Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [53]
The grin had faded. Walsh said angrily, “I didn’t kill any man, with or without help! Except in the War, when I was paid to do it. Are all policemen deaf, or is it that you can’t do your work properly?”
Rutledge responded quietly. “You bought yourself a new cart.” Behind him he could hear Blevins fuming. But the trick with a man like Walsh was to encourage braggadocio. To let him tweak the noses of the police.
“Aye, with the savings from letting Iris go. The old one had got worm in it, sitting in a shed all the time I was away fighting. It had to be replaced. I didn’t have any choice!”
“If you didn’t kill Father James, who did? You were at the bazaar. Did you see anyone looking for a chance to pick up money?”
“Pickpockets, you mean?” Walsh asked. “There were two, but a constable run them off soon enough. Men in the line of housebreaking don’t come to church bazaars. The bloody things are advertised everywhere you look! In shop windows, on pasteboards or lampposts. Invitation to robbery, right out in the streets! All they have to do is watch for a family to leave for the day.”
“We’ll make a note of that,” Rutledge assured him. “Will you tell us where to find Iris now? We’d like to hear what she has to say about killing a priest.”
Walsh shrugged. “London, probably. How do I know? She didn’t work out, and I let her go. She wasn’t what you’d call happy about it, either. But business is business.”
“What’s her full name?”
“Iris Kenneth is what I knew her by. I’m not saying it was her true name. She’s a shill by trade—you know, standing in front of a show like mine and talking it up. Used to work for a Gypsy fortune-teller from Slough, name of Buonotti—Barnaby, he called himself. Italian he was, went home to fight in the War and never come back. So she was at loose ends, and suited me just fine.”
Blevins said, “What did you promise her, Walsh? That you’d take her on again if she helped you? Or was there someone else who owed you a favor?”
Walsh’s laughter was a deep rumble in his chest that welled up and spilled over into a bass chuckle. “I’d have had to promise to marry her to get her to come in with me again. And I’m not the marrying kind! Not yet, anyway!”
After they’d finished with Walsh, Blevins turned to Rutledge and said, “I don’t know. He’s hard to read. But I’m ready to put good money down that says he’s guilty! Too damned cocky by half!”
“Do you think this Iris Kenneth was his accomplice?”
“No. I’d say the shoe’s too large for a woman’s foot.”
“That’s probably true. But stuffed with rags, it would be the perfect blind, wouldn’t it? A man’s shoe. A woman’s foot.” He let the thought lie there.
Blevins said in resignation, watching his simple case grow to monstrous proportions, “I’ll see what London can find out about Iris Kenneth.”
The sky was clear now, the deeper blue of a storm passed and finer weather to come, and even the wind had dropped. The sun’s warmth was not August’s warmth, but it felt good on his face as Rutledge left the police station and walked down toward the hotel. On impulse he continued as far as the quay and stood there looking out across the marshes. He felt tired, deeply tired, and thought about a drink to ease his chest muscles and his arm. But he knew it was better to fight through the pain, if he could.
“You didna’ sleep verra’ well last night,” Hamish pointed out. “Guilty conscience, was it?”
“No.” Rutledge was too weary to enter into an argument with his tormentor.
Hamish said, “There’s more on your mind than Scotland. This murder—this marshy country—I canna’ see what it is that has made you a hollow man.”
It wasn’t a hollowness, Rutledge thought, that left him empty. It was too much, not too little—conflicting emotions, divided passions, an uncertainty he hadn’t felt since June, when he had walked into Warwickshire an