Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

He walked slowly through the gravestones in the churchyard, some of them tilted with age and so mossy he could barely make out the words incised on them. Others he recognized at a glance-Trepol and Trask, Wilkins and Penrith, Dawlish and Trelawny. There were Poldarins and a Hawkins, a half-dozen Raleighs, though none later than the seventeen hundreds, and a pair of Drakes.

But no pansies. He walked on, looking at the delicately drawn Celtic cross on one gravestone, the sad lines of verse on another for a small child drowned in the Bor, an open book with a ribbon marking its stone pages, any numbers of “Beloved wife” and “Beloved husband.” War dead and plague dead, and a very fine stone angel on a plinth with the legend below it, “In Memory of the Men of the Mary Anne, Lost at Sea in a Storm, October 23, 1847. Eternal Father, Keep Their Souls Safe in Thy Care.” And a list of the names, twenty-seven of them.

It was surely Richard’s angel, the cool marble cheeks turned slightly so that the serene eyes stared unwaveringly towards the church tower for all eternity. There was both compassion and strength in the body, power in the wings. He could see why it had made an indelible impression on a small boy who passed the statue each Sunday morning on his way to services.

A voice behind him said, “Lovely, isn’t it? The village took up a subscription to have it carved in London. The Trev-elyans sent an anonymous donation to help make it up to the amount required, in addition to the sum they’d given openly. It was the sort of thing they did.”

It was Smedley, dressed in a dark suit of clothes, not the rough corduroys of the gardener. Over the wet grass his shoes had made no sound.

“I saw you here and wondered if you were searching for a place to lay the sheep bones to rest,” he went on. But there was a sympathetic gleam in his eyes that took away any sting. “I doubt there’s a soul in the village who hasn’t heard.”

“Yes, well, they never seem to know what I want to hear,” Rutledge said irritably. “Only what I’m doing.”

“You’d be surprised. They seem to think you’re on the trail of a murderer. They’re wondering-among themselves, not to your face-if that terrible man doing the killings in London might be a Borcombe man. They’ve gone through the lists of who lived here once, and who moved away. Failing that, someone who’d passed through. It’s the only explanation they can come up with for a Scotland Yard inspector wasting his time on two suicides and an accident when half London is in absolute terror thinking the other half is about to cut him to ribbons.”

Astonished, Rutledge found himself speechless. Hamish, quick to point out the fact that Rutledge might well be more useful there, was not.

Smedley lifted his shoulders deprecatingly. “The newspaper yesterday morning reported that someone named Bowles was quoted as saying that all available manpower had been diverted to the killings. Do you know him?”

“Yes,” Rutledge answered curtly. “The truth is, I was sent down here to keep me out of the picture. Not to run any leads to earth.”

“That reassures me,” Smedley answered, and there was something in his voice that made Rutledge look more closely at him. “All this fuss over the boy, searching for his grave. His body. Proof that he was in fact dead. I don’t know why, I found myself fearful that perhaps he hadn’t perished on the moors, that he’d been taken away and somehow turned into a monster.”

“You prefer the possibility that someone in his own family might have purposely let him die of exposure?”

“No.” There was sadness in his voice. “I prefer that he rest in peace, wherever he may be. Alive. Or dead. I don’t want to think of anyone suffering and lost and alone, in need of comfort. Least of all someone I held in my arms and christened. Whose soul is, in a sense, my responsibility. And most certainly not Rosamund’s son.”

“The murderer in London is very likely mad. What he’s doing is the work of a ruined mind. The murderer I’m searching for isn’t mad. Whatever reasons he-or she-had for killing, there was a reason.”

Smedley sighed. “I can give one to you. Envy.”

“Envy?” Rutledge repeated. It wasn’t necessarily his first choice of sins. And often not a murderer’s, either, in his experience.

“Envy is at the root of many small cruelties. Watch children at play, if you don’t believe me. It’s a natural emotion in them, and they aren’t yet civilized enough to suppress it.”

A child might kill out of envy… “What could Olivia envy?”

“Oh, I daresay many things. A whole leg rather than a shriveled one, for starters.”

“And Nicholas?”

The rector tilted his head and looked at the angel’s face. “I don’t know that Nicholas ever envied anyone. He was a decisive man, in his way. He made his choices and lived with them.”

“Then why didn’t he leave the Hall, go away to sea, make a life for himself somewhere else?”

“Nicholas had an affinity for the sea, that’s true. In another age, he’d have been one of Drake’s sea dogs or Nelson’s captains-or perhaps one of Hakluyt’s geographers. I can see him racing a tea clipper to China and back.”

All of which demanded daring and skill and personal courage. Not to mention ruthless leadership. Yet he’d let himself be led into suicide Rutledge shook his head. “I’m not any closer to understanding him than I was at the beginning.”

“You won’t understand Nicholas, trust me there. Have you read the poems?”

After the briefest hesitation, Rutledge said, “No. Not yet.”

“Let me give you a word of advice. As a priest.”

When Rutledge said nothing, Smedley went on. “Be sure your own ghosts don’t infringe on your logical mind-don’t rain havoc on Borcombe in search of your own absolution. If you can’t finish the puzzle that worries you, be man enough to walk away from it while the rest of us can still get on with our lives. This is a very small village, you see, and we don’t have your London sophistication. We shall go on suffering long after you’ve gone away.”

Watching Smedley walk off across the wet grass, Rutledge was prey to a variety of emotions, and Hamish, relishing the turbulence in his mind, was busy taking advantage of it.

“Ye’re no’ wanted here,” he said, “and no’ wanted in London as well. I’ve no5 seen anywhere you belong!”

“That has nothing to do with the Trevelyan family,” Rut-ledge replied coldly. “The rector is right. My work and my life are separate.”

“Ye’re no’ keeping Olivia Marlowe from getting under your skin!”

“She’s no different from any suspect! Not to me!”

“Except that she’s dead,” Hamish reminded him. “Is that why ye’re no’ reading the poems? You read them often enough before, when ye knew she was alive!”

Rutledge swore and headed for the stone walkway that led from the churchyard to the road. His reasons were his own affair, and none of Hamish’s.

It was a long and tiring day. He was summoned, twice more, to come to the moors. The first time it was a boy who came to fetch him. The ground he must surely have covered last night seemed very different in the sunlight, brown and green and black and yellow, and not very much like the higher Yorkshire moors he knew so much better. But this too was sour land, that grew grass and reeds in the low-lying damp, and vast stretches of quaking marsh that could become quicksand in the blink of an eye.

The boy cheerfully threaded his way through a maze of paths and chattered on about the war, wanting to know how many Boche Rutledge had personally (and bloodily) killed, and if he’d ever been wounded himself. They’d reached the subject of aircraft, and whether the Inspector had ever been up in one (he was disappointed when Rutledge said no), and how many flaming crashes he’d personally witnessed, when the first lines of searchers came into sight below a knoll.