“It’s the same mystery with the dead woman. Why here?” Rutledge had finished his meal and shook his head when the woman waiting tables offered him more tea.
“That’s no mystery at all. The design was to throw you—the policeman, whoever was sent to investigate—off the scent. As it has done, very well indeed.”
But looking out into the darkness, Rutledge thought, There’s more to it than that. He needed a place to bring her. And the stone circle wasn’t new to him, he must have been here before. He must have known that hooded stone was there, and somehow it felt like the right place. Even at the risk of being found out.
What in God’s name had this place meant to a killer?
A village this small couldn’t go on hiding a secret so shameful. Not after two Scotland Yard Inspectors had come here and looked for answers. These people weren’t hardened criminals. Someone would have broken down finally and confessed whatever it was he or she knew.
Hamish said, “Chief Inspector Leslie has a house not many miles from here.”
And Rutledge answered silently, Yes. Then why had he taken the train from London to Marlborough, when he came down for the inquiry, rather than drive? He always drove. Even to Dartmouth, down on the coast. Unless of course he met her train in Marlborough, on his way back from Dartmouth, and feared that someone might remember the motorcar—and his passenger? That has to be considered.
It was very late, and he was bone tired. Anything began to seem logical when the mind was hungry for sleep.
With a last look at the stones, like ghosts in the distance, he turned and walked quietly into the inn, regretting that he’d treated Mason so shabbily when he couldn’t even entertain the possibility that Leslie had been a killer.
“Because,” Hamish said, his deep voice seeming to follow Rutledge up the stairs, “he’s a Scotland Yard Chief Inspector. He’s trained to look for proof. Who better to conceal it?”
Rutledge stopped, his hand on the handle to his room, Hamish’s words seeming to echo in his mind.
Why hadn’t there been a photograph of the victim in the Yard file? What had become of it?
He found it hard to believe that it had simply got lost.
Drifting in and out of sleep, Rutledge thought about France.
So many things still came back to the war.
There were women available to men given leave in Paris and Calais and Rouen. Women of the streets, women who plied their trade wherever they could. And there had been refugees desperate to survive, who were willing to sell their bodies for food and shelter.
Many of the officers avoided them because disease was often rampant among those women. Others preferred the women of good family who became “aunties” and looked after their British soldiers as carefully as the women at home in England. Sending them packages, writing to them, waiting for their next leave. Far from home and loved ones, lonely, often frightened by what they must return to, men found respite wherever they could. And a good many wounded were sent to Rouen and then to Paris to recover.
Could Leslie have met her that way? And now that the war was over, had she somehow decided to find him again? Had that been her mistake?
She’d had a child.
Had she come here, hoping to find the father? It would explain a good deal.
And yet Rutledge found it hard to believe that Leslie would have walked away from her at war’s end, without making some provision for the mother of his child. He wasn’t that sort of man.
The blankets and coverlet were sliding off the bed, and he reached for them, pulling them back over his shoulders as he tried to shut off the thoughts tumbling over each other.
Mrs. Leslie hadn’t borne any children. He might have loved that child more than the mother. What had become of it? Why had she left it behind? Affairs that might be forgiven in time of war would be viewed differently now, two years later. Especially if the child had died, the bond between a man and his mistress broken.
It was going on four before at last he fell asleep, but even his dreams were tangled, and he woke up at first light feeling as if he’d had no rest at all.
The next morning he made the rounds of villages close by Avebury, but no one had seen any indigent soldiers asking for work.
As one Constable put it, “This weather, they tend to stay close to the cities. No farm work to be had, and very little hiring at all.”
Another told him, “If he took anything worth selling at that break-in in Stokesbury, he’d be looking for somewhere to sell it. He wouldn’t be hanging about here, for fear a Constable might take it into his head to clap him in gaol and then find what he’d taken on him.”
Both made very good sense, and by the time he returned to Avebury, Rutledge was of the opinion that the vagrant didn’t exist.
He encountered Mrs. Marshall, the Rector’s wife, as he walked down toward the doctor’s surgery, and she paused to ask if he’d been coming to return the photograph.
“I’m sorry, not yet. But I assure you, I’ve taken very good care of it.”
She wasn’t best pleased with his answer, saying only, “Kindly see that you do.” She was about to walk on when Rutledge remembered something.
“I’m told the victim was wearing a very pretty scarf when she was found. And you kept it, for further identification. Can you describe it for me?”
She bristled a little, as if half expecting that he intended to take that as well.
“It’s a rather fine scarf. French silk, I think. Cream, with dark blue fleurs-de-lis embroidered on it. I’m hoping that it will mean something to someone.”
“Thank you.” He touched his hat as she nodded and then walked on.
He watched her go on her way.
Had the man Katherine sought in England given it to her?
Or was he, Rutledge, grasping at straws?
Experience told him he was not.
He changed his mind about stopping at the surgery, not ready to lose the train of thought that seemed to haunt him. At the next turning by the corner of the church, he felt as if he could put a name to every house in Avebury. Walking on, he passed the church, remembering how he’d stood beneath the windows and examined Katherine’s photograph. Ahead were the walls of the manor house gardens, and beyond that the front of the house. Looking at them, he made a decision, crossing the road to the church, finding the sexton trimming a tree limb that was brushing against the walls.
Rutledge told him what he was after, and together they carried a tall ladder from the shed at the back of the Rectory and propped it against the manor house garden walls.
Rutledge climbed while the sexton, a short, wiry man by the name of White, steadied the ladder.
When he could see over the wall into the winter-dead garden, he realized how attractive it must be in summer. He wished he’d thought to bring his field glasses from the boot, but from his position on the ladder, he began to scan every foot of it, every shadow and wind drift of leaves.
White called to him, “All right, is it?”
“So far.” And then, finished scanning, still unsatisfied, he went over it again.
A valise would be easy to pick out, its shape too regular. A woman’s handbag another matter. But where better, after the deed was done, to toss both over the wall and out of sight?
Yet there was nothing in the garden’s paths and borders and squares that remotely resembled what he was hoping to find.