A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [85]
He pedaled steadily, without haste, a nondescript man on a nondescript bicycle, head down as if tired and looking forward to home and his bed. On the outskirts of Marling he turned toward Seelyham, his eyes already accustomed to the dim light and his ears picking up the night noises: the bark of a fox, off in the fields, an owl calling his mate from the deep shadows close to the trunk of a spreading oak, the whisper of wind through the autumn grasses and the dead stalks of summer. His tires made a rhythm of their own, soft and sibilant, never intrusive.
When he had reached Seelyham, he turned at the crossroads for Helford, a lone traveler with no company except his own. From time to time he whistled, not for his own sake, but to throw off any suspicion that he was himself the elusive murderer. The last thing he wanted, as Hamish had warned, was someone mistaking him for a killer and trying to get in the first blow.
Hamish, unhappy over the heavy shadows and fading moonlight, was wary, as watchful as he had been leaning against the trench walls in France. He’d had a keen eye for movement, while their best shot had stood at his side, with his rifle ready to fire where his corporal pointed. But there was no one here with a rifle, no one to stand guard.
Rutledge had once loved the night. He had been at home in the open spaces of the Downs or the dales of Yorkshire or the valleys of Wales. Like many Englishmen of his time, he had found walking a means of reaching out-of-the-way places where he was completely alone, open to the sounds and smells and mysterious moods of a land inhabited over centuries stretching back in time. Self-sufficient and capable of protecting himself if need be, he had never thought twice about the dangers or the loneliness. Neither superstitious nor overly fanciful, he had felt safe in the dark, however strange the place, however far from civilized society it might lie.
This, after all, was England. . . .
France had taught him a different kind of night. With star shells and artillery fire and snipers and dread of the first faint glow of morning when the gas came over. Night didn’t cloak; it concealed, and death lay in the blackness of a shell hole or behind the blasted trunk of a tree. Death came out of the night as often as it came out of the day, but in the night it could break a man’s nerve.
Such memories were only just beginning to fade a little. The space of a year had taken the edge off the tension and the watchfulness but had failed to put them behind him. The year had given Rutledge back the ability to sleep through a night, and to look people in the eye without wondering what they could read in his face. But Hamish was still there. His uncertainties were still there. And unexpected shocks still threw him into the chaos of self-doubt, an awareness of the changes that had not yet come. Might never come.
Hamish reminded him of the Roman candles at the Guy Fawkes bonfire, and Rutledge winced at the memory. It was stupid to react irrationally to fireworks. And yet fear and its blood-brother, self-preservation, were so deeply buried in the very marrow of a soldier’s bones for so long that they were hard to root out. To start at sounds and sudden movement, to act primitively and quickly, was the difference between living and dying. Even when he had wanted so badly to die, the body—and bloody luck—had taken the choice out of his hands.
Fear and courage—and boredom. The three faces of battle.
Rutledge threw off the past and concentrated on the night. But there was no one abroad, not on the roads he had chosen to take.
He paused from time to time, standing astride his bicycle and listening. Feeling the darkness, feeling the loneliness. The three men killed here were at home