Hunting Shadows: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery (6 page)

Now he could see the profile of the massive Cathedral across the flat landscape, rising above it like a great mirage floating on a flat green sea. It must have been, he thought, quite amazing in Medieval times to see it there, a wonder to behold in such a wet landscape. The Isle of Ely it truly was. And in the haze of sunlight, it was still quite magnificent. The town surrounding it seemed not to exist at all.

I
nspector Warren looked up as Rutledge was ushered into his office.

“You’re a day late,” he said, rising to greet his visitor, noting the dark stubble of beard and the unpressed suit. “Did you sleep rough?”

“Near enough. I was caught in the weather yesterday. But that put me close enough to Wriston to have a look at the market cross this morning.”

Warren raised his eyebrows. “Wriston? You
were
well and truly caught out, weren’t you? All right. Sit down.”

Rutledge took the empty chair by the desk. The other was piled high with paper. Statements, he realized, with a sinking feeling. Days’ worth of work before any progress could be made. That was, unless Inspector Warren was prepared to sort them for him.

Warren wore a harried air. A tall man, stooped and fair, his hairline only just beginning to recede, he had a strong face, with laugh lines that crinkled at the corners of his eyes.

But the Inspector was not in the mood to laugh at the moment.

“Since you’ve been to Wriston, I’ll start there. Did they tell you half the village had followed the victim to the market cross, where apparently they were met by the other half? We interviewed every one of them. Not all of them were constituents, mind you, but Swift usually gave good value at his rallies, and the curious had come to hear him as well. I expect there were a number of hecklers in the crowd, but he was dead before they could interrupt him. We searched the buildings nearest the cross, but of course by the time we reached the scene, there was nothing to find. We settled on two vantage points. The roof of the ironmonger’s shop has a dormer. He and his wife live above the shop, but both of them were in the street.” He gestured to another stack of papers. “A dozen people saw the ironmonger and his wife. They’re in the clear. Nobody locks anything, worst luck, and the killer could have helped himself to half a dozen vantage points. Cheek by jowl to the ironmonger’s, there’s a fine pair of chimneys. The greengrocer’s shop. But if he’d chosen
them,
he couldn’t have got away unseen. My money is on the dormer window.”

“Then the shooter could have easily come and gone through a rear door without being seen or disturbing anyone.”

“Oh, yes. It was dark, all the light was in the square, torches smoking enough to blind a regiment. But Mrs. Percy, our only witness, claims she saw a face in the dormer window. That has to be where the man with a rifle was standing, not the chimney pots. I believe her. Not, mind you, a monster’s face, which is what she initially described to Constable McBride and then to me. But something.” Warren grimaced. “As if we didn’t have our hands full enough with what happened here in Ely.”

“I must agree with Mrs. Percy, from my own observations this morning. Especially if the wind was blowing the smoke away from that window. But what she saw wasn’t a man with a rifle.”

“Yes, well, there’s that. But you won’t convince me that there were two people in the dormer.”

“How did she describe the face?” Rutledge asked.

“She wouldn’t. She told me it was monstrous, the stuff of nightmares. My words, there, but close enough. She was badly frightened then and later when I came to speak to her. What’s more, she is a little hard of hearing. She couldn’t get any closer through the crowd of people, and being rather short, she moved around behind Herbert Swift. Lucky for us.”

“There are several possibilities. Someone wearing a gas mask from the war—although that would make firing his rifle more difficult. Someone badly burned. Or even someone who wrapped his head, to be certain he wasn’t recognized.”

“That last would mean someone local.”

“Very likely.” Rutledge paused. “There’s been no trouble in Wriston before this? You said no one locked his door at night?”

“They do now,” Warren replied grimly. “But no, nothing major. Petty crimes, quarrels, that sort of thing. The last murder in Wriston was back in the 1890s.”

Rutledge remembered what Miss Bartram had said about being glad of someone else, even a stranger, in the house last night when it was impossible to see who—or what—was outside the windows.

“Did Swift have enemies? Had he stepped on any toes in announcing he was standing for office?”

“Not that we can discover. The general view was, he was well liked, and likely to win. The other camp had only put up a token candidate to oppose him. Mind you, he wasn’t here during the war. Any friends—or enemies—he made while he was away are another matter.”

“That’s when he could have met Hutchinson.”

“Possibly. Yes. But proving it will be difficult.”

They moved on to the first shooting, in Ely.

Warren stood up and said, “Come with me, you’ll want to see this for yourself.”

They walked from the police station to the Cathedral. Warren was saying as they went, “We’ve enough statements to fill the nave. And they come down to a single fact. We have damned little to go on. I’d hoped, when word reached us about what had happened in Wriston, that he’d made a mistake we could use, but he hasn’t.”

Ely’s Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity came into view then. It was unique among English Cathedrals with that elegant octagonal tower, called the Lantern, set above the crossing of the transepts and the nave. Now, as the two men approached, the massive, battlemented West Front loomed before them. There was a small double-arched west door, and few of the embellishments or niches for saints to decorate the opening. Compared to Salisbury, for one, or Lincoln, it was more or less plain. And yet it was both elegant and powerful.

Warren said, pointing, “Here is where the motorcars pulled up. At the top of the Green. Arriving guests descended and walked toward that west door. Captain Hutchinson was among the last to arrive, in the motorcar belonging to the Honorable Reginald Sedley and his wife.”

“Why was he with them? Any particular reason?”

“He was staying with them. I gather they hadn’t met before. The bridegroom’s family had arranged accommodations for many of the out-of-town guests, and Hutchinson was up from London.”

“Go on.”

“According to the statements from the Sedleys, they were talking about the wedding as they moved toward the west door. And behind them, another motorcar had followed their own, stopping to set down its passengers. That was the bridegroom and his best man, as we were to discover. The chauffeur of that motorcar was already moving on, making room for the one behind it. This meant that the bridegroom was only a little way behind Captain Hutchinson, and perhaps about five feet to his right. And then everything seemed to happen at once.”

Warren moved forward, then stopped again.

“Hutchinson went down just here. The reverberations of the shot shocked everyone for an instant, and then Mrs. Sedley began screaming for a doctor as her husband knelt to try and help the victim. When we were finally able to speak to her, it was clear she hadn’t seen anything but the Captain collapsing at her feet. Nor did Sedley, for that matter. He was intent on doing what he could to save Hutchinson. But of course that was hopeless.”

Now Warren pointed toward the Cathedral. “There was general pandemonium. Guests who hadn’t yet entered the west door and local people who were standing behind a barrier set up just there, to keep them out of the way of the wedding party”—Warren pointed to the spot—“while watching the show, ran in every direction, expecting more shots to be fired.”

“It must have been difficult to account for everyone who was a potential witness.”

“Believe me, it has been a nightmare.”

“Better you than me.”

“Yes, well, I hope they give you more than they have given us. There was an artillery Major, man by the name of Lowell, who more or less took charge. He sent someone for the police, another man to find a doctor who was amongst the wedding guests, and ordered everyone within hearing to stay where they were. Unfortunately, he himself had been standing just inside the church doorway and couldn’t tell us where the shot had come from. But he informed us at once that it had been a rifle. And of course that was borne out by the distance. Still, it saved an inordinate amount of time trying to sort out the various accounts.”

“Very convenient. Could he have fired that shot, then hidden the weapon?”

“I don’t see how. He arrived just before Hutchinson and was speaking to one of the canons by the door. In plain sight. There were other former officers attending the wedding, but they had taken their places in the nave with their wives. Lowell is unmarried and was in no hurry to go inside.”

They were walking now toward the West Front and the door to the Galilee Porch. Warren was saying, “Those buildings to your right belong to the Cathedral. We searched them as well as the Cathedral itself. Top to bottom. The Gallery—that’s the wall there, still to your right—encloses the church grounds, offices, and the homes of various churchmen. We discovered a ladder placed up against the wall on the inside, out of sight from where we are, of course. See there, where that woman with the small child is passing? We left it where it is. I refused to allow them to move it because no one would admit to putting it there, not a churchman, not a gardener, no one. It’s possible our man used it as a fallback position. Climbing it and resting his rifle on the top as he fired, then ducking out of sight. The problem is, he’d have been visible to anyone in the grounds who looked that way. Still, it offered the best means of escape. The artillery Major told us the angle was wrong, unless the killer was going for a head shot.”

Rutledge looked toward the wall and then turned to the spot where Hutchinson had fallen. “Yes, Major Lowell is right.”

“Our next possibility was to the left of the Cathedral door. There, see that makeshift wall? It runs out from the Lady Chapel and then turns down by the lane.” Warren began to walk in that direction. “And there’s a door in it. It’s closed now, but it was standing ajar that day. We found a single cartridge casing on the ground, just about where you’d step through and then step back. It had rolled into a clump of grass by the wall, half hidden by the door. He didn’t have time to look for it.” He stopped, waving in that direction. “The doctor and the Major disagreed over that one.”

Rutledge looked at where Hutchinson had fallen and then turned back toward the gate. “It would be a fairly easy shot,” he replied. “It wouldn’t take a marksman to do it. As long as the people at the barrier were out of his line of fire. Why did they disagree? The doctor and the Major.”

“Lowell felt that the gate was a possible shot, just as you said. But when the doctor examined the body, he claimed the shot had come from above. Up there.”

Warren pointed up at the west tower. “A constable climbed all the way up there and told me the slope of the roof would have prevented a decent shot. People were walking toward the door, and anyone standing up there with a rifle was bound to be noticed.”

Rutledge shielded his eyes from the sun as he stared upward. “Surely there was room to kneel.”

“He says not. And no one has brought it up save for the doctor. Of course, Dr. Bradley has had no military experience, but later during the postmortem, he showed me the course of the bullet. It would seem he was right, although the only evidence, the casing, was here.”

“What did Lowell have to say about that?”

“At the time, he never turned Hutchinson over. There was no reason to.” Walking on toward the Cathedral, Warren added, “By the time we arrived, there were at least two hundred people milling about. Wedding guests, bystanders, those drawn from the school down there to your right. Ordinary people who heard the shouting and screams and came to see what had happened. My men began to sort them and take down names to collect statements. And I began to realize that no one had seen anything useful. By this time, the bride’s father was pressing us to allow the wedding to go on, late as it was, and as soon as the body was removed, we really saw no reason to prevent it.”

“Are there any statements in particular I should pursue?”

“There are several it wouldn’t hurt to look at. Oddly enough, the bridegroom was convinced he was the target, while the bride, arriving in the middle of the chaos, thought he was the victim and was hysterical. It would probably have been wiser to postpone the affair.”

By this time, they had reached the west door and Warren pulled it open.

“Is it usually closed? This door?”

“As a rule it’s open during services and for occasions such as the wedding.”

They walked inside. It had been some time since Rutledge had been in this Cathedral. Beyond the porch, to his right the lobby spread out toward the shorter twin towers overlooking the wall where the ladder had been left. Ahead, through another set of doors, he could see the unusual painted vault of the nave. It was quite long, leading down to the crossing, which supported the Octagon, which in turn supported the Lantern overhead. Thence to the choir. Ely was, in a way, a glimpse of what churches and Cathedrals must have looked like before the Reformation, when there were frescoes and painted statues and ceilings. The Victorians had reveled in adding color too, but not always successfully.

As he made his way down the aisle, he looked to his left and saw a rose petal, dried now, the color faded, that had escaped the cleaning women. It was caught under the edge of one of the kneelers, a sad reminder of the wedding’s chaos.

Silence surrounded them in the nave, their footsteps echoing to the stone walls. It was cool and dimly lit after the warm sunny afternoon outside. Warren’s voice was subdued as he said, “We had people out in the Lady Chapel, up on the roof, up in the Lantern, searching all the buildings in the Cathedral precincts, the Bishop’s quarters, everywhere we could think of. This place is a rabbit warren, did you know that?”