Rutledge examined it, turning it in his hands, asking,
“And you shot out my windscreen with this?”
Tommy nodded. “I must have done. It’s what I was shooting.”
But Rutledge had dug a bullet out of the frame of his motorcar where it had buried itself after narrowly missing him. “Then where’s the revolver?”
He shook his head in confusion. “I don’t know, sir, truly I don’t. I must have lost it!”
Smith started to speak, but Rutledge was there before him. “Did you lose it in the pasture? Where the horse was grazing? Were you lying by the hedgerow, and dropped it after firing at my car? Where the road bends,” Rutledge added, as Tommy seemed unable to grasp the exact location.
“That’s the Upper Pasture, where the road bends.” The boy’s face changed. “Inspector Smith didn’t say it was the Upper Pasture—I—he said where the horses are, and that’s the home paddock. I don’t go to the Upper Pasture, not anymore.” The vehemence in his voice was unmistak-able, and his face had paled, making him look even younger than his years.
“Why? Because of what you’d done there?”
“No, sir, no—I don’t like the dead soldier there. I’m afraid of him.”
Rutledge had quartered every foot of that ground, and there had been no dead soldier. Nor even the makings of a grave.
But it was clear that Tommy had seen someone there. Or something.
In spite of Rutledge’s efforts, he got no other information from the Crowell boy. Whatever had caused his terror had emptied his mind of details, and he shook his head over and over again, saying, “I don’t—I don’t know.”
In the end, Rutledge handed back the slingshot and said,
“That’s a nice piece of workmanship, and I think your mother ought to allow you to have it again.” With Smith at his heels, blustering, Rutledge went out to the motorcar and cranked it himself. The night had turned cold, with frost, surely, by morning. Pulling on his gloves, he got behind the wheel.
Smith was still protesting.
Rutledge said, “I don’t believe he ever touched a revolver. Whatever you ask him, he agrees with. ‘Where is the revolver?’ ‘I don’t know where it is, sir.’ That’s the literal truth—he doesn’t. Because he never had it. You’ve asked him a direct question and he gives you the best answer he knows how. But whatever—whoever—was in that Upper Pasture must have done the firing.”
“A dead soldier? That I knew nothing about? You didn’t buy that cock-and-bull tale, did you?”
But then, Hamish was saying, Smith knew nothing about the .303 casings.
“Not even a suicide?”
Smith answered, “Look, if the boy is lying about the revolver, he’s lying about the dead man as well. It’s a matter of self-preservation. He doesn’t remember what he did with the weapon, and so he gives you a corpse instead.
You’re a policeman, and corpses are what you deal with.
Even Tommy Crowell understands that.”
“He doesn’t lie. Simple people seldom do. He told you he didn’t know where the revolver is, and he doesn’t. If he saw a dead man in that pasture, he described him in terms he could understand.”
He recalled Tommy’s exact description. “He was dead, buried. I saw him and I didn’t like it. And I ran.”
“Buried, as in a churchyard?”
“No, not in a churchyard. There were no flowers, and no tombstone. Still, he was lying there, buried.”
“I can hardly scour Hertfordshire for a dead soldier! It’s a waste of my time and the time of my men.”
“No. Whoever was in that pasture couldn’t have been a local man.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
Rutledge glanced at him, saw the angry face etched by the motorcar’s headlamps, and answered him carefully.
“It’s your patch. You know it best. If you find out anything, you know where to reach me in London.”
“If it’s not a local man,” Smith said, pursuing the issue doggedly, “it was no accidental shooting, was it? He knew where he was aiming.” When Rutledge said nothing, he fell silent, thinking it through. Where the rutted lane met the main road and the motorcar’s tires fought for a grip in the icy mud as Rutledge turned, Smith went on. “You have an enemy out there, then. I’d not care to be in your shoes.”
He turned his head to look behind Rutledge, as if searching out Hamish. “I’ll thank you to take your troubles out of Hertfordshire as soon as you can. We don’t need them.”
7
Bowles was pacing his office by the time Rutledge had received his summons and knocked at the door.
“Where the hell have you been?” the Chief Superintendent demanded angrily. “I sent for you a good half hour ago! And what’s happened to your face?”
“I’ve just got in from Hertford, sir—”
“I don’t give a dance in hell where you’ve come from.
You’re leaving for Northamptonshire straightaway.
There’s trouble in a place called Dudlington in the north of the county. A constable has been shot with a bow and arrow, for God’s sake!”
“A bow—” Rutledge began, surprised, but Bowles cut him off.
“He’ll live, no thanks to the bastard who did it, leaving him in the weather to die of his wound. It was intentional, this shooting, we’re certain of that. And I want whoever it is brought to justice now. Do you understand me? Hensley’s one of my men, or was, when I was an inspector in Westminster. He went north over my objections, and look where it’s landed him.”
Bowles’s face was red and blotched with fury. He shoved a file of papers at Rutledge.
“Well, don’t stand there, man! I want you to interview Hensley tonight, if those fool doctors will let you, and get to the bottom of this business. They’ve got him in hospital in Northampton, and the local man says he’s just out of surgery.”
It was useless to plead fatigue or other pressing business. Bowles was not a man who cared about anything but getting his own way. And blustering anger was a well-tested method of keeping his subordinates from arguing with him.
Rutledge took the file and left.
Down the passage he ran into Sergeant Gibson in conversation with the man sweeping the floor.
Gibson turned away to speak to Rutledge and said dourly, “If you want the truth of the matter, Hensley left under a cloud. I never did know the ins and outs of it. A personal matter. He managed to keep it from Old Bowels’ ears, I’m told. The Chief Superintendent thought he was the perfect copper. Threw him up to us any number of times.”
Rutledge said dryly, “Then there’ll be no end of suspects for this attempt at murder.”
Gibson caught himself before he grinned. Instead he retorted, “How the mighty are sometimes brought low.” And with that he was off down the passage, leaving Rutledge standing there.
Dudlington was a tiny village of stone-built houses topped with gray slate roofs and a single, slender-towered church, huddled together in the midst of open fields, as if for warmth or comfort. The rich brown of plowed acres and the yellow green of winter pasture lay like a blanket around them, but the houses turned their backs to the land, as if ignoring it, and the barns were a low afterthought, tucked here and there, as if no one had known what to do with them. It lay north of the county town, but Rutledge’s first call was in Northampton.