A cold treachery - Charles Todd [102]
“You think you're on to something, then?” Miller's face was alert, intrigued.
“Possibly. Yes. Will you do it?”
As if indulging a superior's whim, Miller answered, “I'll just get my coat, sir, and we'll be off.”
When Miller had left him at the farm, Rutledge looked up at the still, silent house, and felt a chill.
He was not superstitious, and yet the horror of what had happened here had left its mark.
The odor of fresh paint met him as he let himself into the dark kitchen, and he flicked on the torch he was carrying to make his way across the floor.
Hamish had been arguing incessantly with him for hours, and Rutledge found himself on the brink of a headache.
He climbed the stairs up to the small room where Hazel Robinson had slept.
It looked out across the yard and up the fell. He walked to the window, pulled up the only chair in the room, and settled down to watch. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Rutledge began to pick out details. The path he'd taken earlier. The sheep pen. The hut. And looming over them was the fell, massive and dark and somehow sinister.
Around him the house creaked and stirred in the cold night air. He could imagine people walking about downstairs, the way the floorboards groaned in the dark. Or someone on the roof above his head, moving stealthily.
War had inured him to the stirring of the dead. He sat there and waited.
The hours seemed to drag by. Watching the stars, he could see that time was passing. He had scanned them in the night at the Front, when all was quiet. The silence before an attack, when it wasn't safe to light a match for a last cigarette, and faceless men coughed or stamped their feet, their nerves taut as they pretended to sleep. The unrelieved tension had been telling.
Hamish was reminding him of the sniper who had crept forward, invisible, deadly, eyes sweeping the English lines for any indication of where a careless man might be standing, where the tension might drive a soldier to peer across No Man's Land and think anxiously about tomorrow.
“There will be no sniper here,” Rutledge answered him aloud, startling himself as his voice filled the small room.
It was well after two when he thought he heard the trot of a horse coming down the lane.
His eyes told him nothing was there, that the night was still empty.
Hamish was intent behind him in the darkness; Rutledge could feel it. How many nights had they stood shoulder to shoulder in the trenches, patient, alert, and yet drowsing as only a soldier can . . .
Yes, it was a horse. He could see it now, moving up the lane, a stark outline against the whiteness of the snow. The figure on its back was an uneven bundle of dark clothing, head and shoulders hunched together against the cold.
Man or woman? There was no way of knowing.
He waited, and the horse slowed as it approached the house, reined in and guided to the shadows cast by the barn.
It stood there for a time, not moving except for the swish of its tail and the occasional nod of its head as it chewed at the bit.
There was no saddle.
Rutledge could see that now.
After a time the figure stirred and dismounted. Holding the reins, it stared up at the house, and Rutledge almost had the feeling that whoever it was could see him, back from the window though he was. He kept very still.
Finally, as if convinced there was no one about, the intruder began to climb the track that led up from the yard. Easily seen, silhouetted against the snow, even without the torch that was flicked on to guide feet through the ruts that Rutledge and Drew and the searchers had made, it was not difficult to follow.
In time it reached the sheep pen and then moved on to the hut.
Rutledge, with only Hamish for company, waited.
The light seemed to lose itself in the hut's thick walls. He could see that whoever had come in the night to search was being thorough.
And it was a long time before the figure turned and made its way down the long treacherous slope.
Rutledge