by Charles Todd
"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 bring 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 Let- teridge'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."
"No, but I wonder if
it had some bearing on Miss Letteridge going to London in 1914, leaving young Emma Mason to fend for herself. And whether this man's death in the war brought Miss Letteridge home again, shortly before Emma disappeared."
"You're an imaginative sort, aren't you?"
"Then why does Emma Mason's name crop up so often in connection with Constable Hensley?"
"Yes, well, I expect every man wants to appear brave and worldly and exciting in the eyes of impressionable young women. When Hensley first came to Dudlington, he kept his head down, as a newcomer should. After all, he was the outsider, and he had to earn our respect, constable or not. But it wasn't long before he was bragging to anyone who would listen about his experiences in London. I can understand that Emma might be curious about the sort of life her mother lived, and so she encouraged him more than was proper. Mrs. Ellison would never have painted London in such a glowing light. She's convinced that London is little short of Satan's second address."
"I'm told it went beyond mere bragging, that he used his experiences to impress a young and vulnerable girl. What if she believed his stories, and ran away to London on the basis of them? Leaving Hensley to take the blame for her disappearance."
"To find her mother? It could have happened that way, yes. Still, I gave Emma credit for more sense."
"The fact is, she's missing. Surely if she went to London to find her mother, Mrs. Ellison would have been told she was there and safe. Or Mrs. Mason herself would have sent Emma home again, with orders to stay here."
Towson stared at him briefly over the rim of his cup. "Are you trying to tell me that after only a few days here, you believe that Emma is dead, and that Constable Hensley is being blamed for her death? That that was why he was shot?"
"I'm saying that whatever became of Emma-whether she died here in Dudlington or something appalling happened to her on her way to London-on her own she might never have considered doing anything so rash as running away."
"Yes, well, that's one way to look at it." Towson sighed. "I'm a trained priest, I know the shortcomings of human nature as well as most. It's just that I don't want to think of the child as dead. I'm sorry. I'd like to believe that her mother came back, and so one day might Emma."
"With or without a child?"
Towson stared. "You are a very hard man, in your own fashion. That was a cruel thing to say." Rutledge, leaving the rectory with a borrowed umbrella in his hand, asked the Reverend Towson if there were other strangers in the village, either as visitors or on business.
Towson, shivering in the cold air after the warmth of his parlor, answered, "I've not heard of anyone. And as a rule, in time I hear most gossip. Are you suggesting now that it could be something in Constable Hensley's past that caught up with him? Rather than trouble over Emma Mason?"
Rutledge fell back on the tried-and-true formula of an inquiry. "Early days, yet, to be sure of anything. I'm keeping an open mind."
Towson said doubtfully, "Yes, I see."
But Rutledge tilted his umbrella against the downpour and began picking his way over the flagstones that made up the path to the rectory gate, unwilling to be drawn into any explanation for his personal interest in strangers.
When he reached the constable's house again and climbed the stairs, intent on changing out of his wet clothing, the shell casing was gone. He left early the next morning, as soon as it was light and the rain had become a raw drizzle.
Hamish was in a worse mood than the weather warranted and kept up a running argument about what Rut- ledge was intending to do.
It was a long drive back to London, and he was, in fact, absent without leave from his duties.
But Hensley was safe in hospital, and his wounding could wait for twenty-four hours.
"Aye, but no' if he's released, and you havena' taken anyone into custody."
"Hensley is as safe as houses. For now. On the other hand, someone was there in Dudlington, to leave and retrieve that cartridge case. He's playing with us. When he's bored with that, or satisfied that he's put the fear of God into us, he'll decide whether we're to live or die. It's a matter of time. Do you want to take that risk?" He hadn't realized that he'd used the plural we. Hamish said, "I willna' die twice. Until I'm ready." "No. But it's rather like crossing No Man's Land again. You don't know where or when death is coming. And there's no way to stop this fool, unless we look into the shadows for him." Outside London there was a brief smattering of sleet before the temperature climbed again and the sun bravely tried to find a way through what was left of the clouds. Rutledge stopped at his flat long enough to look through the post lying on his parlor carpet and then put in a call to Maryanne Browning. She was at home and surprised to hear from him. "Ian, how are you? Frances had said you were in the north on a case." "I am, or should be. Other business brought me back to London. Can you give me Mrs. Channing's direction? I'd like to contact her." "What on earth for? Don't tell me you believe she could help you with your inquiries?" He laughed. "Hardly that, Maryanne. Where can I find her?" "Well, she's on the telephone," she answered doubtfully, and gave him Mrs. Channing's number. "I don't want to ring her up, I want to know where she lives." "Oh, why didn't you say so?" She rummaged in some papers, their rustle coming through clearly to him, and he could picture her sitting in that tiny closet, looking for her address book. Finally she gave him what he needed, and he rang off. Mrs. Channing lived in Chelsea, in a small house near the hospital. He'd interviewed witnesses in Chelsea any number of times, but now he felt a sense of unease as he reached her door.
It was intensified by stiff resistance from Hamish, who clearly wished to be elsewhere.
"I didna' care for this woman then, and I do na' care for her now."
She answered his knock herself and said without any inflection of pleasure or surprise, "Mr. Rutledge. Or should I address you as Inspector? This isn't a social occasion, I take it." Her voice was as he remembered, low pitched and compelling.
"I want to talk to you, if I may. About the seance," he told her baldly, and she stepped aside to invite him into the house.
He wasn't sure what he had expected to find here. It would have been easier if the furnishings had been exotic, with gypsy flair or an aura of the Arabian Nights, to dismiss her as a fraud. A woman who used her parlor tricks to gain entrance to society homes. Instead he'd walked into the sort of house any relatively well-to-do widow might own, for there were no men's coats on the rack in the entrance hall, no hats on the hooks, and no sign of a man's taste in the small drawing room decorated in pale shades of lavender and rose. She herself was dressed in black, with a white lace collar, an ordinary woman on the surface.
But what lay below that surface?
She sat down opposite him and waited. He suddenly found it awkward to begin. Mrs. Channing's face showed only polite interest, her hands folded in her lap, her serenity unruffled by the brief, uncomfortable silence.
"She kens why you're here," Hamish warned silently.
Finally she said, "It was something about the seance, Inspector?"
"I left early the evening you entertained Mrs. Browning's guests. As you may recall. And I found something unexpected on the step outside her door."
He reached into his pocket and took out the first of the machine-gun cartridge casings, which he'd retrieved from his desk at the flat.
She leaned forward to see it more clearly but made no effort to take it and examine it closely. "It's a cartridge case, of course. I have no idea what kind."
"It's from a Maxim machine gun."
"Indeed," she commented, sitting back in her chair. "Why have you brought this to me? Did you think it was mine?"
"Or meant for you. Anyone who knew the guest list might have assumed that a woman alone wouldn't choose to stay as late as a couple. But I received an unexpected call from the Yard, and so I was the first of the guests to go down the front steps."
She smiled. "My dear Inspector, I'd never have given it a thought, even if I'd seen it. And if Dr. Gavin had left before
you did, I don't believe he'd have paid it any attention either. Commander Farnum on the other hand was in the Royal Navy. He'd have recognized it, no doubt, and even wondered how it had got there, but he wouldn't have picked it up and kept it."
"Yes, I've considered that."
Mrs. Channing studied his face for a moment. "But you were in the trenches, I'm told. This would have taken you back, I think, to the killing. And you'd have wondered why the war had intruded again on a peaceful London."
It was so close to the mark, he was silent.
"Have there been others?"
Rutledge was on the verge of denying it, and then answered truthfully. If this woman had had anything to do with the cartridges, she already knew the answer. And if she hadn't, telling her would do no harm.
"There've been three others."
Hamish was clamoring for his attention, warning him to walk carefully.
"Yes, that's when you realized that the first one was indeed intended for you. But why have you come here, if you knew the answer to that? Why would you think I might recognize them?"
"A policeman always makes certain his information is correct. You were the only person at Maryanne's party I didn't know."
"I see." She digested that.
"You hold seances for the amusement of your friends. What would you do, if you raised the dead during one of them?"
"I'd be stunned, Inspector. It isn't my intention and I have no-talent in that direction, thank God! What I do have is a rather good instinct for what people find entertaining. As soon as one of Maryanne's guests thought that the King's spaniel was her own beloved dog, I made certain not to tread in that direction. We had a rather interesting discussion instead on whether or not Charles II had climbed that oak tree, or if it were merely a legend. After that we had a few words with Lord Nelson, to amuse Commander Farnum. You had nothing to fear, you know."