by Charles Todd
“Is there anyone else at the school, other than the Crowells?” He’d seen no one, but that might be the rub. If not Mr. Crowell…
“There’s Old Fred. He cleans,” Hugh said, as if offering up a sacrifice to hungry gods. “We had two other masters, but they were killed in the war. Mr. Crowell has had to manage on his own since he came back.”
“And Mrs. Crowell. Does she walk at night? Without her husband?”
“I never saw her,” Hugh maintained. And the ring of truth this time was clear, unequivocal. “What would she be going about at night, alone, for?”
“Johnnie?”
“No, sir. Never. You can ask anybody.”
Rutledge gave it up. “You’re sure I can’t see you home? Johnnie? Do you have far to walk?”
“Not far.” He gripped his stomach with both arms wrapped around his body. “Please, can we go now?”
“Yes, be on your way.”
Rutledge watched them scurry away, like mice frantic to escape the claws of a cat.
Mary Norton was looking after them also as he reached the motorcar and stopped to turn the crank.
“I think you’ve put the fear of God into those two. Was it really necessary?”
“I think they’ve put the fear of God into themselves, and I’d like to know why.”
“Then you’re still harassing Albert Crowell,” she said, making it a statement and not a question.
“I’m trying to get at the truth,” he answered her as he closed the door on his side of the motorcar and let in the gear. “I’m not here to badger anyone.”
“That’s what people always say, but the police have made a good job of upsetting Albert and his wife.”
He wanted to tell her that she herself had caused Alice Crowell anxiety in her earnest and misguided effort to prove that the dead man wasn’t Shoreham. “The problem is that the only piece of evidence we have points to Crowell. And once I find out why it does, it may serve instead to clear his name.”
“The sooner the better, then, before he’s lost his job and his reputation. Have you policemen thought of that? No, I expect not. He’s the fox and you’re the hounds, and there won’t be any peace for him until you lot have caught him.”
She sighed, and said nothing more for the rest of the journey.
After dropping Mary Norton at the hotel, Rutledge went back to the police station, intending to report to Madsen.
But the inspector had left, he was told by an elderly constable. “He’d missed his luncheon. Not knowing when you’d return.”
Rutledge thanked the constable and walked back to the hotel.
Hamish said as Rutledge closed the door to his room, “Was it a lie, that the man in the sketch wasna’ the one who scarred the schoolmaster’s wife?”
“I don’t think she lied. But I think she’s tried to forget his face and has partly succeeded. I’ll ask Gibson at the Yard to track down Shoreham. But if that’s who the dead man is, why meet him at the ruins, take him away and kill him, then bring him back? And what does a book of alchemy have to do with revenge?”
“A lure?”
Rutledge put the sketch in his valise and then, on second thought, pulled it out again to keep with him. After a brief half hour given over to his lunch, he left almost at once, intending to visit the abbey.
He approached the abbey through a quiet parkland that led him to a stream crossed by stepping stones. And soon he was there, in front of the great arched ruin soaring into the gray sky.
Hamish said, “There are abbey ruins in Scotland. Burned by the Borderers who came for revenge.”
“I’m not sure these weren’t destroyed for revenge,” Rutledge said, looking up at the elegance of simplicity in design. The abbeys were wealthy, and wealth Henry VIII envied.
The monks had built well here. Something of what they’d done had survived Henry VIII by three centuries and more. The King had destroyed the abbey and what it stood for, but not the memory of its beauty. Or its greatness.
A strange place, Rutledge thought, to leave a dead man. Why here?
He went through into the nave, his footsteps alternately echoing on stone and whispering on the grass. The cloister was open to the sky, constructed for contemplation and peace, where monks could walk or sit in the noonday sun or pray in private.
He found the wax drippings from a candle, then the crushed grass where the victim had lain, but too many other feet had come and gone here, there was nothing to tell him about the dead man or who had been here with him.
He turned to look at the stone surrounding him, at the curve of an arch and the delicacy of a wall. Why here? Why meet here?
This was private property, the chance of being discovered at any moment was a risk that had had to be considered. Or did it appear safe, because it was private and therefore there was nothing to fear?
He heard a dog bark outside the church, and a voice call, “Is anyone there?”
Rutledge turned to walk back the way he’d come, stepping out of the nave to be greeted by a sleek Irish setter sniffing suspiciously at his heels.
The man standing some fifty feet away stared at him.
“Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard,” he said easily, ignoring the dog. “Were you the man who found the body?”
“I was.”
“And you are?”
“The undergardener. Hadley.”
“Did you notice anything the police might have missed, Mr. Hadley?”
“No.”
“Did you look at the man’s face, under the respirator?”
“I could see he was dead. There were flies about. I went directly for the police.”
“You didn’t look at the book lying beside the body?”
“It wasn’t beside it. It lay at his feet.”
“Open or closed?”
“Open, like a tent.”
“Not where the man might have been holding it?”
“No.”
“Could you or your dog tell how the man had come this far? Or how the killer might have left?”
“By the time I’d thought of that, the police had come and gone. There was a muddle of scents.”
“If you think of anything that might be useful, however insignificant it might seem to you, will you contact Inspector Madsen at once?”
“I’m not likely to remember anything more. The dog stood here barking, as he did at you, and when no one came out of the ruin, I went to see what he was on about. I wondered, just now, if there might be another dead man in there.”
It was a grudging admission.
“There’s a sketch of the dead man in my motorcar. Will you come and look at it?”
“I needn’t see it. I was here when they first took off the mask.”
“Did you recognize him? Or had you seen him before?”
“He was a stranger.”
“But the family might have known him.”
“It’s not likely they’d know a murdered man.”
Murder didn’t happen in nice circles…
Hamish said, “He’s no’ concerned with the dead, now. It’s no’ a part of his duties.”
It was true.
Rutledge thanked the man, waited until he’d called off the still sniffing dog, and then walked back the way he’d come.
Rutledge realized, driving back to Elthorpe, that what he’d been sent north to do was to put a name to the victim.
And that didn’t appear to be a simple matter.
But he could see, he thought, what the army was about—searching out unidentified bodies in the expectation that one of them might be Gaylord Partridge. Because the man still hadn’t returned to the cottages in Berkshire, or London would have recalled the Yard’s emissary by now.
Why did they think Partridge might be dead?
Did he have other enemies? Or was it that the army didn’t want to step forward and publicly claim the man’s body? If Rutledge identified him in the course of a murder investigation, there would be no connection with off
icialdom.
It was possible that Partridge’s earlier forays had been made to prepare an escape route, so to speak, away from his watchers. And this time, unlike before, he had no intention of coming back.
And instead of going missing and causing an uproar, he’d died and inconvenienced everyone.
Rutledge was tempted to take the sketch to show at the Tomlin Cottages, to see what Quincy and Slater and the others might say about it.
But early days for that, now.
He found he’d driven back to Dilby, where the schoolmaster lived.
Hamish said, “It willna’ be useful.”
And yet Rutledge left his car by the church and walked through the village, getting a sense of it.
He’d seen much of England over the years, both as a policeman and as an ordinary visitor. Wherever he had traveled, he’d found a sense of place—a shared history, a shared background. But this little spot on the map seemed to have none of that. No sense of the past in the square buildings with their slate roofs, gray in the cloudy light. No sense of history, no armies marching through the churchyard, no Roman ruin under the baker’s shop, no medieval tithe barn on the fringe of the village. The abbey must have wielded some influence here—if not Fountains, then one of the others. Ripon, perhaps. What had the monks run here? Sheep, or even cattle? Or was this tilled land? Beyond the village, where he could see green and heavily grassed pastures, there must have been good grazing from the earliest days. Surely the inhabitants of Dilby had been tenants of the abbeys, not monks. Laymen or even lay brothers, earning their keep and owning nothing until the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII had left them masterless and destitute, scraping out a living where they could or falling under the sway of whatever lordling had coveted these acres.
He had come to the end of the village now, and turned to walk back.
Hamish said, “It’s no’ a place of comfort.”
Rutledge was about to answer him when he saw a face in an upper-story window staring down at him.
A young boy’s face, so terrified that he seemed to be on the verge of crying. Glimpsed for only a moment, then gone, as if Rutledge had imagined it.
It wasn’t Hugh or his friend Johnnie. He was certain of that.
What did these children know? What were they so frightened of?
Rutledge walked on, an unhurried pace that took him back to his motorcar, nodding to men he passed on the street, touching his hat to the women. No one stopped him to ask his business.
They already knew. The blankness in their eyes as they acknowledged his greeting covered something else, an unwillingness to be a part of what was happening.
How long could the schoolmaster go on living here, if the cloud of suspicion wasn’t lifted, and soon? He would be sent packing, no longer the proper person to form young minds. Miss Norton was right about that.
Rutledge drove back to Elthorpe in a bleak mood, as if the village had left its mark on him.
On the outskirts lines from the poetry of O. A. Manning seemed to express what he felt about Dilby. It had been written about a shell-gutted village in France, empty of people, empty of beauty, empty of hope.
There is something cold and lost
Here, as if the people died long ago,
No one left to mourn them or tell me why.
My footsteps echo on what was the street,
A rose blooms in a corner where no one sees
The beauty that it offers to the dead.
I thought to pluck it and take it away,
But it belongs here, a memorial to them.
No birds sing in the ruined trees,
No fowl scratch in unweeded kitchen gardens,
No child’s laughter answers a mother’s voice.
There’s only the wind searching for something to touch
And passing through unhindered.
A fleeting memory came to him—Alice Crowell’s welcome, as if she had been expecting him. And yet as far as he knew there was no reason why she should.
8
The next morning found Rutledge back at the Dilby school, encountering a surprised Albert Crowell in the passage just as he came out of a classroom. Rutledge had brought the sketch of the dead man back with him.
“Inspector. What can I do for you?” Crowell asked.
“I’d like a word with your wife, if she’s here.”
There was a wary expression in his eyes now.
“In regard to what?” Crowell asked bluntly.
“I’m afraid that’s police business at the moment.”
Crowell gave some thought to the request and then said, “She’s in the small room we call the library. Four doors down and to your left.”
“Thanks.” Rutledge walked on, feeling the man’s gaze following him as he counted doors and stopped to knock lightly on the fourth.
A woman’s voice called, “Come in.”
But whoever it was Alice Crowell was expecting, it wasn’t Rutledge this time. Surprise crossed her face, and she bit her lip before saying, “You haven’t come to arrest my husband, have you? Please tell me you haven’t.”
“Not at all. I didn’t intend to alarm you,” he said easily, coming into the room and shutting the door.
As if Hamish knew now what he was about to do, the voice in his head seemed to swell into angry remonstrance.
“No’ here, it isna’ wise, what if yon schoolmaster is guilty?”
He ignored it as best he could.
There were handmade bookshelves around the walls, most of them half full. The titles ranged from simple children’s works to more serious books on history and geography and biography. He recognized a tattered copy of Wordsworth, and another of Browning, among the poetry selections. A meager library, but for this small place, it must seem handsome.
Mrs. Crowell gestured to a chair across from the one where she was sitting. It was an intimate arrangement in the center of the room, two chairs and a scattering of benches for the children. A woven carpet covered the floor, and there was a fireplace in one wall.
“It’s here we read to the children at the end of the day,” she said. “They may never have access to such books after they’ve left us. Sadly, most of them are destined to work on the farms for their fathers or their uncles. But on the other hand they’ve known that since they were old enough to understand anything, and they take it as a natural course of events.”
“It must seem to you a waste, at times. With a particularly bright student.”
“Education is never wasted. But yes, we’ve taught a few who might have gone on to university. We encourage them, of course we do. But who will work the farm while they’re away? And what will happen to that farm if the son of the house comes to prefer London or Ipswich or Canterbury to Dilby? Do you have children, Inspector? Do you expect them to be policemen?”
He could see that she was avoiding asking him what had brought him to her.
“Sadly, I’m not married,” he told her, “but if I had a son, I’d hope he chose the career most suited to him.” He found himself remembering a small boy in Scotland, named for him but not his son. “Did the war reach as far as Dilby?” he went on quickly, before the memory took hold.
“Oh, yes,” she replied with sadness in her voice. “We paid a high price here, considering our numbers. Most of our men wanted to serve together, and so they were killed together as well. A good many of our children were orphaned. It’s been very hard for them. And Albert lost his brother, Julian. But Mary has told you about him, hasn’t she? I’m sure she has.”
“Your husband was in the war, I understand.”
The wariness crept back into her eyes. “Yes.”
“We didn’t disparage the men who drove ambulances,” he said. “They were very brave to go where they were needed most. And they were caring. In the worst of the fighting, they were often the last touch of England that many dying men knew.”
A smile brightened her face. “Thank you,” she said softly. As if she too ha
d wondered about her husband’s bravery under fire and had had no one to ask.
He went on, “I’ve come to make a request. I’d like to speak to several of your students, alone if possible.”
“Why? And which of them do you have in mind? I didn’t think you knew any of them.”
“The one called Hugh. And his friend. Johnnie. The one who went home because he’d been sick.”
“Why on earth should you be interested in those two? They’re troublesome, but nothing beyond the usual mischief one expects of boys who are not good students and find school boring.”
“Something appears to have frightened them.”
She frowned. “How do you mean? Are you saying that someone has frightened them?”
“Not necessarily someone. Perhaps something.”
“But what has this to do with my husband?”
“Nothing at all, for all I know. But until I speak with them, I can’t tell you how they fit into this business. And it might be best to do that here, rather than in their homes. Less intimidating, perhaps.”
All the while, Hamish was reminding him that Crowell was the chief suspect. “Ye could verra’ well be putting yon lads in harm’s way.”
Mrs. Crowell was intelligent, her mind working quickly as she sorted through several thoughts pressing for her attention.
“And if I say no?”
“Mrs. Crowell, I would prefer your cooperation. But if you refuse to give it, I shall have to approach the families directly.”
“You don’t seem to understand. John Standing isn’t here today, he’s not well enough to return. And for several days, another boy, Robbie Medway, has been ill. His mother was saying to me only last evening that she was at a loss to know what was wrong. His brother Tad and John’s cousin Bill have been very distracted in class. And that’s not like them. It isn’t boredom. I expect they’re worried about their friends. The four of them are also friends with Hugh Tredworth. He’s not been himself either. Very subdued. It would be best not to add the distress of speaking to a policeman to the problems in their home situation just now. You see, one of our brightest boys died a few months ago of complications from measles, and any illness is disturbing to the children now. One of the younger students asked me only this morning if Robbie was going to die too. There’s your frightening something.”