It was nearly two hours before they reached their destination, and Rutledge was never quite sure how the constable had found his way across the featureless expanse. Tracks there were, but they seemed to go where they willed rather than in any discernible direction, to any discernible destination.
A great pile of rocks loomed up, ruins of a colliery, Rutledge thought, peering at it through the darkness. And then the sputtering fire that the men had lit to keep warm if not dry. The rains had stopped, but there was a drizzle in the wind that clung to everything. It was easy to understand why a small boy might die out here of exposure, even in summer.
In the lea of a boulder, where erosion had widened the crevice over the years, there was a pile of bones, pitiful in their smallness. Rutledge could see the whiteness of a longer one behind the others. He dismounted, leaving the bike in the charge of a roughly dressed man who appeared out of nowhere to take it.
“There’s no skull,” Dawlish was saying to Hawkins. “And no pelvis, as I told you. Only the little bones, and that leg bone yonder. Can you tell anything about it, sir?” Someone was bringing a lantern over to them, its light spilling across their feet, and then their faces.
Hawkins knelt. “You’ve looked for the skull? Or ribs?”
“Aye, sir, all through the rocks. Nothing.”
“Carried off then, by wild dogs,” he said, running his fingers over the smaller fragments. Lifting the leg bone, he brought it closer to his face, then adjusted the lantern in the holder’s hand so that it fell the way he wished it to. “This was broken. Here.” He pointed to a jagged fracture line in the bone. “Died before it began to heal. Caught a foot in the hole by the rock, I’d say, and couldn’t get out again.” He got up and went to the fire, using that and the lantern to better judge the bone.
After a few minutes he said, “Just as I thought. Sheep carcass. That’s what you dragged me out here for!”
“There was no knowing for certain, sir. With nothing larger than that one bone to go by,” Dawlish said apologetically.
“Next time, bring the damned things in to me.”
“No,” Rutledge said, countermanding that instruction. “I want to see them in place. Not on a laboratory table. And as soon as they’re found.”
Hawkins glared at him, went to fetch his bicycle, and Rut-ledge had to hurry to catch up with him—or stay on the moors with the searchers, as Dawlish was doing.
Halfway back to the village, Rutledge heard Hawkins say, “You’re a damned fool. You know that, don’t you?”
“I’m a policeman. I do what I have to do. No more, no less.”
“You could go back to London and leave us in peace! Half those men out there in the rain will be sick before the week’s out, and they’ll still have to work the nets or tend their sheep or dig in their fields. The boy’s long dead, and God alone knows where he could be. Murdered by gypsies, down one of the mine shafts—”
“I thought those had been searched.”
“Yes, of course they have. But a boy that age is small. He could crawl where a man can’t go. You could walk by him a thousand times over and never realize it. Predators carry off small bones—birds and animals could have taken his remains anywhere. Dawlish should have explained all that.”
“Nevertheless, I’m going to continue. Until I find him.”
Silence ruled until they were nearly back in the village again. Rutledge, remembering a case he’d handled before the war, asked, “How long before the flesh rotted off a child’s body and you could move the bones? Or crush them beyond recognition, before scattering them?” It was worth considering—a husband had nearly gotten away with murdering his wife, experimenting with temporary burial and a very permanent exhumation.
Turning to look at him, Hawkins nearly skidded in a puddle, then swore again and straightened the wheel in time. “You’re mad, d’you know that? Stark, staring mad!”
He turned in at his gate without another word.
Morning dawned fair, though cooler after the rains, as if summer’s heat had been washed away. The first task Rutledge set himself was to search the churchyard for flowers growing there.
In his experience, English churchyards, unlike those he’d seen in Europe, were seldom planted with flowers. Along the walls, sometimes, or by the path to the front door of the church. Occasionally by the gates. But not on or around the graves themselves or close to the headstones. The English still preferred their yews as funereal offerings. These had first been set out in churchyards in the days of the long bow, as a source of raw materials, and become a habit. Their shape and somber dark green seemed to suit the mood and the gravity of the place better than a riot of color.
Flowers were more acceptable in tall vases inside the church. Rutledge could remember as a small boy going with his mother to do the altar flowers when it was her turn. He’d sat on the cold stone floor, running his fingers in the deep crevices of the memorial brasses that held place of honor down the aisle, until he knew the shapes by heart. A knight with plumes and sword and handsome spurs. A lady in a conical hat, the sweep of her long, embroidered robes nearly hiding the little dog near the hem. And an elegantly bearded Elizabethan gentleman with padded breeches and coat, looking more like a portly merchant than the adventurer he had been.
He walked slowly through the gravestones in the churchyard, some of them tilted with age and so mossy he could barely make out the words incised on them. Others he recognized at a glance—Trepol and Trask, Wilkins and Penrith, Dawlish and Trelawny. There were Poldarins and a Hawkins, a half-dozen Raleighs, though none later than the seventeen hundreds, and a pair of Drakes.
But no pansies. He walked on, looking at the delicately drawn Celtic cross on one gravestone, the sad lines of verse on another for a small child drowned in the Bor, an open book with a ribbon marking its stone pages, any numbers of “Beloved wife” and “Beloved husband.” War dead and plague dead, and a very fine stone angel on a plinth with the legend below it, “In Memory of the Men of the Mary Anne, Lost at Sea in a Storm, October 23, 1847. Eternal Father, Keep Their Souls Safe in Thy Care.” And a list of the names, twenty-seven of them.
It was surely Richard’s angel, the cool marble cheeks turned slightly so that the serene eyes stared unwaveringly towards the church tower for all eternity. There was both compassion and strength in the body, power in the wings. He could see why it had made an indelible impression on a small boy who passed the statue each Sunday morning on his way to services.
A voice behind him said, “Lovely, isn’t it? The village took up a subscription to have it carved in London. The Trev-elyans sent an anonymous donation to help make it up to the amount required, in addition to the sum they’d given openly. It was the sort of thing they did.”
It was Smedley, dressed in a dark suit of clothes, not the rough corduroys of the gardener. Over the wet grass his shoes had made no sound.
“I saw you here and wondered if you were searching for a place to lay the sheep bones to rest,” he went on. But there was a sympathetic gleam in his eyes that took away any sting. “I doubt there’s a soul in the village who hasn’t heard.”
“Yes, well, they never seem to know what I want to hear,” Rutledge said irritably. “Only what I’m doing.”
“You’d be surprised. They seem to think you’re on the trail of a murderer. They’re wondering—among themselves, not to your face—if that terrible man doing the killings in London might be a Borcombe man. They’ve gone through the lists of who lived here once, and who moved away. Failing that, someone who’d passed through. It’s the only explanation they can come up with for a Scotland Yard inspector wasting his time on two suicides and an accident when half London is in absolute terror thinking the other half is about to cut him to ribbons.”