Rutledge walked to the motorcar and took up the crank.
The leather seats were cold as the grave, he thought, climbing in. And the heater offered such little warmth that it might as well not exist.
He turned into the main road, heading north. This was the way Hensley would have traveled to Letherington. The road ran straight and narrow between the low stone walls that followed it to the right, and the open vistas of Dudlington’s pastures and fields to the left. As the land climbed with it, it began to bend to the right, away to the east. On a sunny summer’s day, when the cattle and sheep and horses filled the meadows, and light glinted on the winding stream that bisected the fields beyond the village, it would have been a pretty scene. Old England, and worth fighting for.
He crested the hill and paused to look back. There was the village, the inn already out of sight, the church spire standing tall, and Frith’s Wood visible as bare treetops, seemingly nothing out of the ordinary at this distance.
He set the brake and got out of the car, walking to the stone wall and climbing it. Taking out Hensley’s field glasses, he surveyed the ground, slowly turning in a full circle.
Then he studied the wall itself, on the pasture side away from the road, scanning the dark crannies at its base.
Nothing.
He was about to put the glasses back into his pocket when he saw crows in a field farther along.
Hensley had mentioned crows rising.
He scrambled down and went back to the car.
Half a mile on, the bend of the road took him away from Dudlington, and even standing in the motorcar, he could see only the tip of the spire. Characteristic of Northampton, it rose above the church like a finger pointing toward God.
He set the brake for a second time and found a place to climb the wall again. Here it was overgrown with weeds and brambles, but there was a lower section where he could just manage to get to the top. Not as flat, this one, he discovered, as he nearly pitched headfirst into the pasture.
Precariously balanced at best, he slowly drew out the glasses and lifted them to his eyes. Nothing in the fields.
But on the far side of the wall, not fifty feet from where he was, he could just see a bicycle tucked under the brambles and all but out of sight.
He walked toward it, sending the crows flying.
Hamish said, “Who hid it here? Yon constable before he went down to the wood? Or his assailant, making certain no one found him quickly?”
It was a good question, and without a good answer.
Rutledge lifted the bicycle, brushed off the earth and dried leaves, and walked it back to the place where he had come over the wall. It took some effort on his part to get it into the rear of the motorcar, and by the time he had finished, the storm, hovering in the low gray clouds all day, broke in earnest.
He made a point to stow the bicycle behind Hensley’s house in the bare back garden, covering it with a tarpaulin he found in the tiny shed where picks, shovels, and spades were kept.
There must have been a dozen people who saw him bring it with him, he thought, but until gossip had spread that word, he wasn’t going to make an issue of his find. He wanted no questions about where and how he’d come up with it.
After washing his hands and cleaning his boots, he crossed the street to Emma Mason’s grandmother’s house and knocked.
This time an elderly woman came to the door. She was tall and handsome, but when he spoke to her, introducing himself, she leaned forward as if uncertain what he’d said.
He repeated his name and asked if he could come inside. She invited him into the house rather reluctantly.
The parlor was feminine, with lacy curtains, crocheted antimacassars on the arms and backs of the chairs, and a long lacy cloth over the table by the piano. On it were photographs, and one was of a young girl holding a black and white kitten and smiling up at the camera. She was quite pretty even at the age of around ten, with good cheekbones and a high forehead, framed in hair that appeared to be dark and thick and curling.
Mrs. Ellison offered him a chair and sat down herself. In the flat tones of the near deaf, she asked him his business.
“I’m looking into the... accident that befell Constable Hensley in Frith’s Wood,” he said, pitching his voice so that she could hear him.
“I’m not deaf, young man,” she retorted, and he smiled.
“Apparently not.”
“I do have trouble sometimes with what the words are.
Putting them together to make sense.”
“Do you know Constable Hensley well?”
“I’m his neighbor across the street. I don’t invite him to my house to dine.”
“Is he a good policeman?”
“How should I know?” Her lips tightened, as if to hold back what else she might have said.
“He investigated the disappearance of your granddaughter. And couldn’t find her,” he reminded her gently.
“It’s always been in my mind that she went to look for her mother. My daughter. When her husband died—
Emma’s father—she wanted no more to do with the child.
I think it was too painful a reminder of happiness lost. I don’t know what became of her, to be truthful. She never wrote to me in all these years. Not even to ask how young Emma fared.” Her face crumpled, but she recovered and said in a reasonably steady voice, “Beatrice was pretty too, and it was her downfall. Sad, isn’t it, how blood can tell.”
When he asked to see Emma’s room, Mrs. Ellison raised her eyebrows in disapproval. “This has nothing to do with Constable Hensley’s unfortunate accident!”
“She’s not here,” he prompted her. “I shan’t be intrud-ing. But it might help me to see what interested her.”
“Even that Inspector Abbot, from Letherington, respected her privacy,” Mrs. Ellison retorted. “I can’t think what good it would do you. Unless it’s voyeurism.”
Stung, he said with some harshness, “You can’t be the judge of what’s important in a police matter. I can go to Northampton and ask for a warrant to search. It would be far less pleasant than five minutes in her room.”
“Very well.” She rose, led him to the stairs, and climbed ahead of him, her back stiff with protest.
The girl’s room was on the front of the house, and when he went to the windows, he could see that one of them, the one nearest the dressing table, looked directly into Hensley’s bedroom across the lane.
11
The walls of Emma Mason’s room had been painted a pale yellow, with cream curtains at the window and a patterned cream coverlet on the bed. The skirts of the dressing table were a yellow and cream print, matching the cushions on both chairs. The carpet was floral, with splashes of cream and ivory and yellow mixed with a pale green. The effect was like sunlight pouring in, on such a gray day, even though the lamps hadn’t been lit.
“Her granny treated her well enough,” Hamish commented as Rutledge looked about him. “It wasna’ unhappiness at home that made her leave.”
To Rutledge’s eyes nothing appeared to have changed since Emma Mason’s disappearance. The room was clean, fresh, ready for its owner to step back into it again, as if these three blank years hadn’t existed. The delicate scent of lavender filled the air, and Hamish said, “It lacks only flowers.”
It was true. Something in keeping with the pretty surroundings. Daffodils in a slender glass vase, violets in something silver, roses in a cream pitcher. Rutledge could imagine it.
But there was nothing personal in the room, no dolls long since outgrown, only a few well-read books on the shelf by the bed, and a single photograph of Mrs. Ellison as a younger woman, placed by a ticking china clock on the bedside table.
A shrine? Or was this simply the way a grieving grandmother preferred to remember her grandchild?