A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [83]
Aldrich wasn’t the first to make a fortune from the war. But even Meade seemed to feel uncomfortable with that. He added, almost as an afterthought, “It’s no bad thing for Marling, to have fresh blood coming in.” As if in apology for his own eagerness to conclude this sale. “A widower, of course—”
Hamish observed, as Rutledge finished his questions and rose to go, “Yon Aldrich will be good company for Raleigh Masters, when there’s no one left to dine wi’ him.”
Rutledge smothered a smile.
THERE HAD BEEN no time to consider lunch, and Rutledge had bought a pork pie and apples at a small shop on the High Street before calling on Mr. Meade. He finished the apples as he made his way back to the scenes of the killings, drawn by reasons he couldn’t explain.
The roads were quiet at this hour of the day, and clouds were building to the east, over the Downs, threatening yet more rain. A cold wind had blown up as he came to the line of trees where Will Taylor had died, and he reached for his coat as he left his car.
What was there about these stretches of country roads, out of sight of witnesses, that had invited murder?
Rutledge had always depended on intuition, on a sense of what was there beneath the surface, unplumbable unless the mind was open to receive whatever swam up from the depths and into the light. He had no way to describe his intuition; he had never really questioned it. But something was there. Not on command—intuition was never amenable to conscious will. It simply responded in its own fashion, with an unexpected knowledge.
He walked the length of the line of trees, and tried to feel some response that would help him understand the terrible thing that had happened here. But nothing came, no small whisper of knowledge or breath of emotion. It was as if these trees, older than he was, open to the wind and elements, to time and space and seasons, had nothing to offer him except mute witness.
Here a man died. We don’t know why—
Smiling wryly at his morbid imagination, he went back to the motorcar and turned toward the other two scenes.
Hamish, always at his shoulder, unseen but never mute, had nothing to say, his mood dark.
Rutledge stood at the place where Kenny Webber had died, and listened to the soft soughing of the wind in the bare trees. He was standing so still that a small meadow mouse crept out of the high grass to stare at him before scurrying off to safer ground.
There was nothing, Rutledge told himself, that fitted any particular theory well enough to support it.
But the Shaw case had been much the same. . . .
No clues to the killer of women who had little to steal but whose pitiful treasures had offered a poorer man hope. It had been sheer accident that the police had stumbled on the name of a man-of-all-work who had come to help and ended up killing.
Would it be the same thing here? Would these two cases, seemingly so similar to a man tormented by the past, end up with the wrong suspect hanged?
He shivered at the thought, and turned back to the motorcar.
And Hamish, the practical Scot, whose family tree boasted feuding clansmen through centuries of bloody warfare, insisted, “It isna’ the same in the light. It isna’ the same . . . The murders happened at night.”
Rutledge stopped in his tracks.
And he was walking here in the light, where everything was different.
Even on the battlefield, the night had been different from the day. You could see what was coming in the daylight. You could prepare yourself for defense or attack. At night, sounds seemed to roll in from nowhere; movement was hidden and stealthy. A wind jangling the wire, a man coughing, the unexpected stirring of the rats—nerves, raw and alert, jumped like live things, and eyes watered with trying to pierce the darkness for the first sign of anything that could kill.
Rutledge said, “It’s true,” and bent to crank the motorcar, his mind already busy.
In the country it was not uncommon