Watchers of Time (5 page)

He wondered what kind of life they might have shared these past seven months, after he’d finally been released from the clinic, still a prisoner of his own terrors. And how deeply they would have come to hate each other, finally. Or if she might have found herself wishing that the bullet he’d taken in Scotland in September had put an end to their pretenses.

Hamish said, “She’d ha’ been bonny in black.”

Certainly she would have carried herself with great courage, impressing all his friends, trailing behind her the whisper of great passion and love lost, where neither had ever existed.

Still, he was swept by a sense of loss as he watched her pass through the door of the church, oblivious. She hadn’t felt his eyes or his thoughts. She hadn’t sensed his presence and turned to look for him. There was a loneliness in that.

By the end of that week, Rutledge told himself that he’d made rather remarkable strides from the crippled man struggling to shave one-handed while his sister watched. The throbbing in his shoulder and chest muscles had begun to subside into a dull ache that he could put out of his mind. He could do without the sling now for hours at a time, al hough the arm was still tightly bound.

Another week,
he told himself,
and I’ll be fit again.

The dinners with his sister were beginning to wear thin. Much as he loved her, enjoyed the variety of her cooking, and appreciated the fact that she did not fuss, Frances worried about him, and he found it difficult to smile and ignore that. On the other hand, before the War, it had been Rutledge who had worried about her. And he knew too well the signs of unspoken concern. Of skirting around issues that ought not to be discussed—what had happened in Scotland, Jean’s approaching wedding, mutual friends who were in worse straits than he was. He had reached the point of wanting to blurt out, if only for the sake of clearing the air between them: “Look—I know David is worried that I haven’t written him—I just can’t face it yet. Don’t ask me why! And as for Jean, I wish her well, I’m not heartbroken. I’m lonely, that’s all, but I don’t want to meet a dozen of your suitable friends. For God’s sake, that’s not the answer!”

Hamish reminded him, “Ye’re no’ fit company for yourself, much less a lassie. Get drunk and get it o’er with!” As advice, it wasn’t bad.

But that Friday there were more pressing matters to consider. Chief Superintendent Bowles, after a consultation with the police surgeon, considered his options, then went to see Rutledge.

“It’s a matter of setting the Bishop’s mind at rest. He’s worried about the death of one of his people. Catholic priest, murdered in some backwater of Norfolk called Osterley.”

“A priest?” Rutledge repeated, surprised. In the eyes of the law, killing a clergyman was no more heinous a crime than killing a shop girl or a fishmonger. The penalty was the same—hanging by the neck until dead. But in the eyes of society, a man of the Cloth was protected by his calling, set apart. Inviolate.

Hamish reminded him that priests had once been burned at the stake. But that was another day and time. With no bearing on 1919.

Bowles was shaking his head. “We lost our way in the War, you know.” It was one of his favorite themes. “No good ever comes of change. Women doing men’s work—it isn’t natural! The lower classes getting above themselves. I shouldn’t wonder if we’ll see worse before we’re done. Society breaking down, Bolshevism on the loose. Now a priest’s dead.”

He peered at the sheet of paper in his hand. “Struck down with his own altar crucifix in St. Anne’s rectory, to be precise. The local police haven’t caught the villain yet. The priest walked in on a thief, apparently. It’s probable he could have recognized the man, and was murdered for that reason. The police are looking at that as the primary motive, for now. Still—we may have a madman in our midst, who’s to say differently? Little wonder this Bishop wants reassurance that we’re doing all we can.”

“What was the thief after?” Rutledge interjected. There were more likely choices for breaking and entering than a church office or rectory. A poor box and a priest’s pockets were notoriously bare. Madman indeed!

“A paltry sum collected at the church harvest festival, I’m told, which means everyone at the festival, in the village, and in the countryside for miles around knew there must be money in the rectory.”

“That broadens the inquiry considerably,” Rutledge agreed. “Did the priest have a housekeeper? How did an intruder get past her?”

“She’d already gone home for the day. And the priest himself should have been in the church to hear Confession, but had put up a notice there saying he was away at a deathbed and might not be back in time. Clear sailing, the thief must have thought. But Father James came home and went up to his study, and the intruder panicked. A shame, but there it is. It could happen to any householder.”

It could—and often did.

“Word has come down from the Chief Constable in Norfolk that it’s politic to send an officer,” Bowles said. “You’re to show the Yard’s concern and have a look at the evidence. Speak with this Bishop or one of his people, assure him that the local police know what they’re about, and once he’s satisfied that everything possible is being done, come back to London. From what I hear of the local man, Blevins, he’s competent and has a good reputation for using his head. Shouldn’t take you more than a few days. And October in the Broads is usually fine.”

Rutledge remembered that it was often wet, but said nothing.

Hamish said, “It’s no’ a holiday, mind. Watch your back! You canna’ trust the man. He doesna’ want you in London.”

“It’s more likely a diversion,” Rutledge answered silently, “to take pressure off Blevins. While everyone is watching me, he’ll be free to get the job done.”

Hamish grunted, “Have ye forgotten Scotland already?”

Bowles was saying, “Leave now, and you’ll be there tonight. Anything I ought to know regarding those, before you go?” He gestured to the files spread across Rutledge’s desk. “Parker can deal with them.”

“No, I’m finished with this lot. In fact, I was about to hand them over to Sergeant Williams. He’ll know which are to be filed and which distributed to the officer in charge of the investigation.”

“I’ll send Williams up to collect them. There’s a train at half past ten, you can make it if you hurry!” Bowles smiled in encouragement. Rutledge was reminded of crocodiles. The same cold yellow eyes.

“Very well.” He stood up, took the pages Bowles handed him, tucked them under his good arm, and went to open the door. “I’ll report by telephone, shall I?”

“No need. It’s a courtesy visit; you won’t be getting involved.”

The doctor, taking the bandages off Rutledge’s chest for the last time, looked at the wound, poked and probed at it—making the patient wince—and then nodded in satisfaction.

“You were damned lucky,” Dr. Fleming said, “that no deep infection set in. Still, it won’t hurt to have a small plaster over it. A matter of prevention. How do you feel?”

Rutledge, looking down at the raised, raw scar in the matted hair on his chest, replied, “I can breathe without discomfort.” He flexed his arm. It felt like a soggy rag. “I doubt I could take on a child of six in a brawl.”

Fleming chuckled. “Nor should you. But that arm will be like new, once you begin using it. Never fear! Just don’t overdo it for the first few days—don’t carry anything heavy or push at anything that doesn’t want to budge. Again, a matter of prevention. I have found in twenty years of treating patients that Nature is a good doctor, too, given half a chance. The problem is, we seldom give her credit and therefore come to regret it.”

It was, Rutledge knew, one of Fleming’s favorite homilies. “I’m off to Norwich. Which shouldn’t be strenuous.”

“Cheating the ratepayer, are you? I’d take the train if I were you. Less demanding on the chest muscles than driving.”

But Rutledge left London in his own motorcar, his claustrophobia still rampant. It was not possible for him to sit in a compartment jammed hip and knee into other travelers. The compulsion to stand and scream for air would be as violent as it was unreasonable.

By the time he reached Norwich, his chest muscles were in open rebellion, Mother Nature urging them on. Hamish, worse than Dr. Fleming at pointing out Rutledge’s shortcomings, reminded him that he had made the drive against advice.

As a compromise, Rutledge found a small hotel on the outskirts of town and stayed the night there, not prepared to face the traffic of Norwich at the end of the day.

Hamish, who had alternately raged at him and baited him for miles of the way, was as tired as he was: The familiar voice was silent over dinner.

Rutledge slept hard from fatigue. Hamish never followed him into sleep—the voice in his head lived in the waking mind, a bitter and hourly reminder of the bloody offensive in 1916 on the Somme, where so many men had died not by the hundreds or thousands but by the tens of thousands, their lives thrown away in wave after desperate wave of futile attacks. Where he himself had been buried in mud and saved from suffocation by the body pressing down on him. He’d been told over and over again that Corporal Hamish MacLeod had saved his life. But the blood caked like a second skin all over his face and hands had come from the English firing squad and the coup de grâce Rutledge had had to deliver personally in the instant before a direct hit had blown the salient to bits. Hamish hadn’t died from German fire, and Rutledge had been too shaken, too lost in the depths of shell shock to set the record straight: that Corporal MacLeod had been shot for refusing a direct order on the battlefield the night before that final dawn assault.

The tangled skeins of truth and official reports had left Rutledge with silence, with memory, with a waking haunting that had nothing to do with ghosts. Only with the broken mind of a man who had been sent straight back into battle before he’d had any rest, or come to terms with his own deep sense of guilt for having to choose between one man’s life and the morale of the equally exhausted and dispirited soldiers who
hadn’t
refused the order to climb out of the trenches and fight again. And three years later, he still had not exorcised that guilt.

It had become too deeply rooted in blood and bone and sinew, like a second self.

Rutledge had tried over and over again to die during the last two years of the War, putting himself in the way of danger, courting the unholy bombardments that splintered the earth, daring the hidden machine-gun nests that raked No Man’s Land with lethal fire. Like a lover embracing a bloody mistress he had sought out any peril—and had come through unscathed.

To find himself again and again hailed as a hero, because he seemed to have no fear of dying.

It had been the bitterest irony.

CHAPTER 3

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, RUTLEDGE FOUND HIS way through the busy streets of Norwich to the address he’d been given by Chief Superintendent Bowles. It was a small house near the new Catholic church, far older than the building in whose shadow it stood, and with a small garden behind it. A gloomy house, upright and Victorian, with sharp eaves that seemed to pierce the low clouds. Rutledge walked up to the door in a misting rain that enveloped the earth like a shroud. On a small wooden board, faded gold letters spelled out
Diocesan Office.
Lifting the door knocker, a great brass ring that fell with a doomsday clamor, he turned to look at the street behind him. A half dozen men were waist-deep in a broken sewer, digging shovels full of stinking mud out of the pit. Urchins gaped down into the hole, fascinated, while passersby held handkerchiefs to their noses against the rank odor. A pair of women huddled together on the corner exchanging news, the hems of their black skirts even blacker with the run-off of the umbrellas they clutched over their hats. A man walking a dog moved swiftly, hurrying it along as it stopped to sniff in the gutters.

No one took notice of the caller at the rectory. Rain was a great separator.

Hamish, whose fierce Covenanter ancestors had taught him well, was skittish about entering this den of popery and idolatry. Rutledge, amused, assured him that his soul was in no danger.

“How can
you
be sae sure, when the Church of England is hardly better than this lot?”

The door was opened by a housekeeper whose hair, graying at the temples, was auburn, and whose face, flecked with freckles, had a touch of Irish in it. The woman looked him up and down as he gave her his name, and asked, “Are you ill, then?”

He smiled. “Official business.”

“All the same, you look as if you could do with a cup of tea! And the poor man hasn’t had his, either, writing reports all the morning! Come in, then.”

She took his hat and coat, clicked her tongue at the dark patches of rain across the coat’s shoulders, and spread it carefully over a chair to dry. Then she led the way down a passage to a room at the far end. To Hamish’s considerable relief, there were no niches filled with bleeding saints in the passage, nor a pervasive odor of incense. Except for a single small crucifix above the narrow entry, there was no sign that the occupants of this den had designs on anyone’s soul.

Opening a door into a gracious room at the back of the house, the housekeeper stood aside to let Rutledge enter. Beyond the windows the rain fell softly on a garden already drab and colorless, and dripped from a small pear tree. A tall secretary desk, the doors in the upper half standing open and the front piled with papers, stood against the far wall, and there was a table and comfortable chairs set to catch the light spilling in the windows. A man in simple priest’s garb sat there, staring out at the wet flower beds, a book open in his lap. He looked up as the housekeeper gave Rutledge’s name with a flourish.