Charles Todd - The Confession

But it wasn’t chained by the farmhouse, as he’d expected. He could hear the barking growing louder as the animal raced toward him.

Rutledge stayed where he was, and when the dog was fifty feet away, he whistled softly and held out one hand palm down. The dog, large and dark, slowed, legs stiff, tail straight, and the ruff on the back of his neck standing up. Rutledge dropped to his haunches and called, “Come on, there’s a good dog,” speaking quietly until it approached. All at once its tail dropped and began to wag, and stretching out its muzzle, the animal sniffed Rutledge’s fingers.

It had been a good two years since the airfield had been shut down, but clearly the dog remembered the men posted here and their friendliness, and soon accepted Rutledge as one of them, letting this newcomer scratch behind its ears.

Together they walked on across the field, and then turned toward the barn. Here Rutledge saw great stacks of wood and brick out behind the building, where the thrifty farmer had retrieved what the Royal Flying Corps had left behind. In another pile were broken propellers, cracked struts, and even torn bits of canvas and metal, where aircraft had crashed or been in a dogfight, and the equally thrifty ground crew had salvaged what they could. He wondered what the farmer intended to do with such bits.

The dog wandered into the farmyard, and Rutledge turned back the way he’d come. Finding the gap in the fence was harder from this side, but after several tries, he came across it.

On the road again, he walked toward the village. He was almost there, the river glinting in the distance, when he heard oars in oarlocks and quiet voices echoing across the water. Then close by, the sound of a boat being dragged up on the rough shale.

He stepped quickly into the shadows of the large plane tree at the bend in the road, well hidden beneath the broad leaves weighing down the branches overhead.

Three men strode up from the water, silent and staying close to one another as they made their way along the side of The Rowing Boat, keeping between the tall shrubs that marked the pub’s boundary line and the darker shadows under the roof ’s overhang. As they reached the High, Rutledge could see that each man carried a haversack slung over his left shoulder, hunching a little under of the weight of it. And under his right arm, each man carried a shotgun, the barrel just catching the starlight and glinting dully.

Smuggling, Rutledge realized, and slid deeper into the shadows until his back touched the smooth bark of the tree. He stood no chance against three shotguns.

The men separated without a word, two hurrying off up the High and the third coming directly toward him.

There was nothing he could do but stand where he was, his back pressed against the tree trunk, his body braced for whatever he would have to do. There was no time to pull his hat lower to cover the paleness of his face or even to turn away. He carefully ducked his head so that his chin was nearly touching his collar, and waited.

Hamish, his voice a low growl, seemed to be waiting too, just behind his shoulder. But Hamish was not there, and no help if it came down to a fight.

Rutledge watched as the man cut diagonally across the road, grunting as he shifted the haversack a little to ease his shoulder.

Fifty feet. Thirty. Twenty feet and closing.

Near enough now to see him standing there, surely. And the men who had gone the other way were still within hearing. One shout and they’d turn. He could deal with one of them, he even stood a good chance of disarming the man nearest him, given the element of surprise. The other two could bring him down from a distance, and his only hope was to make it out of range before they fired.

Barber had had no qualms about clubbing him to death. These men would shoot first and worry later.

Something in the way the man walked was familiar. Had he seen him before? When he was here with Frances?

Just then, only ten feet away, the man grunted as he shifted the haversack again.

And the haversack was all that stood between them, blocking the man’s view of Rutledge there under the tree. He walked on, whistling under his breath.

It also prevented Rutledge from seeing the man’s face.

He wouldn’t have been able to identify him if his life had depended on it. Not in a courtroom. There was just that instinctive recognition. And it too could be wrong.

A door opened a little farther along on Rutledge’s side of the street and then shut again as quietly as possible. By that time it was too late to move away from the tree to see where the other two men had gone.

Hamish said, his voice seeming loud enough to be heard on the far side of the river, “Ye ken, this is why no one is happy to have Scotland Yard come to ask questions.”

Had they known anything about Ben Willet’s death? Or had they believed that it was only an excuse to look into other matters?

The inn was only a short distance ahead, but Rutledge waited until he was certain there were no watchers guarding the backs of the three men. He was just about to move when someone detached himself from the recessed doorway of The Rowing Boat and turned to jog up the High Street, disappearing into the small village school.

He waited another ten minutes, in case the watcher left the school and went home. Finally, satisfied that he was in the clear, he stepped quietly out of the shadow of the plane tree and walked without haste toward the inn.

Rutledge had seen Barber-or in point of fact, heard him-at the kitchen door of the inn hardly more than an hour ago. Therefore he couldn’t have been one of the three coming up from the river. Nor was he the watcher in the pub’s doorway, for that man was smaller in stature. Still, Rutledge wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Barber was the force behind the smuggling.

Smuggling wasn’t unheard of along the southern coast of England even in this day. Fisherman had long ago learned that they could supplement their meager living from the sea by dropping in at a French port and making quiet arrangements with their opposite numbers. War or peace, men needed to eat, and His Majesty’s Excise be damned. But this last war, with submarines as well as Naval vessels and German raiders patrolling the seas, must have curtailed the usual cross-Channel trade, much less fishing. Times would have been hard for villages like Furnham. The question was, why had the village turned its back on the airfield, which could have brought in much-needed revenue to the shops and pub?

He reached The Dragonfly without incident and, as silently as possible, climbed the stairs to his room. The innkeeper was nowhere in sight. And his room was as he’d left it. No one had come in to search it in his absence.

Rutledge wouldn’t have put it past the inn’s owner.

The next morning, Rutledge was grudgingly served his breakfast in the small dining room overlooking the street. There were five tables, crowded together cheek by jowl, but he was the only guest.

“Tell me about the airfield,” he said to the young woman who was serving him.

She was pretty, fair hair tending to curls in spite of rigorous attempts to keep it out of her face, and her eyes were hazel. He wondered if this was the Molly who had brought news of Ned Willet’s death.

“I dunno much about it, sir,” she said. “I was only twelve when they came to build it, and my mother saw to it that I had nothing to do with the young men who were posted here. She said they’d break my heart by dying, and there was no use to befriend them. And she was right about the dying. We saw three of them go down out over the water, trailing smoke. I was glad I didn’t know them then.”

“Still, the airfield must have changed the way of life in Furnham. By sheer numbers if nothing else.”