A Long Shadow

3

Mid-January 1920

Rutledge stood on the cliffs above Beachy Head Light.

Below him the gray waters of the Atlantic moved in angry swirls, clawing at the land. All around him the grass seemed to sway and dance, whispering in the echoes of the wind like disturbed voices.

He had come here after a difficult twenty-four hours forcing a would-be murderer to give himself up and release the hostages he had taken in a small cottage outside the village of Belton. The man, tired and unshaven, unrepentant and silent, offered no explanation for stabbing his wife. He went with the constables without giving them any trouble, and the local man, Inspector Pearson, had said only, “I was convinced in the end he’d kill all his family. It’s a miracle he didn’t. In for a penny, in for a pound. We can only hang him once.”

“He had nowhere to go,” Rutledge pointed out. “And whatever anger was driving him, it had finally burned away.” He could still see the eyes of the man’s mother-in-law, staring at him in undisguised relief, something in her face that was old, as if twenty-four hours had aged her. Her daughter, trembling with exhaustion and pain, allowed the doctor to wrap her in a blanket and take her away in his carriage to his surgery. Blood had soaked through her dress, and her hands were clenched on the blanket’s folds as if to hide the sight. Her mother had followed in a second carriage with an elderly aunt, a thin, pale woman who appeared to be in shock. Even the ex-soldier standing near the horses mirrored her numbness, his face turned away.

As soon as the affair had been dealt with and he was free to go back to London, Rutledge had driven instead toward the sea, leaving his motorcar and then walking down to the cliffs. Beyond lay France. It was said, during the war, that the big guns could be heard here along England’s coast.

But they were mercifully silent now. Had been for a year and two months.

Looking back over that year, he could recognize his own long struggle to survive. The strain, the tension, the con-stant badgering of Hamish in the back of his mind had taken their toll. Jean’s defection... The still unsettled business with his godfather in Scotland. And now the letter from Westmorland.

Had he really fallen in love, there in the north? Or had he been beguiled by those easy domestic moments in the kitchen, when life had seemed so simple and comfortable?

A lonely man could have mistaken such brief respites for feelings that weren’t there—on either side.

He couldn’t be sure anymore. Even though he’d gone over and over his own emotions.

Elizabeth Fraser’s letter had ended: It is better for me to live as I am, where I am, than to imagine I could fit into any other world. I have a history in London. It would do no good to pretend I haven’t. And I don’t want to reawaken the memories there. They would be too painful. Don’t come back to Westmorland, Ian. I beg of you. I am safer alone...

He was too tired to try to work it out. As long as Hamish was there, in the shadows of his mind, he’d be mad to love anyone. It was reckless even to consider the possibility. He had nearly got Elizabeth killed, after all. He shuddered.

What would he have done then? Mourned her as his lost love? From guilt?

He could hear Hamish’s derisive laughter.

A small stone, dislodged by his shoe, ran down to the cliff’s edge and tumbled over, out into space. He watched it spin out, then disappear into the sea far below.

It would be easy to step over the face of the cliff after that stone and end the struggle, end the uncertainty, silence the voice, crush out the ghostly faces of men he had led and failed. It was tempting. It was in some ways the answer he had postponed in the hope that somehow he would heal.

“It’s no’ so simple,” Hamish said. “Leaping o’er the edge willna’ change the past. And it canna’ change what you are. Ye’ll be dead and so will I. Ye’ll ha’ killed me twice. That too will be on your soul.”

The voice was clearly Scots on the wind, coming from nowhere, and it was steel. After a moment, without answering, Rutledge turned back the way he’d come, to where the motorcar was waiting.

He had already turned the crank, heard the engine ticking over, and was climbing in, when something on the driver’s seat caught his eye.

It was another shell case. In fact, a pair of them, linked together in a short length of a machine gun’s ammunition belt—collected and thrust there, because the casings were normally ejected from the weapon as it fired. He picked up the pair and stared at them. The same size and caliber of the one he’d found in London. And this time he was in no doubt—they’d been left where he alone would find them.

There was a pattern around the metal perimeter of one casing, and he turned it around to examine it in the pale light of the winter afternoon.

An odd pattern, a delicate staircase of poppies that curled around the brass surface, but where there should have been blooms, there were tiny skulls with hollow eyes staring up at him.

Death’s heads.

Hamish said, “A warning.”

The same thought had crossed his own mind. “But why on only one of them?” Rutledge asked, curious, still examining the workmanship.

“May be he thinks ye ken why, well enough.” After a moment he added, “There was a private soldier in one of the companies doon the line. I didna’ know him well, ye ken, but his sergeant found one of his carvings with a death’s head on it, and the next time o’er the top, the sergeant died of a bullet in his back.”

Rutledge had never reexamined the single casing he’d found outside Maryanne Browning’s house. He’d been far more interested in why it was on her doorstep than in what was cut into its surface. As far as he knew it was still in his dress coat pocket.

He looked around the headland, tasting the salt on his lips as the wind turned and blew off the sea. There was no one else out here. No one at all.

Yet the cartridge casings hadn’t been in the seat when he left the motorcar to walk out to the cliff’s edge. That was a certainty.

If anyone had followed him here from the village— where was he now? Lying flat somewhere in the scrubby grass or long since gone on his bicycle, making a silent retreat?

Turning slowly in a circle, Rutledge scanned the landscape once more, as far as he could see.

The emptiness around him seemed filled with something malevolent.

He couldn’t shake off the sense of being watched. But there was not even a gull in the sky overheard.

There hadn’t been anyone in the square in London either.

After a moment or two, Rutledge tossed the casings onto the passenger seat and put the car in gear. All the way to London, he reminded himself that while someone might have known he was going to the Brownings’ party—

Sergeant Gibson had tracked him down, after all—no one could have guessed that he would drive out to this godfor-saken headland late on a cold and windy January afternoon. He himself hadn’t expected to come here. It had happened on the spur of the moment, a whim dictated by a need for silence and peace. Someone would have to be a mind reader...

He was nearly certain that there was no reason for anyone to follow him from the village where the hostages had been taken. It was far more likely that someone had tracked him from London.

But why?