“Yes, sir.”
“Then take the motorcar and call at the farms. Poke around. It might go faster that way.”
“Sir?” Leigh stared at him.
“Farm dogs bark, Constable. Start with that. See where it leads. We also need to know how the killer got the body to the churchyard. Which direction he might have come from. If he didn’t go through the village, how did he get here? Or leave here? He didn’t fly. He drove. A carriage, a cart, a motorcar. Even a lorry. A country lane will do as well as a parish road, if you don’t want to be seen in the middle of the night.”
Rutledge watched him drive on down the street, then began to walk. It was time to draw a rough map in his head of the village, and that was best done on foot and alone. Villagers cast curious glances his way or nodded civilly as they passed him, well aware of who he was and why he was there. But no one came up to speak to him. No one crossed the road ahead to avoid him. By the time he turned his steps back toward The Dun Cow, he had a sense of Tern Bridge and its inhabitants. What that was telling him supported what he’d learned so far. If there was a killer in their midst, the villagers hadn’t started to point fingers. Not yet. They still felt safe in the prevailing assumption that if the woman was a stranger, so was her murderer. When would that begin to change? When the Constable came back with his interviews of the farmers?
If the Constable found answers there, it would be a very good piece of luck indeed. Rutledge knew better than to count on it.
Replies from neighboring villages began to arrive later. None of them reported having any information about a missing woman. And that supported Rutledge’s budding theory that the dead woman had been left here precisely because she was far away from anyone who might know her.
Constable Leigh soon returned from speaking to the owners of the nearby farms and the men working for them, and he had come up empty-handed. “Not that I expected much help in that direction, sir. No visitors, not this time of year, and with the windows closed tight against the cold, they didn’t hear anything that was useful. The dogs keep to the barn most nights. Still, you never know until you ask.”
Rutledge remembered the difficulties Chief Inspector Leslie had had finding the killer of the woman in Avebury. He had a feeling his inquiry might turn out the same way, a murderer eluding him. Was there by any chance a connection? The same killer moving across England? He didn’t know enough about the Avebury murder to be certain. The problem was, how had the killer known about the open grave at Tern Bridge? Unless he was one of the expected mourners?
Rutledge said to Constable Leigh, “You told me the grave was prepared for a Mr. Simmons?”
“That’s right, sir. Fifty-three, a widower with a daughter in Shrewsbury. But she’s been here for the past fortnight, ever since he took ill. If you’re thinking she might be the woman in the grave.”
“Any other relatives expected for the funeral?”
“Two cousins in their seventies, and a friend of Miss Simmons. She’s staying over to help with the clearing out of the house. They’re accounted for, sir.”
“The undertaker. Where is he from?”
“The next village. Norham. It’s twice the size of ours, and better situated for the firm to serve other villages. Quite reputable, they are, sir.”
“The sexton. What’s known about him?”
“He’s lived here all his life. I’ve heard nothing against him. In his late thirties, I’d say. He’s not much for the ladies. Lost his wife some eight years ago. She ran off with the man who came to dig a new well at the Rectory. Gossip claimed she’d ended up in London, and no better than she ought to be.”
“Could she have come home? The prodigal wife?”
Leigh stared at him.
“If she did, and the sexton wanted no part of her, what better place to leave her body than the freshly dug grave.”
Shaking his head, the Constable said, “I’d never have thought about her. But the dead woman is too young. Joan was younger than he was, there’s that. But she left here eight years ago. And she didn’t dress as modestly.”
“Perhaps she reminded him of his wife, and he killed her for that.”
Constable Leigh was skeptical, but he accompanied Rutledge to the church.
They found the sexton removing the dead greenery left there from the funeral that was never held. He looked up as he heard the south porch door scraping open across the stone flagging.
Courtney Miller was in his late thirties, a broad-shouldered man with fair hair so bleached by the sun that it was almost white. His eyes were a startling blue in a face roughened by weather. It was as if they stared out from behind a mask.
“Good afternoon,” he said, straightening up, his arms full of dry greenery. “Looking for Rector? He’s at the Taylor farm. Mrs. Taylor had a boy at four in the morning. Eight pound, according to the midwife.”
“The doctor didn’t attend her?” Rutledge asked.
“I’ve heard it said she didn’t care too much for his modern ways. Old Sally, now, has been midwife for as long as I can remember, and there are women who swear by her.”
“I understand you were married,” Rutledge commented. “Any chance that the woman in the grave is your wife, returning to Shropshire because she’s had enough of London?”
Miller had been looking directly at Rutledge, apparently untroubled until his wife was mentioned. His gaze went to Leigh, accusing.
“He had no right to draw her name into this business. But no, it’s not Joan, and even if she did turn up here one day, I’m not likely to be taking a knife to her.” He faced Rutledge now. “When she first left me, yes, I was boiling mad. I don’t know what I might have done back then. But it’s been seven—no, eight years, and I’ve got over her now. It was a mistake to marry her in the first place, and that’s a fact.”
Leigh said, “Sorry, Court. But the Inspector did ask.”
Rutledge said easily, “Don’t blame the Constable. He’s right, I was asking questions about all the villagers, and that perforce included you. A man with the opportunity—you knew about the grave—and you found the body.”
“Anyone could have told you it wasn’t Joan.”
“People change. If no one was expecting her to come back to Shropshire, it’s possible no one recognized her.”
“I would’ve,” Miller replied curtly. “Don’t you think that would have been the first thing I noticed?”
“Do you remember her birthdate?”
“’Course I do,” he said. “She’d be thirty-five this May. The seventeenth.”
Rutledge had put the dead woman’s age at around twenty-eight or -nine.
“Does the dead woman look anything like your wife? Could she have been mistaken in the dark for Joan? Someone who might not want her to come back to Tern Bridge?”
Something in the sexton’s face changed. “What do you mean? Not want her back? You’re not saying my mother mistook her for Joan?” He shook his head. “No, I won’t believe that. Mum hated her, that’s true enough. But she wouldn’t go killing a stranger she saw in the dark. What was that woman doing wandering about, anyway? It doesn’t make sense. Where did she come from? How did she get here? That’s the question you ought to be asking.”