A cold treachery - Charles Todd [16]
The wind had died and with it the squalls of snow. With his torch in his hand, he surveyed the overturned vehicle, thinking that by this time—if he hadn't come along the same road—Janet Ashton would be dead.
“She was verra lucky,” Hamish agreed. “And who will res-cue us?”
Ignoring the jibe, Rutledge got out to walk warily to the road's edge. His policeman's brain was registering details even as a part of his mind was picturing himself pinned under the overturned motorcar. It would have been, he thought, an easier way to die than most, to fall asleep in the cold night air. Was this the fate of the missing child? It would be ironic indeed if the weather had claimed the murderer as well! A fitting justice, in a way.
What appeared to be a valise was just a white hump beyond the place where he had trampled the snow to get Janet Ashton out of the carriage. It had been tossed some feet away by the impact of the carriage's tumbling fall. And the off wheel, he noted, was cracked. But the horse, tangled in its traces, was pointing in one direction, the vehicle in another. It was nearly impossible to judge where Miss Ashton had been heading when she had skidded wildly off the road. And he hadn't thought to ask her. She had seemed so vulnerable—detached from the tragedy that had taken place in Urskdale but a victim of the same storm. The miracle wasn't that someone had found her in time, but that she had survived at all. It had been a nasty spill. Satisfied, he flicked off the torch.
Hamish said as Rutledge returned to the idling motorcar, “If she had broken her back, you couldna' ha' dragged her up that slope.”
“No.” Moving her could have killed her or crippled her terribly.
Releasing the brake, Rutledge turned the motorcar with great care and continued on his way.
But Hamish, responding to the weariness that still dogged Rutledge, was in a mood to bring up unpleasant subjects.
He ranged from the case just ended in Preston to the letter that had come from Scotland the day before Rutledge had traveled north. This had invited him to spend the Christmas holidays with his godfather, David Trevor. And he had answered that the weather was too uncertain to plan on driving north in December.
“It couldna' be any worse than this night.”
Rutledge argued for a time and then fell silent, unwilling to be drawn again.
Hamish was not satisfied, and kept probing at what he knew very well was a sore subject. It was not David Trevor that Rutledge was avoiding but his houseguest, the woman Hamish should have lived to marry. . . .
CHAPTER SIX
The stars were just visible as Rutledge drove into the small community hugging the roadside. Shops and houses mingled against the backdrop of the lake on the right and in the shadow of high peaks to his left. The main thoroughfare was churned into muddy ruts, freezing over in the predawn cold and cracking under his wheels. Another quarter of an hour or so, and it would be morning. But now the windows were dark, the streets empty. The door to the police station was shut, and no one answered his call as he stepped inside. He went back to the idling motorcar and began to search for his lodgings.
A long ridge loomed above the village, its irregular outline smooth in the darkness, the rocky slopes shapeless under their white blanket. As if concealing their true nature. Below, Urskdale was oddly quiet, almost withdrawn. Rutledge soon found the rambling stone house that served as the local hotel—hardly more than a private home with rooms to let in the summer for walkers.
Someone had shoveled out the drive after the earlier storm, and the new fall was not as deep. Rutledge made the turning with ease and continued past the side of the house into the