A cold treachery - Charles Todd [81]
“Because,” Hamish said in the darkness, “it was too close to the Elcott farm.”
Rutledge made his way back to the house and shook the snow off his boots before stepping inside.
Elizabeth Fraser was there in her chair, her hand raised in alarm as if expecting him to attack her.
Hamish had already hissed a warning, and Rutledge recovered first.
“What on earth are you doing here at this hour?” he demanded, taking off his hat so that she could see his face more clearly.
“Oh, my God, you frightened me!” she was saying, catching her breath on the words. “Where have you been? What's happened?”
“Nothing has happened. I—couldn't sleep—”
“No, that's not true,” she challenged him, her voice still trembling. “There was someone out there—”
He wheeled to look over his shoulder, then turned back to her. “I didn't see anyone. I was walking back from the shed, passing the barn—”
She shook her head. “Not by the barn—it looked like a dog—and someone following it. Hunched over, staring at the ground.”
“If that's true,” he said, unable to keep doubt out of his voice, “you shouldn't have been here, you put yourself at risk. If someone had seen you—”
She heard his doubt. “I can't believe I dreamed it. It was real!”
“I don't understand how he could have slipped past me.” But he wasn't sure that that was true. Standing there, cold and tired, his attention had wandered in the last half hour.
He looked back at the night, the silent fell rising above him, the looming shapes of outbuildings, the stark patterns of white snow and dark shadows.
A dozen men could be hidden there. . . .
And yet his sixth sense, which had made a difference between life and death for four years of war, told him there was no one in the yard.
When he turned again, she was looking up at him, her face a white oval in the pale light of the snow.
“It's happened again,” she said in a whisper.
“Another murder?” he asked quickly.
“No.” She spun her chair, maneuvering it around the table, where the light couldn't reach her. Out of the darkness she answered him. “I—see things sometimes.”
“What are you telling me? Imagination? Dreams—”
“I don't know.” He thought she was crying. “It's a curse. I can't be sure what it is. Sometimes my eyes play tricks. Or my brain. I don't know,” she said again. “I wish I did. But it was so real. I couldn't move. I couldn't do anything but watch.”
But Rutledge thought he understood. She had been walking in her sleep. It was, perhaps, what he had seen before, on his first night at the hotel. Her restless mind, driving her, sent her out of bed and on missions of its own, and this time, inadvertently, he had awakened her by coming in the door.
“I wouldn't worry about it, if I were you,” he assured her. “You're safe now, and there was nothing out there but shadows moving with the clouds. Would you like a cup of tea? Something warm to send you back to sleep again?”
“You don't believe me,” she said forlornly.
“My dear girl, I do believe you. I've known men at the Front who saw whole armies coming towards them across No Man's Land. Straining their eyes to see how far away they were, and giving the alarm when there was nothing there. It's caused by anxiety when you know the enemy is forming up to attack, and the wait seems to tear at your nerve endings until you'd rather face it now than later.”
“I have no enemy waiting to attack.”
“We all do,” Rutledge told her. “Sometimes it's just a fear of ourselves.”
She was silent for a time. Then she said, “What is your enemy?”
He almost told her, there in the dark, where he couldn't see her face and she couldn't see his. But he was afraid to put his fears into words, and have to live with them tomorrow in the light of day.
“The war,” he said finally. “And living when so many died.”
“Yes. I understand that.”
He could hear her turn her chair towards the passage door. “Will you latch the outer door for me, Mr. Rutledge?”
“Yes. Good night.”
“Good night.” Her voice came softly to him from the passage.
He stood there in