Authors: Charles Todd
Bowles was pacing his office by the time Rutledge had received his summons and knocked at the door. "Where the hell have you been?" the Chief Superintendent demanded angrily. "I sent for you a good half hour ago! And what's happened to your face?"
"I've just got in from Hertford, sir—"
"I don't give a dance in hell where you've come from. You're leaving for Northamptonshire straightaway. There's trouble in a place called Dudlington in the north of the county. A constable has been shot with a bow and arrow, for God's sake!"
"A bow—" Rutledge began, surprised, but Bowles cut him off.
"He'll live, no thanks to the bastard who did it, leaving him in the weather to die of his wound. It was intentional, this shooting, we're certain of that. And I want whoever it is brought to justice now. Do you understand me? Hensley's one of my men, or was, when I was an inspector in Westminster. He went north over my objections, and look where it's landed him."
Bowles's face was red and blotched with fury. He shoved a file of papers at Rutledge.
"Well, don't stand there, man! I want you to interview Hensley tonight, if those fool doctors will let you, and get to the bottom of this business. They've got him in hospital in Northampton, and the local man says he's just out of surgery."
It was useless to plead fatigue or other pressing business. Bowles was not a man who cared about anything but getting his own way. And blustering anger was a well-tested method of keeping his subordinates from arguing with him.
Rutledge took the file and left.
Down the passage he ran into Sergeant Gibson in conversation with the man sweeping the floor.
Gibson turned away to speak to Rutledge and said dourly, "If you want the truth of the matter, Hensley left under a cloud. I never did know the ins and outs of it. A personal matter. He managed to keep it from Old Bowels' ears, I'm told. The Chief Superintendent thought he was the perfect copper. Threw him up to us any number of times."
Rutledge said dryly, "Then there'll be no end of suspects for this attempt at murder."
Gibson caught himself before he grinned. Instead he retorted, "How the mighty are sometimes brought low." And with that he was off down the passage, leaving Rutledge standing there.
Dudlington was a tiny village of stone-built houses topped with gray slate roofs and a single, slender-towered church, huddled together in the midst of open fields, as if for warmth or comfort. The rich brown of plowed acres and the yellow green of winter pasture lay like a blanket around them, but the houses turned their backs to the land, as if ignoring it, and the barns were a low afterthought, tucked here and there, as if no one had known what to do with them. It lay north of the county town, but Rutledge's first call was in Northampton.
He found his way to the hospital there, only to be turned away because Hensley was still recovering from his surgery.
Rutledge spent what was left of the night in a hotel recommended by an orderly and returned early in the morning.
Over the objections of Matron, he stepped into the ward to see if Hensley was awake.
The constable was in the men's surgical ward, halfway down the row and on the left, watching through half-closed lids as a nursing sister bathed his neighbor in the next bed. There were some six or seven other patients in the long room, two of them snoring heavily, and the others lying quietly, as if in too much pain to move.
Hensley looked up as Rutledge stopped by his bed. "You a doctor, then?" he asked hoarsely. "I was told they were giving me something for the pain."
He was pale, his barrel chest swathed in bandages, his thinning dark hair combed and parted, as if he'd already been tidied by the plump sister who now turned to Rutledge.
"It's not visiting hours for another forty minutes," she told him crisply. "I'll have to ask you to leave!"
"I'm here on police business, Sister," Rutledge said, bringing a chair from another bedside to place it next to Hensley's.
She tried to stare him down and failed. "You won't tire my patient, then. Or I must ask Matron to throw you out."
"No, I won't tire him." Rutledge sat down, dropping his hat on the foot of the bed. "How are you feeling?" he asked Hensley. It was a rhetorical question, asked as a courtesy.
"Bloody awful," Hensley complained in a strained voice. The roughly handsome features were drawn, giving them a sharper edge. He made an effort to collect himself. "I'm told the doctors here saved my life. I can't say. I don't remember much about what happened. Who are you? Not a local man ..."
"The name's Rutledge. I've come from London to look into this business."
"Was it Old Bowels who sent you?" Hensley asked, showing more interest. "He always did look after his own." Not waiting for Rutledge to answer, he shifted uncomfortably. "It's these damned bandages—they stick and pull at the stitches, and there's no help for it. Bad enough what they did to remove the point of the arrow. Aches like the very devil! Between that and the catgut, I've not had a minute's peace since I came out of the ether and found myself in this bed." He shot a black look in the direction of the sister, but she ignored him.
"You say you remember very little of what's happened. Do you remember where you were when the arrow struck you?"
Even as Rutledge spoke, his mind conjured up an image of the windscreen shattering, and he pushed it back into the shadows.
Hensley looked away. "I'm told they found me at the southern edge of Frith's Wood. I can't say if that's true or not. If it was, I didn't get there under my own power."
"Would this wood normally be a part of your regular rounds? Close enough, for example, for you to see or hear something that attracted your attention? Even if now you can't remember going that far?"
Hensley answered him with more intensity than the question merited. "The last thing I remember was riding my bicycle along the road to Letherington, well to the east of the wood! How could I see or hear anything from there? I draw a blank on the rest of it. They tell me I came to my senses as they were lifting the stretcher into Mr. Staley's wagon. If I did, I couldn't tell you what was said to me."
"Do you have any idea who might have shot you? Would someone practice archery in the wood, or hunt rabbits there?"
"Not in Frith's Wood, they wouldn't. People avoid it." He stirred again, trying to find a little comfort. "At any rate, the trees are too close for true archery or much of anything else."
"Is there anyone in Dudlington who bears you a grudge?"
Something flitted across Hensley's face, a shadow of guilt, Rutledge thought.
"I don't have any notion what happened, much less why," he answered just as a patient three beds away began to cough heavily. The sister hurried to his side, and Hensley watched her prop the man higher on his pillows. "No one goes to that wood. Not if they've got any sense. Least of all me. I can't think why anyone might drag me there. Unless it was to hide what he'd done."
"He's no' a light man to be hauled about," Hamish said, stirring, his voice no more than a thread in Rutledge's mind. "No' in the middle of the day, when people are about."
"What's wrong with this wood?" Rutledge asked. "Why do people avoid it?"
"It's haunted by the dead. So it's said."
"What dead?"
Hensley shut his eyes, as if keeping them open was an effort. "It's not a police matter. Saxon dead, a long time ago. The story is there was a massacre, raiders herding everyone from the village into the wood and slaughtering them. You haven't been there, you don't know what it's like. Strange. That's all I can say."
"Who found you?" Rutledge asked.
"I don't know. I asked Dr. Middleton that, and he said I wasn't to talk." He shifted again. "They did tell me I lay there bleeding for more than two hours. I was that cold, they thought I was already dead. That was afterward, on the journey down to Northampton. I can recall a little of that."
"Anyone on your patch who uses a bow?"
He moved his hand slightly, indicating he didn't know. "Sister," he called as the nurse eased the coughing patient and started down the ward with her basin of bathwater. "Is it time yet?"
"I'll tell you when it's time," she said. "Mr. Rutledge, I believe you've asked enough questions."
Hensley turned his head restlessly. "Bloody woman," he said under his breath. "I'm the one here in the bed, not her. How does she know how I feel?"
"How often do you go to Letherington? Could someone have expected to find you on the road there at a particular time of day?"
"I go to Letherington when I need to meet with Inspector Cain. Or report to him. There's no pattern to it." He hesitated. "I thought I heard crows above the fields, making a bloody racket. I stopped my bicycle and stood there, looking around. That's the last I remember."
Distracting Rutledge, Hamish reminded him, "Ye ken, the crows flew up fra' the trees by the road at the sound of yon shot. No' at the sound of the motorcar."
That's true, Rutledge agreed silently. They weren't disturbed until the revolver was fired. Whoever it was had lain quietly in wait for some time. Long enough for them to settle. He brought his mind back from Hertfordshire to Constable Hensley's attacker. What agitated them in this case? Not an arrow being loosed.
The man in the bed was saying, "At a guess, I never got to Letherington. But you'll have to ask Inspector Cain about that. I remember setting out, I remember the crows."
He shook his head, as if bewildered. "It wearies me, this business of not knowing."
"If you can bring back any more details, ask Matron to call Chief Inspector Kelmore or one of his people here in Northampton, and he'll get word to me." Rutledge retrieved his hat. "Do you have a station in Dudlington?" Hensley's voice was weaker, and he closed his eyes against the dim lamplight. "We don't run to station houses. I use my parlor as my office. You'll find whatever you need there. Make yourself at home. I won't be back for a bit, if these bloody butchers have their say."
Rutledge stood for moment beside the bed, looking down at the wounded man. He appeared to be in no hurry to find his attacker. And that in itself was odd. No anger, no fierce need to help speed the inquiry along.
But then Hensley's eyelids opened, and he said, as if realizing his own mistake, "I'll worry about it when I'm better. I can't now. You can see that. Tell Inspector Kelmore I'm not fit enough for questions yet."
Matron was coming with a little tray of medicines and a cup of water. Hensley saw her, and his face cleared. "Thank God!"
Matron nodded to Rutledge as she reached the bed. "You promised me only five minutes."
"Yes, I was just going. Tell me, do you know what became of the arrow that was taken from Hensley's back?"
"You must ask the surgical sister about that."
But the surgical sister, when Rutledge had run her to earth, said, "They'd removed the shaft before he was brought here. You must ask Dr. Middleton what became of it. As for the tip, it was an ordinary metal one. Chief Inspector Kelmore took it, but I doubt it did him much good. We had rather butchered it, extracting it from the rib. Constable Hensley was very lucky. His injury might have been far worse. If the arrow had got past the ribs, he'd be a dead man."
Rutledge went in search of Chief Inspector Kelmore and found him in his office, a stuffy little room reeking of pipe smoke. Kelmore was a graying man in his late forties, with yellowed teeth and ears too large for his head.
The Chief Inspector shook hands with Rutledge and said, "I was just leaving. The wife's ill, and I'm taking the rest of the day off. They've sent you here about Hensley, have they? Lucky he wasn't killed, according to the surgeon." He began to dig through the contents of his desk drawer, then reached instead for a box sitting on the floor. "Here's what's left of the arrow. I expect that's what you came for." He passed the broken shaft with its mangled metal tip to Rutledge. "Nothing unusual about it, except where it was found, in a constable's back."
Rutledge studied the wooden shaft, then the tip. "I should think it would have depended on the distance the arrow flew as to how deep it might have gone."
"Yes, that was my view as well. Hence the luck I spoke of. I daresay whoever loosed this arrow is afraid to come forward and admit to his carelessness." He held out his hand for the tip.
"And that's what you put it down to? Carelessness?" Rutledge asked, returning it.
"What else should I read into it? As you'll see for yourself, Dudlington is hardly a hotbed of murderers. I can't think why someone would have wished Hensley ill. Seems to be a decent enough chap, had no complaints against him. Nor has Inspector Cain, who oversees Dudlington, along with two other hamlets, Fairfield and Letherington. Letherington, to the north of Dudlington, is the largest of the three. Fairfield is a little more to the east." He pointed to a county map on the wall.
"I'll call on Cain tomorrow. Was there any indication in that wood—what's it called? Frith's Wood—how Hensley had been carried or dragged there?"
"I don't think they looked. Does he claim he wasn't in the wood when he was shot? That's odd."
"He says he remembers riding his bicycle on the main road, and the next thing he knew he was on his way to hospital. He doesn't know how he got to the wood. Or when he was shot."