“No. Not that sort of crime.”
“Anything we might use to help us identify her?”
“No broken bones, no prominent moles or birthmarks, nothing unusual that I could find. She’d had a child, but not a recent birth. Her hair is dark enough that she might be Welsh. That’s all.” He let the man opposite him write something more, then rose. “Would you like to see her now?”
Leslie took his time putting away his notebook. Anything to put off the inevitable a little longer . . . They would think him odd if he refused. It was standard procedure.
Would they believe him, if he told them that the war had made examining the body of the dead nearly impossible for him? No, if that got back to the Yard, it could cause no end of problems.
Mason was waiting.
Steeling himself, he and Henderson followed Mason to a small, windowless, frigid back room. As the doctor lit a lamp and the dimness flared into brightness, he could see the shape on the table, draped in a white sheet. Mason led the way and pulled back the covering. It fell into place along the line of her white shoulders. No longer soft, too white for the living.
This was how the dead always looked, he warned himself. This was just one more. When all was said and done.
Mason was busy arranging the sheet, leaving the body some dignity. Henderson was looking down at the dead woman, his expression somber, and then Mason stepped back, and he could see her face, framed in that dark, dark hair.
And he stopped thinking altogether.
The next thing he remembered with any clarity was sitting in the carriage as the Constable drove up the road. Henderson was saying, “It’s for your use while you’re here, sir. The carriage. You’ll need transport. I borrowed it from the inn where you’re staying. The Green Man is probably not what you’re accustomed to in London, sir, but the food is excellent. Sam Bryant’s wife is the finest cook for miles around. You’ll want to try Mary’s apple tarts.”
Leslie barely heard him. His mind was filled with images he couldn’t stop thinking about. The sheet-covered body on a table in that wretched little room, her face still and cold in death. A rising tide of guilt so powerful he couldn’t remember how he’d got out of there, much less out of that house.
Whisky. He remembered that. The doctor had offered them whisky afterward, and he’d wondered if Mason had suspected—guessed—he’d needed it. He’d managed some excuse. He dared not let either of them see just how badly he needed it. He was terrified that he’d already given himself away, and getting out of there was suddenly all that mattered.
Henderson was pulling up at the inn door. Leslie got down and reached for his valise before the Constable could hand it to him. To make amends, he let the man walk with him inside The Green Man and fetch his key from the innkeeper. Then blessedly, Henderson left him alone to find his room himself.
He got up the stairs somehow, stumbled through the door, and sat down heavily on the chair by the window without even removing his coat or hat. He could see nothing but the images in his head.
Her body. Those three ugly gashes while Mason was going on and on about the knife that had caused them. And later, the silk scarf that the doctor had neatly folded inside her coat. That had nearly undone him, because he remembered it so well, remembered buying it, and thinking how perfectly it would suit.
Why—why—why? But it was too late to ask himself that now. There was no way to escape what he’d done.
His fists were pounding against his knees, but he didn’t feel it.
He hadn’t told them who she was. He couldn’t tell them what she’d meant to him. He couldn’t even tell them why she’d come to England.
Welsh—they thought she might be Welsh because of her lovely black hair. He’d let them. It was bad enough that he’d had to hurt her in life. Now he was betraying her in death. But he’d had no choice, had he?
Guilt was crushing him. Oh, God, how was he to go on?
It wasn’t until much later, rousing up enough to notice how cold he was, that he had the coherent thought that he was the investigating officer. He could make absolutely certain of the inquiry’s outcome.
If he didn’t, there was the hangman. Shuddering, he couldn’t stop himself from reliving the hangings he’d had to witness. He’d have to get himself in hand, he’d have to finish this bloody inquiry somehow, without betraying himself. If he hadn’t already . . .
As he got stiffly to his feet and went to light the fire laid ready on the narrow hearth, he told himself he had to find a way to take up the burden of what he’d done. And try to make it right.
But how do you make murder right? How could one live with such a thing on his conscience?
Leslie closed his eyes and begged her to forgive him—for what he’d done and for what he was about to do. Begged her to understand.
Then, drawing a ragged breath, he knelt and put the match to the tinder beneath the coal.
By the time the fire was drawing well, he’d got himself in hand.
He wasn’t proud of it.
Rutledge didn’t know the details of the inquiry that Chief Inspector Leslie had conducted in Wiltshire. He’d heard some talk that the inquest had brought in murder by person or persons unknown, which was surprising, since Leslie, like Rutledge himself, had a reputation for tenacity, working the evidence until he found the one clue that might lead to finding the guilty party.
But as he heard more about the crime itself, he could understand the lack of a solution. A single murder, with no witnesses, no weapon, and no real evidence to break open the investigation, was the hardest to solve. And dealing with someone obsessed with Druids and stone circles and possibly believing that human sacrifice had been practiced when the stones were new was especially difficult. If he’d got what he wanted from the god or gods he’d sacrificed to, whoever he was, he might never kill again.
It was early March when Rutledge went to The Strand Restaurant for a late supper, only noticing the time because he’d come to the last of the reports he’d been reading and realized that he was hungry. And he couldn’t remember anything palatable in the pantry at the flat.
He had avoided The Strand after running into Kate Gordon and her mother there one evening. He hadn’t seen Kate since the nightmare of what had happened on his own doorstep, and he didn’t want to encounter her now and cause embarrassment for both of them.
Her mother had made it plain enough in December that a policeman was not an acceptable suitor for her daughter, who could aspire as high as she liked. After all, Kate’s father was a high-ranking officer in the Army, and his distinguished record during the war had led to his being received by the King. Rumor had it that he was on a first-name basis with half the war department. True or not, it had given Mrs. Gordon a reason to conclude that Kate could marry very well indeed. In fact, the Prince of Wales had danced twice with Kate at a ball marking the end of the Paris peace talks in June 1919, although it was known that he generally favored married women.
Rutledge had barely recovered enough from his own war that June to care who had danced with whom. He’d known Kate then only as the sensible cousin of the woman he’d been engaged to marry in the summer of ’14, and while he’d liked her then, he’d been too blinded by his love for Jean to see that Kate was worth two of her.