by Charles Todd
“You’re saying he’s local, even if she isn’t.”
“You can’t rule that out.”
“I don’t know, sir. But then I haven’t spoken to everyone on the outlying farms.”
“He could work for the undertaker. Or he drives the van that supplies the baker with flour or the butcher with meat.”
Leigh sighed. “That’s a large field, sir.”
“It is.” Rutledge looked at his watch. “After I’ve taken a room at The Dun Cow, we can call on Dr. Allen.”
Constable Leigh got to his feet. “I’ll go with you. I wouldn’t mind having a ride in your motorcar,” he said diffidently.
They drove down the street and found the inn just where Leigh had said it would be. A handsome Tudor structure, the black-and-white work well maintained, and the glass in the diamond-paned windows on the lower floor looked to be as old as the rest of the building.
The pub was full, although the dining room had only one or two couples in it. Leigh walked through the door and nodded to the man behind the bar, who picked up a cloth and dried his hands, then came out to greet the Constable.
“Inspector Rutledge, Mr. Grissom. He’s come for a room.”
Grissom nodded to him. “We’re not too busy this time of year. Would you prefer a room on the back? It’s quieter.”
“I’d prefer the front.”
“It’s over the pub.”
“No matter.”
Grissom led him through a door, and he saw the staircase rising from the center of the hall, with a separate door to the outside. Grissom picked up the lamp on the table near the door and climbed the stairs, Rutledge at his heels.
There were two front rooms, and Rutledge chose the second. It was more spacious, with two windows instead of one. “This will do very well,” he told Grissom.
“I’ll have the key ready for you when you bring up your valise.”
“Fair enough.”
They went back down the stairs, and Rutledge collected the Constable, who gave him directions to the doctor’s surgery. It was a fair-size house on the corner of Butter Lane and the High Street. There was a low stone wall around the shallow front garden, and two doors, each reached by a separate path.
“That’s the surgery door,” Leigh said, pointing to the left. They followed the walk there and Leigh knocked. A light was showing in the pretty fanlight above the door, but the window to their left was dark.
It was several minutes before the doctor answered the summons. There was a lamp on the table by the door, illuminating the entry and his face.
He was a middle-aged man with graying hair and an officer’s mustache.
“Constable,” he said, nodding.
“This is Inspector Rutledge, sir. Scotland Yard. He’s come to view the body.”
“Tonight?”
“If you don’t mind,” Rutledge said pleasantly.
“Very well.” He led them down a passage lit only by the light of the lamp at the outer door. “I’m afraid I don’t have much time—I’ve a lying-in to keep an eye on tonight.” He opened a door at the far end. “She’s in here,” he was saying over his shoulder as he went into the room and stopped just inside to fumble with matches and a lamp. As light filled the darkness, Rutledge could see the table and the body, under a sheet.
Allen crossed to set the lamp down at the head of the table, and drew back the covering.
The face was pale and expressionless in death, but she had been an attractive woman with fair hair and a sweet face. The half-open eyes were a dark blue. Rutledge put her age at about twenty-eight, possibly even thirty.
“Pity,” the doctor said quietly, and then showed them the three stab wounds in her chest. “First one was fatal, but whoever it was made sure of that, having two more goes at it.” He lifted her hands, one after the other. “She didn’t put up much of a fight. No cuts or bruising except around her mouth. That tells me she might have known her killer and didn’t expect him or her to harm her until he or she drew the knife.”
Rutledge looked at her fingers. Smooth, the nails almond shaped and well kept. Whoever this was, she hadn’t worked with her hands.
The doctor was saying, “She wasn’t killed in the grave. Not enough blood there. Whoever it was put her there to rid himself of the body.”
He made to draw up the sheet again, but Rutledge put out a hand to stop him. Pointing to the three wounds, he said, “They’re narrow. What sort of knife do you think was used?”
Dr. Allen sighed. “Anything at all. There are narrow-enough blades in my wife’s kitchen. I’ve got scalpels. Any of a dozen trades might use something similar. The butcher, for one. For all I know, the baker or the draper’s shop.”
Rutledge stepped back and let him lower the sheet. “Her clothing?”
“She must come from a family that’s comfortably off. Good-quality dark gray wool coat, a silk shirtwaist, and a walking dress of dark blue wool, with a matching jacket. Not the latest fashion, perhaps, but certainly last year’s? You could see for yourself that her hands aren’t those of a working-class woman, nails well kept, skin soft. Good sturdy leather boots, but with silk stockings. There’s no hat. I just realized that. She must have been wearing a hat. And there’s no purse, of course. No jewelry. She doesn’t appear to have had a wedding ring—there is no trace of it on her finger. But she did wear a ring on her little finger. Gone, of course, but you could see that it had been there.”
“We’ll search for it tomorrow in the daylight.” Rutledge turned to the Constable. “Was the man for whom the grave had been dug buried in it?”
“No, sir. He’s at the undertaker’s. His family was that upset, they wouldn’t let the service be held.” He glanced at the doctor and then looked back at Rutledge. “Rector insisted they be informed, and of course it was a crime scene.”
“Good. We’ll have a look tomorrow.” To the doctor, he said, “Is there any more you can tell us?”
“It was a long knife. It penetrated deeply. My guess is that either a man or a woman might have struck those blows, if there was enough anger or determination behind them.”
“Thank you.”
The doctor picked up the lamp and walked out of the room with them, pausing only to set it aside and turn down the wick.
“I hope you find him. Or her,” he said as he opened the house door and stood back to let them pass. “We don’t have many murders here.”
Rutledge and the Constable bade him a good night and walked in silence to the motorcar.
Remembering the mustache, Rutledge asked when they were back to the street again, “Was the doctor in the war?”
“Yes, sir, he was. Served on a ship. From what I gathered, he saw action any number of times. There’s a scar above his right wrist. Nasty-looking. Shrapnel, he told me. But he’s not one to talk about what he did or saw.”
That spoke well of him.
“Go home, Constable. Meet me for breakfast at eight thirty, and we’ll have a look at the churchyard.”
“Then I’m walking this way. Good night, sir.” He turned and went on in the opposite direction. Rutledge looked after him, then drove back to The Dun Cow. A wind had come up, and the sign above the inn was moving a little. The brown cow was shown in a field beside a river, and there was a coach and horses on the road behind it.
Hamish, speaking for the first time since Rutledge had arrived in the village, said, “Ye could be right about yon highwayman.”
As he opened the door that led to the staircase, Rutledge replied quietly, “He had a steady nerve to put it on the sign. If that’s the original.”
Rutledge was used to the voice in his head. It had been there since the summer of 1916, at the height of the battle of the Somme. It had been the bloodiest of battles, and men died before his eyes, day and night, until the trenches reeked of rotting flesh and black mud and death. He wasn’t the only one on the verge of breaking as the Germans had pressed harder and harder, hoping to end the stalemate of 1915.
; And then orders had come down to take out a German machine-gun nest that was perfectly situated to halt the next British attack. But it was too well protected, and wave after wave of men had tried and failed to take it. Their wounded and their dead seemed to be piled high around them, and Corporal Hamish MacLeod had finally refused to lead another attack against the position. He pointed out what Rutledge had known from the start, that it was hopeless and a waste of good men. But the next attack was coming, and Rutledge was all too aware that the slaughter would be unimaginable if the first waves were caught in the open with that gun on their flank.
He’d reasoned with Hamish, he’d threatened, and it did no good. Hamish was as sick of the killing as he was, and weary of dragging their dying wounded back to the trench.
Hamish had looked at the men who were left, and he’d said, “It’s murder, pure and simple. I willna’ do it any longer. I canna’ do it again. No man in his right mind can justify it.”
And with the next assault only hours away, coming with the dawn, Rutledge had had no choice but to make an example of his Corporal before the rest of his men lost heart and refused to follow orders as well. Military necessity. The words still haunted him.
Bare seconds later, as Rutledge bent to deliver the coup de grâce, the shelling began, softening up the German trenches before the dawn advance. One of the first ranging shots fell short. And Rutledge, the firing squad, and his dead Corporal had been buried by the explosion. He had been the only survivor, and he’d only lived long enough to be dug out because his face had been pressed against the chest of the man he’s just executed. A tiny pocket of air . . .
Shell shock, it was called. Breaking under fire. But Rutledge couldn’t accept that he’d been the lone survivor—or that the shell had come too late to stop the execution. He’d sacrificed one to save the many. For nothing. And when the war was over Hamish came home with Rutledge in the only way possible. Not as a ghost, not as a living man, but as a voice that haunted Rutledge night and day. A reminder of that night. Survivor’s guilt, Dr. Fleming had called it. Seeing in Hamish MacLeod all the many dead he’d sent into battle, while he himself, always at their forefront, had hardly a scar on him. A charmed life, his men had called it, only half joking.
Rutledge had been tormented by Hamish in the darkness and stench of the earth suffocating him, and the voice hadn’t faded with the Armistice. Dr. Fleming, who had saved his sanity by breaking his will and forcing him to talk about Hamish MacLeod, had also warned him that it might never stop, that the voice might be there for the rest of his life. Enough to drive a man to suicide—and yet if he killed himself, he killed Hamish again. And he couldn’t have that too on his soul.
Now as he stepped into the dimly lit entry and found a candle to light his way up the dark stairs, Rutledge heard Hamish say, “Ah, weel, he must ha’ been a bonny highwayman, no’ to get caught.”
He climbed the stairs with Hamish’s voice in the recesses of his own mind, and braced himself for what lay ahead—a long and sleepless night, with nightmares of the war raging in his memory.
Constable Leigh stepped into the small dining room on the far side of the pub just as Rutledge was about to order his breakfast, and when they had finished their meal, they walked on to the churchyard.
The church was old but plain, with very little decoration and a squat tower barely rising above the tops of the trees. Shropshire wasn’t known for its churches, or its castles and great houses, although it had its share of Tudor and Georgian buildings.
They scoured the churchyard for three quarters of an hour, searching behind the gravestones and under the yew trees whose branches drooped almost to the ground, pushing aside the tall winter grass, probing it wherever something might have fallen. But there was no sign of either the woman’s hat or her purse.
“I hadn’t expected to find them,” Rutledge admitted as he called a halt to the search. The cold wind was biting, and Constable Leigh was blowing on his hands and stamping his feet as they conferred. “But we couldn’t overlook the possibility. The only reason she kept her shoes was the lacing.”
First, he’d stopped by the open grave, helping Leigh remove the boards and the sacking the sexton had pulled over it again, and squatting on the bruised grass at the edge, looking down at where the body had been lying. “One person put those boards across—the sexton. One person could move them far enough to roll the body into the pit. It wouldn’t require two people. And she didn’t look as if she’d been too heavy to carry from the gate over there, to this place. Was there a moon that night, or was it cloudy?”
“It had been cloudy all day, and feeling like rain. But it cleared at sunset, and at about midnight, I woke to see moonlight coming through my window.”
“Then that would have helped him find his way. In spite of the shadows.” He glanced up at the Constable. “Why did you wake up at midnight?”
Leigh frowned. “I don’t really know, sir. I hadn’t thought about it.”
“A dog barking? A heavy lorry passing through?”
“No, sir, I don’t remember anything like that. And my cottage is the other end of town from here.”
“A pity.” Rutledge got to his feet. There was no use wasting time by the grave. Too many boots had trod any evidence into the grass and the earth after the digging and the recovery of the body. But it was natural to hope that some small clue might have been overlooked. The woman’s ring, perhaps. Something to prove it wasn’t theft. The missing ring and purse hinted at that, and yet Rutledge didn’t think that she’d been robbed. The purse would have contained her identity, and perhaps the ring might have been traced to wherever she’d come from. Something a jeweler might recognize.
Walking back to the gate, he said, “Have you asked any of the other villages around here if they have a missing woman matching our body’s description?”
“Yes, sir, I sent word around that afternoon, when I realized no one here knew her. Or said they didn’t. But none of my queries brought back anything helpful.”
“Good man. That saves time.” Remembering what he’d been told about the quality of her clothing, Rutledge thought she might well have come from one of the larger towns. Shrewsbury, possibly. Or even London for that matter. “The question then becomes, who or what lured her here to her death?”
“Needle in a haystack,” Leigh commented as they drove back to the police station. “I don’t see how we’re going to find out who she is.”
“Too soon to give up, Constable.”
“There’s that, sir. But the question is, where do we even begin?”
“It’s likely that no one has realized she’s gone missing. Not yet. Her family could still believe she took the train, intending to stay with friends. They might not be expecting to hear from her this soon. Meanwhile, the friends are worried, but not yet worried enough to sound the alarm. Especially if she wasn’t certain which train she would take. Or perhaps she asked a friend for a lift, and something went wrong.”
Leigh’s cold-chafed face brightened. “That’s true, sir.” He considered the possibilities. “She could even have run off with the wrong man. Someone her family disapproved of, and with good reason. Only she didn’t see it that way.”
“There’s the other side of the coin as well. In her travels she could have seen something she shouldn’t have. And someone was afraid she might talk.” Rutledge paused to turn the crank. “That’s assuming she was the victim, not part of the problem. But she might also have been involved in something she shouldn’t have been, and there was a falling-out with someone.”
“She didn’t look like the sort who would be involved with anything criminal,” Leigh said, getting in.
“No. But that’s not proof that she wasn’t.”
“What now, sir?”
They had arrived at the police station, and Rutledge pulled up in front of it. “There are the outlying farms you spoke of. I want to interview the tenants and owners. The dead woman wasn’t dressed for a farmyard. Still, if I�
�d killed someone on my property, it might occur to me to carry her body to the village churchyard and lay the blame elsewhere.”
Frowning, Leigh said, “I can’t see someone like Mr. Wilkins or Nate Harding doing murder. What’s more, it might be easier if I went with you. I know them better, sir. I can convince them to talk to us. They’ll not want to waste the winter light standing around answering questions.”
Rutledge said thoughtfully, “I take your point, Constable. Still, whether she came to visit or to cause trouble, it would be relatively easy to keep news of her arrival from the rest of the village. Who would know?”
Leigh sighed. “You’re right, of course.” He made to get out.
“Can you drive, Constable?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then take the motorcar and call at the farms. Poke around. It might go faster that way.”
“Sir?” Leigh stared at him.
“Farm dogs bark, Constable. Start with that. See where it leads. We also need to know how the killer got the body to the churchyard. Which direction he might have come from. If he didn’t go through the village, how did he get here? Or leave here? He didn’t fly. He drove. A carriage, a cart, a motorcar. Even a lorry. A country lane will do as well as a parish road, if you don’t want to be seen in the middle of the night.”
Rutledge watched him drive on down the street, then began to walk. It was time to draw a rough map in his head of the village, and that was best done on foot and alone. Villagers cast curious glances his way or nodded civilly as they passed him, well aware of who he was and why he was there. But no one came up to speak to him. No one crossed the road ahead to avoid him. By the time he turned his steps back toward The Dun Cow, he had a sense of Tern Bridge and its inhabitants. What that was telling him supported what he’d learned so far. If there was a killer in their midst, the villagers hadn’t started to point fingers. Not yet. They still felt safe in the prevailing assumption that if the woman was a stranger, so was her murderer. When would that begin to change? When the Constable came back with his interviews of the farmers?