Charles Todd: A long shadow

He wasn't sure what he'd expected to see there. But except for a grazing horse at the far end, the pasture was empty.

His years in the trenches had taught him to pinpoint snipers in their lairs, and the skill came back to him with accustomed ease. He strode along the hedgerow, searching for crushed blades of grass, scuffed earth-any signs that pointed to where someone stretched out on the ground or crouched by the thick tangle of tree limbs and dead wild- flower stalks, waiting to fire.

Underfoot the grass was a dull yellow and damp, quickly soaking into his leather shoes as he broke into a trot, following the line of the hedge. He knew the angle of fire. Less than fifty feet away from where he'd climbed the hedgerow, he found what he was looking for-a muddied patch and above it a single twig snapped in two. He squatted there on the ground, looking back toward the lane, and he could see there was a perfect field of fire from this spot toward where his motorcar had been passing as the windscreen shattered.

Not an accident, then. But what? He couldn't believe that boys had been trying out their father's war souvenir. The shot had barely missed his head. The question was, had it missed on purpose, or because the shooter wasn't skilled enough to hit his target?

Then as he straightened, he saw, shoved into a thicker part of the hedge not more than a foot away, three shell casings, in a length of belt.

His anger had drained out of him, and he turned quickly to scan the pasture again, suddenly aware of how vulnerable he was, if the man with the revolver took another shot. No one there. Nothing to prove anyone had been there.

It was as if it had all been a figment of his imagination. The horse was grazing peacefully, and the crows had settled again into the trees across the road. And yet there was the shattered windscreen, and here was evidence of someone lying in wait, taking aim-pulling the trigger. Not an accidental firing but a careful ambush.

And the shell casings left behind as a taunt.

I could have killed you. But I didn't. This time.

He spent nearly half an hour quartering the pasture for tracks, searching for any sign of how the shooter had come here, or left. At length, unsatisfied, he went back to lift the casings out of the hedge, and look at them more closely.

Behind him Hamish said, "Three."

Soldiers in the trenches were a superstitious lot. It was said German snipers waited for a man to light a cigarette, then pass the match to the men beside him. And as the third cigarette flared, the sniper had made his kill. Three.

Like the other casings, these were.303s, from a Maxim machine gun. It had been the most widely used weapon in the war, half of Europe copying its design for their armies. And the machine gun had been the most deadly weapon of the war, sweeping the stark, shell-pocked, wire-strung terrain called No Man's Land with a hail of bullets that could bring a man down and pass on in a matter of seconds to kill everyone beside him long before any of them reached the first line of enemy trenches. It had, Rutledge thought, caused more casualties than any other weapon. The gunner and his crew could hold off a hundred men, and there was no way to stop him.

Rutledge stood there studying the cartridge casings. Like the others he'd found before, these were clearly meant for him to examine.

Even in the gray afternoon light he could see the skull carefully set in the cup of a poppy blossom, nestled where the stamens should have been. The blossom was beautifully formed, the petals open and lovingly shaped, the death's head staring up at him with blackened eye sockets cut deep enough into the metal to give them a ghoulish realism.

Without thinking he touched his gloved finger to the dark sockets and then saw there was a smudge on the leather.

Rutledge could have sworn that it was blood. But whether his own, from the cuts on his face, or from something on the carving, he couldn't have said. He found a man in Hertford who could replace the shattered windscreen, but there was nothing to be done about his own face, except to ask the doctor recommended by the garage owner's wife to pluck the deeper bits of glass out of his skin.

"I'd report this to Inspector Smith," Dr. Eustace told him. "We can't have silly fools running about the countryside with loaded firearms! This sliver could have blinded you, if it'd struck your eye instead of your eyebrow!" He held up a splinter of glass, bloody on the tip.

"It was an accident," Rutledge answered him, trying to infuse conviction into his voice. His face was stinging like hell. He wasn't about to discuss the shell casings with anyone, let alone a provincial inspector who would begin to ask questions he couldn't answer himself. But all the while Hamish was telling him that the shot had been a near thing. For both of them.

"And ye must ask why he didna kill you, when you were in his sights."

"On a public road?" he retorted silently as Dr. Eustace went on with his digging. "I'd rather know why he followed me to Beachy Head just to leave a warning. Why not shoot me on the cliff and simply roll my body off the edge and into the sea? I was an excellent target, standing there against the sky. It would have been the easiest way to be rid of me without a trace."

"Aye, but I canna' believe he wanted it to be sae easy." And after a moment, Hamish added, "He likes playing wi' you."

"He'd have had to be ahead of me," Rutledge responded grimly as the doctor probed for the last shard of glass and then handed him a mirror. "But how did he get clear so fast?"

"You'll have to put this powder on the wounds," Dr. Eustace was saying, reaching for a small packet on the table behind him, "else they're likely to fester. You won't look very pretty in the witness-box, in spite of my handiwork. But at least the worst of the damage is cleaned."

Rutledge stared at himself in the mirror. Tiny red wounds spotted his face, giving him the appearance of a man with measles.

"It doesn't matter," he answered the doctor. "The cuts will heal soon enough."

But he could remember the sound of shattering glass and the familiar whistle of the bullet rushing past his ear. Hamish was right: it had been damnably close! He had felt the wind of its passing. Either the shooter was a very good marksman, or he'd come closer than he'd intended.

It was rather like being stalked by someone who didn't exist. But the bruised grass by the hedgerow told Rutledge it wasn't a shadow following him.

He remembered too the uneasiness he'd felt at Beachy Head. He'd felt it again in that pasture, a tall target there by the hedgerow, a target even a poor marksman couldn't have missed.

He didn't like being vulnerable.

He didn't like a nameless, faceless pursuer at his heels, invisible because he couldn't be identified. "Aye, he could be anywhere," Hamish told him. "Even in yon courtroom, staring down at you from the gallery." It was a thought Rutledge carried with him into the witness-box. But if this stalking had been an attempt to change Rut- ledge's testimony, it had failed. He saw the prisoner in the dock convicted and walked out of the courtroom with grim satisfaction, even as he scanned the faces around him: five or six women, twice as many men, three ex-soldiers still wearing their army-issue greatcoats, one of them on crutches, and a baker's boy in his white apron, his face speckled with flour. There was no one among them he recognized. But did one of them know him?

Constable Hensley was not a glutton for punishment, but he was not a man of self-discipline either. When the note came, he stared at it for a moment and then crumpled it in his fist. There was no salutation or signature. Just the words "I saw you there in the wood." He'd have sworn that he'd taken every precaution. Who had been out in the fields, or for God's sake, along the road that afternoon? Why had they been spying on him? What did they know? Did they have any idea how often he'd gone to the wood? That he was unable to stop himself from searching it over and over again, looking for any sign that the ground had been disturbed? Where had he-or she-been, this watcher? How many times had he been watched? He remembered that strong sense of someone else in the wood. The sound of a footfall somewhere behind him. Now that he considered the possibility, he was sure that he hadn't imagined it after all. Frith's Wood was always intimidating, with that ominous feeling of something there that was not natural. Not even human.