A Long Shadow

22

Both Mrs. Channing and Mrs. Melford followed him into Hensley’s office, with Dr. Middleton at their heels.

Mrs. Channing disappeared toward the back of the house, and Mrs. Melford pushed a chair forward for Rutledge to sit in.

He sat, grateful to be off his feet.

Someone came to the door to hand Dr. Middleton the shoe that Rutledge had lost by the wall. He glimpsed an unshaven face, and then it was gone.

The doctor took the other chair from behind the desk and propped Rutledge’s right leg across it.

“These trousers won’t be mended,” he said, and searched in his bag for his scissors, cutting the cloth to peel it back from the wounds.

There was a darkening bruise near his thigh, and the back of his leg was bloody, a long cut running down the calf. Middleton looked up as Mrs. Channing came in.

She said to him, “There’s water on to boil. Fortunately the fire hadn’t gone out.”

She took in the damage to Rutledge’s ankle, already turning red over the strengthening blue of a bruise, and said, “You were lucky, you know.”

“Stupid,” he answered, “is more to the point.”

Middleton straightened, turning Rutledge’s face toward him. “You’ve scraped your cheekbone on something.

Where else?”

Mrs. Melford followed Mrs. Channing back to the kitchen as Rutledge opened his shirt. The canes of the rosebushes had left their mark on his shoulder and across one arm, on his stomach, and along his side. Their thorns had torn at his hands. Dr. Middleton went for the water himself, came back to bathe Rutledge’s wounds and sprinkle an an-tiseptic powder on them, then cleaned the gash on his calf.

“You’re going to be sore tomorrow,” the doctor warned him. “Who was that fool driving, I’d like to know. He ought to be shot.”

“A good question. There’s a clean shirt in my luggage in Hensley’s room and another pair of trousers.” He looked ruefully at the earth caked on his coat, and all but filling one of his shoes.

The doctor finished his work. “That’s three,” he said tightly. “Hensley. Towson. You. I’d like to know what’s going on here.”

“Damned if I know.” Rutledge’s cheekbone had begun to throb. He put up a hand to touch it, realized the hand was filthy, and let it drop again.

“Who’s the lady with Mrs. Melford? A friend of hers?”

“No. She’s from London.” He flexed his arm and shoulder, then bent his knee a time or two. He wouldn’t be climbing back up the spire ladder anytime soon.

“I don’t understand. Was it an accident? You’d have thought the driver might have stopped, if it were!”

“It was intentional. Someone had taken a lorry standing outside one of the houses on Church Street.”

“That would be the Lawrences’.” Middleton nodded.

“They had worm, and much of the wood has to be replaced. I say my prayers every night that there’s none to be found in my house. Insidious little beasts!” He paused. “I hesitate to ask, but you don’t believe it was anyone at the Lawrences’, do you? I can’t for the life of me—”

“No.” Rutledge bent to drag his stocking back over a rapidly swelling ankle just as the door opened, and the two workmen, clad in overalls, stepped inside.

“The lorry was just at the top of the rise, where Holly Street runs up to The Oaks,” the older of them said. “Door open, no one inside.”

Rutledge saw Middleton’s look. Whoever it was could have slipped back into Dudlington, or was long since gone up or down the main road.

“Who’s to pay for the damage, then?” the second of the men demanded. “It’ull cost a pretty penny to set things right.”

“Submit your charges, and I’ll look into it,” Rutledge said. “Did you see anyone prowling about outside the Lawrence house while you were clearing away half an hour ago?”

“Their little dog was shut in a bedroom. He barked madly for a few minutes. We thought it might be a passing cat. Ill-tempered little beast, that dog. Working around him will cost the Lawrences, I can tell you. Too bad he didn’t sink his teeth in whoever it was stole the lorry.”

“I’ll bring you a list of damages tomorrow,” his companion promised Rutledge. “We’re late as it is.” He considered Rutledge’s injuries. “Nasty piece of work, the bastard.

What did he want to go and do that for?”

With that pronouncement, he turned on his heel and ushered the other man out.

Rutledge had buttoned his shirt and was gingerly shov-ing his foot into a scraped and flattened shoe.

Mrs. Channing came in at that moment. “Mrs. Melford has gone to fetch your dinner. She doesn’t feel you ought to be walking about just yet. I’ll see myself to the inn, and we can talk more tomorrow.”

“Stay—” he began.

But she shook her head. “You’ve had enough on your plate, Inspector.”

“You shouldn’t walk up that road in the dark. They’ve just found the lorry abandoned there.”

Grace Letteridge stuck her head in the door, half expecting to be turned away. Her anger had faded, and she waited for Rutledge to acknowledge her.

“I’m sorry for yelling at you,” she said contritely, then looked from Rutledge to Mrs. Channing. “I realized afterward that you had nowhere else to go to get out of that fool’s way. What on earth was he trying to do?”

He made no effort to introduce the two women. “Someone stole the lorry and lost control of it as they sped away.”

“Yes, well, I’d like to know who it was. I’ll make him pay for the damages.”

“You’re in line behind the workmen who lost the lorry.”

“Is he seriously injured?” Grace Letteridge turned to ask Dr. Middleton.

“He’ll live,” the doctor said. “You were rude, Grace. I’m not best pleased with you, just now.”

“Yes, it was ill done,” she admitted. “Mr. Rutledge.”

And she was gone, shutting the door behind her.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Rutledge said, getting to his feet and testing the bad ankle. “I can manage now, I think.”

“If you need anything to ease the pain, send for me.”

The doctor gathered up his things and closed his bag.

“Stay off that ankle, if you don’t want it twice its size tomorrow. A cold bath wouldn’t hurt.”

He nodded to Mrs. Channing and left.

“He’s a good man,” she said, staring after him.

“Yes.” He had drawn on his coat. “I don’t like the idea of you staying at The Oaks.”

“I’m safe enough there—you aren’t intending to walk me home, are you?”

“Of course.”

He took several steps while Hamish badgered him, and said, “It doesn’t hurt, however bad it might appear to be.”

“You’re a liar, Inspector. Well. There’s more hot water on the stove. You must soak that ankle for a bit, when you come back. Then use only cold water.”

She collected her own coat and said as she returned,

“You could have been seriously injured. Who was it? Did it have anything to do with those wretched casings?”

“Probably.” He held the door for her, and she stepped out into the street.

“Why should someone want to kill you? What have you done, to earn such hatred?”

“I don’t know that he’s ready to kill just yet. He’s trying to frighten me. You called it waiting.”

“Was it the person in the church tower?”

“Very likely.”

“Then perhaps you’re wrong about the casings. It could be that you’ve come too close to the truth here in Dudlington.”

He could feel the ankle stiffening in the cold night air. “I don’t know that I’ve reached that stage yet.”

“Yet you wonder if it could be Keating who drove at you.”

“I don’t wonder so much as leave the possibilities open.”

She took his arm to steady herself over the cobblestones, or so she said, but he rather thought it was to help him manage them. They walked in silence the rest of the way.

Finally he said as they came to the door of the inn, “How do you live with what you feel—or know—or glimpse?”

“Very uneasily. How do you live with what you suspect, when you’re halfway through solving a terrible crime?

How do you even conceal what you feel?”

He thought about Westmorland then, and the doubts he’d felt there. And in so many other investigations.

“I decided to become a policeman to speak for the dead.

They have no one else, you see. Somewhere there’s always proof of what happened, some piece of evidence that will obtain a conviction. It’s important for the guilty to be brought to justice, I think. Without justice, there’s chaos.”

“That sounds very like revenge, Inspector.”

“No. I leave it to the court to judge. If I’m wrong, I expect the court to discover that during the trial.”

Hamish said, “Nell Shaw.”

And he could see her again, rough and awkward and bent on bringing him around to seeing evidence as she did.

Evidence to refute her husband’s guilt.

“Your cases stay with you,” Meredith Channing remarked, as if she’d followed the direction of his thoughts.

He came quickly back to the present and remembered the woman he was speaking to.

In the dark, as they approached the lights of The Oaks, he glimpsed her face. It was withdrawn, looking inward.

How much did she really know about what was happening to him?

Was she an enemy? Or a friend?

Rutledge left Mrs. Channing at the door of the inn.

As she went up the stairs, lighted by a faceted chandelier overhead, he could hear voices from the bar. They were talking about the accident with the stolen lorry. He listened for a moment, curious to see how it would be viewed.

Someone was saying, “—better if we were rid of him.

I’ve heard it said he’s not interested in what happened to the constable, it’s an excuse to pry into other matters.”

“What other matters?” a second voice asked. “There’re no secrets here.”

“I for one,” a third voice broke in, “would like to know the truth about that brother of Baylor’s. They say he’s scarred, afraid to show his face on the street.”

“That’s ridiculous,” the second voice retorted.

“Well, then, have you seen him yet?” someone else asked.

“No, but—”

“Yes, well, if you ask me, he’s dying. Gas in the lungs, my wife heard in the greengrocer’s.”

“Ted won’t talk about it.”

“No. He’s lost one brother, he doesn’t want to lose the other.”

“Of the two,” the first voice put in, “I’d take Robbie over Joel any day. Robbie was a good man.”

There was general agreement, and then the sound of chairs scraping on the floor.

People were leaving. Rutledge turned to go as well, before anyone found him there, eavesdropping.

Just as he reached for the handle to the door, he happened to glance back at the staircase.

At the top of it, barely visible in her burgundy coat, stood Mrs. Channing, her face a pale oval as she looked down the stairs straight at him.

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.