“Get down,” Rutledge murmured, and they dropped to their haunches, their silhouettes blending into the ground.
For another quarter of an hour, they watched the light.
Then it was doused, and whoever had walked there seemed to vanish.
Rutledge dropped his pitchfork.
“Stay here.” He started running at an angle to the trees, keeping his profile low, intending to cut off whoever had been in the wood.
After several minutes he saw someone walking up the slope of the Dower Fields toward the village. Whoever it was, he was wearing a long coat that flapped around his ankles as he kept up a brisk pace. A hat, pulled low, changed the shape of the head. Rutledge thought perhaps whoever he was chasing was glad to be out of the wood and trying to reach the security of the village as quickly as possible.
The figure had reached the far side of the church when Rutledge ran hard toward the back garden of the rectory and used the shadows of its walls to hurry toward the churchyard.
He stumbled over a low tombstone, choked off a curse, and then ran on, trying to watch where he put his feet.
As he came around the far corner of the church, he nearly collided with the figure.
It let out a cry of alarm, recovered, and tried to turn back the way it had come, but Rutledge was on it, catching at the nearest shoulder with an iron grip.
A lantern fell to the ground, rolling under his feet.
The figure ducked, twisted, and almost broke his grip, but as it struggled the hat came off, and Rutledge pulled his quarry around for a good look at its face.
Only it wasn’t a man. It was Mrs. Ellison.
27
Rutledge was shocked into speechlessness. Of all the people he had expected to find in Frith’s Wood, Mary Ellison was the last. He released her at once.
She stood there, and he could feel her eyes glaring at him, but her voice was husky as she spoke.
“You aren’t the only one to watch from windows,” she said. “What have you found in the wood? Who was the man you brought back to Dudlington with you? Inspector Cain? Is my granddaughter there in the wood? Tell me! ”
“I don’t know—” he began, still at a loss for words.
What could he say to her?
Hamish answered his thought. “Nothing. It’s too soon.”
Rutledge said aloud, “We’ve been searching quietly, so as not to cause you pain. Or give people a reason to gossip.”
She was still breathing hard. “I saw you putting the implements into the car. I saw you leave. Where else would you be taking a rake or a pitchfork at that hour of the night but the wood? I couldn’t sit there waiting.” Her voice shook. “I have a right to know what you’ve found, and why you brought that other man here!”
“Mrs. Ellison, let me take you home.”
She seemed to shrink into herself. “It can’t be my granddaughter. I won’t believe it. In that heathen, un-blessed place? No, I refuse to believe it.”
“What did you find, when you got to the wood?”
“Nothing.” She was still breathing hard. “It was dark, and the lantern cast shadows everywhere. I couldn’t stay any longer, that place terrifies me. Nothing in the world could ever have taken me there but Emma.”
“Let me see you to your house. It’s very cold, and you’ve had a shock.”
She shook her head. “I know my way. Go back there and do whatever it is you have to do.”
As his own breathing slowed, he watched her walk steadily down Church Street and turn into Whitby Lane, and then he went on across the fields again to find Mainwairing.
He wasn’t where Rutledge had left him, and it was clear that his curiosity had got the better of him.
Rutledge went down to the wood. The leaf mat under his feet was silent, and he walked carefully, almost from memory. Mainwaring had his torch and the lamp, and he was on his own.
“There.” It was Hamish speaking.
A flash of light caught his eye and he went in that direction. Mainwaring nearly jumped out of his skin when Rutledge spoke from behind him.
“Found any bones?”
“Blast you, Rutledge! Did you catch whoever it was you were chasing?”
“Yes. Let’s get on with it. This way.”
It took him a few minutes to find the bones again, and he gently pushed aside the covering he’d drawn back over them.
Mainwaring squatted at his heels. “Interesting.”
“Saxon massacre victim?”
“Lord, no, not at all. Look at the condition. This wood isn’t the Irish peat bogs, you know. The conditions here are deplorable. Here, let me get closer.”
They exchanged places, and Rutledge held the lantern while Mainwaring worked.
It took some time to clear enough of the skeleton to make a judgment. The small bones were gone, carried off long since to feed whatever animal had discovered them.
But the skull was there, and the shoulders, part of the rib cage—and the pelvis.
Mainwaring whistled under his breath while he worked, as if to keep the spirits at bay. At one point, he said to Rutledge, “I can see why the locals don’t like this place. I don’t much care for it myself. When I walked under the branches of the first trees, I felt as if I’d stepped back in time to something ugly. Do you believe in ghosts, Ian?”
“I could be persuaded to here. What are those, the thigh bones?”
“Yes. Best indicator of height. But the feet are gone.”
He continued to work, the lantern light shining on his face and on the bones that came to light under his careful prodding, his hands moving delicately as he cleared away rotting leaves and earth.
“That should do it,” he said, getting stiffly to his feet.
“You can have the local man—Inspector Cain, was it?— bring in people to finish the work. There’s no point in keeping this business secret any longer.”
“You’re telling me, then, that we’ve found what we came here to find.”
Rutledge felt depressed. It was a sad end for the pretty, lively girl he had pictured in his mind. Now the question was, who had brought her here and hidden her body?
And what was he going to tell Mary Ellison tomorrow morning?
This morning.
Mainwaring was cleaning his hands on his handkerchief. “You were right to send for me. It wouldn’t have done to pursue this case under the impression it explained Hensley’s unfortunate wounding. He couldn’t have had anything to do with our bones.”
Rutledge said, “I’m sorry?”
“I’ve just poked a hole in your favorite theory. This isn’t your lost Emma Mason. This is a man’s body. Probably closer to thirty-five than to forty. But he didn’t bury himself. Which says he was murdered. I can’t tell you how, there’s nothing on the remaining bones to show us.”
Inspector Cain came with his team of workmen and watched them scour the area around the site of the burial, looking for more evidence.
The people of Dudlington clustered close by the church, watching silently but unwilling to come any nearer.
Rutledge had knocked on Mary Ellison’s door as soon as he’d reached Dudlington, fairly certain she hadn’t gone to bed.
She answered the door fully dressed and stood there staring at him, waiting for the blow to fall.
He said, “We didn’t find Emma. I don’t know whether that’s a comfort to you or not.”
He thought for an instant she was going to fall, for she swayed and then caught the edge of the door’s frame with her hand.
“I can’t tell you whether it is or not. At my age, there’s not much time left to hope.”
The body was brought out of Frith’s Wood in a blanket and carried to Letherington.
Speculation was rife. Mrs. Melford and Mrs. Arundel had found an opportunity to speak to Rutledge, and Mrs.