Legacy of the Dead - Charles Todd [121]
25
WARY OF BEING FOLLOWED, RUTLEDGE DIDN’T STAY THE night in Lanark as he’d intended. The last thing he wanted to do was lead someone to the small clinic and Dr. Wilson. Instead he drove some distance beyond the town, then decided to continue to Duncarrick through the night. With scones, pork pies, and tea he bought at a pub, and Hamish to keep him awake, he let the smooth sound of the engine form a backdrop to his thoughts. His headlamps picked out road signs and the dark fronts of towns and farms as he mentally went back through all his notes, looking at every word with a fresh eye.
Well, reasonably fresh, he told himself as he finished the last of the scones. He stopped several times to stretch his legs or clear his head, the night air cool on his face and the moonlight turning the landscape into stark shapes of deep shadows and brighter patches. It was a far cry from France, he thought, where the long line of the battlefield had no natural definition, the trees blasted into black fingers of ruined trunks and the gentle roll of the fields destroyed in the shelling, with man-made twists of wire and humps of shell-tortured earth the only landmarks. A bizarre black-and-gray world where only the scavengers lived.
Except for a lorry or two, a skittering of hares racing across his headlamps, and once a wagon filled with crates of chickens on their way to market, there was less and less traffic on the road as the hours passed.
Hamish said, “Any decent man is at home in his bed!”
But Rutledge was at peace with the night. It was, he thought, a sanctuary of sorts, where there was no one else to overhear the voice in his head or the long conversations that sometimes tricked him into answering aloud.
Nor did he fear that the sniper might try again. In the night even a marksman would find it impossible to shoot at a moving target, a tire or a radiator, to send Rutledge careering into a ditch. But it helped to keep him awake, thinking about that as well.
“It’s a foolish man—or a desperate one—shooting at a policeman.”
“It was a warning,” Rutledge answered. “I’ve come too close to something. Or to someone. I’ve breached the outer defenses of a wall of silence.”
Hamish said, “It wasna’ a woman, to climb that far with a rifle.”
“There’s no way to be sure of that. But I rather think you’re right. I would give much to know when the first cracks appeared in that wall.” Rutledge smiled to himself. “I’d take great pleasure in widening them!”
WHEN HE REACHED Duncarrick, he bathed and shaved, went to bed, and slept two hours. Then he went in search of Constable McKinstry.
Rutledge ran him to earth making his rounds, coming back from the east end of town with a clutch of small boys in his wake. Their faces were long, downcast. Truants by the look of them. McKinstry dropped them off at the school, where a stern school-master had been watching for him. The boys went in through the door with the air of the condemned, dragging their feet.
“Future criminals,” McKinstry said, catching sight of Rutledge standing in a shop doorway. “But they’re not bad, really, they just have no taste for learning. I probably didn’t either at that age. And they’re fatherless. It doesn’t help.”
“It’s an excuse they’ll hear until they believe it.”
“Still, we make allowances.” The constable grinned ruefully. “The headmaster, now, he won’t.” As the grin faded, he added, “I thought you’d finished with us.”
“Not finished, no.” They turned to walk along together. “Do you remember, when you came to ask Morag if you could speak to me, what you told me about solving crimes in Duncarrick? You said you knew the people, and that that was often the key to finding who had stolen a horse and why—who had killed a lamb and why.”
“Yes. It’s true—”
“But in Fiona’s case, you were at a loss. You couldn’t draw on your knowledge of this town to find out who was persecuting her.”
“That’s right. I don’t have the experience to put with the knowledge.”
They crossed the square and dodged a milk dray lumbering past. Rutledge