A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [55]
Peter nodded. With a bob of his head toward Rutledge, he was gone up the walk to the door, where his little sister let him in.
As Burke got back into the motorcar, he said to Rutledge, “Not much there, I’d say. A fair man, tallish, and not from Kent. Well. I’d just as soon believe this murderer wasn’t one of ours!”
It was a familiar refrain—None of us would be guilty of such a thing. . . .
Hamish, who had reclaimed the rear seat for his own, commented, “Yon description would fit half the men in England.”
Burke was adding, “Like as not, he’d lost his way. There was a man dying that night, you know. Gassed. A good many friends came to say good-bye.”
But in the middle of the week, a working man couldn’t travel far. Most of the dying man’s visitors would have been Kent men, their accents familiar to the boy.
Rutledge was uneasy. Fair, tallish, and not from Kent. It was a description that also fit the man he’d thought for an instant he’d glimpsed at the bonfire. And again along the road near to where the last victim, Bartlett, was found.
Hamish said with relish, “You willna’ be satisfied until you find a rational answer. But there’s no’ likely to be one.”
Burke was saying, “All the same, I’ll ask for a list of the men who came to say good-bye to Bob Nester. The ex-soldier dying of his lungs. It’ll do no harm.”
AS RUTLEDGE CLIMBED the stairs to his hotel room, Hamish said, “The Shaw woman. She’s distracting you fra’ your duty here.”
Answering from habit, Rutledge said tiredly, “It doesn’t matter. I’ve given her my word.”
“Oh, aye? And these dead ex-soldiers. Did ye gie them your word as well?”
“What have we got so far to build with? A child’s description of a stranger? The wine? The fact that all of these men had lost limbs—that they’d served together? And they died at night. It will take more than that to find a killer.”
“If you were no’ so distracted, you’d see another link—”
Rutledge had hung his coat across a chair, to dry. He stopped as he bent to remove his shoes, waiting for Hamish to go on.
But there was only silence.
He said, “Where they drank the wine? I’ve already considered that. Someone had transportation. A cart. A wagon. A lorry. A motorcar . . . In some fashion, those men were lured into traveling with someone. Or stopping somewhere with someone.”
“But no’ in the empty house with its stone pillars. There was no sign that the grass had been beaten down.”
It was true. No vehicle had traveled up that drive since the summer. Rutledge had seen the tall grass but not registered its significance.
“If you were a weary man walking home on a cold night, and someone offered you wine for warmth and courage,” Rutledge said, pacing the room, “would you take a drink?”
“If I knew him, I’d no’ be suspicious. Except to wonder how he’d come by the wine, if he was poor, like me.”
“Yes. I agree. But if he was a stranger—”
“Aye, it would be different.”
And the difference would be the manner in which the wine was offered.
To drink enough to die from the laudanum, a man would have to be well on his way to being drunk. . . .
Apropos of nothing, Hamish quietly quoted an old toast: “Here’s tae us. Wha’s like us? Gey few, and they’re all deid!”
Rutledge shuddered. “. . . all deid.”
The words triggered a memory that had no beginning and no end, that was only an unexpected glimpse through the shadows of Rutledge’s mind. A resurrected image that made no sense and yet was as clear in that instant as it must have been in a very different venue.
The man by the bonfire—he ought to have been in uniform. But not an English uniform. A torn and bloody German uniform . . .
HIS ROOM WAS suffocating, closing in on him. Rutledge lifted his coat, still wet, from the chair and pulled it on again.
Better the out-of-doors, even the rain, than staying here and smothering.
He couldn’t understand why these bits of unrelated memory seemed to jump into his mind and then lead nowhere. What was triggering them? What was bringing them to the surface when—whatever they represented—they had been buried in the depths