Hunting Shadows: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery (33 page)

Somewhere they could hear a woman crying, soft mewing cries.

“This way, I think.” Rutledge moved swiftly down the passage, found an open door, and stepped into the room.

It appeared to be the master bedroom, very masculine, with dark woods and heavy drapes over the windows. There were no lamps lit. Rutledge stepped forward and flung open the drapes. In the pale light coming through the glass, he could see Miss Hutchinson lying across her bed. A pool of dark blood had soaked the sheets and the coverlet, and her hair was black with it.

Cowering by the washstand, he saw Mrs. Cookson, the housekeeper. Looking up with tears running down her cheeks, she said, “I tried to stop him. I thought he would kill me too, when he was done.”

“Where is he?”

“There.” Thornton pointed to the shadows beside the bed. The hurdle maker was lying there, blood blackening the front of his shirt, his head bowed. Rutledge went across to him and knelt by his side while Thornton bent over Miss Hutchinson.

MacLaren was still alive. Just.

He glanced up at Rutledge, his eyes a fierce blue. “It’s better this way. She told me. She took Catriona to the country and stabbed her. In a wood. Hers was the body the police had found, after all. My darling girl buried in a pauper’s grave. She feared her brother was going to marry Catriona. He loved her, she said. And it wouldn’t be like before, when he was away in France. I killed that woman in spite of her confession. She had no room for mercy. Nor did I.” The Highland accent was more pronounced now, as if he were too tired to care.

Thornton said, from where he was standing by the bed, “Too late. She’s gone.”

The blue eyes were dulling, his breathing more difficult. “Don’t tell Marcella it was the windmill keeper. He died long ago, anyway. He had nothing to live for.”

“But you continued to live as Lovat.”

MacLaren smiled faintly. “The Boers always said I couldn’t be killed. I tried drink. It didn’t dull the pain of losing Ellen Trowbridge. I tried to starve myself, and my body refused to quit. In the end, I came back to the Fens and simply existed. To tell truth, I’m glad it’s finally over. There will be no trial. No need to sully
her
name.”

He meant the woman he’d loved.

His body shuddered and the knife slipped out of his hand, falling down beside his hip. He paid it no heed. “I’m sorry for nothing. Except perhaps for the farmer, Burrows. He was merely a diversion. Still. It was his own stubbornness that nearly killed him. The wound was slight enough. I made sure of that.”

And then he reached out, his fingers fastening over Rutledge’s wrist. “Please. Tell them I killed for Catriona. A servant girl. But don’t tell them who Catriona really was. Don’t shame the memory . . .” His voice caught. Then it strengthened again. “I was always a killer. It was my skill, and they’d taught me well.
She
taught me love.”

The grip tightened, almost as a death grip, and then MacLaren’s hand fell away. The blue eyes were empty, the strong face now slack.

After a moment Rutledge reached out and touched the man’s throat. Rising to his feet, he said, “He’s dead.”

“I’m glad he won’t hang.” Thornton walked away to the window. After a moment, he added in a very different voice, “How do you cope with this sort of thing? God, it brings back the war!”

But Rutledge was bending over Mrs. Cookson, helping her to her feet and drawing her out the door. “Go down to the servants’ hall and send someone for the constable. Tell him to go for Sergeant Gibson at Scotland Yard. At once.”

She clung to his arm, still weeping. “I couldn’t stop him. He was too strong.”

“You did your best,” he told her. “Now you must go for the police.”

“But you
are
the police.”

He had to help her down the stairs, but when she saw the door standing wide, she seemed to come to her senses. She hurried to close it, and then turned toward the servants’ hall. He watched until she had shut that door behind her, then went back up the stairs.

Thornton was still by the window. “Am I a suspect?”

“Until this is settled. So far we have no rifle. And until we do, you’re under suspicion.”

He cleared his throat. “Are you going to keep Miss Trowbridge’s grandmother out of this?”

“Yes. And I’d advise you to do the same. All that matters right now is the hurdle maker Lovat whose granddaughter went missing in London.”

Turning, Thornton nodded, then added, “I feel like a fifth thumb. How will you explain my presence to the Yard?”

Rutledge looked toward MacLaren’s body, half hidden in the shadows by the bed. “I’ll think of something,” he said. “You’re a witness, after all.”

“I wish I hadn’t been,” Thornton said under his breath. Then aloud he said, “It’s different from the war, isn’t it? Murder.”

Listening to Hamish in the back of his mind, Rutledge said curtly, “Very.”

“Mary is avenged. Why don’t I feel happier about that?”

But it was a rhetorical question, and Rutledge let it go. He went to another room and found two chairs, setting them out in the passage for himself and Thornton.

And there he waited for Sergeant Gibson and the machinery of the Yard.

Chapter 20

W
hen the bodies had been removed and the master bedroom shut off, when Rutledge and Thornton and Mrs. Cookson had given their statements, it was finished.

Acting Chief Superintendent Markham made an appearance, striding into the house with the air of a man who was pleased to see an inquiry closed.

But Rutledge told him quite frankly that it was necessary to return to Wriston and Ely. “We don’t have the rifle, you see. Or the helmet. We need them to connect the dead man with the shootings there. Otherwise, that inquiry is still open.”

“See that you’re quick about it, then.” Markham rubbed his hands together in a gesture of satisfaction. “Took you long enough, Rutledge. But well done. Well done, I say.” He seemed to notice Thornton. “Who is this?”

“His name is Thornton. He’s been helping us with our inquiries.”

Markham looked the other man up and down. “He has the look of a soldier.” There was speculation in his gaze. “Certain he’s no more than that?”

“Not unless the rifle turns up in his house.”

Thornton threw Rutledge an angry look, but Markham said, “See it doesn’t.” And then he was gone, followed by one of his people.

“Who the hell was that?” Thornton asked. “I can’t say I like him.”

“He’s my superior,” Rutledge said mildly.

“More’s the pity,” Thornton retorted and walked out to the motorcar to wait.

Rutledge took two rooms in a hotel in Cambridge where they slept most of what was left of the day and started early the next morning for Soham. They had brought both motorcars in tandem, Rutledge’s and the one Thornton had commandeered.

Rutledge had remembered the message from Inspector Warren that he’d neglected to answer, but it could wait another day. In Soham, after restoring the motorcar to its still irate owner, they searched both the small house where the man who called himself Lovat had lived and the shop where he dried the reeds and made his hurdles.

All they found were the belongings of a man who lived quietly and frugally. Rutledge even emptied the dustbins, and there he found several bloody bandages. Had MacLaren been wounded by Burrows’s shotgun? It hadn’t been visible. And it hadn’t slowed the man. But here was proof.

Where then was the rifle?

Standing where Lovat was sitting when he first saw him, Rutledge looked down at the bottom of the unfinished basket the man had been making. A rain had fallen, and the reeds had begun to curl.

MacLaren had been a tormented man, and Rutledge knew a little about torment. But it was Thornton who said, “I think he was glad of a reason to die. Finally. Better than the hangman.”

The tone of his voice conveyed what he’d left unsaid, that he also knew what torment was.

After a moment Thornton added, looking up and down the stream that flowed quietly just beyond where they were standing, “He must have known all these waterways. He went out to find his materials for the hurdles. He could have stowed anything anywhere. It would take weeks to search.” Turning back to Rutledge, he went on. “Are you going to keep me here until you find the rifle?”

“If I must.” He walked back into the house. “He was a tidy man. I don’t think he would leave the rifle to be caught in a storm and ruined.” Stepping outside again, he said, “But there is one place he could be sure to leave something. Back to the motorcar, Thornton.”

They drove on to Wriston but didn’t stop until they’d reached the windmill and the ruins of the keeper’s house.

“Why here?”

“Because no one would connect anything found here with the hurdle maker in Soham.”

He got out of the motorcar and moved carefully into the foundations. Anything salvageable had been taken away long since. The rough stones of the foundation itself were still in place. The ground here was too low to dig a proper cellar, but there were steps leading up to what once had been the main door, and opposite them on the far side, a second pair of steps going to the small back garden and the path to the windmill.

Was this the reason why the ruins were said to be haunted? Because MacLaren had come here, like a shadow in the night, to retrieve what he needed?

Rutledge searched carefully, testing every crack and crevice, to see if it yielded anything that might be a hiding place. It would make sense, if Rutledge found what he was looking for here.

But there was nothing, not so much as a hollow behind those steps, no receptacle large enough for a rifle and the other things the man would wish to hide. Still—it couldn’t have been left where someone might stumble over it—a curious child or a scavenging Traveler.

Rutledge refused to give up, probing every inch of the ruins.

Nothing.

Where, then?

Thornton swore as he tripped on rubble. “He’d have broken his neck, coming here in the dark. He must have been more clever than that.”

“What are you looking for?”

The two men turned in unison. Marcella Trowbridge was standing in the road, watching them.

Rutledge said, “There has been a suggestion that the shooter might have left his rifle here.”

“But that’s impossible. Who would do such a thing?”

Rutledge’s gaze met Thornton, then he said, “Someone from Soham.”

“Oh. No one I know. That’s all right, then.”

He went on searching, to no avail, and then walked to the windmill. But that was now managed by the ironmonger, he remembered as he looked up at the weather-stained sails. It would not serve MacLaren to have the ironmonger pawing through his things, out of simple curiosity.

Miss Trowbridge was still there on the road watching. Rutledge said to Thornton, “For the love of God, go and distract her.”

Reluctantly Thornton did as he was told.

Rutledge moved on to the humpback bridge, scrambling down the embankment to look under the arch for a hiding place.

But there was nothing here either. And in a storm the high water would brush against anything hidden here and possibly dislodge it.

He clambered back up to the road again and stood there, wiping his muddy hands on his handkerchief.

Had MacLaren lied to him?

Or had he hidden his proof where no one would ever expect to find it?

Think,
he ordered himself. If it wasn’t the windmill house, if it wasn’t the bridge or the mill, where then? Miss Trowbridge’s house?

Hamish said, “He wouldna’ put the lass at risk.”

That was true. What’s more, she believed MacLaren to be dead.

What do I know about the man?

Rutledge stood there, searching through every fact he’d learned about the hurdle maker, and still he came up with nothing.

Was Thornton his killer after all? At the very least, of the two men, Thornton had easier access to the new army rifles than MacLaren did. After all, MacLaren had used a knife, not a rifle, to kill Miss Hutchinson.

He refused to believe it. It was Catriona who connected the two dead men. Not Mary Hutchinson.

Then where was the proof he needed?

A memory came back to him. The Green Man. The church and the feel of those cold, worn steps leading up into the pulpit, pressing hard into his back. The Rector, Mr. March, finding him there.

No, before that.
What had he seen in the churchyard?

And then he remembered.

The mausoleum. But Miss Trowbridge’s parents had not liked Wriston. They would surely have been interred in Bury.

He hurried back to where Miss Trowbridge was standing with Thornton. “Where was your grandmother buried, do you know?”

“She had a horror of being in the ground. There’s a mausoleum in the churchyard here in the village.”

“It must be locked. Most such tombs are. Do you have the key?”

“Do I—I never thought about it. I expect it’s in my grandmother’s things. My father was not happy about her choice. He wanted her to be laid to rest in Bury, beside her husband. But she insisted, and it was her money, after all. So she built it. I wondered if she hadn’t loved my grandfather very much. She’d married him to please her own father. He died quite young. She went away for a time, to mourn properly, she said. And when she came back, she wanted to live here. In this cottage bought for her. She told me several times that her heart was here, not in Bury.”

Rutledge said earnestly, “If there is a key, I must open the mausoleum. No,” he added as she started to interrupt him. “Only the outer door. It’s unlikely, of course. But someone could have found a way in.”

“That’s horrible.”

She turned, was leading the way toward her cottage, and inside, she left them standing in the small parlor while she went on into her bedroom. In a few minutes she came back with a lovely carved box in her hands.

“It’s from Africa, this box. She never told me how she’d come by it, but it held her most treasured things. I never felt like opening it. I still don’t. It’s—very personal.”

She held the box out to Rutledge, and he took it over to one of the chairs by the cold hearth. Clarissa stirred from her bed on the far side, then subsided into sleep once more.

“It’s locked,” Rutledge said, looking up from his examination of the top.

Miss Trowbridge, frowning, said, “I believe the key is there. On the side.”

And she was right. He found the key set into a small opening in the side of the box, invisible if you didn’t know where to look for it. Carefully removing it, he inserted it into the lock and turned it. Lifting the lid, he looked inside. Thornton came to stand beside him. Miss Trowbridge made a movement to stop him, and then stayed where she was.

There were papers inside. One of them caught Rutledge’s eye. In an elegant copperplate it said:

My Last Wishes. To be opened by my granddaughter after my death.

Rutledge glanced up at Miss Trowbridge. It was not his place to look at these papers. But Marcella Trowbridge had told him she had not wished to pry.

And so he broke the seal and took a sheet of paper out of the envelope.

Miss Trowbridge cried, “Stop. You were looking for a
key
!”

He had already seen a name. He said, “You must read this, I think.”

“No, I told you. She was a very private person, my grandmother. I won’t pry into her secrets now. It would be wrong.”

“You have no choice. Look.” He passed the sheet to her.

She gazed at him for a moment, then against her will, unfolded the sheet.

“Oh!” she gasped, reading it once, then going back to the beginning. “She wants—she wanted Angus MacLaren to be buried beside her.
Angus?
The windmill keeper? But why?”

“I believe it must be the same man,” he said carefully. “Perhaps he was a friend when she needed one.”

“But I thought he was long since dead. I don’t know what to do.”

Thornton spoke then. “He died in London this past week. I—happened to come across the obituary. Would you like for me to see to it for you?”

She stared at him. “In the normal course of events, I’d have asked Mr. Swift.”

“I owe Mr. MacLaren a debt,” Thornton answered her. “This will be my opportunity to repay it.”

Unconvinced, she turned to Rutledge. “I don’t know what to think.”

He said gently, “It would appear that she cared for him. You must do as she asked.”

“She liked him—she—I was so young, you see.” Frowning, she added, “I liked him too. I’ve told you that. But to bury him beside her? I don’t think that would be right.”

Rutledge handed her the envelope. “It’s what she wanted. You can see for yourself. She expected you to do as she asked.”

“But what will people
think
?”

“Does it really matter?”

“No,” she said slowly. “Not really.”

He went back to the box, and in it he found a record of the marriage of Ellen Trowbridge and Angus MacLaren. Next to it, he found the record of a child’s birth. Catriona’s mother, who had married a Beaton.

She hadn’t been able to keep the child. But she had kept this piece of paper, if any question had ever come up about its heritage.

Society wouldn’t have approved of what she had done. Not her family nor her friends in Wriston or Bury. It would appear that there was too vast a difference between the man and the woman in station and in everything else, in spite of his standing in his own glen. What’s more, according to the marriage record, he’d been two years younger. But they had found a way. And no one had ever guessed.

He felt a great sadness for Ellen Trowbridge and Angus MacLaren.

The Bower House . . .

Rutledge set these back into the box. He didn’t think Marcella Trowbridge was ready to learn the truth about the grandmother she’d adored.

At the bottom of the box, under the papers, lay the photograph of a small child sitting on the back of a pony. The background wasn’t the landscape of the Fens. A baronial hall and mountains instead. Catriona’s mother as a little girl? And beneath that lay the heavy iron key to the mausoleum. Someone had put it there. Had Angus been given another?

Closing the box, Rutledge gave it to Thornton, who handed it to Miss Trowbridge.

“What do you want with the mausoleum key?” she asked again, worried. “I don’t understand. Why would someone desecrate a tomb?”

“I’m only being thorough,” he said with a smile. “We were looking for something and thought perhaps it had been left here. By the ruins—er—where no one would think to look for it. Or in a mausoleum where no one would think to search. I shan’t disturb your grandmother. It will be all right.”

“I’ll come with you,” she said resolutely.

He glanced at Thornton. “I think it would be best if both of you stayed here. This is police business, after all. I’ll bring the key back shortly.”

Still she protested, and it was several minutes before Rutledge could persuade her that it would attract unwanted attention if all three went to the churchyard.

“It won’t be in her coffin, what I’m looking for. Just inside the door.” He hoped he was telling the truth. It was what he believed MacLaren had done. Which meant that there was another key to the mausoleum and MacLaren must have kept it on his person. He hadn’t searched the dead man’s pockets, he’d left that to Sergeant Gibson. The list of items would be on file at the Yard . . .