A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [63]
Gibson chuckled. “He wouldn’t be the first to turn respectable, and find old friends on his doorstep. Anything else, sir?”
“He’s a personable man, with a scapegrace way about him when he puts his mind to it.” He added as an afterthought, “He could be passing himself off as an ex-officer rather than a common soldier.”
Gibson noted it. “Not many of them in the stews of London,” he retorted dryly. “I’ll see what I can come up with, sir. But it will take a little time.”
Rutledge gave him the number at The Plough and rang off.
As he walked up the stairs, Hamish said, “Yon Ridger is a wild-goose chase, like as not.”
“True enough,” Rutledge answered. “In police work, we often close more doors than we open. On the other hand, Will Taylor was killed hours after he was questioned about Ridger. And our drunken friend tonight had been asked about him. I don’t want to find Ridger appearing as our cooked goose in the middle of a trial.”
THE NIGHT’S DREAMS were a mixture of unsettled thoughts and emotions—the sounds of gunfire in the dark, the flashes of light, the arcing descent of flares, the first finding shots of artillery, and Rutledge was hunched behind the barrier of the trench wall, waiting for a lull to go over the top. The living Hamish was with him, and others long since dead, and he tried to keep up their courage as the minutes wore on. And then he was standing in a twilit Kent road, talking to Alice Taylor, and searching through the hop fields for the boy, Peter Webber. Mrs. Shaw was sitting in the car, a baleful presence, with her daughter weeping in the seat beside her.
Rutledge woke with a start, his body wet with sweat, his eyes searching the room for something—anything—that was familiar. He had no idea where he was.
And then the shape of the window and the pale light of a moon feeling its way through the thinning clouds brought him back to The Plough Hotel and the small village of Marling.
He got up and washed his face.
Hamish, lurking in the shadows of the room, said something, and Rutledge shook his head. Hamish repeated, “It’s almost dawn.”
So it was.
Rutledge said, “The summer dawns came early at the Front. You never liked them.”
“There was no’ much worth seeing when the light strengthened. Except for the dead, and the wire, and the men coughing with the damp.”
“Or the gas rolling in.”
“Aye.” The Highland Scots, used to the open hills, had been good at spotting the telltale sweep of a German gas attack. All their lives they’d seen sea mists, and that particular floating gauze that was ground mist in the valleys. They knew the feel of the air before these blew in. And they knew the different feel of the air before the gas came toward them on still mornings when the wind wouldn’t disperse it too quickly.
Hamish had often been the first to cry a warning. They had fumbled for their masks, shielding any bare skin, and waited for the attack to pass over them. Anyone too slow, anyone with an ill-kept mask, breathed in the fumes and felt the linings of his throat and lungs burn with a fire that was unforgiving. The damage, once done, lingered for whatever remained of a man’s life.
Looking back at the past in that odd moment, there was something besides the haunting voice and the haunted man in the quiet, dark room. That bond that held together soldiers over millennia, the shared experience of the devastation of war.
17
RETURNING TO BED WAS USELESS; IT WOULDN’T BRING sleep. Rutledge bathed and shaved and then dressed, his mind occupied with murder in this quiet part of Kent.
Sitting in a chair by the window, he waited patiently for the hotel to rouse from the night, and then went down to breakfast at the appointed time. The dining room was empty, and a yawning girl was just opening the drapes that shut off the view of the street.
She looked up, smiled, and said, “I expect you