Charles Todd: A long shadow

Rutledge had never reexamined the single casing he'd found outside Maryanne Browning's house. He'd been far more interested in why it was on her doorstep than in what was cut into its surface. As far as he knew it was still in his dress coat pocket.

He looked around the headland, tasting the salt on his lips as the wind turned and blew off the sea. There was no one else out here. No one at all.

Yet the cartridge casings hadn't been in the seat when he left the motorcar to walk out to the cliff's edge. That was a certainty.

If anyone had followed him here from the village- where was he now? Lying flat somewhere in the scrubby grass or long since gone on his bicycle, making a silent retreat?

Turning slowly in a circle, Rutledge scanned the landscape once more, as far as he could see.

The emptiness around him seemed filled with something malevolent.

He couldn't shake off the sense of being watched. But there was not even a gull in the sky overheard.

There hadn't been anyone in the square in London either.

After a moment or two, Rutledge tossed the casings onto the passenger seat and put the car in gear. All the way to London, he reminded himself that while someone might have known he was going to the Brownings' party- Sergeant Gibson had tracked him down, after all-no one could have guessed that he would drive out to this godforsaken headland late on a cold and windy January afternoon. He himself hadn't expected to come here. It had happened on the spur of the moment, a whim dictated by a need for silence and peace. Someone would have to be a mind reader…

He was nearly certain that there was no reason for anyone to follow him from the village where the hostages had been taken. It was far more likely that someone had tracked him from London.

But why?

Reaching his flat, Rutledge couldn't stop himself from looking down at the front steps. There was nothing there. He walked inside, went up to his rooms, and turned on the lamp before going in search of the other cartridge case, the one from New Year's Eve. It was still in the pocket of his dress coat, and he examined it in the lamp's bright glow.

Poppies. Rows of them gracefully circling the casing, the petals of each bloom very beautifully etched into the brass alloy. But between the leaves and stems he could just barely see something hiding in the greenery. Was that an eye peering out? Or had the engraver's hand slipped? Hard to say. He'd have thought nothing of it, if he hadn't seen the latest example. Now the deliberately vague socket took on a more sinister air.

"By the same hand," Hamish pointed out, and indeed the skill of workmanship proved that.

The question was, Rutledge thought uneasily, what would have happened if he hadn't left the Browning house early that last night of the old year? Would the casing have been retrieved until another opportunity presented itself? Or left to be swept up along with the leaves and debris in the gutter, a malicious impulse that hadn't been successful? What had he set in motion by finding it? Worse still, what did this harrying have to do with his years in the trenches?

He remembered Mrs. Channing, the only guest he hadn't met before that night. Could she have guessed that he wouldn't stay for the seance if he could find a polite reason for walking out on Maryanne's party? Then how had she managed to step outside and leave that casing where he would find it? While he was drinking his port with the other men?

He hadn't served with anyone named Channing.

He searched his memory for the faces he'd seen in Bel- ton, people quickly gathering out of morbid curiosity to learn how a man's murderous rampage ended. She hadn't been there, he'd have recognized her. Who else, then? Who of half a hundred people might it have been? Someone at the back of the crowd, surely, half hidden, wanting to see without being seen.

"Or none of them," Hamish retorted.

As for Beachy Head, it was open, without much in the way of cover.

I'm too good a policeman to have missed him! he told himself. If he followed me, I'd have seen him.

It had taken nerve to step out in the open, reach the motorcar, toss in the casings, and vanish again. I could have turned at any moment, and caught him.

"You had ither things on your mind."

"I wasn't there that long!"

"Longer than ye ken."

Rutledge shook his head.

"He was in the trenches," Hamish went on. "Else, where did he come by these?"

Rutledge flinched, half expecting Hamish to lean forward to touch the cartridge casings. He scooped them up quickly and put them in the drawer of his desk, turning the key. "Why machine-gun cartridges?" he asked aloud, "or poppies?"

Hamish answered him. "That last night-before the firing squad. It was a machine gunner we were sent to take out. And in the spring, poppies bloom in Flanders. They're red, the color of blood." A few days later, Rutledge was on his way to Hertford to give evidence at the trial of a man he'd apprehended some months before. He had stopped briefly for an early lunch at a pub in a village that lay some distance behind now, and he was trying to make up his time. With luck, he'd be in the county town in another half an hour, well before he was due to meet the KC.

The road had narrowed for a mile or more, shrinking now into a stretch that was barely wide enough for one vehicle, let alone two. To one side a winter-bare hedgerow ran up a slope and down again, giving him a feeling of being shut in between it and the flickering shadows cast by a copse on his right.

It was claustrophobic, reminding him of a magic- lantern show gone mad-light and dark, light and dark, the trees flitting by like irregular fence palings and without substance.

As he geared down for the bend ahead, Hamish said, "You'll have us both in the ditch-"

He never finished the warning.

A shot echoed, sending half a dozen crows flying up out of the trees, crying raucously in alarm just as the windscreen in front of Rutledge shattered, glass spraying like bright bits of water into his face. And he could feel the wind of the bullet passing his ear before thudding somewhere in the rear seat behind him.

Fighting to control the motorcar as it veered across the road and straight for the clumped roots and dried wild- flowers at the foot of the hedgerow, Rutledge was swept by horror.

The shot had missed him-but it couldn't have missed Hamish, directly behind him.

The bonnet came perilously close to burying itself into the earth beneath the hedgerow before he had cut the motor and the vehicle rocked to a halt.

His face was wet with blood, but he was barely aware of it. What filled his mind was the silence in the seat behind him.

I dare not turn and look.

If he's badly hurt-what am I to do? I can't touch him-!

As the initial shock receded, he reminded himself that Hamish was already dead, buried in one of the muddy cemeteries in France.

The relief that swept him was followed by a cold, intense anger.

He was out of the motorcar, the door swinging wide behind him, racing toward a break in the hedgerow some twenty feet away.

The shot had come from a revolver, he was certain of it. He knew the range, and his ears had unconsciously registered the direction of the sound, even though he hadn't seen the muzzle flash. And the only thought in his mind now was putting hands on the man who had fired it.

"Ye canna' leave the motor here!" Hamish shouted behind him. "Yon bend-"

But Rutledge was scrambling up the stones, weeds, and packed earth at the foot of the hedgerow, ignoring the stubby twigs and branches that plucked at his clothes and scraped his hands. He found the thinning patch where one of the knot of trees had died out, pushed his way through it with a final effort, and plunged into the rolling pasture beyond.