A Long Shadow (24 page)

He left, without acknowledging her presence there.

Rutledge found his dinner waiting on the table in Hensley's bare dining room.

It was still warm, and he sat down gingerly to eat.

His ankle ached like the very devil, and he realized he shouldn't have walked to the inn and back in the night air. But Mrs. Channing had said something about hot water on the stove.

Finishing his meal, he carried the dishes into the kitchen and turned up the lamp.

The teakettle was where Mrs. Channing had told him it was, and a hand over the spout told him that the contents hadn't cooled yet.

He poured water into a basin from under the sink, and sat down to take off his shoes. The stocking on his right foot was hard to remove, and he looked at the discolored ankle with distaste.

Lowering his foot into the water, he felt the warmth rise up his leg, and the gash on his calf began to sting. Ignoring it, he leaned his head back in the chair. Before long he could feel himself slipping into sleep.

It had been a long day, he thought. And it hadn't ended well.

Hamish said, "Listen!"

And he lifted his head.

There was a sound from the dining room.

He called, "Mrs. Melford? The dishes are here in the kitchen."

She didn't answer or come through.

After a moment, he got awkwardly to his feet, and leaving wet tracks behind him, he hobbled into the dining room.

No one was there.

Imagination, he thought. Or the brink of dreaming.

But Hamish wasn't satisfied, and Rutledge looked around a second time.

It was then he saw what was lying in the seat of his chair.

A shell casing.

Picking it up, he examined it. No carvings. Just a reminder that he was vulnerable, and might well have been run down by the lorry if he hadn't been agile enough to leap over the wall into Grace Letteridge's garden. An admission of responsibility.

He searched the house, but he knew it was useless.

Whoever it was had come and gone without being seen.

Rutledge slept poorly that night. For one thing his ankle throbbed, giving him no peace. For another, with the doors unlocked, there was no safety from intruders, and the smallest noise brought him up from restless sleep.

What did his stalker have to do with Constable Hensley? It was something Rutledge found difficult to believe—that Hensley's wounding had been a ruse to draw him north.

On the other hand, Dudlington offered its own peculiar opportunities for drawing him out into the open. And any killer worth his salt watched for his opportunity.

The question was, why should he, Rutledge, be stalked in the first place?

Was it Yard business? Then why the cartridge casings from a machine gun used in France? If it was something that had happened in the trenches, then why leave it this long, when the war had ended fourteen months before?

"He was in hospital."

Hamish's voice seemed loud in the bedroom, and Rutledge came awake with a start.

It made sense.

The more he thought about it, the more he believed it could be true.

But there were thousands of men suffering from war wounds, scattered all over the country. Trying to track down one man among them was hopeless.

Hamish said, "There's yon farmer's brother."

Rutledge considered Joel Baylor.

But they had never served together. The name was unfamiliar, and God knew, he'd learned the name of every man he'd sent into battle. He would have remembered.

Revenge was personal as a rule. Otherwise it was pointless.

He thought about what Mrs. Channing had said about revenge. And that brought him back again to Nell Shaw.

There was a very good chance that someone who had been sent to the gallows had left behind a family member with vengeance in his or her heart. Who was trying to say to him that the war might have delayed retribution but hadn't blunted the desire for it.

And since Rutledge hadn't died in France, he was fair game now.

"That sounds very like revenge, Inspector."

He could hear that warm, melodious voice speaking to him in the dark.

What had Meredith Channing to do with his past? She'd been in France, she said, and he believed her. She had seen him there, and he believed that as well.

But it was when they were brought together at Maryanne Browning's party that he had come within her reach once more.

She couldn't have followed him—fired at him—tried to run him down with the stolen lorry.

But she could very well have an accomplice, a son or nephew or even a paid assassin, to do what she physically couldn't.

It would explain, quite tidily, why she had learned his address, and why she had followed him here to Dudlington. To watch him die.

But was that true? Or only his feverish imagination searching for a real face in place of the nebulous one that seemed never to be quite mortal.

Hamish said, "Watch your back."

The night seemed to brighten suddenly, as a lamp was lit in the window across from his.

It took him longer to get out of his bed and to the window than he'd expected, and the floor was cold under his feet.

There was someone in Emma Mason's bedroom again, and although he watched for a good half hour, he couldn't tell who it was.

He was tempted to walk into the Ellison house to see for himself. But there was something else he could do.

Shoving his feet into his shoes and wrapping his coat around him with the belt, he walked down the stairs to the door and out into the street.

He found himself a vantage point from which he could see, just, the window in Emma's room and the rest of the darkened house.

When the light went out at last, he waited patiently.

The window on the stairs was lit for an instant, and then the light strengthened again in another pair of windows. After a minute or so, it was turned out.

Mrs. Ellison had been in her granddaughter's room and finally had found her way back to her own bed.

He hadn't been alone in his sleeplessness.

Loss, Rutledge thought, took many forms. And this was one of them.

Meredith Channing had also found it difficult to sleep. When the scraping screech of metal had brought her to the door of the constable's house, she had stood there transfixed.

Rutledge was lying in the lee of a destroyed wall, one arm thrown out to brace himself, the other one pinned under him.

And then doors were flung open on all sides as the lorry roared on up the lane, and a young woman had come rushing out of a house to scream at the fallen man.

It was like seeing something in a dream, she thought, only the sounds were real, the shouts and the cries and that unbearable scraping of metal against stone.

The doctor had come running then, though she hadn't known who he was, taking charge and silencing the angry woman while Rutledge had struggled to one knee, then dragged himself to his feet.

She'd come to her senses at that stage, knowing what she must do.

And so she had called out to the doctor, and the woman in the house but one had stood there with her, saying something about dinner and what on earth had been in that driver's mind, to do such damage and then flee.

When Rutledge reached the house, she had looked at the scrape on his cheekbone and the bleeding wound in his leg, his hands scratched and filthy from the soft earth in the garden.

Lockjaw, the woman called Mrs. Melford was saying, and she herself had hurried to the kitchen to heat water and find strong soap. After all, she'd been trained, she knew what to do in emergencies. More to the point, it kept her hands busy.

And all the while her heart had been thudding in her chest, like a drum.

It had been a near thing, she thought. Too near.

It wasn't until later, when she was walking through the winter darkness with her arm touching his, that she realized she had stopped thinking about him as a policeman.

It didn't do to know people, she thought. It was better to hold them at arm's length, and then it was easier, much easier, to stand aside and let them die.

She had learned that in the war.

Rutledge woke with a start and groped for his watch, lying on the bedside table. It was late, already half past seven. He groaned. How many hours had he slept? At most two or three. He felt as if his eyes had never closed.

He put his foot gingerly over the side of the bed and was relieved to feel less pain than he had during the night.

Hamish, his voice muted this morning, said, "Aye, but it's no' verra' handsome."

True, the swelling was still noticeable, the discoloration was worthy of an artist's palette. But he could stand with his full weight on it, after he had laced his shoes. The rest of his bruises were complaining, but not as vociferously.

Stiffness plagued him, though, for a good ten minutes before he'd worked it out.

He shaved with haste and presented himself to Mrs. Melford, only two minutes late for his breakfast. He had to smile at her examination of the way he walked.

"Aye, she has a cane in yon umbrella stand."

And so she did. But she said nothing about it and disappeared into the kitchen as he sat down to eat.

When she brought in his tea, she finally said, "I'm still shocked by what I saw last night. It was some time before I could sleep."

"Accidents do happen," he told her. "The driver couldn't have been familiar with the weight of a lorry."

"Inspector, you needn't try to put a better face on it. Everyone in Dudlington is talking about your narrow escape." She looked down at him in the chair at the head of her table. "That's three—Hensley, the rector, and now you. What's wrong here? What kind of monster are we harboring!" Hamish clicked his tongue at the turn gossip had taken. "I don't think—" Rutledge began.

But she shook her head. "I'd wondered why Scotland Yard sent an inspector all the way to Dudlington just because a constable had been injured. I couldn't see why Northampton shouldn't look into it. But you know something, don't you? That's really why you're here—there's something else that you're keeping from us. I might as well tell you what people are whispering."

She wouldn't listen when he tried to convince her there was no conspiracy to keep the truth from Dudlington. She simply walked away, saying she was tired of lies.

Trying to shrug off the depression settling over him, Rutledge finished his breakfast and was just stepping into the street when the postmistress came out of Hensley's house.

"There's a letter for you, Inspector. From the Yard. I thought it best to bring it to you straightaway."

"Thank you."

She smiled, one professional to another, and went hurrying back to her little cage in the corner of the shop.

"It'ull feed the gossip frenzy," Hamish told him. "A letter from London."

"Yes."

In fact, the letter had come from Sergeant Gibson.

"I'm writing this at home,"
it began.
"I dare not leave it lying about at the Yard"

Rutledge sat down at the desk in the little office and looked through the two pages of Gibson's scrawl, hoping to find something of interest.

What the sergeant had written, distilled into its essence, was that the search for evidence against Hensley was hopeless. The sprawling black lines went on.

The file is straightforward. The fire, the blame settling on Mr. Barstow's competitor, and the charges brought against the man. But they never went to trial, those charges. Howard Edgerton's death was put down to infection. It's what took him off, true enough. I tried to look up his widow, but it appears she went to live with her family in Devon. The competitor, a Mr. Worrels, lost his business when the whispers had done their work. The file is presently listed as "Unsolved." I did discover the name of the man said to have set the fire. Barstow didn't do it himself, you understand. He hired a J. Sandridge, who was never caught. He'd been employed by Mr. Worrels and held a grudge over a promotion that never came his way
—

Rutledge stopped reading.

Sandridge. Where had he heard that name?

Hamish said, "He doesna' live here."

But Rutledge had a good memory for names. It had served him well in the war.

He got up and went searching through the files in Hensley's box.

Sandridge—someone had written a letter inquiring for him. It was from a Miss Gregory asking if there was another address for him.

Coincidence? Or was there a connection?

Dudlington was too small to hold so many coincidences.

Rutledge went back to Gibson's letter, but there was nothing else of interest, except the last line.

I'd take it as a favor, if you burned this after reading it.

After committing the details to memory, he did as he'd been asked.