A cold treachery - Charles Todd [122]
“Tea. The English panacea for everything short of the end of the world . . .”
She looked up from spooning sugar into his cup. “You're trying to be clever. Arresting Paul. Is it working?”
“Yes. No.”
“Who really killed Gerald and his family?” She handed him his cup. “Or do you even know?”
“There's something I've seen—”
“Then it's all right.”
“You don't understand.” He bit into the sandwich of roasted pork and realized that he was hungry. “What's the most common thing to be found in Urskdale?”
“Sheep,” she answered readily, and he smiled in spite of himself.
“Yes, all right, the next most common thing?”
“Rock. Of all kinds. Slate. Basalt. Volcanic.”
“And it doesn't show tracks. And even if it did, the snow would have obliterated them.”
“That's true, but—”
He took the broken heel out of his pocket. The ring of nails gleamed dully.
“So that's what cut your hand!” she exclaimed, staring at it.
“Indeed. Someone lost this, and you can't walk on rock with a damaged shoe. After a time, it takes its toll on the foot and the ankle. If you'd come all the way from the coast and had to walk out again, what would you need straight-away?”
“A shoemaker. Barring that, a new boot. But you'd have to send to Keswick for it.”
“Yet I've looked, and no one had a damaged boot.”
“And there wasn't time to replace it . . .”
“Exactly.”
She tucked the tea cozy over the pot and thought about it. “If you're saying that this damaged shoe belonged to the killer, I know where he could find a new boot. If they were of a size. Gerald's.”
Rutledge smiled. “Hamish was right. He'd said something about asking the woman.”
She was perplexed. “Hamish?”
“Never mind. I'm going to be out for a while. Say nothing about the heel, will you?”
He drove to the Elcott farm. Without Paul there to paint, the house had taken on a forlorn air. As if it had been abandoned.
Rutledge walked into the kitchen by way of the yard door. The smell of paint was still heavy in the air. And without heat the room had a chill that was permeating. As he pulled off his gloves, he tried to picture it as he'd first seen it. With bloodstains marking where five people had died.
No one had stepped in the blood. No one had stopped to make certain that each of the victims in this room had died. It was the last thing a child would attempt to do. An adult would be aware of the blood on the floor and avoid it. Especially with a torn heel.
There was a rectangular wooden box by the yard door which held an assortment of shoes. Wellingtons in various sizes, heavier boots for walking across the fells. And a pair of pattens for gardening.
He went through them one by one, matching them up into pairs.
And all the pairs were there. Each had heels, worn in some cases, fairly new in others, and a few caked with mud.
Rutledge stood looking at them for a moment, as Hamish said, “He wouldna' be sich a fool as to tak' only one . . .”
“Then where is his cast-off pair? The one with the missing heel and its mate? Am I on the wrong track?”
Hamish didn't answer.
“The barn, then.”
“Aye, but what if the heel was lost as he left the dale?”
“We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Rutledge carefully piled the shoes back into the wooden box and went out, shutting the door behind him.
The barn took a long time to search. He worked methodically, his mind busy with all the possible hiding places. Dust rose from the corners as he dug out old spades and tools, a yoke for a team, chains of various lengths, the broken wheel of a barrow, and an assortment of oddments that had sat idle and unused for generations. He raked out the stalls, searched the mangers, went through the tack room, and then found the ladder to the loft. It was in a far corner, buried under damp and rotted straw, that he finally found what he was looking for: a heavy walking shoe without a heel. And its mate.
Hamish said on the drive back to Urskdale, “Ye ken, this still doesna' prove much.”
When he had tried to fit the heel onto the shoe, the match had been good. And he looked at the size