Charles Todd_Ian Rutledge 08

by A Long Shadow

  Cain got stiffly to his feet. “I don’t know much more about Dudlington’s skeletons than you do. I relied on Hensley’s experience when there were problems. I have a good constable in Fairfield and an even better sergeant in Letherington now, who see me through. Any help you can give me here will be appreciated. Come back in five years’ time, and if I’m still here—God forfend!—I’ll know my turf like the back of my hand.”

  “Where is your carriage?” Rutledge asked him at the door. “I didn’t see it as I came in.”

  Cain grinned. “My constable’s at The Oaks. He’s very good at gossip. I depend on him to tell me what’s being whispered in the dark corners of the bar.”

  And he was off, favoring his left leg as he walked through the rain toward Holly Street.

  Rutledge saw him out of sight, and then climbed the stairs to the bedroom.

  The cartridge casing was still there, where Rutledge had left it.

  Rutledge made a point to search out the house belonging to Grace Letteridge.

  It was one of the few buildings in the village that boasted a thatched roof. Thatching had always reminded Rutledge of a woman wearing a marvelous hat and feeling slightly self-conscious about it. In the case of this particular house, the comparison was apt. It was set farther back from the lane and stood out from its neighbors in the fineness of its stonework. Someone had built a low wall around the front, creating a courtyard of sorts where roses, cut back for the winter and mounded over, like tiny graves, marched across the brown grass.

  He ducked his head under the low thatched roof that covered the porch, and knocked at the door.

  It was opened by a woman in her late twenties, her hair a dull gold and her eyes a very pretty amber in a very plain face.

  “Miss Letteridge?”

  “And you’re the man from London. How is Constable Hensley?” There was a derisive note in her voice as she asked.

  “He’s expected to live,” Rutledge answered, and waited for her response.

  Miss Letteridge led him into the small parlor before answering. “I’m sorry to hear it. I never liked him, and I shan’t be two-faced about it.”

  “That’s rather coldhearted.”

  “Sit down. I won’t offer you tea, because I don’t care for it myself and don’t keep it in the house. I do have some sherry…” Her words trailed off, indicating that she would prefer not to offer him that either.

  “Why don’t you like Constable Hensley?” he asked again. The room was well furnished, with a number of watercolors on the pale blue walls that caught his attention. They had been done with great skill.

  It clearly irritated Miss Letteridge that he appeared not to be giving her his full attention.

  “For the same reason I don’t particularly care for any policeman,” she answered tartly. “They look after their own, don’t they? Hensley was sent here under a cloud, and we weren’t told of it. He wouldn’t get into trouble here, would he? After all, we’re very peaceable in Dudlington, and he only had to walk the streets and mind his own business until he could collect his pension. That was the theory, anyway.”

  “How did you know he was under a cloud when he came here?” Rutledge asked, intrigued.

  “Why else would a London police constable be sent to an out-of-the-way village where nothing ever happens? Where he wouldn’t attract attention? I’m not a fool, Inspector, I know something about the world outside Northamptonshire. I worked in London during the first two years of the war. There weren’t enough able-bodied men to do half of what was needed. Women were pressed into service at every turn, and a police constable worth his salt would have risen quickly through the ranks as men enlisted. Instead his superiors banished him.”

  “That may well be the case. But so far I haven’t heard that it affected the performance of his duties.”

  “No, I doubt if it affected his duties. You’re right. But once a murderer, always a murderer.”

  Rutledge stared at her. “Do you know for a fact that Constable Hensley murdered someone in London and got away with it?” Even Sergeant Gibson hadn’t told him that. Nor had Cain.

  “He condoned arson. And a man was caught in that fire, so badly burned that even his wife couldn’t identify him. I went to London myself and read accounts in the newspapers. They weren’t very helpful, so I talked to his widow. She’s bitter because the police swept it all under the rug. He didn’t die straightaway, you know. Harold Edgerton. He lingered for nearly a month, but in the end the doctors couldn’t stop the infections that overwhelmed him. By that time, there were rumors that he’d started the fire himself. All he’d done was to go back to his desk that evening to retrieve some papers.”

  “Constable Hensley knew all this?”

  “Why else were they in such haste to get him out of London?”

  “And what you’re trying to say, then, is that you believe he killed Emma Mason.”

  It was her turn to stare at him.

  “You already know about her!”

  “I only know that her name comes up when people talk about Constable Hensley.”

  “As God is my witness, he killed her and buried her in Frith’s Wood. I can’t prove it, mind you, but there’s no other explanation for her disappearance.”

  “Did you shoot him down with that arrow, out of revenge? One of Emma Mason’s arrows, perhaps, as a sort of poetic justice?”

  “Was it one of Emma’s? How fitting! I gave that archery set to her, you know. For her birthday. But I wouldn’t have missed my aim, Inspector. If I’d held that bow, Constable Hensley would have died where he stood.”

  12

  The vehemence in Grace Letteridge’s voice was chilling, and Rutledge, listening to her, realized that she could indeed have killed.

  The question was, why?

  Hamish said, “She was plain—and the other lass was pretty.”

  Rutledge asked, “Where is her archery set now?”

  “Truthfully? I have no idea what became of it. Even if I did, I’d be mad to tell you, wouldn’t I?”

  “What was Emma Mason to you, that you’d have killed for her?”

  She looked at him pityingly. “What was Emma to me? A mirror of myself. Motherless. Her grandmother living in a world of pretense and denial. Only in my case, it was my father who couldn’t cope with the realities of life. My mother died in childbirth, and my father felt that God had cheated him. And so he drank himself into an early grave—the only reason he lived until I was twenty was an iron constitution that refused to give up as easily as he had. Mrs. Ellison, on the other hand, saw in Emma a second chance. The perfect child who would make up for the loss of her daughter, one who wouldn’t fail her the way Beatrice had.”

  “You’re very frank about your own life.”

  “I’ve had to be. I grew up very quickly. It wasn’t pleasant, but I refused to let it break me the way it had my father.” She met his glance with her chin lifted, defiant.

  Hamish said, “It didna’ break her, but the hurt went deep.”

  “I was going to say,” Rutledge commented, “that you’re very frank. But was Emma as frank? Or did you read into her circumstances more than was there?”

  “I didn’t read anything. I didn’t need to. Beatrice was amazingly pretty, and people made much of her, the way they do. She was talented as well—a wonderful pianist and a very accomplished watercolorist. She painted these—” Grace Letteridge gestured to the watercolors on the wall. “You’ve noticed them, I saw your eyes on them. She gave them to me, before she left Dudlington the first time. She didn’t want her mother to have them, because her mother was against Beatrice going to London to study art. She saw it as a waste. Women got married and had babies. That was their duty and their purpose. Accomplishments were fine, as long as they enhanced the bride price, so to speak. But a woman most certainly didn’t pursue a career among artists. Prostitution was only one step away, in Mrs. Ellison’s view.”

  “But Beatrice Ellison married.”

  �
�Yes, of course she did, but she made a poor choice. He wasn’t very good to her, and in the end, he left her with a child, no money, and no prospects. She had to swallow her pride and bring Emma here to live with her grandmother. I can understand why she didn’t want to stay in Dudlington herself, but she knew what her mother was like, and I consider it very selfish of her to abandon the child like that.” She got up, restless, and went to the window to look out at the street. “She wouldn’t talk to me when she came home. She was unhappy and unsettled. It was a difficult time. But Emma grew up to be prettier than her mother, and that was the trouble.”

  “Trouble in what sense?”

  “Everyone made over Beatrice,” she said, turning from the window. “But Emma had inherited her father’s charm, and there was something about her that attracted the wrong kind of attention. It wasn’t just old women cooing over her, it was men old enough to be her father or her grandfather watching her on the street, or stopping her to make comments. ‘That’s a pretty dress, young lady.’ Or ‘I like that hair ribbon. Did you know it was the color of your eyes?’ It made Emma uncomfortable, long before she was old enough to understand why.”

  “Did you tell her grandmother what you’d observed?”

  She laughed harshly. “She told me I was jealous of the attention being paid to Emma. And my father punished me for bearing tales. I was sent to bed without my dinner for a week. People see what they want to see—or expect to see. So I took it on myself to be Emma’s protector, and I was hardly more than a child myself. It wasn’t a task I felt I could do, but I didn’t have anywhere else to turn.”

  “And Emma accepted this—protection?”

  She shrugged. “She appeared to be grateful for it. Or so she said. We more or less looked after each other.”

  “How old are you?” Rutledge asked bluntly.

  Grace Letteridge bristled. “It’s none of your business.”

  But he thought he’d been wrong in his earlier estimate of her age. Young herself, vulnerable, and perhaps reading more into what she saw around her than was true, she might have made up the notion that Emma needed protection. It might, indeed, have been her own loneliness that made her seek out the younger child, and cling to her. Anything but coming home to a drunken father filled with his own misery.

  “Why are you so certain that Constable Hensley killed Emma Mason?” he asked.

  “He would stop and talk to her, tell her about London, and plays and concerts—which he’d probably never attended in his life—or describe an evening at the opera, watching the King and Queen step into the royal box, and how the Prince of Wales had spoken to him one morning as he rode his horse into the park. It was pathetic, an attempt to hold her attention, and he would lie in wait for her, ready with a new tale to spin, making London seem glorious, and she knew—she knew!—her mother lived there somewhere. I listened to her concocting schemes to go there as soon as the war ended, and find her mother and live in this fairy-tale world. He had no idea what harm he was doing, and it’s possible he wouldn’t have cared.”

  “More a reason for you to kill him, than for him to kill Emma.”

  “Ah, but what you don’t know is that Emma fell in love! And that put a spoke in Constable Hensley’s wheel. I believe he killed her in a jealous rage.”

  Try as he would, Grace Letteridge refused to tell him who it was that Emma had thought she was in love with. “It doesn’t matter. He’s dead, anyway. In the war.”

  But Rutledge could tell it did matter, a very great deal.

  As he left, Hamish was pointing out that very likely Grace Letteridge had been in love with this man herself. It might explain why she went to London—leaving Emma to her own devices—and why she came home.

  “I canna’ believe her father would let her go sae easily. Unless he was dead in 1914.”

  In 1914, Grace Letteridge couldn’t have been more than nineteen. Which would make her four and twenty now. And Emma would have been a very impressionable fourteen.

  Rutledge walked to the churchyard, feeling the cold wind across his face as he reached the gate, and went inside to search the gravestones for Grace Letteridge’s father.

  It was a wild-goose chase, trying to find one man amongst so many gravestones, most of them green with moss and overgrown with lichen. But a 1914 grave would still be raw enough.

  What he found was unexpected. The young men of the village had not been brought home from France, but stones had been set in a garden for them, and the lonely rows of names struck him as sad and forgotten.

  The cold wind had brought more rain in its wake. He stood there, looking at the line of empty graves, and felt a sadness that went deeper than his compassion for their deaths. It was what all of them, the living and the dead, had lost in four years of suffering.

  Hamish was silent, for he too was only a marker in a lonely churchyard, his last resting place a muddy hole in France with none of the trappings of home to see him into a peaceful rest.

  “There are poppies,” Hamish said finally. “They’ll grow again.”

  Rutledge could see the poppies on the shell casings, and hear again the roar of a revolver shot over the sound of his heavy motor and the calls of the crows as they flew up, startled. The flight of the bullet, close enough for its breath to touch his face and its whine to be heard over all the other sounds, brought back more than the war, it brought back his willingness to die for what he’d done.

  But not like this, not shot by someone who hid in the shadows, with no reality and no right to be his executioner.

  It had all begun at Maryanne Browning’s house in London.

  And it was time he went back to the beginning and found out what had gone wrong on the eve of a new year.

  He could hear someone shouting and looked up, distracted from his thoughts.

  Hamish said, “Yon rector.”

  It was indeed Mr. Towson calling from the porch of his house, his voice thin in the rain and wind.

  “You’ll take your death standing there, young man. Come and have a cup of tea before I freeze to death just watching you.”

  13

  Rutledge splashed across the churchyard, found the gate in the wall that led to the rectory, and reached the porch like a wet dog, wondering what the rector would think if he shook himself violently. Not so much to rid himself of the water, but to rid himself of the mood that had swept over him.

  Towson reached for his hat and coat, tut-tutting over their condition.

  “I watched you for a good quarter hour, out there. Paying respect is one thing, foolishness another. I can’t think you knew any of our dead.”

  Rutledge followed him from the hall into the parlor, gloomy in the light of a single lamp.

  “I was looking for the grave of a Mr. Letteridge. Grace Letteridge’s father.”

  “Ah. Well, it’s nearer the rectory than the memorial garden you were standing by.” He spread Rutledge’s coat across the back of a chair and stooped to put a match to the fire already laid on the hearth. “Sit down, do. Why did you want to find him? Clifford Letteridge has been dead for five years, I should think. Yes, it must be going on five.”

  “I called on his daughter an hour or so ago. I was curious about him after our conversation.”

  “I’m not surprised. She’s bitter, is young Grace, and I can’t say that I blame her. She’s had a sad life, and yet no thanks to her father, she’s become a very fine young woman. Or could be, if she’d let go some of the anger inside her.”

  “She told me he drank himself into oblivion.”

  “His heart was dead long before he died, and that’s the truth. He put food on the table, clothes on her back, kept a roof over her head, and sent her to church of a Sunday with strict regularity, and called that fatherhood.”

  “I wonder that she didn’t marry, if only to leave such a cold and empty life.”

  Towson smiled. “I’m no fool. You’re here to pry the secrets of other people out of me. Sit there and warm yourself, and I’ll b
ring in a tray of tea.”

  He left the room, effectively cutting the conversation short.

  Rutledge looked at the dark paneling on the wall and somber drapes at the window, then turned his attention to the portrait of an elderly man—a cleric, if he was any judge—hanging over the hearth. A grim face, with no humor in it or even kindness. Who did it remind him of?

  Hamish said, “The minister who railed against my Fiona.”

  Yes, of course, that pitiless man in Scotland who would willingly have hounded a defenseless young woman to her death. And it had been a close-run thing. She had loved Hamish, and it had nearly been her undoing.

  The similarity was not so much in their features, but in the unbending view both churchmen must have held of human frailty. Impatient to cast the first stone.

  Towson came in, bearing a tray. “Lucky for you the kettle was on the boil,” he said. “This should put some heart into you.”

  “Who is the man in the portrait?”

  “One of my predecessors. He comes with the house, so to speak. I expect no one else wanted him. I’ve often wondered if he roams the rectory at night, unwilling to lie quiet in his grave.”

  Rutledge laughed. “What would you say to him if you met him in the passage outside your door?”

  “I doubt we’d have much in common beyond ‘How do you do, sir.’”

  Rutledge offered to pour the tea, aware of the gnarled hands handling the pot, but Towson said, “I consider it a point of independence not to need help. At least until I’ve spilled scalding hot tea on one of my guests.”

  “You aren’t going to tell me about the man in Grace Letteridge’s life.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “If she wants you to know, she’ll tell you. You must understand it could have no possible bearing on Constable Hensley’s assailant.”