Wister had said nothing about a conversation with one of the airfield doctors when Rutledge had first spoken to him. Only that such sightings had been said to have happened. But here, in the shadows of the shed, the torch on the dead woman, he seemed compelled to give them his account.
There was a brief silence.
Rutledge said, “Is that why you asked me to be careful how I questioned Lady Benton?”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Wister replied. “I’m a doctor. Dead is dead. But the mind can play tricks, Rutledge. It can sometimes convince itself that it has seen what isn’t there. The danger is, whatever caused the mind to believe in the fabrication can be difficult to assess. And the wrong handling can do irreparable damage.”
Rutledge felt cold, careful to keep the light away from his own face. It was too near the truth. And Hamish was hammering in the back of his mind, drowning out what Hamilton was saying in response.
The two men lifted the blanket by its corners, and turned to leave the shed, carrying their burden between them. Rutledge led the way, keeping the torch pointed to the ground, to ease their passage.
At one point, he glanced up at the distant house, but it was lost in the mist. He couldn’t tell if Lady Benton had been able to rest or if she were roaming the rooms, looking for peace. He hoped she found it, because tomorrow he’d have to tell her about Mrs. Lowell.
It was a long walk back to the motorcar. And then there was the problem of what to do with the body.
Rutledge said, “Take the motorcar. I’ll stay here, and one of you can come back for me.” He would just as soon be alone for a while, and it was going to be some time before he got back to the hotel. “Leave me the torch. I’ll see if there’s anything in that shed that we can use.”
Working together, they put Mrs. Lowell’s body into the rear seat, and Rutledge turned the crank as the doctor and Inspector Hamilton got in, handing him the torch before he shut his door. “A nasty business,” he told Rutledge. “Anything you can find, anything that could tell us why this happened.”
And then they were gone, the sound of the motor lasting longer than the visibility of the rear light.
The silence wrapped around him again as the mist closed in. Rutledge stood there for a time, thinking, but came to no conclusions. Lady Benton had worried that Mrs. Lowell was ill, but she had said nothing about her being in distress. And it seemed odd that if Mrs. Lowell had been in such despair over the anniversary of her husband’s death, that she hadn’t taken flowers to the churchyard before killing herself. A last gesture of love—a last moment by the memorial stone, before choosing to join him in death.
And he had looked in the other sheds before he’d found her body. Where was her bicycle? It wasn’t at the airfield, and it wasn’t at the Old Rectory. Why hadn’t she left it outside the shed before putting the rope in place, and using the stool? Or if she hadn’t taken it to reach the airfield, why wasn’t it in its proper place?
He turned the shielded torch on the hedge, where he had sometimes left his own motorcar well out of sight. Sweeping the branches, probing the depths for some twenty yards or more. If there was a bicycle here, it had been shoved too far in to be readily seen. He went closer. Using his gloved hand to push heavier branches aside.
It wasn’t there.
He couldn’t picture her walking alone in the dark from the Old Rectory to the airfield, carrying the heavy rope she intended to use. Again, according to Lady Benton, Mrs. Lowell had been uncomfortable when Fred Newbold stared at her as she passed The Monk’s Choice. She wasn’t likely to walk past when the pub was noisy, busy with custom, people coming and going.
The more he considered the matter, the more he found it difficult to see Patricia Lowell as a suicide. There was nothing to point to it.
On the other hand, there was nothing to point to murder, either. She seemed to be as unlikely a victim of murder as she was a suicide.
And yet—and yet—she was dead.
Hamish said into the stillness, “Was she mistaken in the dark for Lady Benton?”
Rutledge couldn’t see that, either. And yet it made more sense than any other answer he could think of.
Was the airfield haunted? Not in the sense of ghosts wandering the runway to warn pilots of their impending deaths. More likely because of something that had once happened here—and wasn’t finished even now. Even with the war over, and the aircraft taken away. And he didn’t know why. Or how it was related to what had happened to Lady Benton. Who was searching? Who had unfinished business here?
And what had it to do with Patricia Lowell?
Flicking on the torch again, he started back to the airfield.
Even with better light, there was nothing in the tall shed that he could see. A broken door, a damaged rope hanging from the rafters, the overturned stool, which he’d righted and stood on to cut down the dead woman.
How had Mrs. Lowell managed her own death so well? He wouldn’t have expected it of the woman he’d met in the undercroft. Capable, yes, trustworthy, as Lady Benton had described her. But wandering the airfield in the dark, carrying a stool to the shed, putting the rope over the only beam—how had she known these things were there? If she was afraid of passing The Monk’s Choice when it was busy, how had she found the courage to come to the airfield and search it for what she needed in order to die?
Surely she would have felt safer using a shed on her own property. Or one of the trees beyond the house, if the shed had not worked.
What had brought her here?
And where was her bicycle? Useless here on the field with the foundations and weeds—but it would have carried her safely past the pub, and down the lane. Yet it hadn’t.
Her killer had been particularly careful. If this was murder . . .
Why not, if the intent was to let the world believe she was a suicide, have her hang in her own home? It was what a woman would choose to do, rather than end her life among the cobwebs in the rafters, the smell of oil and damp, a place where her late husband had never served. Even cutting her wrists over his grave might appeal to her, so that her blood ran down into the emptiness under the stone. Either was a more likely death for Patricia Lowell.
But it might well come to be the last straw for Lady Benton, who had not been frightened away by the pantomime in her private garden.
There was going to be a long wait before his motorcar came back . . .
He made up his mind, and picked his way as quickly as he dared over the rough ground back to the hedge, and there he set out at a jog down the farm lane toward the road.
He’d often walked on holidays when he was at Oxford. For the exercise and because he’d liked exploring, finding his way over unfamiliar ground. Sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend. He was accustomed to it.
Rutledge’s intention was to search Mrs. Lowell’s house again, this time not so much trying to discover where she might have gone—or what had happened to her—but to find out what there was in her life that would explain her death.
He’d been walking on the road for what he estimated must be a mile and a half, when Hamish said softly “Hist!”
Rutledge stopped short, flicked off the torch, and as the sound of his footsteps faded, he heard voices. Not close by, he couldn’t distinguish words. And the mist effectively disguised where they were coming from.