Hamish said, “It’s a vagrant looking for something to steal.”
But was it?
And where else could he search?
He got back into his motorcar and drove on to the pub, The Monk’s Choice.
Rutledge really didn’t care if anyone saw him or not.
But there were too many prints for him to pick out the one he was after. He widened his circle, getting farther and farther from the door.
And there it was, left in a bit of mud where the grass grew close to the pub yard.
Whoever it belonged to, the owner of the boot had been here.
Hamish warned him again. “Ye canna’ be sure.”
13
Hamish quarreled with him all the way back to the Abbey, where Rutledge left his motorcar by the hedge.
Try as he would, the airfield was too vast a site to search. And even though he looked closely at the ruins of the burned-out hut, too many shoes had passed through here at the time of the fire to pick out any distinctive boot.
When he went to the stable yard and looked, he found a partial heel that was very like the one he had found in the churchyard.
Hamish was right, it proved nothing.
Rutledge left the stable yard and drove back toward Walmer, without speaking to Lady Benton. There was nothing he could tell her that wouldn’t worry her more.
As he came around the hotel to the main entrance, he found Mrs. Dunn just leaving.
“I thought you’d left, with no news for me about my boy.”
“I haven’t left. And sadly I have no news to give you,” he told her.
She nodded. “I’d hoped you weren’t like the others. Inspector Hamilton, and the Major.” Turning, she walked away.
Rutledge said, “I promise you, I haven’t forgotten your son.”
But she kept going, as if this was only one more false promise.
He watched her until she turned down one of the side streets, out of his line of sight.
Instead of going inside the hotel, as he’d planned, Rutledge went back to his motorcar and drove back the way he’d come. At the hedge where he’d left the motorcar before, he got out. And this time instead of walking through what was left of the airfield, he put on his Wellingtons and set out to cross the meadow to the line of trees that marked its boundary. Moving through them, he came out finally on a marshy finger of land where the sea had come up so many times that it had soured the soil. The footing was treacherous, and he was glad of his Wellingtons. The marsh was unable to drain because of a barrier of sand that had been left by retreating tides. They brought in the sea, but couldn’t retrieve it as they pulled out again. Seagrasses had grown in patches here and there, and beyond them was the strand and the ripple of water. On the far side of it was the Continent, France and Belgium. And here was a perfect place to land the troops of an invading army. But that hadn’t happened, although it had been a fear throughout the war.
He walked down to the water’s edge, discovered a few razor shells, and the tracks of seabirds, then found a piece of wood that looked from the flecks of paint still caught in the grain as if it had come from a ship that had been sunk by one side or the other, in the war.
Turning, Rutledge walked the edge of the marsh for some distance, but he could see nowhere that would provide more than the shallowest of graves, for storm tides could easily uncover it. If Gerald Dunn had been killed somewhere on the airfield—at the farthest end of the runway, for one, where could his body have been taken?
Hamish said, “It’s no’ likely he was killed here. Ye ken, a live man is easier to move than a dead one.”
Then he’d been lured somewhere else.
If that is what happened, he was dead, and not hiding out in the tenements of Manchester or Birmingham. It would take an army of men to find him there, or the Foot Police . . .
Did Haldane know what had become of Gerald Dunn? Rutledge rather thought not. Men like Haldane left the Dunns of this world to subordinates . . .
He had walked far enough to find himself at the edge of another of the countless Essex inlets, where a scruffy dinghy was pulled up into the reeds, out of reach of the tides. In the distance on the far side of the water, he could see two men dragging a hose pipe to one of the tide-fed rectangles where salt accumulated through the evaporation of seawater. Rutledge watched them at their work. It was labor intensive, but they went about it with accustomed ease.
The hose pipe inserted where they wanted it, one of the men walked back to the sheds where the collected salt-laden water was pumped into vats and skimmed as the mineral rose to the surface. The other man began to look at several more rectangles, bending now and again to test them. Finally satisfied, he too disappeared in the direction of his fellow worker.
Reminding himself to buy a packet of Walmer Salt for Melinda, Rutledge turned and walked back through the marshland and the trees to the meadow.
From there, at the edge of the trees, he could see the house rising on its knoll, the westering sun silhouetted it, and from here it could be the Abbey that it once was, with the refectory and the dorter, the workrooms and the chapel.
He was still thinking about that when he reached the hedge and walked past the broken place where the Captain had died. He looked up at the house again. This close to, the sun’s spring brightness was blocked, and he could see the terrace and steps that led to the broad spread of the lawns. The windows were dark, empty, as if no one lived there now—except for one at the very top of the house, the old attics where the servants had once lived in the sixteenth century. A light moved past the glass, brighter than the surrounding darkness, and Rutledge set out at a run.
It took him a good ten minutes to reach the door to which he possessed a key, and, breathing hard, he made himself take his time inserting it into the lock. The door opened, and he went up the stairs, leaving it standing wide behind him, his mind busy remembering how he had found his way when he was searching the rooms.
He reached the floor where the last of the servants here had lived, and searched for the stairs to the next level. It was partway down a long narrow passage, and it opened under his hand. The stairs here were dusty, and he saw the prints as he climbed, coming out into a passage with a single window at the end facing the stables. He stopped, making an effort to calm his breathing as he listened.
The light was fading as it moved farther west, and as he stood there, he could feel the emptiness. Still, he went down the side that overlooked the meadow, opening each door and closing it after peering in. The tiny windows gave very little light, but the rooms were so small it didn’t matter. There was no place to hide in any of them. Any furniture that had once been here had been taken away years ago.
Rutledge came to the room he was nearly sure he’d seen from the airfield, flung open the door. There were more footprints in the dust, a different boot from the print he’d seen in the courtyard, but he thought close to the same size. They had disturbed the dust more there by the window, he noticed, but no one was here now.
Unsatisfied, he continued his search, and finally came to the end of the passage and the tiny window overlooking the stable yard. He peered out, but there all he could see were the stables below, beyond them the tennis courts, and in the distance, the rooftop of the Home Farm’s barn.
When he’d looked into every room on the other side of the passage, Hamish said derisively, “Ye’ve seen your ain ghost.”