A Long Shadow

34

Rutledge stood there in the doorway, considering his options. But there were none. The only other choice was the door from the back garden, but it would plunge him too quickly into the midst of whatever was wrong in the kitchen, with no time to judge the situation.

There was nothing else he could do but trust in Mrs.

Channing’s warning.

Hamish was hammering in the back of his mind, urging him not to trust anyone.

He stepped inside the house, walking steadily through the dining room and down the passage to the kitchen, making no effort to conceal his movements. And then he was opening the passage door and about to step into the kitchen itself.

Mrs. Channing stood there, her back against the cooker, her face turned toward the cellar stairs. She didn’t look at him. Her attention was on something he couldn’t see.

Rutledge swung slowly toward the cellar door and found himself staring at Frank Keating, holding a kitchen knife at the throat of a white-faced Mary Ellison, her eyes large and desperate.

One of her hands was bleeding, as if she had tried to shield herself. Someone—Meredith Channing—had given her a tea towel to wrap around the wound. Blood was beginning to soak through.

There had been a woman in Belton, Kent, stabbed and held hostage in her own kitchen. But he’d been well prepared for that, the local inspector knowing the people involved, suggesting what to expect and how to approach the angry man inside. Useful tools indeed. Here he was on his own.

Frank Keating wasn’t angry. There was a coldness about him that was far more dangerous. He reeked of alcohol, the kitchen awash in the smell of stale beer and too much whiskey. But if he had been drunk, he wasn’t now.

“Keating. What is she to you? What does it matter what she’s done?”

“Have you been down in that cellar, Rutledge?”

“Yes. I have.” He kept his voice steady, his hands at his side. He could just see Mary Ellison’s expression as he answered Keating, a bleakness that was there and quickly smoothed away.

“Then you know what’s down there.”

“I think I know. Yes.”

“Don’t ask me what this woman is to me. You wrote that you had no proof. I’ve found it for you.”

“Keating—I have proof now. I went to Northampton to find it. You needn’t have done this.”

“Don’t lie to me. What proof is there in Northampton?

They’re in the cellar, not in Northampton!” He moved the knife so that the sharp tip pricked at Mary Ellison’s throat.

“Tell him. Tell him what you did! ”

“Keating,” Rutledge began. “I can’t use a forced con—”

“Tell him!”

But Mary Ellison stood there, the knife at her throat, and said nothing.

“There are witnesses here, Rutledge. You and Mrs.

Channing. Myself. And the proof is down there.” He jerked his head toward the cellar. “If she won’t speak, by God I’ll see she dies anyway.”

“You’ll hang.”

“What difference does it make to me? I’m a dead man already. What difference can it possibly make to me! ”

The anguish in his voice was so overwhelming that Mrs.

Channing took an inadvertent step forward, as if to offer comfort.

“Stay where you are!” he shouted, his grip on Mrs. Ellison’s arm tightening. She flinched but didn’t cry out.

Mrs. Channing stepped back. “I didn’t intend—” Then she fell silent, looking at Rutledge for guidance.

“Why are you a dead man?” Rutledge was already asking. The distance between them was too great. By the time he reached Keating and struggled with him, the knife would have plunged into Mary Ellison’s throat. He fell back on words instead, to talk Keating out of what he was intending to do.

The rector had called him a good listener. It would be words in this case that would make a difference. Must make a difference, as Hamish was busy reminding him. He had to choose them carefully.

Keating was shaking his head, unwilling to be lured into Rutledge’s trap.

Mary Ellison spoke for the first time. “This man,” she said, such loathing in her voice that even Keating appeared to feel it, “this man is under the delusion that he’s my sonin-law. Mr. Mason, Emma’s father.”

Stunned silence followed her announcement. Mrs. Channing uttered a little sound, half pity, half surprise.

Hamish said, “It canna’ be true. He died of a tumor.”

But so much of what Mary Ellison had told everyone was a lie.

“Are you Frank K. Mason?” Rutledge asked the man with the knife.

He spoke the name with authority, as if he possessed the knowledge to support it.

“You’ve asked London about me, haven’t you? Well, be damned to you! I served my sentence, I have a right to live as I please.”

It was beginning to make sense. Rutledge glanced at Mrs. Channing, then said to Keating, “Can she leave? The less she knows the better.”

“And have her go for help the instant she steps out that door? She came of her own free will, I didn’t bring her here. But here she’ll stay.”

“Then let’s move into the dining room where the women can sit down. Mrs. Ellison looks ready to collapse.”

“Let her!” The two words were savage. And then he said,

“I wasn’t guilty. But I couldn’t prove it. I’d been out looking for work, and a man promised me thirty pounds to help him break into a shop. I walked away. I had a family, I didn’t want any part of it, money or no. But when he came to trial, he told the court I’d planned the crime and carried it out.

That he’d been persuaded against his will to help me.”

“Why should the jury have believed him?”

“I was a locksmith,” he said, with simple pride. “And a good one. He’d never been caught before, that’s the truth of it. He’d been too careful. And he spoke well, like a gen-tleman. They tell me he’d all but cried in the witness-box, out of shame for what he’d done. And those twelve bastards in the jury box believed him. He went free, I was taken up and sent to prison, leaving my family destitute.

Beatrice would never have come home to Dudlington if I’d been there to feed her and the child.”

A locksmith married to the daughter of a woman with Harkness blood in her veins. It must have been a great comedown for Mary Ellison to learn that the daughter who had gone to London with such high expectations had married a working-class man. No wonder she’d told the world that he was dead. No wonder she’d taken in Emma, and then seen to it that the daughter who had disappointed her didn’t go back to London and her disgraceful life. Or worse, bring her unemployed husband to live in Dudlington when he was released.

Rutledge said, “And you came here, after you’d served your sentence, to watch over Emma.”

“I didn’t know she was alive. Mrs. Ellison had written to me in prison, to say that Emma and Beatrice had died in a fire in London. One day I came here, just to walk in the churchyard and stand at their graves. But there weren’t any.

And when the rector saw me and came over to speak to me, I asked him if he knew where Emma Mason was buried, here or in London. He said I must be mistaken, she wasn’t dead, she was living here with her grandmother. I nearly broke down, but when he asked my name, I said it was Frank Keating. The next day I took every penny I could scrape together and bought The Oaks. It was languishing, but I was good with my hands, I could fix it to suit me. I couldn’t tell the girl she was mine. I’d have ruined her chances. But I could see her, speak to her from time to time. And I didn’t think Mrs. Ellison would have any reason to recognize me, if I stayed out of the village as much as possible. I could still look out for Emma.”

He turned to Mrs. Channing and then to Rutledge, his eyes pleading but his words harsh. “If you tell anyone— anyone!—I was her father, I’ll kill you too!”

He had dropped his guard. Only for an instant, but it was enough.

Rutledge shouted a warning, far too late for Keating to recover.

Mrs. Ellison twisted herself out of his grip, dodged the knife, and with the full force of her body, pushed Frank Keating down the cellar stairs.

Rutledge heard himself swear. Shoving Mrs. Ellison to one side, he went leaping down the steps to bend over the injured man.

“Find Dr. Middleton!” he shouted at Meredith Channing. “Bring him here.”

Keating lay at the foot of the stairs, bleeding from one ear, his body crumpled and one leg thrust out at an awkward angle.

He looked up at Rutledge, his eyes trying to focus.

“Never mind me. Stop her!”

Rutledge dared not leave him. He knelt beside Keating and said, “Help is coming. Don’t move. Where can she go?”

Mrs. Channing came back shortly afterward with Dr.

Middleton. “Grace Letteridge told me where to find him,” she said. “Now go do your work and leave Mr. Keating to the doctor and to me.”

When Rutledge came back up the stairs, he found Grace Letteridge in the Ellison kitchen. She was shaking, her arms wrapped around her body.

“I was certain he’d kill her,” she said. “Not the other way round. I was in the passage just now, listening. I couldn’t stay there on the street, not knowing what was happening.”

“Which way did Mrs. Ellison go?”

“She ran straight into me, pushing me out of her way, and went out the door. Inspector—I think she’s taken your motorcar. I heard the motor turn over.”

He went outside and looked. Somehow Mary Ellison had managed to crank the car and back it out of the narrow space between houses.

“Where would she go?” he demanded, turning to Grace Letteridge.

“I don’t know.”

He remembered Mrs. Channing’s motorcar at The Oaks, and started out at a dead run.

The motorcar had been moved to the side of the inn, out of the way of custom stopping there. He cranked it, stepped inside, and gunned the engine. It roared in his ears.

Had she gone north—or south? As he sat there, looking out across the fields, he could see lanterns bobbing in a line, the search party returning empty-handed from Frith’s Wood.

She’d have avoided them, he thought, and turned south.

He followed suit, running fast, his headlamps piercing the darkness. It was some time before he caught up with his own motorcar.

He could see it in the distance, tail lamps small red dots just vanishing around a bend in the road.

If he could catch up with her here in these rolling, barren fields, it would be better than trying to stop her in a town, where she could lose him in a tangle of streets.

Where was she going? What earthly reason did she have for fleeing? She might have stayed and faced Keating down.

But then Keating had opened the cupboard in the cellar.

There would be no facing that down.

Hamish said into the wind, “She doesna’ want to die in Dudlington. Or on the hangman’s rope.”

Somewhere anonymous, where she wasn’t a Harkness, wasn’t guilty of murder. A nameless woman taken from a canal or a river, buried in a pauper’s grave. The vanished Mary Ellison would be whispered about, speculation would be rife, but after a few months her name would pass into obscurity, untarnished.

The certainty grew as he followed her. Mary Ellison was choosing her own end.

Her husband had failed her somehow; and then her daughter, running away in defiance, had failed to reach the heights of fame through her art. Instead she’d married a man who was to become a common felon. Rutledge didn’t know what Emma’s sin had been, but he thought perhaps the fact that she was so beautiful had something to do with it. Mary Ellison had watched men making fools of themselves over the girl, and in the end, she had blamed Emma. No Harkness would wish to be a public spectacle. It was somehow—unsuitable.

Then without warning, his motorcar’s headlamps swept the sky ahead of him, leaping upward and then dipping in a wild arc.

His first thought was that he hadn’t anticipated her decision to crash the motorcar. They weren’t seven miles from Dudlington, her body would still be taken back for burial—

And then the delayed echo of the shot reached him.

Rutledge pressed down on the accelerator, sending Mrs. Channing’s motorcar speeding around the bend, only his driving skill keeping the tires on the road.

It was nearly too late by the time he glimpsed the other car skewed across the roadway in front of him, directly in his path, seemingly unavoidable.

His hand went out for the brake, pulling hard on it, putting his vehicle into a gravel-spewing skid.

Hamish was shouting at him, and he was fighting the wheel, wondering if both of them were dead men.

When the motorcar rocked to a hard stop, he was no more than two feet from his own bonnet. And through the windscreen he could see the driver slumped over the wheel, her head cradled in her arms, as if she had decided to stop and rest.

He was out and running, without thinking. When he opened the driver’s door, Mary Ellison fell into his arms.

Catching her, he laid her gently on the grass at the verge, then went back to look for his rug to cover her.

In the dark there was no way of telling where she’d been hit. Blood seemed to be everywhere, and he wasn’t sure whether she had struck her head against the windscreen or if the wheel had caught her across the chest. He brushed back her hair and found the thin line of a cut there, blood welling out of it and into her face. It wasn’t deep enough, he thought, to account for a gunshot wound.

There was a long gash on her chin, half hidden by the collar of her nightdress, and it was bleeding freely as well.

Working frantically, he could see her staring at him, her eyes wide in her face. “I don’t want to lie in Dudlington.

There’s an unused grave in London,” she managed to say.

“Be still, don’t talk.”

She made an effort to bring her hand to her chest. “It hurts.”

And he realized that most of the blood came from there, not the cut on her forehead or the scrape on her chin. This time the shooter hadn’t missed. Rutledge tried to stuff his handkerchief into the wound, binding it tight with the belt from her nightdress, but he wasn’t a doctor, there was no way to save her.

“Not in Dudlington,” she repeated, trying to catch his hand and make him promise.

“What had your husband done?” he asked. “Why did you kill him?”

“He’d developed a taste for gambling. He was on the verge of losing all we had.”

“And Emma? What had she done, to deserve to die?”

“She found her mother, when she went looking for that cursed bow and quiver.” The face that had showed no emotion until now began to crumple. “I couldn’t let my granddaughter go back to London to live with a common criminal.

Even if he was her father. And after—after she’d found Beatrice, there was no turning back. It broke my heart.”

Her breathing changed, and he could feel her body struggling to draw in air, her lungs fighting the injury.

“If I tell you something, will you bury me in London?” she asked rapidly, trying to hold on to consciousness.

“I can’t promise—”

“Then I’ll take what I know with me.” Her eyelids flut-tered a little, and then, without warning, she was gone.