“I wish you could tell me who it was who shot Constable Hensley with a bow and arrow in Frith’s Wood.”
She frowned. “Are you asking me to help you?”
“It was a rhetorical question. Nothing more.”
“I can’t call up visions at will, you know. If I could, I’d have done a great deal of good in this world by warning others of their imminent danger. But sometimes I find myself uncannily accurate, and that’s frightening. I don’t want to know the day of my death. Or your death. Or any other sad thing that’s better off hidden from all of us.”
“Could you put your hand on patients in the aid stations and know which would live and which would die?”
“I didn’t need to. I could look at the doctors’ faces and read the answer there. But yes, in time, you come to have a sixth sense about such things. I didn’t like it, and I fought against it. I even tried to distance myself, not allowing my emotions to be touched. It didn’t work.”
Mrs. Channing finished her tea and set the cup aside.
“Thank you, Inspector. That was very good. Do you wish me to go back to London, and leave you to it?”
She had a way of interjecting a complete change of thought into an apparently innocuous remark.
“I don’t know,” he answered her truthfully. “I wish I knew what it was you wanted.”
She stood there, looking down at him. “If I hadn’t— alarmed you with my pretense of a séance, you wouldn’t have left Mrs. Browning’s party early. Someone else might have seen that shell casing, and thought nothing of it. Instead, you found it, and it has brought something frightening into being. I feel responsible, in a sense, you see.”
“You’re saying that whoever came out first—myself or Commander Farnum—whoever set up the casing would have decided that man was his victim?”
She didn’t answer him.
“What if it was the doctor? He hadn’t been in the war.”
“Then it would have been someone else on another day.”
It was a very interesting possibility.
But she didn’t wait to discuss it. He got to his feet to help her into her coat, and with a smile she was gone.
The quiet room seemed to close in on him. He got up and walked to the door, looking at the lock that had no key.
He wasn’t certain whether it was worse to think of himself as the target of someone with a grudge against him, or to see himself as a target of opportunity. A man with a grudge was at least comprehensible, could even be tracked down and stopped. Someone who had chosen him at random was like smoke in the dark, invisible until his victim stumbled into it.
26
It was late, and the afternoon light was waning when Rutledge found a rake and a pitchfork in the shed behind Hensley’s house, just where he’d expected them to be.
There was also a shaded lantern and a sturdy pair of boots.
The wind was still very cold, but dropped with sunset.
By seven o’clock the shops were closed and the streets all but deserted. He put the spade and shovel into the motorcar, tested the shaded lantern in the kitchen, found his torch, and as soon as his dinner was over, he drove out of Dudlington.
He left the car very close to where he’d found Hensley’s bicycle, then climbed the wall on the far side of the road and made his way across the fields toward Frith’s Wood.
Hamish, a good covenanting Scot, kept up a grumbling monologue in Rutledge’s head, reminding him that daring the devil in the dark of night in a haunted wood was little short of madness. “It isna’ wise to open doors that have no business opening.”
“I’m here to close one,” he answered.
Somewhere a fox barked, twice. He walked on, grateful that there was no moon to pick him out, a lone figure on the brow of the rolling pastures.
When he reached the wood he stopped to take his bear-ings. He could see lighted windows here and there in the village, and even the weathercock on the top of the church spire reflected their glow.
There was no one in the pastures, no one following him from the road, no one ahead of him in the wood. All the same, for a moment he wished he could tell Hamish to set a watch, as he had done so many times in the trenches.
Three years, he thought. A long time for a body to lie among the trees, but there were a few bones that might survive even now, if he knew where to look for them.
He began by working through the brambles and vines, using his hands where he could, bringing up the rake or the pitchfork for areas he couldn’t reach.
The shielded lantern was used sparingly, for as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see more than he would have believed possible.
He thought, this is how an archaeologist must feel, exploring one small square at a time, unveiling what lay below the surface—or didn’t lie there—with great care.
Rotted trunks and fallen branches had turned into crumbled wood, and there was layer after layer of well-rotted leaves. The rake was deep into one corner when a skull came to light, small and with a pointed muzzle. A fox, he thought, crawling in here to die in peace. He buried it again and kept going. There was the scurry of mice in another place, and he overturned a nest of fur-lined leaves and four tiny white shivering bodies. Setting it back in place, he thought he heard something behind him, like the bones of dead fingers clacking together, but it was only the boughs and bare branches rubbing together in the wind.
He worked for more than an hour, then stopped to catch his breath. It was a hopeless task, he told himself. One man on his own... The wood had been searched, after all.
“By men who were afraid,” Hamish retorted. “They wouldna’ care to find the devil under a bush.”
There was some truth in that.
The church clock had struck two in the morning, and he was tired. But he had begun to learn the way the ground under his feet was constructed. And where the brambles grew thickest, he could pass on, because they had been settled here far longer than three years, their canes deep in the leaf mold, and their bases thick as his wrist with old growth.
By three, he’d covered more of the wood than he’d expected, and he began to think, looking around him, that he might finish before the late dawn broke.
But by four, he had still had no luck, and this particular part of the wood had seen some wind damage in the past, for there were more downed trunks than elsewhere. He moved each one, shone his shielded torch along the length, sending beetles and spiders fleeing from his light, before letting it go again. Some broke apart in his hands, and others, wet with dew and slick with green moss, left an unpleasant miasma in the air and a slippery coating on his gloves.
He had worn heavy boots borrowed from Hensley and a pair of the man’s corduroys hanging in the closet and two layers of sweaters over his shirt. Now he was sweating heavily, and his muscles were beginning to ache. His ankle had been ready to quit an hour ago.
“A wild-goose chase,” Hamish said dryly. “Better a feather bed.”
Rutledge chuckled, just as his pitchfork bit into something with a very different feel.
Leaving the tool where it was, he knelt to clear away the earth from its prongs, smoothing and pushing gently by turns until he had found what he was after. He brought the lamp closer.
The pitchfork had buried itself between a jaw and a shoulder blade, in what had once been a human neck.
Rutledge rocked back on his heels.
Hamish said, “The Saxon massacre...”
But Rutledge didn’t think it was. There was more defini-tion in the bones than something from the Dark Ages.
Whether it was Emma Mason or not, he couldn’t judge.
But it was time to call in experts who could.