Detective Inspector Ingmar Rutherston of New New Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department looked up from his copy of the preliminary report as the coach began to slow; he’d had the vehicle to himself for the last three stops. The document was signed Corporal Bramble, Ox. & Bucks Light Infantry, but it was as well written, terse and concise as most constables could have managed. The description of the dead man’s condition made Rutherston’s brows rise; the soldier’s dismay showed through the flat official prose, as well.
“Peaceful country to all appearances,” he mused to himself, forcing his mind to stop worrying the scanty data. “But this Jon Wooton is very dead indeed. Beyond that, there’s nothing to be done until I’ve some fresh information.”
He tucked the semaphore-telegraph form into a pocket of his jacket and focused on the view out the window instead. It was a warm afternoon turning into evening, late in August this year of grace AD 2049. A little white dust smoked up from under the hard rubber treads of the wheels, but the vehicle was well sprung on good Shropshire steel. The coach was the weekly from the capital, Winchester, to sleepy little Dover over in Kent, much slower than the British Rail pedal-car but stopping at places not so served, such as his destination, the Hampshire village of Eddsford.
The landscape of the Downs passed by at a good round trot, long shadows falling from the roadside trees as the sun declined toward the west; rolling chalk hills, green close-cropped pasture dotted with off-white sheep, fields of grass and clover and reaped grain on the lower slopes, beech-plantations and coppice-woods and low-trimmed hedges where red admiral and peacock and tortoiseshell butterflies fluttered. An occasional white-walled farmhouse stood in a sheltered spot, thatched in golden straw, surrounded by barn and stable and cart-shed, wool-store, stock-pond and whirling wind-pump and gnarled orchards.
Looking about, you’d never dream that the trackless tangled wildwood of Andredesweald lay only a few miles eastward, home to boar and wolf and the odd tiger down from the Wild Lands, and perhaps an outlaw or highwayman now and then. The New Forest to the west was almost as savage, more than it had ever been in the Conqueror’s time. Here the nearest to nature in the raw were hovering kestrels and a buzzard now and then, and flocks of swallows and house martins crowding the uppermost branches of trees, getting ready for their migration to Africa.
Rutherston smiled at the sight; his father had never seen that without reminiscing about how they’d used the wires strung from pole to pole for roosting when he was a young boy in the Old Days.
The detective rolled the window down the rest of the way and peered out, welcoming the fresh air and the scents of baked earth and growing things with the slightly faded, tattered smell that said summer was past its peak and autumn rains might hit at any moment. A farmer and his workers in the field beyond the roadside hedge were pitching the last of the wheat-sheaves into a wagon drawn by two big chestnut Shires. Men and women and horses alike stopped to look at the high-stepping black geldings that drew the coach, male farmhands with stolid sunburned faces above their smock-frocks, and women in loose pants and blouses and sometimes canvas field-aprons.
A straw-covered jug went from hand to hand as the coach pulled away, and then the pitchforks went back to work. The road dipped down toward the valley of the Rother, showing a glint of sun-struck water in the distance and flatter country southward. Partridges whirred up from the roadside verge...
“No, y’ daft rassgat!” the driver cursed; probably his assistant leveling her crossbow--she was young and enthusiastic. “Just your luck there’d be some kiddie behind a bush!”
The top of the south-facing slope was planted in undulating rows of shaggy goblet-trained grapevines; beyond, the village proper was bowered in trees and followed the riverbank at a cautious distance, separated by water-meadows and a low bank against spring floods.
And that’s the miller’s house where the body was discovered, he thought, looking north. There’s the roof through the trees, and you can just see the water from the millrace.
The assistant tooted again and again on her brass horn, and the driver pulled up to a walk with a woah-woah, there!, to his team; children and dogs and chickens and the odd passer-by afoot or on a bicycle or on horseback made way, and the usual curious crowd started to gather at the inn. The houses were mostly white-walled, roofed in shingle or thatch, slate or tile, along a street still paved with old-style asphalt and lined with big beeches and horse chestnuts.
The lane opened out into a green at the other end, with the tavern on one side and a stretch of grass in the center, and a church further on near the water-meadows. It was unique in the ordinary manner--a handsome battlemented tower of flint and stone obligingly labeled AD 1599 over the west door, and other parts that looked to be anything from Victorian to Norman; a Georgian brick rectory stood a little to one side, nearly hidden in oaks and beeches.
The inn was long and low and rambling, plaster over brick with a higher two-story section in its middle, and an irregular studding of chimneys through its mossy shingles. A brass plaque with the royal arms by the door proclaimed that it was a mail inn, where the coaches stopped for a change of teams and to drop and pick up letters and parcels--usually a profitable sideline for the innkeeper. Three or four shops stood across the green; so did the village post office, flanked by a reading-room and small public library marked by its sign and extravagant stretch of window.
A sign also swung from an iron bracket over the main entrance of the inn, showing a Moor’s severed head on a silver platter, and a branch of dried holly above it. There was a smell of wood smoke and cooking as households prepared their evening meal, mingling with the homely aroma of middens and the odd whiff from pigs kept behind cottages. A toddler tried to climb into a horse-trough by the side of the street, and a harassed-looking woman in an apron ran out of the door and pulled him inside, smacking him smartly on the bottom while she did.
The gate to the inn’s courtyard opened, and an ostler in a leather apron came out, ready to lead out the fresh team. The driver’s assistant unspanned her crossbow with a sharp tunnggg, racked it and jumped down from the seat to open the door as the coach came to a halt. Rutherston sprang down without waiting for the folding step, ignoring a slight twinge where the old wound in his right leg reminded him of that evening in the foothills of the Riff Atlas. She handed down his carpetbags and took a sixpence with a bob of her head before turning to unload the mail-sack and several parcels labeled Eddsford, Hants. The ostler and the driver unharnessed the team and led it over into the courtyard.
And a stout man with a waistcoat straining over a considerable belly and graying muttonchops came out of the front door, smiling and fingering the chain of his watch. The taverner’s experienced eye flicked up and down the detective’s long lanky form and saturnine beak-nosed face; quietly expensive but well-worn traveling tweeds and half-cloak, wide-brimmed panama hat, light cravat of white Irish linen, longsword and belt of good quality but plain and worn, half-boots. Just a touch of gray in at the temples of the yellow hair. And two carpetbags, but no valet...
Rutherston smiled to himself as he saw the quick expert evaluation running through the man’s guileless blue eyes:
Gentleman, but not rich; still, better than a bagsman or commercial traveler. Not a professor, or a doctor, nor a merchant, surely; and not stopping at the Hall with the Squire. Some King’s Man out of Winchester, perhaps, or an officer on leave? Not here for the fishing, though, nei rods...
It was accurate enough, and he spoke with precisely calculated deference:
“Mark Eyvindsson,” he pronounced it Evinson, in the modern manner, “at your service, sir. I’m landlord of the Moor’s Head. Will you be wanting a room for the night then?”
In fact what he said sounded more like: Oi’m the laandlorrd o’ the Moo-er’s ‘Ead. Will ye be tvantin’ a room, fer the noight, then?
If he’d been born in Winchester instead of just living there the last ten years the detective might have suspected the innkeeper of deliberately coming it the heavy rustic. But Rutherston had been born in Short Compton in the Cotswolds himself, about a hundred miles north and a little west of here, where the local dialect was just as heavy and only slightly different.
“Detective Inspector Ingmar Rutherston, of the Yard,” he replied crisply. “I would like a room; for several days, at least.”
The innkeeper managed not to look too startled; several of the oldsters sitting with their pints along the bench beside the inn’s door gaped at him; a pipe nearly fell out of one wrinkled mouth. A babble of voices rose and died away.
“Ah, you’ll be here about young Jon Wooton; quick work for you to get here so soon, all the way from Winchester. A bad business, sir, a very bad business.”
“It usually is, when a man’s murdered,” Rutherston said grimly.
The interior of the inn’s main room was L-shaped: a long space with tables, a hearth--swept and garnished with pots of flowers now--and a row of windows that looked down on a water-meadow and a stretch of the Rother flowing slowly between willows beyond.
There was a fair scattering of regulars trickling in for a pint or two--it was after harvest, after all, the high point of a laborer’s year... and pocket. A man in a good country suit was talking business with some obvious farmers in cords in the snug, and there were a scattering of everything from cottagers in smocks to tradesmen and their families.
The ones that caught his eye obviously weren’t locals: five army troopers and a corporal, hobelars in green-enameled chain-mail shirts and leather breeches and riding-boots, with their open-faced sallet helms propped on tables. The longbows and quivers, sword-belts and bucklers hung on pegs by the door. They all had mugs of beer before them, and they all looked dusty and tired, as if they’d been on road patrol, which they probably had.
Rutherston walked over to their table as the innkeeper and his staff saw to the baggage and took his hat and half-cloak and his own sword--even on a murder investigation, he wasn’t going to wear a long blade inside the village. The soldiers looked up, polite but not more than that--they were the King-Emperor’s men, after all. Then he reached into his coat-pocket and flipped open the wallet to show his Warrant Card, and handed their squad-leader his letter of authorization from the War Office.
That brought them to their feet, saluting smartly amidst a scrape of chairs. The troopers were ordinary enough, strong-built youngsters with open countrymen’s faces, distinguished only by one’s startling red roach of hair or another’s freckles and jug ears. The corporal with the chevrons riveted to the short sleeve of his mail shirt was a few years older than his men. He was about six feet-- Rutherston’s own height--but broader, with dark blunt features unusual for an Englishman and curly hair so black it had highlights like a raven’s feathers.
“Corporal Bramble, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, currently out of Castle Aldershot,” he said in a deep rumbling voice
The accent was a strong yokel burr but with a slight trace of something different, a yawny-drawly lilt that had a teasing half-familiarity. Then he placed it.
Ah, I’ve heard something like that from Jamaican sailors in Portsmouth and Bristol, Rutherston thought. Though he’s definitely English born and bred; yeoman-farmer’s son, I’d say.
He’d half-expected a southern-provinces twang; those looks could be Gibraltarian, but a touch of Caribbean a couple of generations back would account for it just as well.
The noncom went on: “We were told to expect you. I’m to assume this is aid-to-the-civil-power, sir?”
“You are, corporal; dull work, probably, I’m afraid. Your commanding officer has been informed I’d commandeer you; it saves time and trouble. I’ll want to talk to you later tonight. You can quarter your men here at the Moor’s Head, and I’ll handle the requisition slips.”
None of the hobelars looked unhappy about it. They’d be spared fatigues and drills, the food and drink would be free but much better than ration-issue, and the chance of finding a girl interested in the glamour of a uniform rather than hard cash was distinctly better here than near a garrison town like Aldershot.
“Thank you, sir. I’ve a man at the miller’s house, of course, guarding the place where we found the body. I’ll rotate the duty.”
“Good work, that, corporal,” Rutherston said, nodding.
It had saved him an undignified scramble, and he had reasons for not heading straight to the scene of the--possible--crime.
“Permission to ask a question?” the noncom said.
The detective nodded, raising a brow.
“You were army yourself, sir, weren’t you?”
Rutherston smiled thinly. Good. He has a sharp eye, this one.
He nodded. “Yes; in the Blues and Royals. Tours in the Principality on the Provoland border, and out of Rabat and Marrakech. It still shows, eh?”
“It does, inspector.”
“And you’re not from this shire, are you, corporal? A bit further north and east, I’d say.”
“My dad’s place is just north of Woburn, sir; Jamaica Farm, it’s called, after Granddad. Near Wavendon, if you know Buckinghamshire.”
“I do,” he said.
Better and better, he thought
That area was northerly and a little wild, though not quite on the frontier of settlement any more; that ran just south of Nottingham these days.
But still close to the Wild Lands, and still a smuggler’s paradise, up the Ouse from the Wash.
The Moor’s Head wasn’t large, but it had all the modern conveniences you’d expect so close to Winchester and right next to a good trout-and-salmon stream; running water in the bathroom on the first floor brought up by a hydraulic ram from the river, flush toilets, and a big copper boiler that supplied plentiful hot water. The maid had unpacked his bags, all but a small locked case set on the table, and the sitting room had a pleasant view of the Rother; the detective found his two rooms to be very comfortable in a country-inn fashion. Both smelled of clean linen and dried-lavender sachets, and the alcohol lanterns were bright enough for reading, even to one accustomed to the capital’s incandescent-mantle gaslights.
Rutherston wallowed gratefully in a tub of the hot water--at thirty-two, sitting all day in a coach was no longer perfectly comfortable--and set out his boots and traveling suit to be taken and dealt with. He took a moment to write a letter as well; Janice was in her eighth month and naturally hadn’t wanted him to leave town just then.
Then he dressed and came down to an excellent dinner: grilled trout right out of the river, a pie of veal and ham and truffles, sprouts, raudkal, salad, chips, followed by a fruit tart with cream. There was a glass of a perfectly acceptable local Cabernet Franc to go with it.
Bramble’s troopers were plowing their way through much the same, with a roast chicken each added. It reminded Rutherston of the sort of appetite you had when you were twenty years old and spending ten hours a day in the saddle or marching on your own feet under seventy pounds of armor and gear. Instead of his more recent fate, having a city’s pavements under his boots, or worse still, an office chair beneath his backside while he filled out endless reports.
Most of the patrons were quiet, talking with their heads together, but the soldiers were merry enough; it wasn’t their village, after all. He even caught a snatch of song from them:
“For
forty shillings on the drum
Who’ll ‘list and volunteer to come?
And stand and face the foe today:
It’s over the hills and far away...”
When he’d finished his own meal, he signed Corporal Bramble over.
“Sit, man. I’m an officer in the police now, not the Blues.”
“Inspector.”
The big soldier sat, and Rutherston raised his hand for the barmaid--a statuesque blonde a decade younger than himself, with a forty-inch bust displayed to advantage by her low-cut blouse and a pouting lower lip that might have been promising under other circumstances, along with the lack of a wedding-band.
But you do have one on now, Ingmar, at long last. Keep it in mind. Janice can’t see you but God can.
He’d spent a long time as a footloose and fancy-free bachelor, and shedding the habits came a little hard sometimes despite a happy marriage; they crept back while you weren’t looking, especially away from home.
“Now,” he said, opening his notebook. “Let’s get the details. Your report was informative, but short.”
“You won’t be questioning anyone else tonight, sir?” Bramble asked.
Rutherston nodded. “Why am I sitting on my arse waiting for the villains to scarper, you mean?” he said, and smiled at the look of blank innocence the noncom put on. “What I’m doing, corporal, is letting them get good and nervous. Winchester has seventy thousand people, but here in Eddsford there are six-hundred-fifty-odd and they all know each other. If anyone runs, they identify themselves for me. If they don’t, they’ll probably make other mistakes.”
“Hmmm, the guilty flee where nei man pursueth, eh, sir? My dad’s a deacon in our parish,” he added in an aside. “You’re letting them come ripe, as it were.”
“Quite. Tell me what you’ve seen and heard. Then tell me what you think of it.”
The barmaid returned with their mugs. She smiled at the policeman as she put them down, then turned the full wattage on Bramble when it didn’t bring any result. He grinned back at her reflexively-- he was, after all, still several years short of thirty himself--and then cleared his throat and returned to business.
“Yessir.” Bramble’s face went blank as he replayed memories in his mind’s eye. “My men and I ‘ave been on standard road patrol along the South Downs; we vary the route unpredictable-like.”
Rutherston nodded as he took a sip of the cool, nutty-bitter ale; it didn’t do to make things easy for a would-be Dick Turpin. Open lawlessness like that wasn’t likely around here anymore, but it honed field-craft and helped hold edge-dulling boredom at bay. He took his gunmetal cigarette-case out of his jacket and flipped it open, offering it across the table.
“No thank you, sir. Never got the habit.”
Rutherston lit one himself. They were rum-flavored Embiricos cigarillos from Barbados, and he found the rich smooth taste soothed and helped him concentrate. The old-timers said tobacco was bad for you, but then living was ultimately always fatal and they seemed to have been a bunch of damned old women back then anyway.
“Go on,” he said, and opened his notebook to begin jotting down the points.
“We were passing the Mill here on our way back to base--”
“This was early this morning?”
“Yessir, about eight hundred hours. We’d been out since midnight, not seen nothing more dangerous than a badger or a barn owl, the usual. A woman--the old miller’s widow, name of Kristin Wooton--ran out and grabbed me stirrup; there was a man behind her, a wringin’ of his hands. She screamed out that her son Jon was dying, and we should get him help. Well, I sent young Jones--that’s him, sir, the one with the ears like a bat--back into the village for the District Nurse, then went in to see what I could do.”
Corporal Bramble looked hard enough to drive horseshoe-nails with his knuckles, but his strong-boned face was uneasy as he went on.
“The man was dying, right enough. Never seen anything like it, sir, and I’ve seen men die before... been stationed over most of the Empire these last ten years. It was like he was rotting, sir; hair comin’ out in clumps, sores all over his hide. Bleeding from everywhere too, eyes, nose, gums--even his arsehole, begging your pardon, inspector.”
“I’ve heard the word before, corporal.”
A broad white smile, and the man drained half his mug as if trying to wash away a bad taste. His voice was impersonal as he went on:
“Looked like poison to me, sir, and his mother was swearing that he’d been fine the day before, or maybe just a bit peaked. So I sent McAllister--he’s the one with the hair like a new penny--over north to the line of rail, they’ve a semaphore station. Just about then the poor unfortunate bugger did die, and Major Grimsson sent back that I was to hold in place until someone arrived, so I had the body put in keeping, the man’s room sealed and a guard put on it. And then I waited until you got here. Which was quick work on your part, sir.”
Rutherston looked down at his notes, tapping the pen on the metal coil at the top of the pad. “It does sound like possible foul play,” he said thoughtfully. “The first in this parish since 2012... and that was a drunken swain using a hay-knife when he caught his ladylove where she shouldn’t have been.”
“I don’t have any great acquaintance here in Eddsford, sir, but I’ve heard little good of Jon Wooton. Nothing specific... but reading between the lines, like.” A pause for another pull at the beer. “Still, you’d ‘ave to hate a man right hard to do that to him.”
Rutherston nodded and finished his beer. “See that your men get a good night’s rest,” he said.
Meaning, this isn’t a weekend pass so see that they go to bed sober; but there’s nei need to say that aloud.
Bramble nodded in turn, obviously following his meaning effortlessly. He’d never met the corporal before but he knew the type, a reliable long-service non-commissioned man, steady as a rock in any situation he understood.
What’s uncertain is how much imagination he has, but offhand I think he has plenty, just doesn’t show it much.
“Tomorrow we’ll start doing the rounds,” he said aloud.
Bramble hesitated. “If you don’t mind my asking, sir, why do you need me and the lads?”
Rutherston closed the notebook. “I very well may not,” he said. “On the other hand, if there’s something nastier than a simple impulse killing... or someone may run, in which case I’d rather have help quicker on their feet than the usual part-time village Special Constable.”
Bramble nodded and grinned. “The one here, name of Edward Mukeriji... runs the tobacconists and sweet-shop, sir, and he was fair stuttering. I see your point.”
“And while this may not be your village, you might see things that I don’t.”
“Ah,” Bramble said. “That’s a point too, sir.”
The words were uninformative, but Rutherston felt that he’d passed some test.
St. Swithun’s School For Girls was not far from Eddsford, having been moved out of town when it started up again in the resettlement; a few young ladies in the dark-blue frocks with pleated skirts and white blouses of that revered institution were walking through the village, overseen by a nun in a gray habit.
“Dullafullt,” one of them said to a friend, rolling her eyes.
Rutherston had to admit that to a youngster Eddsford might indeed seem a little boring, particularly if you’d been stuck there by your parents during the holidays when the other boarders went home. That had happened to him several times, though Winchester College was admittedly much closer to the heart of things.
I’d quite like Eddsford myself if I weren’t here to investigate a murder, he thought, taking a deep breath of the cool morning air; it was still fresh at eight o’clock, but he thought it would be another warm day. It reminds me of home.
Corporal Bramble stood inconspicuously by his elbow as he used the brass knocker on the door of the clinic, or as inconspicuously as a sixteen-stone man in armor with a longbow and quiver over his shoulder could.
The clinic was just down the lane from the village green; Eddsford wasn’t quite large enough to rate a doctor of its own, though one came by weekly from Petersfield, and could be fetched at need. There was a polished plate by the door, also brass, that read: District Nurse Delia Medford, SRN, and a modern bicycle with a rather heavy tubular frame and solid-rubber wheels in a stand by the entryway. Roses bloomed in a trellis along one wall, and there were colorful impatiens in the window boxes.
Delia Medford opened the door and responded with a dryly courteous nod to the detective’s slight bow. She was a tallish, slender woman in her thirties with blue eyes and brown hair drawn back in a bun and a no-nonsense expression, and a stethoscope tucked into the breast pocket of her jacket. There was another with her enough alike to be her older sister.
“Detective Inspector Ingmar Rutherston, ladies,” he said, removing his hat and showing his Warrant Card. “Corporal Bramble here is assisting me.”
The soldier tucked his helmet under one arm and rumbled “Ma’am,” twice.
The nurse gave Rutherston’s hand a quick firm shake. “My sister, Mrs. Alice Purkiss,” she said, after she’d introduced herself.
The widow Purkiss was a decade older and otherwise very like her sibling, apart from the fact that she wore a conservative knee-length skirt rather than cord riding breeches; the other main difference was her shoes, which weren’t graced with thick rubber soles.
“I was Jon Wooton’s teacher at our little school, Inspector Rutherston,” she said. “We thought it would save you time and effort if I came along first thing. I’m retired from teaching now, but I’m still postmistress and run the Eddsford reading room and lending-library.”
Ah, excellent, Rutherston thought.
He wanted to put off seeing the Wootons until he’d gotten a feel for how the rest of the village regarded them; and these two probably knew everyone’s family history since the resettlement, just for starters. Doubtless they were pillars of half a dozen Church organizations and ran the local Whig election committee with an iron hand as well.
Like most such, the office had a waiting room with chairs, a table, and ancient copies of several magazines--The Illustrated Winchester News, the Church Times, the British Agriculturalist, and rather surprisingly the Boy’s and Girl’s Own Paper.
There was also the inevitable Bible, a tall antique clock ticking in one corner and hanging pictures of King-Emperor Charles IV, Queen Thora, the Pope, and the Cardinal-Archbishop of Winchester. A consulting room gave off it and there were several storage areas in the back; presumably Delia Medford lived over the shop, judging from the selection of Wellingtons, umbrellas, and mackintoshes at the bottom of the hall stairs, and the tabby-cat looking down curiously from the top.
The body was in one of the storerooms, a tile-floored one with two roll-out compartments for cadavers against the wall, and an ingenious icebox-like arrangement for keeping them cold.
“Sir James sends me down ice when I need it,” she explained, as she pulled on a pair of thick rubber gloves.
Rutherston took up her offer of another pair, a bib-apron and a mask that smelled strongly of disinfectant, and a little jar of a strong-smelling ointment. He rubbed a touch of that below his nose and handed it around, and was glad of it when she pulled out the tray--decay had been quicker than he would have expected, given the refrigeration.
Odd, he thought. The marks are almost like burns, rather than sores. Blister marks running with clear fluid. As if he’d been touched with a red-hot... no, there’s no charring. As if he’d been touched with something supremely cold instead.
The nurse might have been examining a gutted chicken at the butcher’s, but Corporal Bramble went a little gray beneath his olive tan, and Mrs. Purkiss looked at the ceiling; both stood well back. Rutherston sympathized. The postmortem had left the corpse as gruesome as anything on a battlefield, if neater, and whatever the man had died of was ghastly. Sections of the back peeled away as she moved the corpse.
“I conducted the autopsy,” she said. “I usually do them here and pass on the reports to the County Coroner. I confess I was tempted to send for Dr. Kvaran from Petersfield this time, but honestly I don’t think Gudrun could have made head nor tail of it either.”
“I’d have brought a forensic surgeon from Winchester if one had been available, but I agree that it’s quite baffling,” Rutherston said. “May I see your notes?”
“By all means,” she said, handing him a clipboard.
Wooton, Jon: age, 27, single male, height 5 ft 11 inches, weight eleven stone, hair, dark brown, eyes, green...
Jon Wooton had been a fairly average modern Englishman... if you subtracted the gruesome lesions that had killed him. The small photograph attached showed him in his late teens, scowling and slouching in a coat with extravagant lapels, but with a certain crude Heathcliffian handsomeness to him. Even allowing for the circumstances, the ensuing decade hadn’t been kind.
Rutherston got out his own notebook and began sketching and making observations of the body; he’d seen a good many corpses himself in both his careers, and this one had certain features you didn’t often find in a Home Counties’ village mortuary. After a moment he tapped his pen in the air above the left shoulder.
“Notice that, corporal?” he said, pointing to a white scar on the triceps.
Bramble nodded. “Not before, sir; I was sort of distracted. But you’re right--he didn’t get ‘is buckler up in time that round,” he said.
Then the noncom followed the pen with his comments: “That’s an arrow-wound... so’s that... or a square-headed crossbow-bolt... sword-scars on the right arm. Nasty cut to the leg--he was lucky that time. That there could be a spear’ead. He didn’t get that lot being quarrelsome in the pub of a Saturday night. Not even a pub in Portsmouth or Bristol.”
“No record of military service,” Rutherston said thoughtfully.
“No, not beyond the usual militia training,” the District Nurse confirmed. “He did say he’d shipped out overseas as a merchant seaman several times, to Asia and America and the African coast.”
“So he might have got those fighting off pirates. But,” Rutherston said, and turned over the man’s right hand.
Even with the skin damage, the hands were definitely wrong for a seaman. Hauling on tarred hemp and sisal and fisting up canvas gave you a layer like cracked horn all across your palms, and you didn’t lose it quickly either; he’d seen that often enough. Jon Wooton’s right hand was if anything less callused than Rutherston’s own, which bore the marks of life-long work with the sword. It did share the “swordsman’s ring,” a circle of hard skin around the outer side of the forefinger and the inner side of the thumb. There were other scars, too, ones that looked as if they’d been caused by hot metal or acid.
Odd, Rutherston thought. Those look like blacksmith’s marks, or even what someone working in a bleach-powder plant might get. With nothing else to go by, I’d put these as the hands of an artisan in some skilled trade.
“But he was away from home for a good long time?” the detective said.
“More often than not, since he turned twenty. Usually about half the year, a month or two at a time; more in the winter than the summer.”
“Hmmm. Did he have money?”
“Nothing formal, but he didn’t seem to lack for it. Of course, the Wootons are fairly well-to-do; the family have held the lease of the mill since the resettlement.”
“Cause of death?”
“Proximate cause was massive exsanguination due to internal bleeding,” Miss Medford said.
She unfastened the clips and opened the body cavity. Her sister looked aside slightly, and Corporal Bramble more than that.
“You see?” she said. “The pattern of tissue degeneration is quite unlike anything I’ve seen before; very severe mercury poisoning, perhaps--that would account for some of the sores--but there’s nei evidence of mercury in the amount you would need. And that should have taken longer. I passed him in the street the day before yesterday, and he was healthy enough to scowl and spit then; perhaps a bit pale, but no more. And note how there’s no inflammation around the lesions? Simple cellular collapse, I think. There’s been no bacterial action to speak of.”
“You don’t think it was an infectious agent, then?”
“Probably not. I’ve read of African viruses with similar effects in the old days, and he might have come in contact with those on a voyage, but it’s a month’s sailing time between Britain and the Guinea coast, and they acted quickly. And the Journal of the Royal Medical Society lists no known cases since the Change; I have a complete series.”
“Had you treated Jon Wooton before?”
“Apart from the usual childhood complaints? Yes.” She sniffed audibly. “For a social disease, twice: gonorrhea. Cured by a course of antibiotics from the National Health Center. One tries to be forgiving, but I cautioned him that I would report any further occurrences to the Ministry of Health.”
She slid the tray closed with a snap. They stripped off their gloves and washed up in the stainless-steel sink with strong medical soap, then repaired to a sitting-room to one side of the business part of the building; Rutherston took a seat, and Bramble stood next to the door, shrewd dark eyes taking everything in. The furniture was in excellent if subdued and rather plain taste, with a picture on the wall that Rutherston thought might be French Impressionist--salvage art--and a landscape showing Eddsford from the Downs, done in the fashionable neo-Pre-Raphaelite style with a certain amateurish attractiveness. Miss Medford rang a small handbell.
“Tea, please, Aud,” she said.
Inwardly, Rutherston raised a brow as a pretty young woman in a dark dress and white apron bustled in and then returned with a tray that had obviously been kept in near-readiness; usually a District Nurse’s salary wouldn’t run to a housemaid, and he noticed that Mrs. Purkiss seemed a little constrained. When the tea came--in a beautiful salvaged set of Wedgewood, rather than modern manufacture--he could tell by the scent that it was the genuine black-leaf article from Hinduraj or Sri Lanka, rather than the herbal substitutes most people still used. Asian tea wasn’t quite a luxury reserved for the wealthy any more, but it was expensive even in these days of prosperity, peace and growing trade, like the cubes of white refined cane sugar in their silver bowl.
He took out his cigarette case and raised a brow. Miss Medford raised her high-bridged nose in turn.
“Not in here, if you please, inspector,” she said in clipped tones. “It’s a filthy habit and I don’t encourage it.”
He sighed slightly and slipped the gunmetal case back into its pocket; he could have used one now... or a stiff whiskey-and-soda, despite the hour. Winchester was a city of 70,000, and they might have as many as four or five homicides a year, but none like that.
She went on: “How do you take your tea?”
“Two lumps and milk, thank you,” he said, sipped appreciatively, then buttered one of the fresh muffins. His notebook went on his knee. “You taught Mr. Wooton, Mrs. Purkiss?”
“Yes; for six years--he left school at fourteen.”
That was the minimum legal age, and usually the maximum for ordinary countryfolk. Rutherston made another note. He’d have expected a miller’s son to take another two years; the rural middle classes, farmers and craftsmen and shopkeepers, usually did. Primary education was free to that level, if not compulsory; and a miller, even if he rented rather than owning the machinery, was usually prosperous enough that he didn’t depend on a teenage son’s labor to keep the family eating.
The retired schoolteacher seemed to sense his question. “Jon’s father died when he was twelve--fell into the gears. His elder brother Eric took over the mill, young as he was. Sir James wanted to keep it in the family.”
“What sort of a student was Jon Wooton?”
Mrs. Purkiss lips thinned until they were bloodless. “Quite talented,” she said in a tone that tried for clinical and nearly achieved it. “And he continued to study after he’d left school; requested books on interlibrary loan through our reading room here.”
“Quite the scholar, then? His interests were?”
“Late-period pre-Change history, and the sciences. He enjoyed reading, too, which I’m sure you know isn’t all that common, particularly if it’s not just romances and adventure stories. Very intelligent; even brilliant, perhaps. With more application and self-discipline, I would have recommended him for a Royal and Imperial Scholarship. Father Frances thought the same.”
“You liked him, then?” Rutherston said neutrally.
The pinched look grew stronger. “He was a detestable little boy and did not improve with age. A sneak, bullied until he got his growth, and a vile bully himself afterwards. When he was quite little he would try to look in the...”
She flushed a little and set her cup down sharply.
“...the girl’s privy.”
“Unpopular?” Rutherston asked. “As an older boy, or a young man.”
“With all but the worst element, louts and... girls of questionable taste. He had his cronies. And he would do unspeakable things to library books! I had to speak very sharply to him about that, and impose fines.”
“Ah,” Rutherston said, with an inward sigh.
Unpopular with the respectable element, and the village Bad Boy. Probably got a girl or two pregnant, too, or gave her Cupid’s Measles, and skipped out on some of his trips to avoid the avenging relatives and the Squire and the parish priest.
When they’d left the clinic, the detective put his hat back on--the sun was bright in a sky with only a few piled white clouds--before he snapped the notebook shut and turned to Bramble with a silent question.
“Bad apple, that one,” Bramble said. “Knew some wide lads like that back home, but none so bad. From the looks of the knocks he took--and lived afterwards--I’d judge he was a hard man and nei mistake, not just your High Street ruffler ready with his fists or a quarterstaff. Smuggler, probably--treasure trove.”
Rutherston nodded. Ruins within the Empire of Greater Britain-- which included western Europe to the old German and Italian borders, the Mahgreb west of the Sicilian settlements around Tunis and Bizerte, and theoretically the Atlantic coast of what had been the United States--were in law Crown property. Salvage for ordinary materials went on by firms making competitive bids for the rights to a given area, and control of exports gave Winchester influence with the King of Ashante and the Sultan of Zanzibar and his ilk.
Certain types of salvage goods, bullion and jewelry and artwork, were still more tightly controlled. Licenses for searching the dead cities for those were dependent on good character, and the government kept the Royal Third. That made violating the law potentially very profitable for interlopers... and in the vast tangled wilderness of the Wild Lands northward and on the Continent outside the English settlements, very hard for the authorities to stop. The whole army wouldn’t be able to surround the jungled wreck of Paris or Madrid alone.
If the wilderness hadn’t been so dangerous, with remnant tribes of Brushwood Men ready to kill and rob unwary travelers--and sometimes, still, to eat them--the problem would have been even worse.
Bramble went on slowly: “There was something a bit odd about the way those two talked about him, sir. Miss Medford didn’t like him--not half! You could tell that, but she gave him penicillin for the clap, twice, without reporting him.”
“That is odd, corporal. Not technically very illegal, but odd. She’d have to mention it, it would be in the NHS disbursement records...”
Bramble frowned as they walked toward the church. “Something rum there. You don’t suppose... you don’t suppose he was having it away with ‘er, or something of that sort, sir? She struck me as a born old maid, though.”
Rutherston started to wave a dismissive hand, checked himself, and spoke slowly in turn, stroking his jaw: “No... but you’re right, there’s more there than meets the eye.” He thought for a moment. “And by the way, do ask questions if you think it would help. I need you for another viewpoint, not just to look formidable.”
He sighed. “The usual procedures are of little use here. Everyone had access to the victim, if it is a poisoning case. There’s no clear time element with slipping something into a man’s beer, the way there is with bashing him over the head.”
The churchyard was well kept behind its wrought-iron fence, even the older graves from the last century. Like most here in Hampshire, the new sections started with a marble slab on a long mound for the bodies found when the area was resettled from the Isle of Wight in the spring of 1999. By then the dead in Britain had outnumbered the living by around three hundred to one...
It bore a simple: For the unnumbered and nameless whom we could not aid: Father forgive us. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.
The fifty-two years since showed the usual pattern, a burst in the first years of terrible struggle, then four or five annually, then more again as population built up and the last survivors of the old days approached their three score-and-ten--according to the Hampshire Gazetteer, the village had about 600 people now, and the parish as a whole twice that. A sexton in his shirtsleeves with his suspenders dangling was digging a new grave for Jon Wooton, not far from a spreading yew whose dark foliage seemed to drink the sunlight.
The notice-board beside the doors of St. Mary the Virgin gave the times for services--Mass Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sunday mornings of course, as well as the holy days--and the usual exhortations to parishioners to make sure that they confessed and were absolved before partaking. Below that were listed meetings of the vestry, the choral society, the Harvest Festival Committee, the Mothers’ Union, the guilds--a dozen organizations altogether, some like the Sunday School chaired by the vicar’s wife.
Rutherston and the soldier removed their headgear and walked through the open door into the cool gloom, with beams of light shining through the stained glass of the windows overhead and a small side-altar to Our Lady of Walsingham. They touched their fingers to the holy water in the font, signed themselves, and genuflected to the altar and the image of the Blessed Mother, waiting for their eyes to adjust. A half-dozen other people were in the church: the usual volunteer middle-aged women and elderly men cleaning and polishing and doing minor repairs, an organist running her fingers through a hymn with the pumps disconnected, a few at silent prayer in the pews, and the vicar himself talking to a deacon.
The detective smiled to himself; together with the sweetness of cut grass from the churchyard it all had the wax-incense-hassocks-and-choirboy smell of Anglican Rite rural piety; not much different from St. Wilfred’s back in Short Compton, where he’d been born. He thought of himself as an unsentimental man, but the scent did take him back to the summer Sundays of his boyhood. Janice and he had been back just this Lammas, to watch the Loaf and the corn dolly being carried in and to share a niece’s First Communion.
The priest here was a different story from old Father Johnson, though. He nodded to the deacon and came striding over, the skirts of his black cassock swirling around stout walking shoes; Father Frances Broxby was a vigorous man in his mid-thirties, not tall but bull-chested and broad-shouldered, with reddish muttonchop whiskers and an athlete’s corded neck under the clerical dog-collar.
Squire’s younger brother, Rutherston reminded himself as they shook hands; he’d consulted Burke’s Peerage and Landed Gentry, and the Church Registry, of course. The grip was not only strong, but callused like a laborer’s or a smith’s.
That’s a bit surprising too. This parish is a reasonably good living.
Topped up by the major landowner, and at his encouragement by donations from the yeomanry and tradesmen. In theory the Church didn’t allow lay patronage, but in practice the bishop always consulted about local appointments with someone like Sir James, who owned about half the parish. The everyday work of the church required the leading family’s cooperation.
Frances Broxby has an Oxford Divinity degree, too, but he’s not ambitious; he wouldn’t have married before he was ordained if he was.
Married men could be ordained in the Anglican Rite and be parish priests, but not those who aimed at episcopal rank, or of course monastics; it was much the same arrangement as for the Ruthenian Catholics though on a vastly larger scale.
“Come, walk with me, my sons,” the priest said. “I think I know what you wish to speak of. A painful duty grows nei easier if we put it off.”
Rutherston blinked in the sunlight behind the churchyard. The long meadow there was part of the glebe--the land a parish priest used to graze his necessary horses and a milch-cow for his household, and cut hay; the sweet scent from the two fresh stacks was overwhelming. It was also the site where the militia practiced with their longbows once a week; the tattered-looking wooden target shaped like a Moorish corsair with a scimitar stood down by the hedge and bank at the end, along with a row of thick shield-shaped wedges of wood on stakes. Two Irish setters trotted up grinning and lolling their tongues; the priest bent to ruffle their ears and then led on at a brisk pace until they were on the embankment.
The tree-lined stream-bank stood on the other side, with the Rother’s surface glittering through the willows where a few last blackbirds and song thrushes were greeting the morning, and there was a pathway along the top of the earth mound.
“I knew Jon Wooton fairly well,” Frances said. “And I regarded him as one of my major failures as a priest.”
“Bit of a wild one, Father?” Bramble said. “We get a fair number of those in the army. They do well enough, mostly, with some discipline.”
Frances looked a little surprised. “Not just that, corporal. Wild young men are common enough, as you say. It was...” he hesitated, obviously groping for words. “It was the fact that he was so intelligent. So able in many ways. And yet the character was the sticking point. Come.”
He turned and walked briskly toward the manse. Rutherston and Bramble exchanged a look that said this one would do well on a route march as they followed him to a long shed-like building behind the brick house, one with skylights of salvage glass.
Frances unlocked it and threw the door open, with a sharp sit to keep the dogs outside.
Rutherston felt his eyebrows rise; his nose tingled to strange metallic scents, oily and sharp and pungent. The inside was fitted out as a laboratory-cum-machine-shop. Shapes of brass and steel and glass shone with the gleam of well-cared-for equipment; the detective recognized lathes and drill presses, a still, racks of chemicals, draughtsman’s tables, and one corner held a library of several hundred books.
“I supervise a club for some of the parish boys--and a few girls-- who are interested in mechanical things, and in the sciences,” he said. “It’s a healthy hobby, better than drink, fornication, and poaching, or even an excess of cricket and Morris dancing, and God did not make everyone to work the soil. For that matter, all the land in this area has been taken up and there are as many laborers as there is employment on the farms. I’ve been able to find apprenticeships, and a few engineering scholarships, for some of the most able of our young people.”
“A worthy effort, Padre,” Rutherston acknowledged sincerely. “I presume Jon Wooton was one of your club members?”
“The best of them!” Frances said. “And one of the first. It was the first time he or any of his family took an interest in anything involved with the church, too.”
“Ah,” Rutherston said, opening his notebook. “Lutherans or Anti-Reunionists ?”
“Nei, we’ve hardly any Dissenters in the parish, not enough for a meeting-house, and none at all in the village. Well, there’s Jack Hordursson, our cobbler, but he’s an atheist... loudly. And the Norbits, they’re Buddhists--they got it out of a book. Nei, the Wootons are just indifferent for the most part.”
“So you were surprised when Jon Wooton joined the...”
“Philomath’s Club. Here, let me show you. This is all his work.”
He led them over to a bench. Several photographs were pinned above it. Rutherston nodded. They were excellent work; one of the priest, another a family group in front of a water mill, and still another of the District Nurse and her housemaid in front of the clinic.
“Jon Wooton made the camera, and developed the negatives. He made several cameras, in fact, some of them every bit as good as one from a factory in Winchester.”
Several model machines were racked against the wall, including a small telescope. Another had a brass tube like a miniature hot-water boiler set over a spirit-lamp, with an affair of levers and pistons in an arrangement like a grasshopper’s legs. The priest undid a cap, poured in water, lit the lamp, and worked valves. After a minute the machine began to hiss... and then, slowly at first, the levers began to work up and down, and the flywheel to spin with a smooth, alien motion.
Bramble took a step back and crossed himself, his eyes going wide. The priest smiled and made a soothing gesture. “Nothing but natural law at work, my son.”
“But... that sort of thing doesn’t work nei more! Not since the Change!”
“Actually it does, corporal,” Rutherston said briskly. “If it isn’t the type that needs high pressures. But an... what’s the phrase, Padre? I should have paid more attention in Classics... they work.”
“A Watt-style steam engine, that functions by creating a vacuum and then using the pressure of the air to push the piston--an atmospheric engine. Wooton made this himself, when he was sixteen, just from the plans in a book. And it worked the first time.”
“That’s rare?”
“Take my word for it. Very rare.”
Rutherston nodded. “There’s a few large ones in dockyards to pump out dry docks, and in coal mines up the Severn for drainage. They’re not of much use otherwise; they weigh too much and take too much fuel for the work they do. For most purposes, an ordinary waterwheel or windmill is far better.”
Frances pointed to several places where the brass rods of the little engine had been bent and then carefully repaired.
“There you have Jon Wooton’s genius, and his failing--when I told him that nei great use could be made of the engine under modern conditions, he smashed it and stormed away.”
“And who fixed it, Padre?”
Frances passed a hand over his face and sighed. “He did. I had expelled him from the club--and from the sacraments--nine years ago, for reasons which must remain confidential. Then just two years past he came back to Eddsford from his longest trip abroad. He’d made a little money, it seems, as a sailor--”
Bramble rolled his eyes slightly toward the ceiling. Too holy for his own good, this one, the expression said. Rutherston gave an almost imperceptible nod.
“--and he convinced me that he had mended his ways. Among other things, he offered to help instruct at the Philomath Club here. And did so... brilliantly. Until I found him in a compromising position with one of the girls who was a member.”
He shook his head. “And he absconded with... oh, nothing of value. Some fanciful plans he’d drawn up, and a few books--old works, on technologies that definitely do not operate since the Change.”
Rutherston nodded. “Evidently the young man was a disappointment to most people who knew him, Padre. Do you think anyone was disappointed enough to kill him?”
The priest bit his lip. “Inspector, you put me in a very difficult position.”
“Oh, I realize that you have to respect the confidences of the--”
The vicar of Eddsford surprised him by chuckling. “No, it’s not so much that. It’s that there were so many people here in Eddsford who... ah... very strongly disliked Jon Wooton. I hope I’m Christian enough to forgive those who wrong me, but my brother--”
“Frances!”
The voice came from beyond the door; a woman in a good plain dress hurried in with a leather box in her hands; it had a buckled flap with a golden cross embossed on it. “Frances! Mrs. Thordarsson--oh, pardon me.”
“Inspector, corporal, my wife Hrefna Broxby,” he said, pronouncing it more like Refna. “Yes, dear?”
“Mrs. Thordarsson is failing.”
“Ah, then I’ll have to leave you, I’m afraid, inspector,” he said briskly, taking the leather box. “Their farm is on the edge of the parish and time presses. Very much a pleasure and do feel free to call on me at any time.”
A youngster in his teens outside was holding the reins of a rather thickset horse in the shafts of a light two-wheeled carriage; it looked like a prosperous farmer’s Sunday showpiece. The priest walked out at the same quick pace, stepped into the seat, gave the other a hand up, flourished the whip, and started off at a brisk trot.
The vicar’s wife watched him leave with a smile, then turned to the two men: “Oh, detective inspector,” she said. “Sir James asked me to pass on his invitation to visit this afternoon.”
After they’d left the churchyard, Bramble nodded slowly to himself. “Think I’ve got a bit of a handle on this Wooton fellow, sir,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Well, he was a right clever lad, eh? And thought he should be a big man... and maybe he should have been.”
Rutherston frowned. “Then why in God’s name didn’t he leave? Miller is the best thing he could hope for here, in a settled county like Hampshire. And he wasn’t even the heir to the lease; there’s an elder brother.”
“But,” Bramble made a sweeping gesture, “he kept coming back, you see? He wanted to make his mark here; not in Winchester or Portsmouth or Bristol or the colonies, but here. Where he grew up and with all the people here, where it really counts, sir.”
“Ah,” the detective said. “Now I see your point.”
He glanced up at the sun; it was an hour or so to noon. “Let us repair to the Moor’s Head until luncheon. If there’s anyone in town who knows the gossip, it’s an innkeeper.”
“Then the Squire,” Bramble said. He smiled. “Better you than me, sir.”
The park around the manor wasn’t particularly large, probably because labor had been scarce until the last few decades, but Rutherston stopped to admire the sight of a herd of fallow deer grazing beneath a beech. They ambled away across greensward studded with crimson poppies and golden corn marigolds as he and Bramble walked in past the gatehouse; the laneway was flanked by clipped shapes of golden yew as it curved around an ornamental pool of several acres, and then through a screen of timber and over a ha-ha into the house gardens, velvety lawns and tall chestnuts and cedars, and banks ablaze with phlox, penstemon, black-eyed Susan, and more. A few gardeners stared or waved tentatively as the two King’s Men walked toward the entrance.
Royston Hall itself was Seventeenth Century work for the most part, a rectangular block done in pale stone and four stories high. The gray-haired butler opened the door before he could knock and took the card he offered.
“You’re expected, sir,” he said, not deigning to notice Bramble. “If you’ll follow me?”
And I don’t think he’s been a butler all his life, Rutherston thought. Men rarely have half their left ear chopped off in that line of work. Or get a limp quite like that.
There was a suit of armor inside the door at the entrance to the hall, a modern man-at-arm’s outfit of head-to-toe articulated plate. The model had been Fifteenth Century, but the metal was considerably better than any available to medieval smiths.
The detective and the corporal gave it identical considering glances as they went by. It took a good deal of effort to batter good alloy-steel armor into that sort of shape, and it wouldn’t be at all healthy for the man inside; the shoulder-flash of the Cordoba Lancers was barely visible, and the visor of the sallet helm had been cut nearly in half, which must have taken a two-handed blow with a heavy axe or a halberd. The butler led them into a room with bay windows overlooking a walled garden; they were open, and a scent of lavender and cut grass drifted in, along with a country-house smell compounded of faint traces of lamp and dog and wood-smoke, tobacco, the old walls...
Sir James Broxby was a man of medium height, still slender and lithe at fifty, with amber-colored hair and mustache liberally streaked with gray. He would have been handsome if it hadn’t been for the slash that had taken his left eye and furrowed the brow above and the cheek below; as it was he wore the black patch with distinction, and the other eye was bright blue and shrewd beneath the shaggy brow. Rutherston heard Bramble make an mmmm sound behind him, and the same thought occurred to him as they shook hands:
Well, that’s what happened to the suit of plate.
“A pleasure, Sir James,” he told the baronet.
“Mutual, inspector... just a moment... Rutherston... the Short Compton Rutherstons? The Blues?”
“Yes, Sir James, twice. On the retired list at present, and making my way in the CID--younger son, and all that. Youngest of four sons, actually.”
“Ingmar Rutherston... the Military Medal down in Morocco some time ago?”
The detective shrugged. “Medals came up from the rear with the rations, and everybody deserved one,” he said.
That brought a short laugh and a nod; not precisely agreement, but a meeting of minds on matters that others without their shared experience could never really know. Rutherston opened his cigarette case and offered it.
“Ah, Embiricos,” Sir James said, taking one. “These alone made the cost of resettling Barbados worthwhile, and damn the Whigs and their Babbage Engine project.”
He cocked an eye at Bramble. “You can sit too, corporal.”
“I’ll stand, if it’s all the same, sir,” Bramble said, taking a position behind the sofa where Rutherston sat; it was rather like having a bear behind the flowered chintz, but reassuring for all that.
“The corporal has been assisting me, and doing rather a good job of it,” Rutherston said.
“I’m not surprised.”
The baronet rang a bell, and a housemaid slid into the room. “Gin and tonic, please, Martha,” he said. “And you, inspector?”
“The same, thank you. It is a warm day.”
They made small talk--the weather (good), the state of the just-completed harvest (excellent), the trends in wheat and wool prices (deplorable), Sir James’s former command in the resettled areas of southern Spain (great potential)--until the drinks came. Rutherston sipped at his, enjoying the tart astringency, and then opened his notebook as a hint.
Sir James sighed. “Unpleasant business this, all ‘round. I confess I wouldn’t have been even the least upset if young Wooton had come to grief somewhere abroad, but to have him murdered in my own village...”
Rutherston nodded sympathetically. “The Wootons are an old family here?”
The other man laughed shortly and drank, smoothing his mustache with a knuckle. “Very old. Gaffer Wooton... Jon’s grandfather... lived here before the Change. So did my family... nearby, at least.”
Rutherston’s brows went up. That was unusual. The rescue parties had swept up selected people from all over Southern England that first year and taken them to the Isle of Wight Refuge to wait out the inevitable die-off after the machines stopped. Most had been farmers, and the others craftsmen or skilled workers of high value. Thatchers, weavers, and blacksmiths and the like... and to be sure, the families of commanders and of their soldiers and of persons of influence on the Refuge. The men in charge had saved civilization here where nearly everything on the Continent from Normandy to Iran had gone down in utter wreck... but they’d still been only human, and their power had been near absolute for a while.
The Squire of Royston Hall sighed again. “I don’t know how much background you want--”
“The more the better, Sir James.”
“Well, the Wootons got the lease on the mill as soon as this area was resettled in the spring of 1999--my grandfather was commandant of the region under the Emergency Regulations and got a substantial grant of land when things were privatized, the usual arrangement. Old Tom Wooton did a splendid job; he’d been in the Life Guards with my grandfather, driving one of those... what where they called? Not automobiles or trucks, moving steel fort things on bands of metal...”
“Tanks, I believe.”
“Yes. One called after a sword, a ‘scimitar,’ I think. Old Tom was handy with machinery, and so he was put in charge of renovating the mill--it hadn’t been operational before the Change, just kept for appearances, they did a lot of that sort of foolishness then of course. He married an Icelandic woman--”
Rutherston nodded; that was also common. It had been encouraged, in fact, when the refugees from the northern isles were welcomed into a land gone empty in the second and third years.
“--And his son extended it, added a fulling section.”
The detective closed his eyes for a second to search his memory. The mill was on the fringe of the village, but he hadn’t heard the distinctive sound of wet woolen cloth pounded by wooden hammers. At his unspoken question, Sir James went on:
“We closed it down about nine years ago. There’s not as much weaving here as there was in my father’s time--just rough homespun and blankets, that sort of thing. The cloth trade’s been moving off to the West Country and north into your bailiwick lately and it’s cheaper to buy the finer grades. Our Rother really doesn’t have enough water power for manufacturing.”
True enough, Rutherston thought. Though I wouldn’t call Dursley and Stroud and Chalsford our bailiwick, precisely; we just sell them our farmers’ wool and wheat and flax.
He’d never liked the mill-towns. They were too big--Stroud was the most monstrously overgrown and had four thousand people nowadays--and they didn’t really fit into the Cotswold country he loved.
Winchester and Bristol and Portsmouth are cities, he thought. Eddsford and Short Compton are villages. Those places are neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat.
“I turned it into a winery instead, and loaned a few of my tenants the money for planting more vines. There we have some chance of competing, what with haulage costs from the colonies. In any case, young Jon took it hard. He’d been full of plans for making the fulling operation more efficient--even adding a spinning mill. That we definitely wouldn’t have had the water power for, but Jon was a trifle unbalanced on the subject. We had words on the matter when I pointed out that it was my property and the decision was mine. In fact, we both lost our tempers. He swore he’d buy the mill and the freehold of it and I... well, I’m afraid I laughed and said he was welcome to do it, any time he had a thousand pounds in cash about him.”
Rutherston winced slightly, and felt Bramble do the same at some subliminal level. A thousand pounds was what Rutherston made in five years or a corporal in fifteen. There were places, not here in Hampshire but not necessarily right out on the frontiers either, where you could buy and stock a good farm with that much.
Sir James looked at the end of his cigarillo, finished his gin and tonic, and then sighed.
“Well, two years ago... by God, he did it.”
Rutherston felt his jaw start to drop, and the Squire of Eddsford nodded.
“Yes, quite a surprise. But I’d given my word, even if I meant it as a joke, and... there he was with a thousand in good Bank of England notes. I had absolutely nei desire to sell family land, but what could I do? It was a fair price, after all; better than fair, even if I did have to put up a new winery. I felt lucky he didn’t insist on making a public parade of it; he was always one to kick a man when he had him down, was our Jon.”
The detective’s pen scribbled over his pad. Unwillingly, he felt a certain admiration for the late Jon Wooton’s sheer gall. To come home and beard the Squire that way... although it said something reasonably favorable about the landowner, too. If Sir James wanted to he could make living here impossible for anyone he took against, since he was the largest landowner, the major employer directly and through his tenant-farmers, and Justice of the Peace and militia captain to boot. Nobody apart from his own mother seemed to have liked Jon Wooton much either, which would have made his position that much worse.
Just then the door crashed open. A woman stood in it, dressed in black silk. It clashed horribly with her graying ginger hair, which escaped in wisps about her long and rather horsey face; she had mismatched features that might have been charming if she smiled, but he had an instant and distinct impression that she didn’t do that very often, even apart from whatever was bothering her now.
Relative of the Squire, Rutherston thought instantly. Close relative. Sister, probably.
Her eyes were red as if from prolonged weeping, but she glared at Sir James Broxby with open rage.
“You killed him, James! How could you!”
The accused man sighed again, closed his eyes for a second, and stood. “I’m rather busy now, Vigdis--”
She turned to Rutherston, who’d also stood by automatic reflex. “Arrest him! He killed Jon because he couldn’t stand the thought of my being happy, of having a home of my own--”
Something in the detective’s face stopped her; she started to weep again, then snatched something from a shelf and threw it. The porcelain shattered against a window, which broke itself; then she turned and stormed out again.
The baronet sat again. “Good God,” he said quietly. “I apologize for subjecting you to that, inspector.”
Rutherston sat as well. “No need to apologize, Sir James. In my line of work one often sees people when they... ah... aren’t at their best.”
His host rang the bell again. “Another gin and tonic, Martha,” he said. “Much gin, little tonic, nei ice. Another, inspector? Nei? Well, I need it, by God!”
He shook his head and went on: “I’ve been lucky in my wife, my sons and daughters, my brother and our other sisters... but Vigdis is, as you can see, a consummately silly woman. And Jon Wooton was rather a swine with women of all classes. Whether you believe me or not, I wouldn’t have objected if I’d thought he would give her some happiness, but... it wouldn’t have mattered if Wooton had ten thousand pounds coming in every year and a seat in the Lords.”
“Of course, Sir James,” Rutherston said; quite sincerely, on the whole.
By God, it’s a good thing that being a copper is a cure for embarrassment; otherwise I’d be dropping dead of the English Disease right here. I suspect Corporal Bramble is willing his vital functions to cease immediately.
“Now,” he continued. “Jon Wooton bought the mill two years ago?”
“Yes, and that made his brother Eric his tenant,” Broxby said, escaping to--relatively--impersonal matters with relief. “Another reason I hated to sell; Eric’s been a perfectly sound man. Jon immediately cleared out the winery equipment, and began extending the old mill building, which at least gave some of our Eddsford people employment. In fact, he swore he’d put in spinning machines as well, even power-looms.”
Rutherston snorted. He might not like Stroud, but having it close by as he grew had taught him something about the economics of the textile trade. Nobody used power-looms. Power spinning, yes, and some of the processing parts of the fine-cloth trade were mechanized, but when so many cottagers had good treadle-looms and needed work in the off-seasons of the farming year it just didn’t pay, especially when people willing to work in factories were so scarce and could demand high wages. Master-spinners put the thread out for weaving through the cooperative guilds, then bought back the cloth for finishing.
“I thought you said there wasn’t much spare power from your river?”
“None!” Broxby said, then: “Ah, thank you, Martha,” and knocked back his drink as if it were neat whiskey. “In fact, there’s a Catchment Order enjoining anyone on this stretch from building more dams or weirs. To preserve the fishing, you see. But Wooton would have it that he could install a steam engine, of all things! In Hampshire, with not a pound of coal within fifty miles! And they don’t pay for anything but pumping out mines even up the Severn, where it’s cheap.”
Rutherston started to snort again, then remembered the vicar and his Philomath Club, and the little model.
But that makes even less sense. He was nei fool, our Jon, and he knew you couldn’t get useful work out of one of those machines. Not without a coalmine right beneath it, so the fuel was free! And they took most of the coal in the Old Days; we’re working their leavings, or seams too small to be worth noticing back then.
That was the basic lesson of the Change; under the laws of nature as they’d applied since that March 17th of 1998, you couldn’t get mechanical work out of heat, not in any really useful amount. Not in an engine, not in a firearm. The detective shook his head. He’d learned the details of it in school, though it had been boringly abstract, especially the bits about electricity--you could visualize a steam engine in your head, but not force flowing in wires.
What really puzzled him was that Jon Wooton, in his own personal and repulsive fashion, was acting as if he was seventy years old and remembered the Old World, and missed it enough to keep scheming to find a way around the Change. Sir James Broxby braced his elbows on the arms of his chair and steepled his fingers. When he looked over them at Rutherston he was once again the forceful man he’d first met.
“I’m afraid we’ve presented you with a puzzle, inspector. You have to determine who didn’t want to kill Jon Wooton.”
“Starting with the District Nurse and his schoolteacher,” Rutherston said ruefully.
For a moment he wished he’d accepted the second drink.
The brow over Sir James’s single eye went up. “Them? They have been handling his business correspondence with that firm in Portsmouth,” he said. “So they can’t loathe him quite as much as the remainder of us.”
“No, not all as it seems,” Bramble said, frowning intently, as they walked back down the lane to the park gate.
Rutherston nodded. He’s been caught up in the puzzle of it, he thought, amused. Natural huntsman, I suppose.
The big noncom went on: “If Sir James was going to kill a man, he’d do it face-to-face; Jon was younger and knew how to use a blade, too, sir.”
Dueling wasn’t legal. On the other hand, it wasn’t absolutely unknown, either, in the last generation or so.
“There’s his sister,” the detective pointed out. “The most honorable of men could lose control... still...”
Bramble cleared his throat apologetically. “No disrespect to the Squire’s sister, but Jon was a man with an eye for the girls from all we’ve heard, and you’d have to be right desperate to fancy waking up next to her for the rest of your mortal days. And he was a good ten years younger.”
“Unless it was for revenge.”
“Then he wouldn’t string her along. Having it away and then dumping her public-like would be revenge in plenty.”
“Hmmm,” Rutherston said. “I see what you mean. He probably did mean to marry her then... and be a rich man here in Eddsford, with the Squire’s sister too. That might be enough to overcome Sir James’s scruples.”
“More likely one of his men’s. Did you see that butler, sir?”
Rutherston shot him a glance, and got that guileless expression once more.
“Yes, I did. Yes, you’re right, corporal, he might be the sort to quietly take care of something the master wouldn’t or couldn’t... but I don’t think he’d use poison. Quick stab to the kidneys, and then the body never found, that would be more like it.”
“Something to that. But someone did it... and it would have to have a bit of spite behind it, inspector. He died hard, did our Jon. Very hard.”
Rutherston nodded. “That’s the way we have to approach this. Usually we look for motive and opportunity...”
“But everyone in this sodding village hated Jon Wooton, and they all had the opportunity to drop sommat in his beer.”
“Exactly. Therefore we’ll have to focus on the means. Time to go see what may be seen at the Wootons.’“
The mill was at the other side of the village; they walked back through the green and along the single long lane, since Eddsford had more length than breadth. With the harvest in the farm-workers who made up most of the people here were taking time to do repairs and tidying up; they passed half a dozen parties of thatchers, with householders tossing up bundles of the golden straw to be pegged and trimmed. The trades and crafts were busier than ever, though; they went past a shoemaker--who from the sign also repaired harness and saddles--tapping away with his family working around him, a smithy with its blast of heat and inevitable hangers-on and iron clangor, a tailor’s where the treadle-powered sewing machines hummed.
Children were running about, enjoying their last weeks of freedom before the school year started. A mob of the older boys came by kicking ,a football; one of them sent it across the path of the two men. Bramble stopped it with his foot, bounced it expertly into the air with his toe, bumped it up with his knee and then head-butted it unerringly to the gangling youth who’d kicked it to him. The tow-headed boy grinned back and then led his shouting mob down a laneway toward the water-meadows.
Rutherston caught a look of mild enjoyment on the noncom’s face before it gave way to his usual seriousness.
“You may have found His Majesty a recruit there,” he said.
“Worse things than going for a soldier, sir,” Bramble said. “If you’ve the inclination.”
“True enough.”
They passed out of the village proper; beyond it were the allotments--plots of a few acres came along with the rental of a cottage. Many of the villagers were at work there, hoeing and weeding, or harvesting vegetables and fruit into woven-withe baskets. Some of them nodded to the two outsiders; others just glanced at them.
“You or I would be grockles in Eddsford if we lived here thirty years, married local girls and were buried in the churchyard,” Rutherston said.
“Probably, sir. Not quite as bad as that where I come from; we weren’t resettled until a decade or so later. Still had new folk moving in until around the time I was born.”
A few two-wheeled carts went by, loaded high with billets of firewood cut in the coppices; this was the season to start laying it in for the winter. It was also the season for milling some of the recently harvested grain, of course, though not all of it; besides taking time to thresh, it kept better in the kernel. The tall overshot steel wheel was turning as water dropped onto the curved metal vanes from the millrace. That wound out of sight along the hillside and into a patch of dense forest.
Ah, Rutherston thought, looking at a series of heavy metal shapes, forged steel and cast iron; they rested by the newer section of the long rectangular building. That will be the parts Sir James mentioned from Portsmouth. Odd that Miss Medford didn’t mention doing Jon’s correspondence.
In mourning for a brother or no, the world’s work had to go on; as they approached, a sling full of the sacks was hoisted up to the top story, to be poured into the hopper and eventually emerge as flour--and sacks of that were being unloaded into empty wagons from a doorway lower down. The groaning sound of burr millstones turning on each other ran under the rush of the water and the rumble of the big gearwheels meshing. There was a mealy, dusty smell in the air, despite the dampness.
A tall man with thinning sandy hair was overseeing operations. He turned as Rutherston and Bramble approached and nodded at them:
“Been expecting you. I’ve a bit t’ do furst, sir.” Then he shouted upwards at his workmen: “Awroi, keep her running! Light on the lever! There’s nei way for even biyani like you t’ bugger it up now, so don’t!”
Rutherston introduced them; the miller had a hand like something carved from bacon-rind, and a gravely respectful manner that might be hiding resentment... or possibly relief. He led them into the rambling ivy-covered house that stood near the mill and offered refreshment--nammit was the word he used for the pound-cake and rosehip tea that his wife brought in and slammed down with a nervous irritation that made the husband wince.
“Where’s mother?” he said to her. “And the kids?”
“She’s in Jon’s room, with his things,” she said with a waspish note.
Eric Wooton looked surprised. “How’d she get in? It’s locked! There’s the guard! She were fussing about it all yesterday, and yelling at the so’jer.”
“The squaddie’s asleep, and she used a strip of tin!”
Oh, my, Rutherston thought, and exchanged a glance with Bramble as they both rose.
Mrs. Wooton the younger was a woman of about her husband’s age, somewhere between thirty and forty, with bright blonde hair and sharp intelligent features and tourmaline-green eyes. She went on with a snap:
“Margrethe and Sally and Tom are staying with Jenny. And that’s where I’m. going now. Call me when your Jon isn’t mucking up our lives any more. I didn’t marry him, you know.”
Eric Wooton winced as the door slammed, and went on as he trailed after the two King’s Men down a corridor toward the stairs.
“Jenny’s her sister...” he sighed, then went on: “You talked with the Squire, I suppose, inspector? Jon... ee allus was a strange boy, off alone with his books or fiddling with some bit of gearwork, but he changed when the Squire closed the fulling mill. First he goes off to sea; then he comes back with money and big plans, talking all fess about how he’d settle everyone who ever crossed him, and then he goes and buys the mill!”
“Which will be yours now, I suppose, Mr. Wooton?” Rutherston said over his shoulder, as they came to a landing.
The square Saxon face went slack. “I hadn’t thought!”
The detective blinked. He’d been on the receiving end of a great many attempts at innocence, and that was the real thing if he’d ever seen it.
And now the poor fellow has more guilt to add to the relief he’s trying not to feel, Rutherston thought; the Wootons had ratcheted up two steps on the local social ladder. Now, how to interrupt his mother...
Eric Wooton visibly put the dawning realization that he now had his beloved mill in fee simple and rent-free aside and continued:
“I didn’t think any good would come of it, nor of those friends of his.”
Aha, Rutherston thought. That’s new.
“Friends?” he said.
“Foreign,” Eric Wooton said shortly.
The problem is, foreign could just mean someone from Warwickshire, or even Winchester, Rutherston thought. I doubt they were from outside the Empire.
“And they came by night. Jon would go out and talk to ‘em, I suppose he went with them on his trips away, but he wouldn’t bring them into the house--not that I wasn’t glad of it. Wouldn’t want them around my kids. Then when they left he’d have more--”
Suddenly he stopped and sniffed the air. Rutherston did too; there was a hint of smoke, not likely from a hearth in this season, but it could be from the iron stove in the kitchen.
“Mother!” Wooton bellowed, and tried to bolt past them.
Bramble had his sword out. Rutherston made a gesture and the noncom sheathed it as they went pounding up the last flight of stairs. The trooper who’d been on guard lay slackly on the floor with a cup beside him; drugged, not drunk or asleep, but Rutherston didn’t envy him when he eventually met Corporal Bramble again in his official capacity.
The door had been locked once more; the miller rattled the handle and shouted incoherent pleas, threats, and curses at his mother. Smoke leaked underneath it; Rutherston shoulder-checked the agitated man neatly out of the way, and Bramble hit the oak planks with his shoulder tucked in. That was practical, if you had a lot of bone and muscle behind the shove, and a mail-coat and padding to protect it. The lock tore out of the jamb with a crunch, and the door banged open.
“No!” a woman screeched.
That was probably Kristin Wooton; at least she was stout and middle-aged. She went for Rutherston with a creditable tackle, but he dodged aside--he’d been a very good rugby fly-half once--and picked up a jug of water by the side of an unmade bed still marked with the dried blood and fluids of Jon Wooton’s hard dying. Smoke turned to steam as he threw it into a metal box where flames ran. Behind him Bramble had the mother in an unbreakable grip-- despite her attempts to kick and gouge--and Eric Wooton was...
A wringin’ of his hands, Rutherston thought, as he opened a window and waved a pillowcase to disperse the smoke. If I had to pick a recruit for a commando operation, I’d take Eric’s mother Kristin over him any day of the week.
The basket held charred papers. And charred photographs as well. The detective picked one up between thumb and forefinger.
For a moment the shapes made no sense. Then his brows rose as he mentally untangled the interlocked limbs and saw what was going where; he hadn’t seen anything like it since a handful of pre-Change magazines were handed eagerly around after lights-out in the dormitory at Winchester College... Then the brows rose again, to, an almost painful level. Those photographs were modern, and not posed; they’d been taken at some distance, through an open window--with a camera hooked up to a telescope. It took him a moment to recognize Delia Medford, and a moment more to identify pretty Aud; facial features weren’t the most immediately apparent part of the overall composition.
No wonder his mother had wanted to burn them! Rutherston thought. And no wonder that Delia Medford was willing to handle his business correspondence... and she certainly had a motive for murder.
“Good God almighty,” Bramble said in reverent tones.
Rutherston turned, automatically holding the photograph closer to his chest with the back outwards. A large trunk stood by the bed--evidently pulled from beneath it, and with the large, complex and extremely strong-looking lock hammered off. At a guess, Jon Wooton’s mother had done it when she realized that the police were on the doorstep. Part of the contents had gone into the metal waste-basket and been set on fire; the rest had been tossed on the bed. They included some diagrams... and several neat bundles of banknotes, with many noughts in their numbers. Buying the mill and ordering equipment from Portsmouth hadn’t exhausted young Jon’s profits from his putative illegal salvage trips by any means.
“I don’t want the money!” Kristin screeched. “Take the money! Just don’t you slander my Jon! Jon was a good boy!”
No, he was a man, and a very bad one, Rutherston thought. But that doesn’t mean it was all right to murder him.
Then he looked at the plans. A steam engine, right enough, he thought. There was the big rocking beam, the circular boiler, the huge six-foot piston, and the separate condenser. The rest of it made less sense. The channels for water were labeled cooling system. Surely the point was to heat the water up, though? And there was no provision for a coal store; simply a rectangular object with pipes running through it labeled heat source. And a weird geared arrangement to lower rods into it from above, each fitting neatly into a cylinder.
They were neatly titled control rods, with graphite in brackets after that and a note: test composition? Add fuel elements gradually to check necessary mass.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” he said to himself, baffled. “But Jon was brilliant at mechanical things; it’s the one virtue he had, and everyone agrees on it. What could--”
He felt his face go pale. “That’s impossible,” he added.
No, he realized after a moment. It’s just very implausible. Anything else is impossible.
“Dammit, I should have known better!” he said softly.
Kristin Wooton’s screeches had subsided into sobs. Bramble heard the older man’s words.
“Sir?” he said.
“Known that you see what you expect to find!”
“What was it you expected, exactly?” said Bramble, letting the woman down on her feet; she stumbled to a chair and dropped her face into her hands.
“I expected to find a murder.”
“The trail’s as plain as plain, sir,” Bramble said. “Now that we’ve got one end of it, I can follow it.”
The olive face was phlegmatic as usual, but there was a slight sheen of sweat on it. It was near sunset, and they’d been quartering the hanger north-east of Eddsford’s mill all afternoon. Half the corporal’s squad were helping--the ones with the best field-craft, as Bramble put it.
Or the ones that did the most poaching, Rutherston thought mordantly.
“Best get the rest of them out, then,” he said aloud. “We don’t need numbers to check on something.”
The detective and the non-commissioned officer looked at each other in perfect unspoken understanding; if you were a leader of King’s Men you didn’t send them where you wouldn’t go yourself. Or send them at all instead of going yourself, if accomplishing the mission was simply a matter of one man walking into danger. He’d been honor-bound to tell the corporal what he thought they were looking for. Corporal Bramble wouldn’t let him go in after it alone.
It felt eerily strange to walk through an English beechwood with the smooth gray bark dappled by the sun and feel this way. You were meant to feel like this amid a landscape of arid rock, knowing that hating black eyes were peering at you and quivering-eager hands gripped spears, while the armor was like a vise around your chest and the long clatter of boots and hooves on rock echoed back from the sides of the wadi. His hand ached for the hilt of his longsword, but there was nothing here from which a sword could protect him.
“Here,” he said.
Whatever-it-was had been buried skillfully, but you couldn’t sink a dozen boxes bigger than coffins into the dirt without leaving some trace. Rutherston forced his mind and memory back from a time more than a decade distant, swallowed, cleared his throat.
“This one,” he said.
They scrabbled at the duff with their gloved hands. The steel top of the box was still covered in chipped, faded olive-green paint, with faint black traces where words and code-sequences had been stenciled on. The rope handle was modern, though. Rutherston licked his lips again and bent to pull at it. The effort made him stagger, taken off-guard; the weight was far greater than a four-by-three section of stamped steel should be. Bramble stepped nearer and gave him a hand; there was room for both on the loop of hemp.
The lid began to creak upwards. As soon as it was open at all. he could see that the chest had been lined with thick plates of lead and then something else--graphite, he thought. Then he saw what was within, dull-shining metallic wedges, and he jumped back. Bramble did an instant later, and the lid fell back with an echoing whutnp. The softness of the sound meant that the fit must be very good, sealing the boxes airtight.
Thank God for Jon Wooton’s clever hands, Rutherston thought, scraping the back of one hand across his face. And damn him for a lunatic!
“Corporal, get your man out to the semaphore line. Code Seven-Seven-Eight, and send it emergency priority.”
“Yes sir!”
That gave Bramble a reason to run. Rutherston turned and walked instead. He couldn’t outrun what waited in those lead-lined boxes behind him... and you could never really outrun fear, anyway.
“He wanted to what?” Sir James said.
“Build a steam engine,” Ingmar Rutherston said.
He looked around the parlor in Royston Hall. Only the essential people were there: the Squire, his brother the vicar, and District Nurse Delia Medford, SRN. And Corporal Bramble, of course. The sheer normalcy of it was inexpressibly comforting, down to the tea-tray the maid had left, and the sheen on the mahogany of the table, the leather of the sofa and chairs and the large and rather bad oil of William the Great’s victory over the Moors at Tenerife that hung by the door.
“That is mad!” the Reverend Frances Broxby said.
The nurse stirred her cup, genteelly holding out the little finger of that hand. She nodded as the detective went on:
“Not if he had the right fuel,” Rutherston said. He lit one of his cigarillos and leaned an elbow on the mantelpiece. “Plutonium, I believe it was called, Father?”
The scholarly priest shook his head. “Plutonium--you’re all familiar with the name?--plutonium won’t explode any more. Even if the chemical explosives to drive the pieces together would work, or the electronic control mechanisms functioned. It won’t even get hot enough to melt. And thank God for that. Otherwise it would have poisoned half of England as it burned through the containment structures.”
“Thank God indeed. From my dimly recalled lessons one sort turns into another sort as it runs down, somehow, and only God and a few boffins know what it is by now.”
“Radium, cobalt-60, other decay products,” the priest said quietly. “Wooton’s chests probably came from an old power station. Whoever dug it out probably did so under duress, and died very quickly.”
Rutherston nodded; even if the slave laborers had been Wild Lands savages, it was an unpleasant thought. He went on:
“As you say, Padre. But though it won’t melt down, in concentrated form it will sit there and glow at about seven hundred degrees... which is quite hot enough to boil water, and to keep doing so for a very long time. I remember that from a course on the Dangerous Substances Act. Generally we leave the old reactors strictly alone--they’re safer repositories for the stuff than anything we can build now.”
He could see that the priest followed him, and Delia Medford was unsurprisingly unsurprised; it took Sir James a little longer.
“You mean... you mean it would have worked?” he said at last, blinking his one eye.
“In theory. In practice, no, and Jon Wooton would have killed everyone in Eddsford trying. It’s been looked into exhaustively, back around the turn of the century, though the studies were kept secret. The resources of the whole realm couldn’t do it, not with the machines we can make. That stuff is hellish dangerous.”
“Good God,” the baronet said, and drank blindly from his cup, looking as if he’d prefer something much stronger.
“Fortunately, the disposal squad says that nothing significant escaped. The boxes will be put in larger boxes, those will be encased in seamless lead castings, and the whole will be cast into very deep parts of the sea. What the boffins call a subduction zone, where evidently we won’t have to worry about it again this side of doomsday.”
Father Frances crossed himself. “So there was no murder here in Eddsford,” he said slowly. “Thank God indeed! Jon Wooton simply killed himself... by accident.”
All those present signed themselves as well, as the cleric murmured “Amen.”
“And no harm done to the village or the people,” Sir James said, with a gusty sigh. “I think, Frances, that a thanksgiving mass is in order... not that we need be too specific about the cause.” He looked at Rutherston. “And no crime was committed after all.”
“Oh, there were several crimes: smuggling, violation of the Treasure Trove Act, the Dangerous And Prohibited Substances Act... but all by the very late, and extremely unlamented, Jon Wooton. So my report will make plain.”
There will be an investigation, but not here and, thank God, by the Special Branch, not me. Aloud he went on:
“I don’t think any of you will be bothered further. Officially this will be simply a matter of a dead smuggler’s buried treasure being confiscated--sensational enough to satisfy village gossip. Provided everyone here is discreet.”
There were smiles and handshakes all around; Rutherston firmly declined the Squire’s invitation to dinner.
“My wife expects me back just as soon as possible, Sir James. Otherwise our first child might be born in the absence of his or her father, and I’d never hear the end of it.”
“I could lend you a phaeton and some fast horses...”
“Many thanks, but I think I can impose on the military for a pedalcab to Winchester along the line of rail. Miss Medford, shall I walk you home on my way to the Moor’s Head?”
Bramble fell discreetly behind as they walked down the drive from Royston Hall. Casually, Rutherston drew an envelope from his jacket and handed it to her.
“I suggest you burn these, Miss Medford,” he said. “I glanced at the first, but very briefly.”
The spare handsome face of the nurse was calm as she accepted the package. “You don’t feel obliged to include them in your report?”
Rutherston lit another cigarillo. “Why should I?” he said with a shrug. “There’s no indication of anything illegal... on your part; Jon Wooton was evidently a blackmailer, among his many other sins, but that will go with him to the grave. Nothing illegal, or in Winchester even cause for much remark. I’m a detective, not a priest.”
“But Eddsford is my home, and where my work is, and I very much wish to continue living here,” she said. “Thank you very much, inspector.” She drew a breath: “About the money--”
“Dear lady, I am a policeman. Intelligent blackmailers usually try to have as many strings on a victim as possible. It would be just like Jon Wooton to force you to accept part of his smuggling profits. If you feel you should donate to charity, that’s none of my affair either.”
“Thank you very much, inspector.” They came to the door of the clinic. “And you should stop smoking those things. They’ll kill you.”
Small children followed the two King’s Men as they walked toward the inn, and there was a ripple of nods and smiles from the adults; everyone was happy to have the murder settled so quickly and nobody in their tight-knit little world brought up before the law. The ostler of the Moor’s Head had his employer’s trap ready, with a good-looking horse between the shafts; it would be an hour’s travel to the semaphore station on the rail line, and then perhaps two back to Winchester. Rutherston smiled contentedly and drew the smoke into his lungs.
“She scragged ‘im, of course, sir,” Bramble said quietly.
“No names, no pack drill,” Rutherston said. “Yes, of course. At a guess, she gave him some worthless placebo and assured him it would protect him from the radiation, then told him to pick the pieces up and measure them against some part he’d ordered from Portsmouth, or something of that order. From someone who’d healed his illnesses since he was a child, he’d believe it.”
“She’d have grassed him up before much longer, any rate,” Bramble said thoughtfully. “Don’t blame her for waiting ‘till the last minute, sir, either.”
“Not at all,” Rutherston agreed.
The two men turned and faced each other. The detective held out his hand; they gave a single firm grip, no squeezing nonsense, but a mutual recognition of strength.
“You were of the greatest possible help, Corporal Bramble, and I will say so in my report.”
“Thank you kindly, sir.”
“And Bramble... have you considered what you’ll be doing after your current enlistment ends? Promotion is slow in peacetime.”
Bramble’s square face went a little slack for an instant. “Hadn’t thought much, sir... might take up a farm in Spain, p’raps. Under me own vine and fig tree. Though farming’s a mite too much like ‘ard work, when you come to think about it.”
“Have you considered the police? A good many ex-servicemen do... myself, for example.”
Bramble chuckled. “Honestly, sir, I can’t see meself in a leather bobby’s ‘elmet, rattling the doors of an evening and chatting up housemaids.”
“I meant the detective branch, of course. The pay and pension are reasonable, we can always use good men--and you’d be protecting King and Country just as surely as you would in that tin shirt.”
He held out his card. “Take this, think it over, and drop me a line if you want to talk it over a bit more.”
Bramble took the card, turning it over in his thick fingers. “I will give it a thought, sir.”
Then he grinned. “It hasn’t been as boring as road patrol, inspector, I’ll give you that.”
Rutherston put a hand on the side of the trap and vaulted into the seat. He tipped his hat to the corporal, and waved to the crowd of villagers. They were still waving back as the horse broke into a trot, hooves falling hollow as it trod the shadows of tree and cottage into the roadway.
The detective settled back as the ostler whistled to his horse, smiling as the long peace of Eddsford fell behind and the blue-shadowed line of the Downs rose ahead. The church bell rang as they crested the first hill above the river, calling the villagers to give thanks for God’s protecting hand.
And it’s no slight privilege, to share the work with Him.