A False Mirror - Charles Todd [56]
“And yet,” Hamish put in, “she didna’ fear to send her husband out in the dark.”
Which was an interesting point. Mr. Cornelius was a prime target, if someone was intent on distracting the police from the attack on Hamilton by hunting other likely prey in the night. Rutledge shifted his emphasis slightly but that was in effect his next question.
“If you were concerned about who or what was out there, was it wise to send Mr. Cornelius to the police?”
She stared at Rutledge. “But he took Benedict with him. And besides my husband has no enemies.”
Over her head Rutledge and Cornelius exchanged glances. In silent agreement that she needn’t be told her husband had gone out alone.
“Neither, apparently, did Hamilton have enemies,” Rutledge answered her.
Mrs. Cornelius refused to wake the boy for Rutledge to question further tonight. “The problem is out there, not in here. I’ve told you everything my son told me. There’s been enough time wasted already, Inspector. If this ‘monster’ is to be found, you’d best hurry.”
In the end, he didn’t press, and Cornelius saw him out again with heartfelt apologies.
Walking back through the mist, Rutledge could understand the sense of unease that had triggered the boy’s fear. Nothing appeared to have its normal shape in this white shroud. A cat skirting a garden walk loomed large as it rounded the corner of a wall, as if magnified by the murky light. And a small boat, putting out to sea, seemed to be sailing into a milky curtain that clung to it and draped it until it vanished, a captive of some voracious sea monster. Rooftops appeared and disappeared, chimney pots were heads poking out of the swirls as if strange creatures were dancing there high above the street. A wandering dog knocked over a pail, and the noise of it rolled among the houses with waves of echoes.
He spent half an hour searching for whatever it was young Jeremy had seen, but there was nothing to account for it.
“The lad should ha’ been abed and asleep.”
And if the Nanny had caught Jeremy disobeying rules, he might have invented a monster to distract her. It had to be considered.
Rutledge had circled back to the head of Mercer Street and now stood still, looking down it toward the Cornelius house. The windows were dark, everyone settled in his bed. He found himself wondering who would see him if he raised his arms high, threw back his head and howled silently.
Chances were, no one. Perhaps whoever had passed here, briefly crossing Jeremy Cornelius’s line of sight, had counted on that. And in the mist, everyone was all but invisible.
A straying husband hurrying back to his wife. A drunk, hoping to find his bed at last, or a housebreaker taking his chances?
“Or yon doctor, on his way to a confinement,” Hamish put in. “It needna’ be more out of the ordinary than that.”
Rutledge turned toward the inn, grateful for his heavy coat against the night chill.
Odd that Bennett had sent Cornelius to him, he found himself thinking as the inn came into sight. The sign was disembodied, a floating man high above the street, catching the light from the lamp that Rutledge had left burning in his room.
Even with its tenuous connection to the Hamilton matter, Jeremy Cornelius’s ghostly figure was not a case for the Yard. Bennett had hoped to make him look like a fool, chasing a child’s hobgoblins in the middle of the night.
A not-so-subtle attempt to show the outsider that the local man knew what he was about, and at the same time, placating a prominent citizen in need.
Rain came an hour later, a downpour that went on until the eaves were dripping and the dawn was lost in the heavy clouds that seemed to rest on the very rooftops, replicating last night’s fog.
Rutledge awoke some forty minutes later than he usually did, the darkness in his room and the regular pattering of the rain blotting out nightmares, allowing him for once to sleep deeply.
The dining room was empty, his breakfast set out on the long table by the kitchen door. He filled his plate and