Hunting Shadows: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery by Charles Todd

he hadn’t. And then he tried again. He might have been careless.” Rutledge paused. “And if he wasn’t, he could well be searching for a new target, because he knows we can’t touch him. Yet.”
    “I hope to God you’re wrong.” Warren took a deep breath. “The Chief Constable is already demanding answers, and he’ll be in your face if there’s another murder. The wedding was bad enough, given who was attending, and then Swift on top of that.”
    But there was very likely to be a third, Rutledge thought. He could almost feel it.
    He was halfway to the street when he remembered the barrow. Turning, he went back to Warren’s office, poked his head around the door, and said, “The deaf fellow. Mathews. He saw a man with a barrow walking away from the scene. After any number of people had rushed past him toward the Cathedral, he left the barrow and went to see for himself what the excitement was about. He’s not likely to be our man, but if we don’t follow up on him, we’ll never know for certain.”
    “Any idea what was in that barrow?”
    “According to Mathews it was covered by a cloth.” He thought about the strand of gray cotton in his handkerchief. Had it come from that barrow? It would be luck indeed if it had. But where was the barrow’s owner now? Much less that cloth—long since tossed into a tip?
    Inspector Warren was nodding. “Very well, I’ll see to it. Do you think Mathews can identify him? There must be twenty or more men with barrows in Ely.”
    “We’ll have to trust that he can.” Rutledge thanked him, went back to The Deacon, thought about it, and walked on to Teddy Mathews’s house.
    He was in and alone. Rutledge apologized for coming in unannounced, when the man’s sister was away.
    Mathews shrugged. Rutledge said, speaking clearly, “The barrow the man abandoned to run back toward the Cathedral. You said there was a cloth thrown over the contents.”
    He handed his notebook to Mathews, who took up the pen and wrote on the first empty page he came to , I expect I ought to have said sacking. It was so filthy you could hardly tell that once it had been yellow.
    Yellow, then. Not gray.
    He’d probably sent Warren’s men on a wild-goose chase. Still, he was reluctant to rescind the request. And who knew what lay under the sacking? Whatever color it had been.
    He thanked Mathews, who scribbled something more on the page, then passed the notebook back to Rutledge.
    I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help.
    “You’re a good witness,” Rutledge assured him, then took his leave.
    At The Deacon Inn, Rutledge asked Reception to hold his room but took his valise with him and set out for Wriston, stopping briefly for petrol.
    It was a village, not a town. Fewer people were involved. Ely was the proverbial haystack, and for all anyone knew, the needle was already back home in Soham or Burwell, even London. Wherever he’d come from.
    Hamish said as Rutledge threaded his way through Ely to the Cambridge Road, “For a’ anyone knew, he was walking the mist in Wriston.”

 
    Chapter 7
    N ow that he was in the village in his official capacity, Rutledge’s first duty was to call on the constable.
    He’d arrived at Wriston by a roundabout way, crisscrossing the Fens to explore several nearby villages, and there was not much to choose between them save for size. Isleham was smaller, Soham a little larger, and Burwell, the largest, a bustling town with a fine church. And the fields that ran for acre after acre in their long narrow beds for the most part held the same variety of market crops—oats, peas, and barley.
    It was late in the afternoon when he walked into the police station, across from the duck pond. Constable McBride was at his desk, reading an Ely newspaper.
    He was a burly man with thinning brown hair, and he looked up at Rutledge with some surprise, recognizing him at once as the stranger he’d chivvied along only yesterday for excessive curiosity about the site of Swift’s