. “I got up about six and made myself a cup of tea. There's no law against that, the last time I looked.”

  But a stove would dry boots very efficiently. Was that when Elcott had begun drinking, to cover his night's activities?

  Elcott went on, “I thought you'd be at the farm, by this time, spade and torch in hand. Looking for whatever it is you expect to find there.”

  “How did you get on with Josh?”

  “Well enough. I told you, I thought Gerry was a fool to take on a ready-made family. And I didn't like the boy. But that's not to say I'd harm him.”

  “But the Robinson children were no threat to you, were they? They couldn't inherit from their stepfather.”

  “I asked Gerry about that. How things stood. I mean, it's one thing if the children are Elcotts by blood, quite another if they have no ties to the land or to Urskdale. He told me the farm wouldn't be left away from our line.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “There wasn't much choice, was there? But yes, I thin
k he was telling the truth. He was bred to that land, more than I ever was. Josh was ten. He had no ties here, except his mother and sister. It might have been different if the boy was a babe in arms-”

  He stopped, realizing what he'd all but said. “Have you finished what you came for, Inspector?”

  “I'd like to see the kitchen, if you don't mind.”

  “I do mind, but that's beside the point. You know the way.”

  Rutledge examined the small kitchen. Any rags that might have been used to clean shoes would have gone into the fire.

  Hamish was complaining, “For all your fine lies, you've got nowhere!”

  There was a bit of mud under the table, where Elcott might have sat in the chair drawn up to it.

  But there was no way of telling whether it had come from walking in from the stable or from climbing the fell.

  Rutledge thanked Elcott and left.

  H is next call was on Hugh Robinson. The man was already dressed and having breakfast in the kitchen. Rutledge quietly went to his room and looked at his boots.

  Nothing.

  He went back to Robinson and said, “Did you go to the farm last night?”

  “The farm? God, no. If I never see it again, it will be soon enough.”

  “I thought perhaps you might have wondered if your son was there, hiding. And went to look for him.”

  “I'll admit I thought about it-” He broke off as Elizabeth Fraser wheeled herself into the room.

  “Harry isn't feeling well this morning. I knocked and he told me he thought he felt a migraine was coming on.”

  “You'll no' see his boots this morning!”

  Her bandages had been changed and were thinner. But she couldn't lift the heavy teapot, and Rutledge poured a cup for her. She thanked him.

  Robinson went on, “I don't know whether to mourn my son-or hold on to a slim thread of hope. What do they do to children that age, if there's been murder done? I can't sleep for thinking about that. Surely they don't hang them-and prisons are no place for a boy. What do they do?”

  Rutledge found himself thinking of the young man who had just been committed to an asylum. As an alternative, it offered little hope to a grieving father. Yet it had seemed to be a kinder choice to that man's parents. “It will be left to the judge to decide what's best,” he answered, watching Elizabeth Fraser's face. “That's his duty. Mine is to sift out the truth from the evidence. Where is Miss Ashton?”