Hunting Shadows: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery (20 page)

The next morning, following Constable McBride’s directions, Rutledge found the drive leading up to the farm and was met there by a large Irish wolfhound who sniffed his boots and followed him up the broad pair of steps.

The house was a little grander than that of the Swifts or the Burrowses, and there was a large bed of flowers where the drive looped in front of the door. Although as Hamish was pointing out,
drive
was more or less a courtesy term for the hard-packed clay that made up the roads, tracks, and lanes in the Fen country.

A young woman answered his knock and told him that her mother was in. He was led to a sunny room in the back of the house where a new sewing machine had just been set up and was being tested.

Mrs. Abbot was plump, there was no other word for it, and as her daughter brought a stranger through the door, she looked up, her face flushed from attempting to thread the machine’s needle.

“Mama, this is Mr. Rutledge, here to see you. He’s from Scotland Yard,” the younger woman informed her mother.

“Indeed,” she said, straightening up. “Do have a try, Charlotte, your eyes are better than mine. Now then, Mr. Rutledge, how can I help you?”

“I understand Miss Trowbridge’s mother used to come to Wriston in the summer and was a houseguest of yours?”

The pinkness was fading from her face as she gestured to a chair, and she said, “My goodness, that was years ago. However did you discover she’d been here? Did Marcella tell you?”

“It was someone in the village.”

“I wonder who. Well, then, what can Miss Trowbridge’s mother have to do with Scotland Yard?”

“I understand that Mr. Swift and your brother vied for her attention one summer, and it resulted in a quarrel between the two men.”

Mrs. Abbot laughed. “Hardly men. I think they must have been all of seventeen. I was ten, and my sister was nineteen. She had gone to school with Helena in Bury, and in the summer holidays she invited Helena to stay with us for a few weeks. Of course with a new and pretty face about, all the lads were falling over themselves to attract her attention. When Herbert and Ben fell to, it was more a scramble than a fight, and Helena was dying of embarrassment. As I remember, it began with a promise Helena had made to Herbert Swift to come and see the new foal at his father’s farm. The lads didn’t speak for a fortnight or so, and then Helena was gone, back to Bury.”

“But would your brother have told you if that resentment had lasted?”

“They were far too young to be thinking of marriage. It was a summer’s infatuation, nothing more. Two years later, Helena was engaged to James Trowbridge.”

“Who was the village doctor in Wriston, as I understand it. Until his wife persuaded him to live in Bury.”

“Well—yes, that’s true. But you must understand that Helena had been brought up in Bury, her father had friends in Cambridge, and she was often taken to concerts and plays and the like. She enjoyed her summer fling on a farm, it was not her life.”

He was listening to something Hamish was saying—that Herbert Swift had not been happy as a farmer’s son.

Rutledge said, “Was it the visit of this girl from Bury that made Swift decide to become a solicitor rather than farm with his brother?”

Mrs. Abbot’s eyebrows flew up in surprise. “I’d never thought about that, to tell you the truth. Perhaps it was. But of course he married a girl from Ely. Not Helena.”

Still, Helena’s visit must have sown the seeds of discontent. Even a gentleman farmer’s lot was not going to satisfy a young man who had glimpsed another world, one where he had seen himself lacking the polish and sophistication to enter.

The question now was, how had that visit changed Ben Montgomery?

“And your brother? What has become of him?”

A cloud passed over her face. “Ben chose the Army. He went to Sandhurst, over his father’s objections. We’d had a military band come to Ely that summer, and we all went to hear them play on Palace Green. Ben talked of nothing else after that. It broke my mother’s heart. She was never the same afterward.”

“Where is he now?”

“Ben? He lives in London. We don’t see him very often. The Army changed him. He was such a sweet boy, kind to Shirley and me, always helping Papa and the men on the farm, and of course was the heir to it. But when I married he asked my husband to take it on.” She looked around the room. “I was born in this house, you know. I still live here.”

“And your older sister?”

“She married a trainer down in Newmarket. She loved horses, I wasn’t surprised when she brought Ted home.”

“How did the Army change your brother?”

“He was always such a skinny lad. You wouldn’t know him now, his shoulders as wide as a door, and three more inches in height. But that was all right, you know. It was the grimness about him that made him a stranger to us. When I said something about that, he told me that he killed men for a living, and it was expected of him to live with it. I asked him why he didn’t walk away, and he said he liked the Army, most of his friends were soldiers, and he didn’t know what else he might like to do.” She glanced toward her daughters, then turned back toward Rutledge. “I shouldn’t have told you that. I can’t think why I did. I doubt I’ve mentioned Ben to anyone in a long time.”

“He survived the war, then?”

“Oh, yes. He was wounded several times and has the scars to prove it, so he says. But he’s still a serving officer.”

He asked for Montgomery’s regiment and she told him.

It had seen heavy fighting in the first days of the war.

“Is he married?”

“He was courting someone, but nothing came of it. The Burrows girl. But her father wasn’t keen on their marriage. And she’s never found anyone else.”

A tangle of lives, he thought, and it would be up to him to sort out whether or not Marcella Trowbridge’s mother had set in motion something that had seen two men killed and one wounded.

“Did your brother know a Major Clayton? Or Captain Hutchinson?”

“I have no idea,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not something he’d mention in his letters. They’re usually no more than a few words to tell us he’s well and to ask after us. As if he doesn’t know what else to say.”

“Mama,” the younger daughter interrupted diffidently. “Charlotte has the needle threaded at last.”

“Wonderful, my dear. Thank you. Is there anything else, Mr. Rutledge? I don’t think I’ve been very much help.”

But she had. He thanked her and left.

What he’d learned from Mrs. Abbot warranted traveling to London, but he was reluctant to leave the Fen country just now. He drove back to Wriston, intending to go on to Ely, but as an afterthought he stopped at Miss Trowbridge’s door and asked if he could speak to her.

She greeted him coolly but allowed him to come inside.

For once Clarissa was awake, and she examined him with interest, picking up the scent, he thought, of the Irish wolfhound.

“I’ve just called on Mrs. Abbot,” Rutledge began, taking the seat he was offered. “I understand your mother came one summer to visit the Montgomery sisters.”

“She did. It was her first visit to the Fens. I don’t think she’d have come again if she hadn’t met my father. She liked Society, and there’s very little of that in Wriston.” Echoing what Mrs. Abbot had said, Marcella Trowbridge added, “Farmers and their wives work from first light to last. There isn’t time for visiting art galleries or attending the theater or musical evenings. It was the way my mother had been brought up.”

“And yet you—and your grandmother, who had this cottage before you—have been happy enough in Wriston.”

“You don’t know if I’m happy or not,” she retorted sharply.

“Yes, that’s true. Sorry. I was also told that Herbert Swift and Ben Montgomery quarreled over your mother.”

She smiled suddenly, lighting her face with brightness. “I’ve heard that story. They were only boys. The fight was broken up by the man who kept the windmill. Angus.”

“Angus?”

“He was a Scot. At a guess he left the Highlands to seek his fortune, and very likely he got no farther than Cambridgeshire before his money ran out. I do know he was more or less adopted by the old man who kept the mill at that time. Mr. Sherborne had no son, and Angus had no father. They hit it off, and Angus took over the mill when Mr. Sherborne was too ill to work it any longer.”

“Where is this man Angus now?”

“I should think he’s dead. He left Wriston years ago, but I remember him from my childhood. A quiet, lonely man. He liked my grandmother. But at the end of each December he got terribly drunk—some sort of Scottish holiday—and then was completely sober for the rest of the year.”

“Hogmanay,” Hamish said, in the back of Rutledge’s mind, and before he could stop himself, he repeated the word aloud.

“I’m sorry?” Miss Trowbridge said, uncertain.

“It’s the Scots’ new year,” Rutledge replied. “Celebrated with food and whisky.”

“I don’t think Angus was very much interested in the food. But he did enjoy his drink.”

“You call him Angus. What was his full name?”

“I don’t think I ever heard it. He was always just—Angus.”

Another false lead.

“Why did the mill house burn?” he asked, curious.

“I don’t really know. There are any number of stories. It was a windy, stormy night, and I expect a lamp blew over. Our roof was damaged as well, and two of the blades of the mill were broken. There was more trouble in the village. Slates from the church roof, a few trees down, a chimney, and even a few flowerpots dislodged from steps and doorways.” She gestured toward the world outside. “It’s so flat, you see. There’s nothing to stop the wind for miles, and then suddenly there’s a village in its path. Without the mill we feared there would be extensive flooding. But the rain passed with the wind. That was all that saved us.”

He had a feeling she hadn’t told him the truth. But why would she lie?

He thanked her and rose.

“The mill house is said to be haunted. Or was,” she went on as she followed him to the door. “I don’t know if fire destroys ghosts as well as buildings.”

“How was it haunted?”

“Angus claimed it was haunted by his wife. I hadn’t known he’d been married, and I asked if she had died. He told me that not all ghosts are dead. I thought it an odd thing to say. But Mr. Sherborne claimed it was haunted too. I never knew him, but apparently he often told the story that two of the Dutchmen brought over to drain the Fens had played cards there one night. There were two versions of the story. One version held that it was on a Sunday that they were playing, and the Devil came and took their souls, leaving only their bodies with nowhere to go. The other version claims that they fought and one killed the other, but not before he’d been gravely wounded himself. And he died later of his wounds. He goes back to the house, looking for his friend, to make certain he’s dead.”

She lived here alone, out by the mill, Rutledge thought, but the stories seemed not to trouble her. If ghosts walked, she didn’t see or fear them.

But he thought she must be haunted in some way. He remembered finding her staring up at the mill, as if searching for something. Or waiting for someone?

“Who looks after the mill now?” Rutledge asked. “It’s still a working mill, is it not?”

“Yes, it is. Currently it’s the ironmonger who sees to it. It’s a hobby, I think, that he’s grown tired of, but no one else has come forward. The Rector offered, but then when it comes to machinery, he’s rather at sixes and sevens.”

I
n the afternoon Rutledge drove to Ely, to try again to reach Sergeant Gibson.

Clouds were building on the horizon now, and the air had that oddly heavy feeling that presaged a storm.

Rutledge paid a courtesy call on Inspector Warren before going on to the telephone, to report what he’d learned—but not what he suspected about the killer.

Warren smiled wryly. “You’ve not made much progress.”

“I’ve brought that list of ex-soldiers.” He took it out and spread the sheets across Warren’s desk so they could study it at the same time. “This is what I’ve discovered thus far. What do you know about the sort of war these men had? The ones with the question mark by their names. I’ve spoken to them, but I wasn’t satisfied when I left that they were in the clear.” He stepped back and waited.

“A little. But I’m not sure what you’re after,” Warren said, parrying the question.

“Have they been troublesome in the past?”

“The only trouble has been occasional public drunkenness and assault. It’s not unusual for a man who served in the war to find himself in an altercation with someone who wasn’t. I’ve told you, we don’t run to murders, here. Although you’d think, given the isolation of the Fens, that we’d regularly find a body or two in the ditches or under one of the bridges. There are people in Newmarket who might wish to be rid of a troublesome debtor or the like. But the thing is, people down there don’t know the Fens; they couldn’t hide a body as well as I could, for one. And since you can see for great distances, someone stopping a motorcar to toss a corpse into a ditch is more likely to be spotted than someone around, say, Norfolk, with its low hills.”

Whoever his man was, Rutledge thought, he hadn’t hurried into murder. He’d waited, and rid himself of his target in such a way that he wasn’t a suspect.

“Thornton. Ruskin. Brenner. What do you know about them?”

“Nothing professionally. Thornton’s family goes back a long way in the Fens—to the fifteen hundreds, I expect. There are memorials in the churchyard at Isleham to many of them. I’d be surprised if he turned out to be our man. Quiet, respectable, and no history of violence. Ruskin and Brenner haven’t been quite the same since the war. But they’ve done nothing out of character that I got wind of. Brenner was drunk once or twice, but as a rule he’s sober, and even if he’s drunk he stays in his house. Ruskin keeps to himself, is surly sometimes with his custom, but no better nor worse than the others.”

“It doesn’t mean they don’t have another life.”

“If they do, then they’ve managed to keep it quiet. There’s been no gossip.”

“What about Ben Montgomery?”