Mrs. Trask was nobody’s fool. She stared at him in horror. “You aren’t saying, are you, that he killed poor Mrs. Lowell?”

  He swore to himself. “Early days, Mrs. Trask, but you must keep that to yourself. I am serious, I don’t want you to mention this to anyone and find yourself in danger as a consequence.”

  “Of course I shan’t,” she snapped. “I can see that for myself. Come on, then, up the stairs with you.”

  There were only two bedrooms at the top of the stairs, and instead of running side by side, with the staircase in between, they were back to back, one facing the street and the other facing the back garden, with the stairwell and a cupboard in between.

  The room was as tidy as the parlor, with a bed, a small armoire, two chairs, and a washstand as its only furnishings. Drapes had been opened, allowing the morning light from a pair of windows to fill the room with brightness.

  Mrs. Trask neatly stepped ahead of him to stand between him and the chamber pot discreetly set to one side of the washstand, and pointed to the windows.

  “The moon was up, I could see clearly. The church clock had only just struck three, and there was someone moving about old Mrs. Thompkins’ tomb. He stayed there, he didn’t leave, and I went down to be sure my doors were locked, even though the churchyard wall stands between us. He was still there when I came back up the stairs. I watched for half an hour or so, but he didn’t move. I thought perhaps he was sleeping rough. And there was a little chill that night. Not that the dead could warm him.”

  “Are you certain it was a man?” Rutledge asked her. She was right, he could see the table tomb from here. “Not a dog?”

  She was affronted. “I may be seventy, but I’m not blind,” she told him sharply. “Even without my glasses. I can still tell two from four, and he had two legs. And before you ask, he had on trousers, not skirts.”

  Hamish said, his voice seeming loud in the small room, “She’s a verra’ sound witness.”

  And he was right, Rutledge thought. The woman’s gray hair covered a very clear mind.

  “He was not there in the morning?”

  “I usually rise with the sun, and he was not there.”

  “You hadn’t seen him there before that night?”

  “I draw the curtains most nights. But the moon was bright, and after I turned down the lamp, I decided to open them.”

  Oddly enough, very like Lady Benton, she enjoyed the moonlit nights.

  “Still,” she was saying, “I did look the next night, and there was no sign of him.”

  “Did you report this to the police?”

  “The nearest police are in Walmer. How was I to report to them? I sent my son to speak to Rector.”

  She had done her duty.

  He stood for a moment, looking out at the back of the churchyard, the table tomb clearly visible from here, the only one of its kind that he could see. And then he turned to leave. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Trask. I will look into it.”

  Satisfied, she escorted him down the stairs, offered them tea again, but Rutledge told her that he must pay a visit to the churchyard.

  On the way back to the Rectory, Farmer asked, “Do you truly believe there’s anything to this business?”

  “Probably not, but I should take a look. Still, I would advise you not to mention my interest in it. Or even that anyone had noticed anything in the churchyard. It’s best.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand.”

  They walked in silence back to the Rectory, and Rutledge left Farmer at the house door, not wanting anyone else tramping about on the ground before he’d had a good look.

  But whoever had been there, he’d left nothing behind, not a bottle, the paper from a packet of sweets—nothing.

  There was the imprint of a boot some three feet from the table tomb, in the soft ground near an older, sunken grave.

  Rutledge squatted there to take a closer look.

  A military boot, meant for long marches, perfect for walking any distance, if they fit well enough that no blisters formed. The tread was well worn, especially on the inner side of the heel, as if the wearer had some problem with his leg. Other than that, the sole was ordinary.

  Hamish said, “Ye canna’ know who walked here.”

  It was true, but he had something to be going on with.

  The road perforce passed the Old Rectory, and Rutledge pulled in. There was little hope of find a matching shoe print here, but he owed it to Patricia Lowell to try.

  It took him two hours of scouring the ground around the house and then around the outbuildings.

  And there, by the shed where Mrs. Lowell had kept her bicycle, was a faint heel print just inside the door. Someone—it looked like a woman’s boot—had stepped on the print, obliterating much of it. But not that distinctive wearing down on the inner side of the heel.

  Hamish said, “It’s a vagrant looking for something to steal.”

  But was it?

  And where else could he search?

  He got back into his motorcar and drove on to the pub, The Monk’s Choice.

  Rutledge really didn’t care if anyone saw him or not.

  But there were too many prints for him to pick out the one he was after. He widened his circle, getting farther and farther from the door.

  And there it was, left in a bit of mud where the grass grew close to the pub yard.

  Whoever it belonged to, the owner of the boot had been here.

  Hamish warned him again. “Ye canna’ be sure.”

  13

  Hamish quarreled with him all the way back to the Abbey, where Rutledge left his motorcar by the hedge.

  Try as he would, the airfield was too vast a site to search. And even though he looked closely at the ruins of the burned-out hut, too many shoes had passed through here at the time of the fire to pick out any distinctive boot.

  When he went to the stable yard and looked, he found a partial heel that was very like the one he had found in the churchyard.

  Hamish was right, it proved nothing.

  Rutledge left the stable yard and drove back toward Walmer, without speaking to Lady Benton. There was nothing he could tell her that wouldn’t worry her more.

  As he came around the hotel to the main entrance, he found Mrs. Dunn just leaving.

  “I thought you’d left, with no news for me about my boy.”

  “I haven’t left. And sadly I have no news to give you,” he told her.

  She nodded. “I’d hoped you weren’t like the others. Inspector Hamilton, and the Major.” Turning, she walked away.

  Rutledge said, “I promise you, I haven’t forgotten your son.”

  But she kept going, as if this was only one more false promise.

  He watched her until she turned down one of the side streets, out of his line of sight.

  Instead of going inside the hotel, as he’d planned, Rutledge went back to his motorcar and drove back the way he’d come. At the hedge where he’d left the motorcar before, he got out. And this time instead of walking through what was left of the airfield, he put on his Wellingtons and set out to cross the meadow to the line of trees that marked its boundary. Moving through them, he came out finally on a marshy finger of land where the sea had come up so many times that it had soured the soil. The footing was treacherous, and he was glad of his Wellingtons. The marsh was unable to drain because of a barrier of sand that had been left by retreating tides. They brought in the sea, but couldn’t retrieve it as they pulled out again. Seagrasses had grown in patches here and there, and beyond them was the strand and the ripple of water. On the far side of it was the Continent, France and Belgium. And here was a perfect place to land the troops of an invading army. But that hadn’t happened, although it had been a fear throughout the war.

  He walked down to the water’s edge, discovered a few razor shells, and the tracks of seabirds, then found a piece of wood that looked from the flecks of paint still caught in the grain as if it had come from a ship that had been sunk by one side or the other, in the war.

  Turning, Rutledge walked the edge of the marsh for some distance, but he could see nowhere that would provide more than the shallowest of graves, for storm tides could easily uncover it. If Gerald Dunn had been killed somewhere on the airfield—at the farthest end of the runway, for one, where could his body have been taken?

  Hamish said, “It’s no’ likely he was killed here. Ye ken, a live man is easier to move than a dead one.”

  Then he’d been lured somewhere else.

  If that is what happened, he was dead, and not hiding out in the tenements of Manchester or Birmingham. It would take an army of men to find him there, or the Foot Police . . .

  Did Haldane know what had become of Gerald Dunn? Rutledge rather thought not. Men like Haldane left the Dunns of this world to subordinates . . .

  He had walked far enough to find himself at the edge of another of the countless Essex inlets, where a scruffy dinghy was pulled up into the reeds, out of reach of the tides. In the distance on the far side of the water, he could see two men dragging a hose pipe to one of the tide-fed rectangles where salt accumulated through the evaporation of seawater. Rutledge watched them at their work. It was labor intensive, but they went about it with accustomed ease.

  The hose pipe inserted where they wanted it, one of the men walked back to the sheds where the collected salt-laden water was pumped into vats and skimmed as the mineral rose to the surface. The other man began to look at several more rectangles, bending now and again to test them. Finally satisfied, he too disappeared in the direction of his fellow worker.

  Reminding himself to buy a packet of Walmer Salt for Melinda, Rutledge turned and walked back through the marshland and the trees to the meadow.

  From there, at the edge of the trees, he could see the house rising on its knoll, the westering sun silhouetted it, and from here it could be the Abbey that it once was, with the refectory and the dorter, the workrooms and the chapel.

  He was still thinking about that when he reached the hedge and walked past the broken place where the Captain had died. He looked up at the house again. This close to, the sun’s spring brightness was blocked, and he could see the terrace and steps that led to the broad spread of the lawns. The windows were dark, empty, as if no one lived there now—except for one at the very top of the house, the old attics where the servants had once lived in the sixteenth century. A light moved past the glass, brighter than the surrounding darkness, and Rutledge set out at a run.

  It took him a good ten minutes to reach the door to which he possessed a key, and, breathing hard, he made himself take his time inserting it into the lock. The door opened, and he went up the stairs, leaving it standing wide behind him, his mind busy remembering how he had found his way when he was searching the rooms.

  He reached the floor where the last of the servants here had lived, and searched for the stairs to the next level. It was partway down a long narrow passage, and it opened under his hand. The stairs here were dusty, and he saw the prints as he climbed, coming out into a passage with a single window at the end facing the stables. He stopped, making an effort to calm his breathing as he listened.

  The light was fading as it moved farther west, and as he stood there, he could feel the emptiness. Still, he went down the side that overlooked the meadow, opening each door and closing it after peering in. The tiny windows gave very little light, but the rooms were so small it didn’t matter. There was no place to hide in any of them. Any furniture that had once been here had been taken away years ago.

  Rutledge came to the room he was nearly sure he’d seen from the airfield, flung open the door. There were more footprints in the dust, a different boot from the print he’d seen in the courtyard, but he thought close to the same size. They had disturbed the dust more there by the window, he noticed, but no one was here now.

  Unsatisfied, he continued his search, and finally came to the end of the passage and the tiny window overlooking the stable yard. He peered out, but there all he could see were the stables below, beyond them the tennis courts, and in the distance, the rooftop of the Home Farm’s barn.

  When he’d looked into every room on the other side of the passage, Hamish said derisively, “Ye’ve seen your ain ghost.”

  But ghosts didn’t carry lamps or torches. And one or the other was needed in these attics, where the only illumination came from those tiny windows.

  He walked back to the stairs, and went down them, bent on searching that floor as well, but as he stepped out into the dim passage, someone leapt out of the shadows and swung something in his direction.

  Even though he ducked, he wasn’t in time, and whatever it was brushed by his head with enough force to send him to his knees.

  Hamish was shouting, “On your feet!”

  Shaking his head to clear it, he was in time to see someone just starting down the next flight of stairs. He could hear the clatter of boots on the treads.

  Rutledge stumbled to his feet, and followed. These were the back stairs, now, leading down in darkness to the kitchen passage. He was moving fast and he could still hear whoever it was he was following, a flight ahead of him.

  The passage door to the back garden swung open in a momentary shaft of light, bright after the darkness. Rutledge saw a figure dressed in black dart out and turn left, toward the stables.

  He had only one more flight to go when the passage door into the kitchen was flung open, and a woman stepped out.

  “What in God’s name are you playing at?” she snapped.

  He nearly cannoned into Lady Benton.

  “Out of the way,” he ordered, but she refused to move, and he had to physically set her aside as she protested vehemently, one hand clutching his arm. But he got clear and went through the door, turning left through a bed of young beets, trampling them underfoot as his quarry had done before him. But when he reached the stable yard, there was no sign of the man he’d been after.

  Rutledge went into the stables and the carriage house next to it, flushed his quarry from behind a handsome landau, and chased him into the yard.

  He had vanished again. Swearing, Rutledge searched everywhere he could think of, but the man was nowhere to be seen. He had just come out of the small shed where gardening tools were kept when he stopped abruptly.

  Lady Benton was bearing down on him, her face flushed with anger.

  “Go back inside. There’s an intruder—” he began.

  “Where? Not in the house, surely!”

  “The old attics. Go inside, I tell you. Find the other women and make sure they are all safe.”

  “What was he doing up there? And how did he find a way inside?”

  “Wait here,” Rutledge said, still breathing hard. And ignoring her protests, he turned and ran toward the lane. But it was empty in both directions as well. Had the intruder hidden in the hedge? He started after him again but whirled as he heard running feet. But whoever it was had reached the road, and was out of sight.

  It was useless to follow him, there were endless places to hide in the fields across from the Abbey’s wall.

  When he turned back to Lady Benton, she was waiting impatiently. “You must tell me what is happening.”

  And this time he caught the anxiety beneath the anger.

  “I was coming up from the airfield. I saw a light in the old attics. I let myself in and went to see who might be up there. It isn’t a likely place for your staff to go.”

  “Oh, dear—Margaret had just gone to the servants’ floor to look for a pail she remembered seeing there—”

  “I might have caught him, if you hadn’t stepped out of the kitchen just at the wrong time.” He was still angry with her, while her own anger had changed to worry.

  “I heard someone racketing down the stairs when I went to fetch more milk for the undercroft. We have visitors. I thought one of them had dropped out of the tour and was wandering about on his own. I didn’t recognize you at first, and when I did, I thought perhaps that’s who you saw.”

  “It’s late for a tour,” he told her.

  “They asked for the evening. A half dozen couples. It seems they were staying in Chelmsford, and someone who had toured the house before suggested it. They wrote to ask for this evening. They wanted to see it by candlelight, as it must have been ages ago. A good deal of work for us. But they offered a great deal of money, and so I agreed. They’re having a special tea in the undercroft.”

  “Then let’s go there now, and see if there are still six couples.” He started toward the door to the house.

  “I won’t have you disturbing them,” she said, hurrying after him.

  “Lady Benton, I’d rather disturb your guests than know someone got into your house.” He kept walking, long strides.

  She had no choice but to try to keep pace.

  Rutledge opened the door into the house and held it for her, then followed her into the sitting room and beyond. Mrs. Hailey had a long-handled candle snuffer and was putting out the candles in the third room they came to. Beyond, on the way to the chapel, evening shadows were thick. But Lady Benton led the way with the assurance of long practice.

  In the dimness, lit only by the windows high above, the Madonna was almost ghostly in her gray robes.

  He could hear voices and laughter coming from the undercroft, and as he descended the stairs, Lady Benton was speaking to him. But he ignored her.

  There were four tables set with white cloths, china and silver, and tall candelabra gave a flickering softness to the low-ceilinged room that the usual lamps lacked.

  He did a quick count. Six couples, twelve people. They were all there. At the long serving table, the middle-aged woman attending it looked up and smiled when she saw Lady Benton.

  But Rutledge turned, and with a hand on her back, gave Lady Benton no choice but to retreat back up the stairs.

  “I thought—” she began, but Rutledge shook his head.

  “There were twelve people at the tables. None of them appeared to have been racing back to take his seat. And Mrs. Hailey would have seen him.”

  Exasperated, she said, “Well, what am I to do, pray? Are you certain he’s gone? Or did he slip back into the kitchen passage, where we left the door standing wide?”