A cold treachery - Charles Todd [104]
Hamish said softly in his ear, “Taylor, the escaped prisoner . . .”
Was it? Rutledge waited, silently urging whoever was there to come down the hill and into his line of sight.
But he stayed high, watchful as an animal. His attention was focused on the house still, and Rutledge realized that he would be hard to see from Hazel Robinson's bedchamber. The line on which he seemed to be moving was bare rock, brought to the surface by the rain and the sun's warmth. A shadow on a shadow, he thought, like a fish in a pool.
And then, finally, he was coming down.
Rutledge ducked out of sight, and said to Janet Ashton, “Stay here with the horse. Whatever happens. If he's armed, he might fire at anything that moves.”
“Don't leave me here,” she begged. “I don't want him to find me!”
“He won't. You're safest here.”
He was back at the shed door, listening.
The crunch of boots could be heard indistinctly. All at once, the sound stopped. And then turned away, moving fast.
Rutledge swore under his breath.
A good soldier could sense danger. Could sense the shift in the silence that told him someone else was there, concealed and menacing. Whatever alerted the man on the slope, he was taking no chances. By the time Rutledge started up the track, the man was lost in the darkness.
He could crouch down and stay unseen, like a rabbit outwaiting the fox. It would be impossible to spot him until one was nearly on top of him . . .
Nevertheless, Rutledge thought, I've got to find him.
But it was useless. After an hour of trying, Rutledge was forced to give up.
When he came back to the shed, he discovered that Janet Ashton was gone.
But who was the other shadow up there on the hill? Where had he been heading, the house or the hut, before something had alerted him to his own danger? What would he have done, left to his own devices?
It was just before dawn when the sound of the motorcar roused Rutledge from an uneasy sleep.
Sergeant Miller, square and sensible behind the wheel, said, “I hope it was worth missing sleep over, this wild scheme of yours.”
“It was a quiet night,” Rutledge answered him.
Miller grunted. “That's as may be, sir. You were lucky. Anything could have happened out here, and you had no way of summoning help.”
When he got to the hotel, Rutledge stepped into the barn and looked at Harry Cummins's mare. She was standing in her stall, asleep.
When he touched her neck, he could tell she'd been ridden, the sweat still stiff there in the hairs.
That explained how Janet Ashton had come to and returned from the farm—bareback, because with her sore ribs she couldn't have tossed a saddle over a mount's back.
Then how did the other night stalker get there? And what had brought him, if not the lure of the candle purportedly found in the hut?
When Rutledge came down to the kitchen for hot water to use to shave, Janet Ashton was sitting in the predawn darkness, holding a cup of tea.
“I suppose you intend to arrest me now. Returning to the scene of my crime.”
“You could just as easily have run into the murderer as you did me. And he could well have circled back while I was out there on the fell.”
She inadvertently shivered. “That never occurred to me, or I'd have stayed here. Are you going back today to look for tracks?”
“That won't do much good. The search party made it impossible to tell who was coming or going.”
“And so now you can't decide whether to take me into custody or trust your judgment that the other idiot out there in the night was the man you want.”
“I'm prepared to arrest both you and Elcott and then let the courts make sense of it!”
She caught the edge in his voice. “You haven't thought, have you, that Paul and I might be in this together . . .”
He took the candle stub from his pocket. And the cuff link he had kept.
“The boy broke this, either by accident or in a fit of temper. Do you know who gave them to him?”
She didn't need to look at it. “Hugh gave them to Josh on his birthday. Grace let him keep them in his own room. It was a mistake, I can see that now.”
“Why would he want to