The shot had missed him—but it couldn’t have missed Hamish, directly behind him.
The bonnet came perilously close to burying itself into the earth beneath the hedgerow before he had cut the motor and the vehicle rocked to a halt.
His face was wet with blood, but he was barely aware of it. What filled his mind was the silence in the seat behind him.
I dare not turn and look.
If he’s badly hurt—what am I to do? I can’t touch him—!
As the initial shock receded, he reminded himself that Hamish was already dead, buried in one of the muddy cemeteries in France.
The relief that swept him was followed by a cold, intense anger.
He was out of the motorcar, the door swinging wide behind him, racing toward a break in the hedgerow some twenty feet away.
The shot had come from a revolver, he was certain of it.
He knew the range, and his ears had unconsciously registered the direction of the sound, even though he hadn’t seen the muzzle flash. And the only thought in his mind now was putting hands on the man who had fired it.
“Ye canna’ leave the motor here!” Hamish shouted behind him. “Yon bend—”
But Rutledge was scrambling up the stones, weeds, and packed earth at the foot of the hedgerow, ignoring the stubby twigs and branches that plucked at his clothes and scraped his hands. He found the thinning patch where one of the knot of trees had died out, pushed his way through it with a final effort, and plunged into the rolling pasture beyond.
He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to see there. But except for a grazing horse at the far end, the pasture was empty.
His years in the trenches had taught him to pinpoint snipers in their lairs, and the skill came back to him with accustomed ease. He strode along the hedgerow, searching for crushed blades of grass, scuffed earth—any signs that pointed to where someone stretched out on the ground or crouched by the thick tangle of tree limbs and dead wildflower stalks, waiting to fire.
Underfoot the grass was a dull yellow and damp, quickly soaking into his leather shoes as he broke into a trot, following the line of the hedge. He knew the angle of fire. Less than fifty feet away from where he’d climbed the hedgerow, he found what he was looking for—a muddied patch and above it a single twig snapped in two. He squatted there on the ground, looking back toward the lane, and he could see there was a perfect field of fire from this spot toward where his motorcar had been passing as the windscreen shattered.
Not an accident, then. But what? He couldn’t believe that boys had been trying out their father’s war souvenir.
The shot had barely missed his head. The question was, had it missed on purpose, or because the shooter wasn’t skilled enough to hit his target?
Then as he straightened, he saw, shoved into a thicker part of the hedge not more than a foot away, three shell casings, in a length of belt.
His anger had drained out of him, and he turned quickly to scan the pasture again, suddenly aware of how vulnerable he was, if the man with the revolver took another shot.
No one there. Nothing to prove anyone had been there.
It was as if it had all been a figment of his imagination.
The horse was grazing peacefully, and the crows had settled again into the trees across the road. And yet there was the shattered windscreen, and here was evidence of someone lying in wait, taking aim—pulling the trigger. Not an accidental firing but a careful ambush.
And the shell casings left behind as a taunt.
I could have killed you. But I didn’t. This time.
He spent nearly half an hour quartering the pasture for tracks, searching for any sign of how the shooter had come here, or left. At length, unsatisfied, he went back to lift the casings out of the hedge, and look at them more closely.
Behind him Hamish said, “Three.”
Soldiers in the trenches were a superstitious lot. It was said German snipers waited for a man to light a cigarette, then pass the match to the men beside him. And as the third cigarette flared, the sniper had made his kill. Three.
Like the other casings, these were .303s, from a Maxim machine gun. It had been the most widely used weapon in the war, half of Europe copying its design for their armies.
And the machine gun had been the most deadly weapon of the war, sweeping the stark, shell-pocked, wire-strung ter-rain called No Man’s Land with a hail of bullets that could bring a man down and pass on in a matter of seconds to kill everyone beside him long before any of them reached the first line of enemy trenches. It had, Rutledge thought, caused more casualties than any other weapon. The gunner and his crew could hold off a hundred men, and there was no way to stop him.
Rutledge stood there studying the cartridge casings.
Like the others he’d found before, these were clearly meant for him to examine.
Even in the gray afternoon light he could see the skull carefully set in the cup of a poppy blossom, nestled where the stamens should have been. The blossom was beautifully formed, the petals open and lovingly shaped, the death’s head staring up at him with blackened eye sockets cut deep enough into the metal to give them a ghoulish realism.
Without thinking he touched his gloved finger to the dark sockets and then saw there was a smudge on the leather.
Rutledge could have sworn that it was blood. But whether his own, from the cuts on his face, or from something on the carving, he couldn’t have said.
He found a man in Hertford who could replace the shattered windscreen, but there was nothing to be done about his own face, except to ask the doctor recommended by the garage owner’s wife to pluck the deeper bits of glass out of his skin.
“I’d report this to Inspector Smith,” Dr. Eustace told him. “We can’t have silly fools running about the countryside with loaded firearms! This sliver could have blinded you, if it’d struck your eye instead of your eyebrow!” He held up a splinter of glass, bloody on the tip.
“It was an accident,” Rutledge answered him, trying to infuse conviction into his voice. His face was stinging like hell. He wasn’t about to discuss the shell casings with anyone, let alone a provincial inspector who would begin to ask questions he couldn’t answer himself. But all the while Hamish was telling him that the shot had been a near thing.
For both of them.
“And ye must ask why he didna kill you, when you were in his sights.”
“On a public road?” he retorted silently as Dr. Eustace went on with his digging. “I’d rather know why he followed me to Beachy Head just to leave a warning. Why not shoot me on the cliff and simply roll my body off the edge and into the sea? I was an excellent target, standing there against the sky. It would have been the easiest way to be rid of me without a trace.”
“Aye, but I canna’ believe he wanted it to be sae easy.”
And after a moment, Hamish added, “He likes playing wi’ you.”
“He’d have had to be ahead of me,” Rutledge responded grimly as the doctor probed for the last shard of glass and then handed him a mirror. “But how did he get clear so fast?”
“You’ll have to put this powder on the wounds,” Dr. Eustace was saying, reaching for a small packet on the table behind him, “else they’re likely to fester. You won’t look very pretty in the witness-box, in spite of my handiwork.
But at least the worst of the damage is cleaned.”
Rutledge stared at himself in the mirror. Tiny red wounds spotted his face, giving him the appearance of a man with measles.
“It doesn’t matter,” he answered the doctor. “The cuts will heal soon enough.”