Wings of Fire

by Charles Todd

  “While you,” she said irritably, “sit in a warm and dry inn!”

  “Hardly that. I saw you walking towards the Hall earlier. Why?”

  Trask brought a tray with their orders, cutlets for him, a breast of chicken for her, and began to arrange the plates on the table, saving her from having to answer.

  By the time the innkeeper had finished and gone away again, she had a pat reply ready for Rutledge. And he had a question of his own ready for her.

  There was a pounding on his door in the dark of night, and Rutledge came awake with a start. “Who is it?” he called sharply, after sitting up and clearing his throat. One hand fumbled for his watch.

  “Constable Dawlish, sir.” There was a certain pitch to his voice, as if he relished dragging the Inspector out of a warm bed at three o’clock. “I think we’ve found something. Out on the moors.”

  Rutledge threw back the blankets and reached for his trousers.

  14

  In a city there’s never true darkness in the night. But in a place like Borcombe, where people still used oil lamps and clouds obscured what little starlight there was, the blackness was nearly absolute. Rutledge bumped into the bicycle that one of Dawlish’s men had leaned against the wall by the inn door, and swore feelingly.

  “You’ll make better time with that,” Dawlish was saying, “than going in your motorcar. We can take some of the paths. Shortcuts.”

  Still rubbing his shin, Rutledge nodded, then swung the other leg over the saddle. Side by side the two men pedaled down the wet road, coming to a halt at Dawlish’s signal by Doctor Hawkins’ surgery. The doctor, rumbling with bad temper, came out leading his own bicycle, then without a word, joined them.

  It was a long, wet ride, and Rutledge, who didn’t know where he was going, had to follow the shadowy figure of the Constable while Hawkins, still grumbling, brought up the rear. Hamish, of them all, seemed to be most comfortable with the night. The Highlander, keeper of sheep and cattle before turning soldier, had been bred to it.

  The moors were several miles away, even by the shortcuts that Dawlish took over fields, across hummocky meadows— once startling a herd of sleeping cows—and through one stand of trees.

  The moors were not what Rutledge had expected. Bare, yes. Barren, yes. Rolling, yes. But there were rocks and marshes, rills that tumbled into pools, and scrub growth here and there that rose up like humbled spirits out of the ground. The silence he noticed most. There was a whispering wind that seemed to be saying something just under the range of human hearing, but it didn’t displace the quiet. A ghostly white flock of sheep went scurrying off over a hill like disturbed spirits, jostling each other in their haste, and leaving behind a strong aroma of wet wool that mixed with the wind from the sea and the smell of rotting earth like a miasma.

  It was nearly two hours before they reached their destination, and Rutledge was never quite sure how the constable had found his way across the featureless expanse. Tracks there were, but they seemed to go where they willed rather than in any discernible direction, to any discernible destination.

  A great pile of rocks loomed up, ruins of a colliery, Rutledge thought, peering at it through the darkness. And then the sputtering fire that the men had lit to keep warm if not dry. The rains had stopped, but there was a drizzle in the wind that clung to everything. It was easy to understand why a small boy might die out here of exposure, even in summer.

  In the lea of a boulder, where erosion had widened the crevice over the years, there was a pile of bones, pitiful in their smallness. Rutledge could see the whiteness of a longer one behind the others. He dismounted, leaving the bike in the charge of a roughly dressed man who appeared out of nowhere to take it.

  “There’s no skull,” Dawlish was saying to Hawkins. “And no pelvis, as I told you. Only the little bones, and that leg bone yonder. Can you tell anything about it, sir?” Someone was bringing a lantern over to them, its light spilling across their feet, and then their faces.

  Hawkins knelt. “You’ve looked for the skull? Or ribs?”

  “Aye, sir, all through the rocks. Nothing.”

  “Carried off then, by wild dogs,” he said, running his fingers over the smaller fragments. Lifting the leg bone, he brought it closer to his face, then adjusted the lantern in the holder’s hand so that it fell the way he wished it to. “This was broken. Here.” He pointed to a jagged fracture line in the bone. “Died before it began to heal. Caught a foot in the hole by the rock, I’d say, and couldn’t get out again.” He got up and went to the fire, using that and the lantern to better judge the bone.

  After a few minutes he said, “Just as I thought. Sheep carcass. That’s what you dragged me out here for!”

  “There was no knowing for certain, sir. With nothing larger than that one bone to go by,” Dawlish said apologetically.

  “Next time, bring the damned things in to me.”

  “No,” Rutledge said, countermanding that instruction. “I want to see them in place. Not on a laboratory table. And as soon as they’re found.”

  Hawkins glared at him, went to fetch his bicycle, and Rut-ledge had to hurry to catch up with him—or stay on the moors with the searchers, as Dawlish was doing.

  Halfway back to the village, Rutledge heard Hawkins say, “You’re a damned fool. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I’m a policeman. I do what I have to do. No more, no less.”

  “You could go back to London and leave us in peace! Half those men out there in the rain will be sick before the week’s out, and they’ll still have to work the nets or tend their sheep or dig in their fields. The boy’s long dead, and God alone knows where he could be. Murdered by gypsies, down one of the mine shafts—”

  “I thought those had been searched.”

  “Yes, of course they have. But a boy that age is small. He could crawl where a man can’t go. You could walk by him a thousand times over and never realize it. Predators carry off small bones—birds and animals could have taken his remains anywhere. Dawlish should have explained all that.”

  “Nevertheless, I’m going to continue. Until I find him.”

  Silence ruled until they were nearly back in the village again. Rutledge, remembering a case he’d handled before the war, asked, “How long before the flesh rotted off a child’s body and you could move the bones? Or crush them beyond recognition, before scattering them?” It was worth considering—a husband had nearly gotten away with murdering his wife, experimenting with temporary burial and a very permanent exhumation.

  Turning to look at him, Hawkins nearly skidded in a puddle, then swore again and straightened the wheel in time. “You’re mad, d’you know that? Stark, staring mad!”

  He turned in at his gate without another word.

  Morning dawned fair, though cooler after the rains, as if summer’s heat had been washed away. The first task Rutledge set himself was to search the churchyard for flowers growing there.

  In his experience, English churchyards, unlike those he’d seen in Europe, were seldom planted with flowers. Along the walls, sometimes, or by the path to the front door of the church. Occasionally by the gates. But not on or around the graves themselves or close to the headstones. The English still preferred their yews as funereal offerings. These had first been set out in churchyards in the days of the long bow, as a source of raw materials, and become a habit. Their shape and somber dark green seemed to suit the mood and the gravity of the place better than a riot of color.

  Flowers were more acceptable in tall vases inside the church. Rutledge could remember as a small boy going with his mother to do the altar flowers when it was her turn. He’d sat on the cold stone floor, running his fingers in the deep crevices of the memorial brasses that held place of honor down the aisle, until he knew the shapes by heart. A knight with plumes and sword and handsome spurs. A lady in a conical hat, the sweep of her long, embroidered robes nearly hiding the little dog near the hem. And an elegantly bearded Elizabethan gentleman with padded b
reeches and coat, looking more like a portly merchant than the adventurer he had been.

  He walked slowly through the gravestones in the churchyard, some of them tilted with age and so mossy he could barely make out the words incised on them. Others he recognized at a glance—Trepol and Trask, Wilkins and Penrith, Dawlish and Trelawny. There were Poldarins and a Hawkins, a half-dozen Raleighs, though none later than the seventeen hundreds, and a pair of Drakes.

  But no pansies. He walked on, looking at the delicately drawn Celtic cross on one gravestone, the sad lines of verse on another for a small child drowned in the Bor, an open book with a ribbon marking its stone pages, any numbers of “Beloved wife” and “Beloved husband.” War dead and plague dead, and a very fine stone angel on a plinth with the legend below it, “In Memory of the Men of the Mary Anne, Lost at Sea in a Storm, October 23, 1847. Eternal Father, Keep Their Souls Safe in Thy Care.” And a list of the names, twenty-seven of them.

  It was surely Richard’s angel, the cool marble cheeks turned slightly so that the serene eyes stared unwaveringly towards the church tower for all eternity. There was both compassion and strength in the body, power in the wings. He could see why it had made an indelible impression on a small boy who passed the statue each Sunday morning on his way to services.

  A voice behind him said, “Lovely, isn’t it? The village took up a subscription to have it carved in London. The Trev-elyans sent an anonymous donation to help make it up to the amount required, in addition to the sum they’d given openly. It was the sort of thing they did.”

  It was Smedley, dressed in a dark suit of clothes, not the rough corduroys of the gardener. Over the wet grass his shoes had made no sound.

  “I saw you here and wondered if you were searching for a place to lay the sheep bones to rest,” he went on. But there was a sympathetic gleam in his eyes that took away any sting. “I doubt there’s a soul in the village who hasn’t heard.”

  “Yes, well, they never seem to know what I want to hear,” Rutledge said irritably. “Only what I’m doing.”

  “You’d be surprised. They seem to think you’re on the trail of a murderer. They’re wondering—among themselves, not to your face—if that terrible man doing the killings in London might be a Borcombe man. They’ve gone through the lists of who lived here once, and who moved away. Failing that, someone who’d passed through. It’s the only explanation they can come up with for a Scotland Yard inspector wasting his time on two suicides and an accident when half London is in absolute terror thinking the other half is about to cut him to ribbons.”

  Astonished, Rutledge found himself speechless. Hamish, quick to point out the fact that Rutledge might well be more useful there, was not.

  Smedley lifted his shoulders deprecatingly. “The newspaper yesterday morning reported that someone named Bowles was quoted as saying that all available manpower had been diverted to the killings. Do you know him?”

  “Yes,” Rutledge answered curtly. “The truth is, I was sent down here to keep me out of the picture. Not to run any leads to earth.”

  “That reassures me,” Smedley answered, and there was something in his voice that made Rutledge look more closely at him. “All this fuss over the boy, searching for his grave. His body. Proof that he was in fact dead. I don’t know why, I found myself fearful that perhaps he hadn’t perished on the moors, that he’d been taken away and somehow turned into a monster.”

  “You prefer the possibility that someone in his own family might have purposely let him die of exposure?”

  “No.” There was sadness in his voice. “I prefer that he rest in peace, wherever he may be. Alive. Or dead. I don’t want to think of anyone suffering and lost and alone, in need of comfort. Least of all someone I held in my arms and christened. Whose soul is, in a sense, my responsibility. And most certainly not Rosamund’s son.”

  “The murderer in London is very likely mad. What he’s doing is the work of a ruined mind. The murderer I’m searching for isn’t mad. Whatever reasons he—or she—had for killing, there was a reason.”

  Smedley sighed. “I can give one to you. Envy.”

  “Envy?” Rutledge repeated. It wasn’t necessarily his first choice of sins. And often not a murderer’s, either, in his experience.

  “Envy is at the root of many small cruelties. Watch children at play, if you don’t believe me. It’s a natural emotion in them, and they aren’t yet civilized enough to suppress it.”

  A child might kill out of envy ... “What could Olivia envy?”

  “Oh, I daresay many things. A whole leg rather than a shriveled one, for starters.”

  “And Nicholas?”

  The rector tilted his head and looked at the angel’s face. “I don’t know that Nicholas ever envied anyone. He was a decisive man, in his way. He made his choices and lived with them.”

  “Then why didn’t he leave the Hall, go away to sea, make a life for himself somewhere else?”

  “Nicholas had an affinity for the sea, that’s true. In another age, he’d have been one of Drake’s sea dogs or Nelson’s captains—or perhaps one of Hakluyt’s geographers. I can see him racing a tea clipper to China and back.”

  All of which demanded daring and skill and personal courage. Not to mention ruthless leadership. Yet he’d let himself be led into suicide—

  Rutledge shook his head. “I’m not any closer to understanding him than I was at the beginning.”

  “You won’t understand Nicholas, trust me there. Have you read the poems?”

  After the briefest hesitation, Rutledge said, “No. Not yet.”

  “Let me give you a word of advice. As a priest.”

  When Rutledge said nothing, Smedley went on. “Be sure your own ghosts don’t infringe on your logical mind—don’t rain havoc on Borcombe in search of your own absolution. If you can’t finish the puzzle that worries you, be man enough to walk away from it while the rest of us can still get on with our lives. This is a very small village, you see, and we don’t have your London sophistication. We shall go on suffering long after you’ve gone away.”

  Watching Smedley walk off across the wet grass, Rutledge was prey to a variety of emotions, and Hamish, relishing the turbulence in his mind, was busy taking advantage of it.

  “Ye’re no’ wanted here,” he said, “and no’ wanted in London as well. I’ve no5 seen anywhere you belong!”

  “That has nothing to do with the Trevelyan family,” Rut-ledge replied coldly. “The rector is right. My work and my life are separate.”

  “Ye’re no’ keeping Olivia Marlowe from getting under your skin!”

  “She’s no different from any suspect! Not to me!”

  “Except that she’s dead,” Hamish reminded him. “Is that why ye’re no’ reading the poems? You read them often enough before, when ye knew she was alive!”

  Rutledge swore and headed for the stone walkway that led from the churchyard to the road. His reasons were his own affair, and none of Hamish’s.

  It was a long and tiring day. He was summoned, twice more, to come to the moors. The first time it was a boy who came to fetch him. The ground he must surely have covered last night seemed very different in the sunlight, brown and green and black and yellow, and not very much like the higher Yorkshire moors he knew so much better. But this too was sour land, that grew grass and reeds in the low-lying damp, and vast stretches of quaking marsh that could become quicksand in the blink of an eye.

  The boy cheerfully threaded his way through a maze of paths and chattered on about the war, wanting to know how many Boche Rutledge had personally (and bloodily) killed, and if he’d ever been wounded himself. They’d reached the subject of aircraft, and whether the Inspector had ever been up in one (he was disappointed when Rutledge said no), and how many flaming crashes he’d personally witnessed, when the first lines of searchers came into sight below a knoll.

  It took them fifteen minutes to find Dawlish, who was on the far right of the line. The constable was not in good spirit
s. inspector Harvey, returned from Plymouth, had been out there very early to demand an explanation for this business. Inspector Harvey had not caught up with his own suspect, and was in no mood for anyone else’s wild goose chases.

  “Where is Harvey now? I’ll speak to him myself.”

  “As to that, sir, I don’t know. There’s a problem out on one of the farms, somebody’s dog killing sheep, and he had to have a look himself.”

  “What progress have you made here?”

  “More sheep bones and an old dog. They had their heads still, it wasn’t difficult to tell what they were. And we found a man, sir, looked like he must have been a vagabond. Dr. Hawkins has been and gone, and he said it was an old corpse, we could bury it later.”

  “Where?”

  “By those rocks there, about a mile away. One of the men sheltered there to light his cigarette, and he saw something white in the earth. We dug it out, bit by bit, first a hand, then the head. Not very deep, you understand, but that’s the direction the wind blows, and he’d have been covered over in a season or two.”

  Rutledge walked across to see the bones, followed by the boy, whose bloodthirsty spirits were fascinated by the line of human remains laid out next to raw earth under one of the towering rock piles that mark the moor. “That a hand, sir? Where’s the middle finger, then? What’s that? Pelvis? Do I have one of ‘em too? Who et away that rib, do you think? Why’s his jaw over there, and his head here? D’ye think he was murdered, sir? Cor!”

  In fact, there was no indication what had killed the man. No holes in the skull, no signs of damage to any of the bones, no obvious indications of stabbing or a bullet clipping a rib or part of the spine. No crushed vertebrae to show a strangling. But the bones were long and well formed. He’d been tall, with no sign of the thickening that comes with heavy work in an underfed childhood or early diseases like rickets that stunted growth. According to Hawkins, the bones had lain in the earth for no more than seven years.