Hunting Shadows: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery (9 page)

There was anguish in his face as he finished. He had, Rutledge thought, managed to come to terms with his deafness. And then, caught in the midst of chaos, he’d kept his head until he’d reached the safety of his house. Only then had he given in to the shock.

“The man with the barrow. Could you see what he was carrying in it?”

“I seem to remember it was covered with a ragged cloth. I didn’t think about it again until the constable came to interview me.”

It had been the last thing on Mathews’s mind, that was clear.

“Are you sure he’d been leaving the Cathedral area?”

“I don’t know. He was ahead of me on the street, but he could have come from the pub just there or one of the shops. I expect I assumed he was going about his business when the excitement began.” His brows twitched together as he tried to remember. “People do cut across in front of the Cathedral. Every day. But I was at the barrier, and I hadn’t seen him there. He could have come from that lane running down beside the Lady Chapel.”

A man with a barrow. Anything could have been under that cloth.

It was a place to start.

Rutledge thanked him, and Mathews’s sister showed him to the door.

She said, as he stepped out into the late afternoon sunlight, “My brother is a good man. He manages quite well, actually. But he was very upset when he reached the house. I hope this is the last time you will need to interview him. It’s difficult to relive what happened.”

“We’ll try to spare him, Miss Mathews. But we’re searching for a killer.”

“Ask someone else, then. There were dozens of people there. Perhaps if they
heard
the shot they can tell you where it came from.” She closed the door, leaving him there.

His last interview was with a Mrs. Boggs, who was going to market, noticed the cluster of people by the Cathedral barrier, and stopped to see what had brought them there. Someone told her it was a wedding, and she’d stayed in the hope of seeing the bride arrive.

She lived in one of the poorer sections of Ely. She walked home daily from her work as a washerwoman for one of the large homes not far from the Sedleys’.

She was surprised and more than a little flattered to find Scotland Yard at her door.

As he asked his questions, he realized that she was more astute than he’d realized. Her red face, strawlike fair hair, and rough hands were a badge of her occupation, not her mind.

“What I know about guns,” she said, “you could put in a thimble. But I was watching that Captain Hutchinson coming across the grass. He was a well-set-up gentleman, and I saw him step out of his motorcar and offer the lady with him his hand.”

It had been Sedley’s motorcar and Sedley’s wife.

“Tell me about him,” Rutledge asked.

She cocked her head. “Nearly as tall as you are, a man to take notice of. Now the gentleman with him was quite handsome, but a little old to be the bridegroom. Still, you never know, do you? The Captain—they told me his name when they took my statement—was smartly dressed, as if his valet had taken special care. I do know something about valets. They like their gentleman to be well turned out.”

“What did you see just before he was struck by the bullet?”

“The lady was speaking to him, but he looked up, as if he knew something was about to happen, and then he was shocked, as if he couldn’t believe what it was. At first I thought the lady had said something unpleasant, but we heard the shot in the same breath, only I didn’t know what it was, I couldn’t think for the sudden noise. And he was falling over, and everyone was screaming.” She shook her head. “I never saw anything like it.”

“What do you mean, he looked up?”

“The way you do sometimes when you hear something you don’t believe.”

And Mrs. Sedley couldn’t remember what it was she was saying to Hutchinson just as he was shot.

“Did you see anyone by the gate that led into the precincts of the Cathedral, the one close by the Lady Chapel? Or anyone at all who seemed to be out of place? Either the way he looked or because of what he was carrying.”

“There was no one by that gate. Not that I saw. Why should there be? You couldn’t very well watch all the finery from there. As to anything out of place, I do remember something that struck me as a little odd. But for the life of me I can’t bring it back. Just something ordinary, you know, but I was in a state by that time, and it clear went out of my head.”

Try as he would, Rutledge couldn’t coax whatever it was from her memory. In the end he had to thank her and ask her to notify the police if she brought it to mind.

Back in the center of Ely once more, he found a telephone and put in a call to Sergeant Gibson in London.

Gibson’s voice as he came to the telephone had a cautious note in it.

Rutledge said, “Two of the people involved in these murders in the Cambridgeshire Fens came from London. I shall need whatever you can find about one Captain Gordon Hutchinson. He’s the victim in Ely. The other man is the bridegroom here, Jason Fallowfield. He was walking very close to the victim and might well have been the intended target. They’re distantly related, although they called themselves cousins. Most particularly I need to know if the second victim, the one in Wriston, had any connection with either of the other two men. Herbert Swift is the name. There’s no link we can find here—it must lie in London. Finally, there’s an artillery Major, one Lowell, first name Alexander. Does he have a connection with Hutchinson or Swift? He couldn’t have been the shooter. But he may have been involved in some way.”

Gibson said only, “That’s a tall order. Sir.”

Rutledge smiled grimly. Whatever was happening in London must be requiring a good deal of manpower, and Gibson was alerting him to the possibility of delays before he received any information.

So much for Markham’s dictum. Unless there was a break here in Cambridgeshire, there was no possibility of an early arrest.

He thanked Gibson, adding, “Give it your best try. That’s all that matters.”

Gibson was silent for a moment—Rutledge could hear voices, as though several men were walking past where the sergeant was standing. Finally in a rush the sergeant said something that was nearly unintelligible coming down the line, then added “Sir” before ringing off.

Rutledge would have sworn that what he’d heard was
new broom
.

An ominous sign.

Chapter 6

S
hutting the door behind him as he walked into his room under the eaves, Rutledge sat down in the only chair and gave the problem facing him some thought.

He’d seen the mountain of interviews that Inspector Warren had painstakingly collected. It would take days to sort through the rest of them, in the hope of finding something, anything to be going on with. His time was better spent elsewhere.

But there was still the question of the man with the barrow.

Rutledge made a note to deal with it tomorrow, and went out to find himself some dinner before going to bed.

But the room felt still, airless, when he came in again, and a little after two in the morning he could stand it no longer. He got up, dressed. The streets were empty and quiet when he let himself out of the inn door and walked as far as the Cathedral.

In the nearly full moon, it was at once imposing and mysterious. The silvery light shone through the Lantern, giving it a ghostly glow that seemed to emanate from inside. Where it could be seen from his vantage point, the roof gleamed like dull pewter, while below it the stone walls seemed to squat in darkness with very little definition, the occasional spire rising into the night sky, like fingers pointing to God.

The Palace Green stretched before him, full of shadows, the Russian cannon that Queen Victoria had dedicated on a visit to Ely black and ugly. Looking at it, he thought it had been an odd welcome for the wedding guests, but then it had stood there so long it was likely that no one noticed it.

He began where the motorcars had drawn up, at the top of the Green, then took the route that Warren had pointed out to him. There was no one else about, although he thought he heard an owl in the distance. He walked across the grass, now damp with dew, and stopped where Hutchinson had fallen. Standing there, he did what Major Lowell had done, turning slowly in a half circle, his gaze taking in every possible vantage point and then discarding them one by one.

There was no clear line of sight from the Diocesan buildings. It would have had to have been a head shot. But the killer had gone instead for the heart. Why?

The high stone wall, which began next to the Cathedral’s own walls, stretched down the road toward an arch that led into the school grounds. The same wall where a ladder had been placed. Neither Inspector Warren nor his constables had discovered who had put the ladder there. But again the angle was wrong. A bullet from there would have had to traverse the chest, exiting below the left arm after striking the heart. The head would have been a more certain target.

Hamish spoke into the silence. His voice seemed to echo ominously through the darkness. “Yon battlement.”

Looking up at the dark mass of the great west tower, Rutledge was inclined to agree with him. But a constable had climbed up there and found nothing. And it was very exposed, more so than the gate on the far side by the Lady Chapel. Any of the arriving guests might have looked up at the wrong time, attracted by movement—even a pigeon flying up—and spotted the killer. He would have been well and truly trapped, no way out but through that single tower door inside the Cathedral itself. He couldn’t have hidden, unless he was dressed as a guest and could mingle easily. But that meant abandoning the rifle until it was safe to go back for it. Where in hell’s name could he have hidden it? The killer must surely have known that someone would climb up there to have a look. But he couldn’t have come through the tower door with it, hoping to secret it somewhere else. Even broken down, it would have been difficult to conceal. Inspector Warren had even searched the organ pipes.

And yet, if he’d been the killer, Rutledge knew he would have taken his chances there because it was the most certain platform from which to make his shot.

While the gate on the north side was exposed as well, at least there were choices of direction for the man’s escape. And that’s where the cartridge casing had been found.

But a cartridge casing could be dropped anywhere, far from where it had been ejected. The killer could have come down from the tower, left the Cathedral by a different door, and then as he came around the apse and the Lady Chapel to that gate, lost the casing without knowing it.

Misdirection? Both the ladder against the wall and the dropped casing?

“Ye ken,” Hamish said after a moment, “it isna’ sae important to know how it was done. He’s sae verra’ clever, he’s killed twice withoot being seen, save for the auld woman who swore she saw a monster.”

“Not much to go on, that monster,” Rutledge answered aloud with a wry smile.

“Aye, it’s verra’ similar to the problem here.”

“Yes,” Rutledge answered slowly. “Misdirection again. But tomorrow I’ll climb to that tower.”

And shortly after breakfast, when the sun was bright and a mist clung to the lower-lying villages, hiding them from sight, Rutledge came back to Ely Cathedral, and without much notice being taken of him, he wandered about for a time. Much to the horror of Hamish’s Covenanter soul, who had a distaste for ornamentation and splendor that smacked of Popery.

He’d walked down to the choir and thence to the Lady Chapel, exploring as a policeman rather than a worshipper, made his way back to the Galilee Porch, and from there went unchallenged to the tower door. It was a climb. Two hundred eighty-eight steps, unless he’d missed his count. But in the end he came out onto the battlemented top of the tower.

It was a dizzying height. Two hundred feet or more, with splendid views over Ely and across the surrounding Fens.

The constable had been right, the slope of the roof made it difficult to walk around, offering little or no space for footing.

Instead of walking, he got down on all fours and crept around to the position he was looking for. When he came to a spot where he could look down, he saw that he had a perfect view of his field of fire.

He could see where Hutchinson had fallen so clearly that he himself could have taken that shot.

He knelt there, thinking it through, ignoring Hamish in the back of his mind.

There was still the problem of getting the rifle safely away. But the man couldn’t have made the shot with any other weapon. It was too far for a revolver, and by the time Captain Hutchinson had come that close, the man would have had to stand to aim.

There was no proof he was right, of course. But it had been a daring plan, if this had been the place the killer had chosen.

And that was a measure of what the man had felt toward Hutchinson. A savage hate, to take such a risk. Or a cold one?

Which meant, Rutledge realized, that of the two victims, it was Hutchinson who had been the more important one. Herbert Swift could have waited. Days. Weeks. Hutchinson would only be within reach for a stated length of time. And as Inspector Warren had pointed out, the wedding ceremony was the only public appearance the Captain had made. The private parties and dinners hadn’t been announced, there was no way to plan for any one of them. But here—here at the Cathedral, Hutchinson would be certain to appear, and
that
fact had been known for some time.

Rutledge couldn’t blame Inspector Warren for not working it out the way he himself had. Warren had been the man on the scene, he’d had to deal with the bride’s irate father, the Bishop and the Colonel and all the other important men connected to the family. He’d had to depend on his constables to do much of the legwork. Those endless statements had taken time, and the pressure to find the killer had built with each passing day. But Warren had only had a handful of days. Swift was killed then, and a second inquiry had been set in motion, stretching his resources to the limit.

Damned on every side, he’d at least had the courage to ask the Yard to send someone. And he had cooperated fully when Rutledge arrived, knowing he was acknowledging his own failure.

Rutledge could respect that.

He made to rise and move away from the space between two blocks of stone where he’d been crouching, when he realized what it was Hamish was saying to him.

Caught on a bit of rough stone was a single gray strand of cloth, so nearly the same color that it was all but invisible.

He gently tugged at it and brought it free. Worn cloth, he thought, and easily snagged. But how had it got here? More important,
when
? That was the question. And unfortunately there were any number of answers. All the same, if he’d been a betting man, Rutledge would have wagered that it had been the cloth with which the killer had wrapped himself and his rifle, shielding both from view. It made sense. The color alone was not likely to have come from a casual visitor’s clothing. It matched too perfectly.

Taking out a clean handkerchief, Rutledge laid the tiny strand of cotton there and folded it again.

Satisfied, he left the tower and climbed down the multitude of steps once more, carefully opening the door and finding it a simple matter to slip out of it unnoticed. But then there was no wedding today. He had just reached the west door when a man in clerical dress came out of the sanctuary. Rutledge turned.

“Beautiful building, isn’t it?” the man said, his accent strong Scots.

“It is indeed,” Rutledge answered.

The man nodded and went on his way.

Rutledge watched him as he strode out of sight, his mind elsewhere.

After a moment he said, “I’m going back to Wriston. There are too many people involved in what happened in Ely. If I find anything there, I can backtrack to this place.”

Hamish said, “Aye, but will you tell yon Inspector what you found?”

Rutledge shook his head. “Not yet. Not until I can be sure.”

I
nspector Warren was not best pleased to hear that Rutledge was already leaving Ely.

“Giving up, are you?”

Rutledge said, “Early days for that. No, I’ve spoken to those witnesses, and I’ve looked at the ground. I don’t know that we can learn any more here at this stage. What I hope to discover in Wriston is whether or not someone else saw Mrs. Percy’s monster. Surely someone did, and hasn’t had the courage yet to come forward. Would you willingly admit you’d seen something that you couldn’t explain?”

“I probably would, if asked by a policeman,” Warren answered stiffly.

“Yes, perhaps you’d speak to him. But not to your local constable, who would be sniffing your breath or wondering if you’d fallen down and hit your head. You would know full well the constable would file away your vision along with Mrs. Percy’s and remind you of it later, when next he saw you staggering down the High at closing.”

Warren grudgingly agreed, striving to keep amusement out of his gaze.

“Our quarry was faultless here. He’d planned meticulously for this kill. He couldn’t have got away with it if he hadn’t. And then he tried again. He might have been careless.” Rutledge paused. “And if he wasn’t, he could well be searching for a new target, because he knows we can’t touch him. Yet.”

“I hope to God you’re wrong.” Warren took a deep breath. “The Chief Constable is already demanding answers, and he’ll be in
your
face if there’s another murder. The wedding was bad enough, given who was attending, and then Swift on top of that.”

But there was very likely to be a third, Rutledge thought. He could almost feel it.

He was halfway to the street when he remembered the barrow. Turning, he went back to Warren’s office, poked his head around the door, and said, “The deaf fellow. Mathews. He saw a man with a barrow walking away from the scene. After any number of people had rushed past him toward the Cathedral, he left the barrow and went to see for himself what the excitement was about. He’s not likely to be our man, but if we don’t follow up on him, we’ll never know for certain.”

“Any idea what was in that barrow?”

“According to Mathews it was covered by a cloth.” He thought about the strand of gray cotton in his handkerchief. Had it come from that barrow? It would be luck indeed if it had. But where was the barrow’s owner now? Much less that cloth—long since tossed into a tip?

Inspector Warren was nodding. “Very well, I’ll see to it. Do you think Mathews can identify him? There must be twenty or more men with barrows in Ely.”

“We’ll have to trust that he can.” Rutledge thanked him, went back to The Deacon, thought about it, and walked on to Teddy Mathews’s house.

He was in and alone. Rutledge apologized for coming in unannounced, when the man’s sister was away.

Mathews shrugged. Rutledge said, speaking clearly, “The barrow the man abandoned to run back toward the Cathedral. You said there was a cloth thrown over the contents.”

He handed his notebook to Mathews, who took up the pen and wrote on the first empty page he came to
, I expect I ought to have said sacking. It was so filthy you could hardly tell that once it had been yellow.

Yellow, then. Not gray.

He’d probably sent Warren’s men on a wild-goose chase. Still, he was reluctant to rescind the request. And who knew what lay under the sacking? Whatever color it had been.

He thanked Mathews, who scribbled something more on the page, then passed the notebook back to Rutledge.

I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help.

“You’re a good witness,” Rutledge assured him, then took his leave.

At The Deacon Inn, Rutledge asked Reception to hold his room but took his valise with him and set out for Wriston, stopping briefly for petrol.

It was a village, not a town. Fewer people were involved. Ely was the proverbial haystack, and for all anyone knew, the needle was already back home in Soham or Burwell, even London. Wherever he’d come from.

Hamish said as Rutledge threaded his way through Ely to the Cambridge Road, “For a’ anyone knew, he was walking the mist in Wriston.”