A cold treachery - Charles Todd [70]
“God, but you gave me a start, man! Did you ever think to knock?”
“What are you doing here?”
Elcott gestured towards the bucket of water and scrub brush.
“Someone's got to clean this room. And if I'm going to live here now . . .”
One side of the room was nearly clean, the rusty stains only a faint streak in the paint now.
“I thought you lived above the licensed house.”
“The bank won't give me any more money. Not with Gerald dead. I'll lose the place before the month is out. There's nowhere else to go.”
Rutledge thought, I don't envy him, living here with the ghosts.
Hamish said, “Aye, but if he wanted the farm enough to kill for it, ye ken it's timely.”
Rutledge looked again at the bloodstains, at the devastation that represented the abrupt end of five lives. Even when he first stepped through the door here, something had bothered him. A sense of evil and ugliness.
It was hard to believe that a child could have done this.
Elcott seemed to know what had been passing through Rutledge's mind. “I shan't have anywhere else to go!” he said in self-defense. “What am I to do?”
“Did your brother own a handgun?” Rutledge asked. If Josh had killed his own family, where had the revolver come from?
“He never had a hope of reaching it in time, if he did. With small children about, he'd have kept it locked up in his bedroom or out in the barn . . . If I'm to finish here before dark, I need to be about it.” Something in his voice hinted at a fear of the dark in this place. . . .
“Yes, go on. I have other business here.”
Elcott waited, but Rutledge didn't explain. Finally he got to his knees again and began to scrub, but the stiffness across his shoulders indicated that he was all too aware of the policeman by the door.
Rutledge walked outside, going through the barn with some care, looking for trapdoors, looking for some sign that someone had taken refuge here after the searchers had departed. But there was nothing. No makeshift beds, no sacks pulled into a dry corner, no cache of tins or biscuits or anything else a boy might live on. The same was true in the outbuildings. But then the police had already done this search earlier.
He walked out into the yard again and scanned the slopes of the fell, searching for—what?
Hamish said, “An observation post . . .”
To begin with, perhaps. But nearly a week had passed since the murders. Without food, with only cold snow for water, and with little protection during the cold nights, how could a child have survived?
But then this might have been a child with murder on his soul . . . and surviving was the reason for killing.
It would depend, Hamish was reminding him, on how far ahead the boy had planned.
Or, Rutledge found himself thinking, on how Josh Robinson had felt about the bloody shambles he'd fled. He could have carried out the murders and then, overwhelmed by the horror of what he'd done, he might have run too far and lost himself in the unfamiliar night, the unfamiliar snow. And never had the strength to find his way back.
Rutledge went back to the house, this time entering through the front door, climbing the stairs to the bedrooms.
Searching more carefully than he'd had a chance to do in Inspector Greeley's presence, he went through drawers and cupboards trying to find something that defined the dead. Letters—more photographs—
“It isna' a house wi' secrets,” Hamish grumbled.
And that was true. Nothing was concealed. It was as if the family had never felt it had to hide anything. The handful of letters he came across were innocuous, hardly more than everyday accounts of events. Seven from Janet Ashton, three from Robinson. If there had been other letters, they were gone now.
He found a book of accounts in a desk in Gerald and Grace Elcott's bedroom, and turned through the pages, recognizing that the farm was relatively prosperous. Another factor pointing in Paul Elcott's direction.
An album of pressed flowers on a shelf by the bed must have belonged to Grace. She had collected these blooms, pressed them with care, and identified