A Long Shadow

10

It was not a surprise. In many ways, he’d expected it. But Rutledge stood there looking at the small casing, not touching it. What disturbed him most was the fact that once more he had been so easy to find. Surely no one could guess that he would be staying at the wounded constable’s house—unless of course it had been a logical step after discovering that Rutledge didn’t have a room at The Oaks.

After that, the motorcar left at the side of the house would have betrayed his presence.

Had anyone seen this invisible stalker walking into the constable’s house? After all, it was near the baker’s shop and the greengrocer’s, where people did their marketing.

Rutledge went back to the window fronting the street.

Looking in one direction, he could see two women coming out of the greengrocer’s, talking animatedly to each other, and in the other, young children walking hand in hand, a nanny behind them, her starched apron hidden by her heavy coat.

And then two men in muddy Wellingtons came around the corner, heading briskly up the street toward the inn. Or the fields. It was hard to tell. Three houses away, a woman brought out a broom to sweep the walk in front of her door.

It wasn’t that Dudlington was empty—it was that whereas a larger village or town might have forty or fifty people on the streets at any given moment, this tiny pocket in the middle of nowhere seldom saw more than ten abroad at a time. But the doctor had said gossip was the mainstay of life here. And a stranger would have drawn faces to the window, peering from behind the curtains to see where he was going and what his business might be.

Hamish said, “It’ud tak’ an army to interview all o’ them.”

Rutledge examined the cartridge casing. Was it intentionally plain? Or had whoever was stalking him run out of carved casings?

“It doesna’ matter,” Hamish pointed out. “There’s other business here.”

But beyond the shelter of the village streets, the land was flat and sere and rolling. No protection. A perfect field of fire.

Rutledge shivered. It was like No Man’s Land, where the only trees were blackened, disfigured apparitions in a barren, bloody world.

He started to put the casing in his pocket, out of sight.

And then thought better of it.

Would whoever had set it out for him to find come back later to see if it had delivered its message?

It was an interesting point and worth considering.

Finally, with care, Rutledge set the cartridge casing exactly where he’d found it, and then went down the street to take his luncheon at Mrs. Melford’s.

She had set out sandwiches and a pudding for Rutledge. If she was in the house, he couldn’t hear her moving about.

He ate quickly, and then left. Driving up to The Oaks, where the main road ran beyond Dudlington, he found the proprietor in the bar serving several men in corduroys and heavy boots.

They looked around as Rutledge stepped through the door, then went back to their beer, ignoring him.

Rutledge nodded to the proprietor and sat down at a table near the window. When Keating came over to ask what he would have, he shook his head. “Later, perhaps.”

Conversation, which had stopped short at his entrance, resumed stiffly, as if the subject had been changed in midsentence.

It was another twenty minutes before the men took their leave and went out the door. The proprietor, collecting the empty glasses, said, “You have a chilling effect on custom.”

“Indeed.” Rutledge watched the men walk across the road to the fields and stride over them toward the stream.

“Do you know Constable Hensley well?”

“To speak to. He’s not a regular, you might say. I don’t know that anyone would call him a friend.” Keating set about washing up.

“Has anyone asked for him in the last—say, two days?”

“Asked for him? Everyone wants to know how he’s faring.”

“Someone who doesn’t live in Dudlington.”

“We see our share of strangers in The Oaks. It’s the road yonder that brings us most of our custom. You know that.

What is it you’re asking me in your roundabout policeman’s fashion?”

Rutledge smiled. “You know very well. Have you given directions to Hensley’s house to anyone stopping here? Or discussed the constable’s condition with anyone passing through?”

“Someone’s knocking at your door, unwelcomed?”

It was so near the mark that Rutledge considered him.

“It’s not wise to obstruct a policeman in the course of his inquiries. What do you have against the law? Or is it Hensley that you dislike?”

“I don’t know that I care for either, to tell the truth.” He set the first glass on a mat to dry.

“Did you know Emma Mason?”

Keating stared at him, caught off guard by the sudden change in direction the conversation had taken. “Everyone knew her,” he said finally, his voice flat.

“What do you think became of her? Is she dead? Or did she run away?”

“I have no opinion on the subject.”

“Everyone else has.”

“I own The Oaks. I don’t have much to do with the people in Dudlington. They come here if they choose, or not.

If they want to sit at my bar and drink, then I bring them their pints and leave them to it.”

“Did Emma Mason ever come here?”

“What would she be doing here, at a licensed house?” he countered, without answering the question directly.

“You aren’t a native. You’ve lived elsewhere. She might have found that attractive.”

“Here, now, I don’t meddle with schoolgirls!”

“I didn’t suggest you’d meddled with her. Only that she might have wanted more than Dudlington could offer. That she might have liked the idea of seeing motorcars or carriages on their way to more exciting destinations. It might have put the thought into her head that here was an escape.

Did she look her age?”

“I don’t know how she looked. If you want to know, ask in the village, not here.” He was angry, far angrier than the question merited.

“She has to be somewhere,” Rutledge answered mildly.

“She’s either alive or dead. She’s either buried in Dudlington or she’s gone away with one of the men who stopped here for a drink or directions or a dinner. They wouldn’t come to the village, there’s nothing in it for them. She had only to walk up the main street and climb the hill to reach The Oaks, and even if she didn’t set foot in the door, she could see the motorcars and the men—”

“You can get out of my pub!” Keating shouted. “Now!

Or copper or not, I’ll take pleasure in throwing you out!”

Rutledge got to his feet, moving without haste. “I haven’t come here to cast doubt on the girl’s virtue. Her disappearance isn’t even my case. But the name keeps cropping up in connection with Frith’s Wood. And Constable Hensley was nearly killed in that same wood. You can see why I’m—curious.”

Keating slammed his fist down on the bar, rattling the glasses and bottles on it. “Emma Mason was a child. A decent child, with more beauty than it was safe to possess. If I thought Hensley had touched her, I’d do more than send an arrow into his back, I’d have wrung his neck! You’d have had your case of murder then, right enough!”

And with that, he disappeared through the door behind the bar, slamming it after him.

The wind had come up, and with it a cold, spitting rain.

Rutledge walked to the motorcar and took up the crank.

The leather seats were cold as the grave, he thought, climbing in. And the heater offered such little warmth that it might as well not exist.

He turned into the main road, heading north. This was the way Hensley would have traveled to Letherington. The road ran straight and narrow between the low stone walls that followed it to the right, and the open vistas of Dudlington’s pastures and fields to the left. As the land climbed with it, it began to bend to the right, away to the east. On a sunny summer’s day, when the cattle and sheep and horses filled the meadows, and light glinted on the winding stream that bisected the fields beyond the village, it would have been a pretty scene. Old England, and worth fighting for.

He crested the hill and paused to look back. There was the village, the inn already out of sight, the church spire standing tall, and Frith’s Wood visible as bare treetops, seemingly nothing out of the ordinary at this distance.

He set the brake and got out of the car, walking to the stone wall and climbing it. Taking out Hensley’s field glasses, he surveyed the ground, slowly turning in a full circle.

Then he studied the wall itself, on the pasture side away from the road, scanning the dark crannies at its base.

Nothing.

He was about to put the glasses back into his pocket when he saw crows in a field farther along.

Hensley had mentioned crows rising.

He scrambled down and went back to the car.

Half a mile on, the bend of the road took him away from Dudlington, and even standing in the motorcar, he could see only the tip of the spire. Characteristic of Northampton, it rose above the church like a finger pointing toward God.

He set the brake for a second time and found a place to climb the wall again. Here it was overgrown with weeds and brambles, but there was a lower section where he could just manage to get to the top. Not as flat, this one, he discovered, as he nearly pitched headfirst into the pasture.

Precariously balanced at best, he slowly drew out the glasses and lifted them to his eyes. Nothing in the fields.

But on the far side of the wall, not fifty feet from where he was, he could just see a bicycle tucked under the brambles and all but out of sight.

He walked toward it, sending the crows flying.

Hamish said, “Who hid it here? Yon constable before he went down to the wood? Or his assailant, making certain no one found him quickly?”

It was a good question, and without a good answer.

Rutledge lifted the bicycle, brushed off the earth and dried leaves, and walked it back to the place where he had come over the wall. It took some effort on his part to get it into the rear of the motorcar, and by the time he had finished, the storm, hovering in the low gray clouds all day, broke in earnest.

He made a point to stow the bicycle behind Hensley’s house in the bare back garden, covering it with a tarpaulin he found in the tiny shed where picks, shovels, and spades were kept.

There must have been a dozen people who saw him bring it with him, he thought, but until gossip had spread that word, he wasn’t going to make an issue of his find. He wanted no questions about where and how he’d come up with it.

After washing his hands and cleaning his boots, he crossed the street to Emma Mason’s grandmother’s house and knocked.

This time an elderly woman came to the door. She was tall and handsome, but when he spoke to her, introducing himself, she leaned forward as if uncertain what he’d said.

He repeated his name and asked if he could come inside. She invited him into the house rather reluctantly.

The parlor was feminine, with lacy curtains, crocheted antimacassars on the arms and backs of the chairs, and a long lacy cloth over the table by the piano. On it were photographs, and one was of a young girl holding a black and white kitten and smiling up at the camera. She was quite pretty even at the age of around ten, with good cheekbones and a high forehead, framed in hair that appeared to be dark and thick and curling.

Mrs. Ellison offered him a chair and sat down herself. In the flat tones of the near deaf, she asked him his business.

“I’m looking into the... accident that befell Constable Hensley in Frith’s Wood,” he said, pitching his voice so that she could hear him.

“I’m not deaf, young man,” she retorted, and he smiled.

“Apparently not.”

“I do have trouble sometimes with what the words are.

Putting them together to make sense.”

“Do you know Constable Hensley well?”

“I’m his neighbor across the street. I don’t invite him to my house to dine.”

“Is he a good policeman?”

“How should I know?” Her lips tightened, as if to hold back what else she might have said.

“He investigated the disappearance of your granddaughter. And couldn’t find her,” he reminded her gently.

“It’s always been in my mind that she went to look for her mother. My daughter. When her husband died—

Emma’s father—she wanted no more to do with the child.

I think it was too painful a reminder of happiness lost. I don’t know what became of her, to be truthful. She never wrote to me in all these years. Not even to ask how young Emma fared.” Her face crumpled, but she recovered and said in a reasonably steady voice, “Beatrice was pretty too, and it was her downfall. Sad, isn’t it, how blood can tell.”

When he asked to see Emma’s room, Mrs. Ellison raised her eyebrows in disapproval. “This has nothing to do with Constable Hensley’s unfortunate accident!”

“She’s not here,” he prompted her. “I shan’t be intrud-ing. But it might help me to see what interested her.”

“Even that Inspector Abbot, from Letherington, respected her privacy,” Mrs. Ellison retorted. “I can’t think what good it would do you. Unless it’s voyeurism.”

Stung, he said with some harshness, “You can’t be the judge of what’s important in a police matter. I can go to Northampton and ask for a warrant to search. It would be far less pleasant than five minutes in her room.”

“Very well.” She rose, led him to the stairs, and climbed ahead of him, her back stiff with protest.

The girl’s room was on the front of the house, and when he went to the windows, he could see that one of them, the one nearest the dressing table, looked directly into Hensley’s bedroom across the lane.