A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [35]
“A lure?”
Rutledge put the sketch in his valise and then, on second thought, pulled it out again to keep with him. After a brief half hour given over to his lunch, he left almost at once, intending to visit the abbey.
He approached the abbey through a quiet parkland that led him to a stream crossed by stepping stones. And soon he was there, in front of the great arched ruin soaring into the gray sky.
Hamish said, “There are abbey ruins in Scotland. Burned by the Borderers who came for revenge.”
“I’m not sure these weren’t destroyed for revenge,” Rutledge said, looking up at the elegance of simplicity in design. The abbeys were wealthy, and wealth Henry VIII envied.
The monks had built well here. Something of what they’d done had survived Henry VIII by three centuries and more. The King had destroyed the abbey and what it stood for, but not the memory of its beauty. Or its greatness.
A strange place, Rutledge thought, to leave a dead man. Why here?
He went through into the nave, his footsteps alternately echoing on stone and whispering on the grass. The cloister was open to the sky, constructed for contemplation and peace, where monks could walk or sit in the noonday sun or pray in private.
He found the wax drippings from a candle, then the crushed grass where the victim had lain, but too many other feet had come and gone here, there was nothing to tell him about the dead man or who had been here with him.
He turned to look at the stone surrounding him, at the curve of an arch and the delicacy of a wall. Why here? Why meet here?
This was private property, the chance of being discovered at any moment was a risk that had had to be considered. Or did it appear safe, because it was private and therefore there was nothing to fear?
He heard a dog bark outside the church, and a voice call, “Is anyone there?”
Rutledge turned to walk back the way he’d come, stepping out of the nave to be greeted by a sleek Irish setter sniffing suspiciously at his heels.
The man standing some fifty feet away stared at him.
“Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard,” he said easily, ignoring the dog. “Were you the man who found the body?”
“I was.”
“And you are?”
“The undergardener. Hadley.”
“Did you notice anything the police might have missed, Mr. Hadley?”
“No.”
“Did you look at the man’s face, under the respirator?”
“I could see he was dead. There were flies about. I went directly for the police.”
“You didn’t look at the book lying beside the body?”
“It wasn’t beside it. It lay at his feet.”
“Open or closed?”
“Open, like a tent.”
“Not where the man might have been holding it?”
“No.”
“Could you or your dog tell how the man had come this far? Or how the killer might have left?”
“By the time I’d thought of that, the police had come and gone. There was a muddle of scents.”
“If you think of anything that might be useful, however insignificant it might seem to you, will you contact Inspector Madsen at once?”
“I’m not likely to remember anything more. The dog stood here barking, as he did at you, and when no one came out of the ruin, I went to see what he was on about. I wondered, just now, if there might be another dead man in there.”
It was a grudging admission.
“There’s a sketch of the dead man in my motorcar. Will you come and look at it?”
“I needn’t see it. I was here when they first took off the mask.”
“Did you recognize him? Or had you seen him before?”
“He was a stranger.”
“But the family might have known him.”
“It’s not likely they’d know a murdered man.”
Murder didn’t happen in nice circles…
Hamish said, “He’s no’ concerned with the dead, now. It’s no’ a part of his duties.”
It was true.
Rutledge thanked the man, waited until he’d called off the still sniffing dog, and then walked back the way he’d come.
Rutledge realized, driving back to Elthorpe, that what he’d been sent north to do was to put a name to the victim.