He heard a dog bark outside the church, and a voice call, “Is anyone there?”
Rutledge turned to walk back the way he’d come, stepping out of the nave to be greeted by a sleek Irish setter sniffing suspiciously at his heels.
The man standing some fifty feet away stared at him.
“Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard,” he said easily, ignoring the dog. “Were you the man who found the body?”
“I was.”
“And you are?”
“The undergardener. Hadley.”
“Did you notice anything the police might have missed, Mr. Hadley?”
“No.”
“Did you look at the man’s face, under the respirator?”
“I could see he was dead. There were flies about. I went directly for the police.”
“You didn’t look at the book lying beside the body?”
“It wasn’t beside it. It lay at his feet.”
“Open or closed?”
“Open, like a tent.”
“Not where the man might have been holding it?”
“No.”
“Could you or your dog tell how the man had come this far? Or how the killer might have left?”
“By the time I’d thought of that, the police had come and gone. There was a muddle of scents.”
“If you think of anything that might be useful, however insignificant it might seem to you, will you contact Inspector Madsen at once?”
“I’m not likely to remember anything more. The dog stood here barking, as he did at you, and when no one came out of the ruin, I went to see what he was on about. I wondered, just now, if there might be another dead man in there.”
It was a grudging admission.
“There’s a sketch of the dead man in my motorcar. Will you come and look at it?”
“I needn’t see it. I was here when they first took off the mask.”
“Did you recognize him? Or had you seen him before?”
“He was a stranger.”
“But the family might have known him.”
“It’s not likely they’d know a murdered man.”
Murder didn’t happen in nice circles…
Hamish said, “He’s no’ concerned with the dead, now. It’s no’ a part of his duties.”
It was true.
Rutledge thanked the man, waited until he’d called off the still sniffing dog, and then walked back the way he’d come.
Rutledge realized, driving back to Elthorpe, that what he’d been sent north to do was to put a name to the victim.
And that didn’t appear to be a simple matter.
But he could see, he thought, what the army was about—searching out unidentified bodies in the expectation that one of them might be Gaylord Partridge. Because the man still hadn’t returned to the cottages in Berkshire, or London would have recalled the Yard’s emissary by now.
Why did they think Partridge might be dead?
Did he have other enemies? Or was it that the army didn’t want to step forward and publicly claim the man’s body? If Rutledge identified him in the course of a murder investigation, there would be no connection with officialdom.
It was possible that Partridge’s earlier forays had been made to prepare an escape route, so to speak, away from his watchers. And this time, unlike before, he had no intention of coming back.
And instead of going missing and causing an uproar, he’d died and inconvenienced everyone.
Rutledge was tempted to take the sketch to show at the Tomlin Cottages, to see what Quincy and Slater and the others might say about it.
But early days for that, now.
He found he’d driven back to Dilby, where the schoolmaster lived.
Hamish said, “It willna’ be useful.”
And yet Rutledge left his car by the church and walked through the village, getting a sense of it.
He’d seen much of England over the years, both as a policeman and as an ordinary visitor. Wherever he had traveled, he’d found a sense of place—a shared history, a shared background. But this little spot on the map seemed to have none of that. No sense of the past in the square buildings with their slate roofs, gray in the cloudy light. No sense of history, no armies marching through the churchyard, no Roman ruin under the baker’s shop, no medieval tithe barn on the fringe of the village. The abbey must have wielded some influence here—if not Fountains, then one of the others. Ripon, perhaps. What had the monks run here? Sheep, or even cattle? Or was this tilled land? Beyond the village, where he could see green and heavily grassed pastures, there must have been good grazing from the earliest days. Surely the inhabitants of Dilby had been tenants of the abbeys, not monks. Laymen or even lay brothers, earning their keep and owning nothing until the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII had left them masterless and destitute, scraping out a living where they could or falling under the sway of whatever lordling had coveted these acres.
He had come to the end of the village now, and turned to walk back.
Hamish said, “It’s no’ a place of comfort.”
Rutledge was about to answer him when he saw a face in an upper-story window staring down at him.
A young boy’s face, so terrified that he seemed to be on the verge of crying. Glimpsed for only a moment, then gone, as if Rutledge had imagined it.
It wasn’t Hugh or his friend Johnnie. He was certain of that.
What did these children know? What were they so frightened of?
Rutledge walked on, an unhurried pace that took him back to his motorcar, nodding to men he passed on the street, touching his hat to the women. No one stopped him to ask his business.
They already knew. The blankness in their eyes as they acknowledged his greeting covered something else, an unwillingness to be a part of what was happening.
How long could the schoolmaster go on living here, if the cloud of suspicion wasn’t lifted, and soon? He would be sent packing, no longer the proper person to form young minds. Miss Norton was right about that.
Rutledge drove back to Elthorpe in a bleak mood, as if the village had left its mark on him.
On the outskirts lines from the poetry of O. A. Manning seemed to express what he felt about Dilby. It had been written about a shell-gutted village in France, empty of people, empty of beauty, empty of hope.
There is something cold and lost
Here, as if the people died long ago,
No one left to mourn them or tell me why.
My footsteps echo on what was the street,
A rose blooms in a corner where no one sees
The beauty that it offers to the dead.
I thought to pluck it and take it away,
But it belongs here, a memorial to them.
No birds sing in the ruined trees,
No fowl scratch in unweeded kitchen gardens,
No child’s laughter answers a mother’s voice.
There’s only the wind searching for something to touch
And passing through unhindered.
A fleeting memory came to him—Alice Crowell’s welcome, as if she had been expecting him. And yet as far as he knew there was no reason why she should.
8
The next morning found Rutledge back at the Dilby school, encountering a surprised Albert Crowell in the passage just as he came out of a classroom. Rutledge had brought the sketch of the dead man back with him.
“Inspector. What can I do for you?” Crowell asked.
“I’d like a word with your wife, if she’s here.”
There was a wary expression in his eyes now.
“In regard to what?” Crowell asked bluntly.
“I’m afraid that’s police business at the moment.”