“How did you come by that?” Mason asked, washing the ash from his fingers.
“In an unexpected place. Look at the gray, that little edging of gray. Do you think it might have matched the dead woman’s coat? You told me it was a dark gray wool.”
Mason peered at the scrap again. “I couldn’t swear to it. But yes, I would say that to my eyes, it would. Rather a nice dark gray, you know.”
James Westin had called it drab. “What became of the coat?”
“We buried it with her. Well, we didn’t quite know what else to do with it.”
Rutledge wrapped the fragment in his handkerchief again, and put it in his coat pocket. “A pity.”
“In hindsight, yes.”
Rutledge rose. “That’s been the trouble with this inquiry. It’s like a puzzle where many of the pieces are missing. It’s difficult to be certain just what is important and what isn’t.”
Mason said slowly, “What else have you found?” When Rutledge didn’t answer, he went on, “I’ve heard about those lapis beads. I am treating the boy with the measles, you know. His little sister is the proud owner of a new child’s tea service. Your doing, the mother says. And you’d asked me about the family as well. Did the beads belong to the dead woman, do you think?”
“I found the owner. He told me he’d misplaced them.”
Surprised, Mason said, “Here in Avebury?”
“That’s a mystery I’ve yet to solve. Thank you for the tea. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t speak of that scrap from the fire. Or the lapis beads.” Collecting his hat and heavy coat, he walked down the passage, with Mason just behind him.
“Have a care, Rutledge,” the doctor said at the door. “I’ve got a feeling that there’s something going on here that might be ugly.”
12
It was an odd warning from Dr. Mason.
Hamish said, “Ye ken, whoever killed yon woman has covered his tracks verra’ well.”
And most murderers were not that clever. They were driven, and they made mistakes.
“Aye. But consider, if yon killer is sae clever, he could be just as clever putting the blame elsewhere.”
“The vagrant.”
“Or the Chief Inspector.”
Rutledge had arrived at the inn. Taking the stairs to his room two at a time, he shut the door and gave that possibility some thought.
At the Yard, it was easy to make enemies. Advancement was slow in coming, but Leslie had risen quickly in his career, in spite of four years in France during the war. Who resented that? Who might be behind what was happening?
He could think of several names. Inspector Martin seemed to have Markham’s ear, but he hadn’t been promoted. Rutledge himself had had a few problems with the man. And there was Chief Inspector Stanley. Leslie seemed to rub him the wrong way.
But were they killers?
Rutledge couldn’t believe that they were. In his opinion, they weren’t clever enough. But Leslie was. Why did so many small bits of fact seem to have the Leslie name on them?
He took out his notebook and scanned what he’d written there, and he found nothing he had overlooked, nothing he had misread, nothing he had not done.
If the killer was Leslie, he’d be a formidable opponent.
He was still wrestling with that problem when he left Avebury, heading for London.
Passing empty stretches, Rutledge wondered again why the killer hadn’t simply left her body in a ditch at the side of the road. How was that different from leaving her in the ditch at Avebury?
There was some message here that he couldn’t seem to decipher. There had been anger in the method of killing. Was there contempt in leaving her body in the ditch?
Or had that been necessary to give the killer time to get far away?
He went directly to Haldane’s house. There was no one else to ask without endangering Leslie’s career and his own.
The man was in his study when Rutledge was announced. He looked up and said, “Found the woman, have you?”
“Only that she might have arrived in England through Dover.”
Haldane’s eyebrows rose at that. “Well, well.” He gestured to the chair across the desk from him.
Rutledge said, “The question is, why did she come to England? To visit a friend, to begin a new life, to look for someone she’d known in France or wherever she’d come from before that?”
“Which brings us back to the war.”
“I expect it does.”
Haldane considered Rutledge, his expression hard to read. “A great many Englishmen went to France during the war. Not all of them came home. It’s possible she came to find someone who didn’t survive—who didn’t send for her when he came home, as he’d promised to do.”
“If she hadn’t found him—if he was dead—she wouldn’t have been killed.”
“I think you have a particular soldier in mind. An officer? Or a man in the ranks?”
“An officer. I can’t really link him to this woman.” But Leslie, who had a reputation for thoroughness, had failed to bring in her killer. “This is more an effort to eliminate than to confirm.”
“To put your mind at ease? Or to spare him the embarrassment of bringing him in for questioning?”
“He was an officer in the war. He’s presently an officer at the Yard.”
Haldane sighed. “A complication indeed. May I ask why you wish to eliminate him from consideration?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve known him for some time. That’s the problem.”
“Then you are concerned about the repercussions if in the end, you must bring him in.”
It was blunt. And astute.
“I have not wished to go that far.” Rutledge was silent for a moment. Then he said, “He was assigned to the inquiry, and he failed to find the guilty party. I can see why, I’ve had the devil of a time as well. But there’s something else that troubles me. Who better to shape the outcome of the inquiry than the man responsible for finding himself?”
“Then you want to know more about his war. If there is an enemy of this man. Or something that the Army never discovered. If he knew this woman.”
With some reluctance he gave Haldane Leslie’s name, regiment, and rank. But he knew there was no other way of learning what he needed to know.
Haldane said, “Thank you. It may take some time, you understand. But I will be in touch.”
It was a dismissal, but Rutledge said, “I want to be wrong. I’ve always liked and respected the man.”
“Perhaps you are wrong. But we shall soon know.”
Too restless to go back to his flat, Rutledge drove through the busy streets of London until he reached the Tower, and found a place to leave his motorcar on a side street just above it. Getting out, he walked down to the entrance and stood there for a time, staring down into the moat. Clouds had moved in while he was speaking to Haldane, and now a spitting rain was beginning to fall. He ignored it.
His godfather, David Trevor, had told him once that he often went to the Tower to clear his mind when he encountered a problem with plans he was drawing up. An architect, he would stare at the White Tower, put up by the Normans to show a defeated country who had the power now. As a political statement, it had been very successful, but as a building, it had survived the men who had erected it through nine centuries of changing monarchies, intrigue, and even warfare. For Trevor, the Tower’s very existence was satisfying, visible proof of what an architect’s skill could achieve.