Charles Todd - Watchers of Time

Rutledge stared at the tool in his hand, another thought rising among the confused images that exhaustion was fusing, like drug-induced dreams in hospital, into a semblance of reality.

The mare hadn’t been at the scene when the doctor arrived-he wouldn’t have been able to examine her shoe for signs of blood and hair. And by the time she was found, any useful traces on the shoe would have been worn away. A pity. It would have been clearer evidence in the chain of events Blevins had to sort out. Indeed, someone ought to wait here until the mare was brought in.

He himself should be on his way to Priscilla Connaught…

His mind fragmented by multiple lines of thought, Rutledge tried to find coherence. And the fatigue riding him refused to let him.

How many hammers were there in Osterley-in a twenty-mile radius of Osterley?

It didn’t matter. The bodies of the dead often told their own stories of how they died. But not always why. It was the why that mattered now.

He realized what Hamish had just said to him. “… a needle in a haystack…”

Rutledge turned and walked toward the stalls that had held three Norfolk Grays only last night, thinking that the hammer had been in the barrow with its brothers only last night. He’d seen them there when he’d gone through the barn with the farmer Hadley and Tom Randal.

But he hadn’t been searching for hammers, only for Walsh The luminous brown eyes of the remaining horse met his and as Rutledge neared the stall, the animal blew softly, interested in the mixed smell of dog and motorcar that he carried with him. The yellow dog walked patiently at his heels, panting and grinning, a willing conspirator if Rutledge took it into his head to steal this last mount.

Rutledge approached the horse with care, concentrating on speaking quietly, reassuringly, before reaching out to the nose stretched toward him. “Where are your stable-mates? Hmmm? And what’s keeping your master-”

Hamish said something, fast and unintelligible.

There was heaving movement in the shadows at his shoulder, hardly visible, more a sudden blend of sounds and shapes so startlingly close that there was no defense against it. Rutledge ducked, prepared for a wild attack.

A second gray horse, awakened by a voice next to where she’d been dozing head down in her stall, swung it high and stretched forward to nuzzle him.

The mare.

She was home.

Once his breathing had settled back into the range of speech, Rutledge stepped into the stall, calling her name softly as he ran his hand down her neck and then along her flank, before moving toward her hindquarters. The mare quivered, her coat rippling with the movement of the nerves under it, but she stood still. He kept one hand on her back and bent to lift the heavy hoof on the near side. In the poor light of the barn, he couldn’t see well enough to examine it.

Turning her head to stare at him, she let him work with her without protest. He put down that hoof, and then moved to lift the other.

For an instant he thought she was going to kick out, and he could see himself caught in the head just as Walsh had been, his back too near the stall’s high side wall to let him escape the blow. But she simply moved a step forward, as if to give him more room.

The shoe was missing.

He put down the heavy hoof, keeping his hand gently on the mare’s rump. Her coat was rough with the lather of sweat, briars and leaves tangled in the thick hair. She had been ridden very hard, and she was tired…

He lifted the hoof again. She turned her head, the great brown eyes watching him.

But she did not kick. She was safe in her own stall now, and not likely to object, in her present state. He let the hoof down, and moved around toward the big head.

“Clever girl, to find your own way home.” He slapped the neck just below the ears twitching with interest as if wondering what it was he wanted.

Hamish said, “Left to hersel’, it’s no’ a great surprise.”

Where was Randal?

Had he come back yet? There was no sign of the gelding. This time Rutledge moved on to the last stall to peer inside. It stood empty.

Randal was still searching for his lost mare.

Rutledge laid the hammer by the harrow, where he’d found it, and walked out of the barn. He could hear ravens calling in the woods, and somewhere the sharp whistle of a pheasant.

Priscilla Connaught was waiting. He had to go.

It was almost a surprise when he heard Hamish’s voice saying, “The woman willna’ go away. Stay until yon farmer comes back.”

Rutledge thought, “I’ll finish what I’ve begun.” But in Hurley, the doctor would be ready to examine Walsh’s body. Hamish was right. He ought to be there, too. No matter what he did, he was off track-last night, this morning-and there seemed to be nothing he could do about it.

Besides, it was Blevins’s case. The Inspector would have to be present.

He absently fondled the dog’s ears. Walsh was dead. Whatever Hamish thought, one had always to remember the living.

THE FARMHOUSE WHERE PRISCILLA CONNAUGHT HAD been taken after wrecking her motorcar was set, like so many others, back from the road down a winding lane that led up a slight rise and then into the farmyard. It was muddy, the warm smell of manure coming from a cart by the far wall where the milking shed had been cleaned. The cows themselves, some dozen of them, were already plodding steadily out to pasture, following a routine so well established in their lives that they needed no human direction.

A walk of paving stones led across to the house, and one branch of it disappeared through a hedge around to the front. Rutledge left his car by a stack of bricks covered with a tarpaulin and picked his way across the yard to the walk. There was a door at this end of it, what he assumed to be the kitchen door into the yard. It opened before he got there.

An anxious woman peered out at him. She wore her graying hair in a bun at the back of her neck, and a heavy sweater over her dark dress. “Inspector Rutledge?” she asked, her voice rising.

“Mrs. Danning? I met your husband along the main road. He’s brought the team down to pull Miss Connaught’s motorcar out of the ditch.”

She said, disapprovingly, “I shouldn’t wonder he’ll have his hands full. She shouldn’t have been driving so fast just there. It’s a miracle she didn’t do serious harm to herself!”

It was, he thought from her expression, more a condemnation of a woman at the wheel of a motorcar than it was of speed. Priscilla Connaught would have little in common with Mrs. Danning. They were brought up in very different worlds. The farmer’s wife had work-reddened hands and dressed much as her own mother must have done a generation ago. Youth had deserted her, her life given over to chores and cooking and raising children. To her, Priscilla Connaught was a city-bred peacock suddenly and inexplicably set down in a farmyard.

Holding the door for him, she walked ahead down a flagged passage, past the dairy room and a larder, then opened another door into the warm, lamplit kitchen. “She’s just in here,” Mrs. Danning added over her shoulder, and he stepped into the large room, his hat in his hand. Although sparsely furnished, there was a good round table, handsome chairs, the work sink, and two oak dressers. One of them held jugs and plates, cups and bowls, the glaze shining in the lamp’s glow.

Priscilla Connaught, her hair pinned up haphazardly, her coat dirty and torn, a long scrape across her cheek from her ear to her nose, was sitting hunched in a chair by the coal stove, though the room was warm. Someone had given her a shawl to wrap around her shoulders. It was handmade, thick, and appeared to have been knitted of whatever oddments of wool had been in the basket. There was almost a frivolous air about it, as if the juxtaposition of blues and grays and a very pretty rose had not been thought out as a pattern. A child’s first efforts, perhaps, for the stitches were sometimes too tight.