LONDON End of February, 1920
Chief Superintendent Bowles sat at his cluttered desk, chewing on the end of his mustache, staring at his subordinate.
“Time off?” he said. “What on earth for?”
“A-personal matter,” Inspector Rutledge answered, unforthcoming.
“Indeed!” Bowles continued to stare. The nurse who’d sent him a copy of this man’s medical file before Rutledge returned to duty last June must have lied.
Rutledge was still thin for his height, and his face was drawn as if from lack of sleep. But the eyes, dark and haunted, were intelligent and alert. So much for cowardice. And he hadn’t shown a yellow streak in the north, over that nasty business about the child. The local man had complained of him, of course, and Mickelson had been angry over the outcome of the case. But the Chief Magistrate had told Bowles in no uncertain terms that the investigation had been brilliantly handled.
And the Chief Magistrate had Connections. It wouldn’t do to ignore that.
Rutledge had also done well in Northamptonshire, though it had been a grave risk sending this man to see to Hensley. But then he’d trusted Hensley to keep his mouth shut, and it had turned out all right. There was no proof to be found that he’d known what Hensley was up to. Or none that he knew of.
His thoughts returned to the letter from the clinic.
Bowles had half a mind to bring that fool nurse up on charges of incompetence. For the past six months, Rutledge had somehow managed to turn every test into a small success. What was he to do about this man who refused to destroy himself? The nurse had sworn she’d overheard him threatening suicide time and again, she had sworn he wouldn’t survive the rigors of the Yard for more than a month, two at best. What’s more, how did Rutledge manage to carry out his duties in such a way that others protected him? Protectors who were unaware that Rutledge had come out of the trenches with shell shock and must have killed who knew how many brave soldiers through his own lack of moral fiber!
Bowles would have given much to know who had pinned medals on this man’s chest and called him a hero. That officer deserved to be shot, by God!
Better still, Rutledge ought to have been shot, he thought sourly, and not for the first time. It was the least the Germans could have done, after their rampage across Belgium and France. A nice clean bullet to the heart crossing No Man’s Land. If Rutledge had ever crossed it, of course-very likely he’d cowered in the trench out of harm’s way while his men died. And no German fire could reach him there, however hard the guns had tried.
His already bleak mood was turning into a nasty headache-
Bowles suddenly became aware that he’d been glaring at Rutledge in silence. He cleared his throat, shifting in his chair to give the impression he’d been preoccupied with other issues instead of sitting there like a fool, daydreaming.
“There’s the Shepherd’s Market murder still to be solved. Not to mention that business about the men found dead in Green Park. I don’t see how I can spare you. Or anyone else for that matter.”
Rutledge said, “It’s rather important.”
“So is peace and order!” Bowles snapped. “Or do you think yourself above the rest of us? Jaunting about the countryside attending to personal affairs indeed, while there’s work to be done here.”
“Neither of these cases is mine,” Rutledge reminded him, his voice neutral. But something in his eyes warned Bowles that this leave he’d requested was a more serious business than Rutledge was willing to admit.
Bowles brought his attention back to his inspector’s face. Was Rutledge on the brink of breaking down? Was that what made him so anxious to get away for a bit?
The more Bowles considered that possibility, the more he began to believe in it. What else could it be but a recognition on Rutledge’s part that time was running out?
“You’re to stay in town and work with Phipps, do you hear me? You’ll help him find out what’s behind the Green Park murders. And there’s an end to it.”
He sat back in his chair and studied the fountain pen in his fingers. “An end to it!” he repeated forcefully. “Request denied.”
Chief Inspector Phipps was a nervous man whose efficiency was not in question, but whose personality left much to be desired. He seemed to feed on his own anxieties to the point of aggravating everyone around him. Inspector Mickelson had sworn the Chief Inspector could drive God himself mad.
What would close contact with him do to a man facing a breakdown?
Satisfied, Bowles picked up a file on his desk and opened it. Rutledge was dismissed.
Chief Inspector Phipps walked into Rutledge’s office without knocking, his fingers beating a ragged tattoo on the back of the file he was carrying.
Rutledge looked up, his gaze going to the file.
The Green Park murders, so close to Buckingham Palace, had drawn the attention of the press. Two men had been killed there, a week apart. So far nothing uncovered in the investigation indicated any connection between them. But each had been garroted and left in the bushes. An early riser found the first victim when his dog was drawn to the shrubbery and began barking. Children playing hide-and-seek with their nursemaid had discovered the second victim. Their father-titled and furious-had appeared at the Yard in person, demanding to know why his son and daughter had been subjected to such a gruesome experience. They were distraught, as was his wife, he’d told Phipps in no uncertain terms. And the Yard was to blame for allowing murderers to roam unhindered in decent parts of town. No mention was made of any anguish the nursemaid had suffered.
Phipps set the file on Rutledge’s desk and began to pace the narrow office as he spoke.
“Bowles has given you to me. Anything in particular on your desk at the moment?”
Rutledge said, “I’ve closed the file on George Ferrell. This morning.”
“Good, good!” Phipps wheeled and paced back the other way.
“Each of our victims,” Phipps went on, “was found on a Sunday morning. Tomorrow is Saturday. I want Green Park covered from first light to first light. You’ll be given a police matron dressed as a nanny. She’ll be pushing a pram, and you’re her suitor, a young clerk from a nearby shop, who urges her to sit and talk for an hour.” He paused to consider Rutledge. “You don’t really look like a lovesick young clerk. I’ll ask Constable Bevins to assume that role, instead, and you can walk Bevins’s dog several times during the day and early evening. I want an inspector close by at all times, you see. You’ll have the damned dog on your hands until Bevins is off duty. See the beast doesn’t annoy the chief superintendent, if you must bring it back to the Yard.”
“With so many people in the Park, it isn’t likely that another murder will occur there,” Rutledge pointed out.
“And that’s what I’m hoping, don’t you see? We throw our man off balance, make it difficult for him to plan.” Phipps paused long enough to crack his knuckles, one by one. “Once the killer has lured his target into the park, it won’t be easy to shift him to another site.”
“What if he’s already killed the two men he’d intended to murder?”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s a very likely possibility! We’ve got ourselves a trend here, don’t you know. He’ll come to the Park, all right. Wait and see. And he’ll have told his victim where and when to meet him, I should think. Safer than arriving together. Someone might see them and remember.” He was pacing again, rubbing his jaw with the back of his nails. “Very well, then, we’re looking for two men, arriving separately, then meeting. They’ll go off together toward the shrubbery, for privacy. That’s when we’ll have them. Bevins is to bring his dog to the Yard at six o’clock tomorrow morning. Be here and make certain that you have a change of clothes-we shan’t want to be noticed!”
Hamish said, “Aye, but the dog will be the same dog.”
But Rutledge’s mind was elsewhere. It was cold, the trees bare, the wind brutal coming down the Thames. Huddled in a greatcoat, he thought, who would know whether he was wearing a blue or a gray suit beneath it? But a change of hat and shoes might well be in order…
Phipps was at the door, tapping the frame as he changed his mind again.
“No, perhaps you ought to be the policeman on foot-”
“I hardly look like a young constable. The dog and I will manage well enough.”
“Unless he decides to bite you. I’ve heard that Bevins’s dog has a nasty disposition.”
And with that he was gone.
Rutledge, leaning back in his chair, wished himself away from this place, away from London. Away from the wretchedness of torn bodies, bloody scenes of crimes. Although he suspected Frances, his sister, had had a hand in it, he’d just been invited to Kent, to stay with Melinda Crawford, whom he’d known for as long as he was aware of knowing anyone other than his parents. As a child, Melinda had seen enough of death herself, in the Great Indian Mutiny. He could depend on her to keep him amused and to thrust him into her various projects, never speaking about what had happened in November, not twenty miles from her. Even a long weekend would be a godsend. But there was nothing he could do about it.
As it happened, Bevins’s dog was a great, heavy-coated black monster with more than a little mastiff in him. He slavered heavily as he greeted Rutledge and then trotted sedately at his side as the two of them left the Yard and headed for Green Park.
In the back of Rutledge’s mind, Hamish was unsettled this morning. The voice was just behind his shoulder, clear in spite of the traffic that moved through the streets even at this early hour or the jostling of people as they hurried past or stepped aside with a murmured comment about the dog on its leather lead.
“Ugly brute,” one man said, and as if the dog understood, he raised his massive head and stared back. The man turned into the nearest shop, out of reach of the strong white teeth grinning malevolently almost on a level with his throat.
Hamish was saying, “Ye’ve been reduced to this, then. A distraction any green constable on probation could ha’ provided.”
“Not by choice,” Rutledge answered curtly, under his breath.
“Aye, he’s a bad enemy, yon chief superintendent. M’ Granny would ha’ found him in the bowl of water, and put a curse on him.”
“I wonder what my godfather would have to say to that.”
“He’s no’ a Scot. He wouldna’ be told what went on below the stairs.”
The voice was not really there-although Rutledge had never dared to turn his head to see. It was in his own mind, deep-seated since July 1916, when both he and Corporal MacLeod had cracked under the stress of the ferocious Somme Offensive. But it was Hamish MacLeod, the good soldier, the caring young Scot putting his men ahead of himself, who had faced the hastily collected firing squad intended to keep order in the midst of the bedlam of battle. The charge was refusing an order, but the order had been to lead his men back into heavy fire for one more hopeless attempt to reach the German machine gunners-one more suicidal command sent up from the rear. Hamish had continued to refuse, and Rutledge had had no choice but to execute his corporal. For the greater good, for the men who would have to die anyway, whether their corporal was with them or not. Military necessity. He himself had delivered the coup de grace, refusing to leave to any of his men that last horror-only to be buried alive moments later by a British shell fired too short.
And Rutledge knew then, and in all his waking moments since that dreadful half-death, that one more night-one more day-would have seen him refuse orders as well, refuse to be a party to more ungodly slaughter. Instead, he’d been patched up at the nearest aid station and sent back to the trenches, a man emotionally destroyed, trying desperately to protect his men, and all the while, the voice of a dead man ringing in his head and in his dreams and in his ears.
Rutledge said, “There’s the park.” He wasn’t aware that he’d spoken aloud, but the dog turned its head as if the words were meant for him. “Good dog,” he said, and then considered Hamish’s remark. Rutledge’s godfather, David Trevor, had shut himself away in his Scottish hunting lodge after the death of his son Ross at sea. There had been times when Rutledge had been sorely tempted to confide in Trevor about his own war, about what he had done, but Scotland held too many memories now. And however much Trevor had wanted Rutledge to befriend and guide Fiona, the young woman who was foster mother to Trevor’s grandson, it was not possible. She was the girl Hamish had intended to marry after the war, and she still grieved for her dead fiance. Every time Rutledge looked into her face, his own wretched guilt closed his throat.
It should have been Hamish, not himself, who had come home at the end of the war.
He could feel himself losing touch with the present, the London street he was crossing in the midst of traffic. His surroundings faded into images of torn and bloody young bodies lying in the mud, and the sounds of men who screamed in agony as they were mortally hit, or begged for their wives and mothers to help them. He could hear the bolts on the rifles of the firing squad as a round was chambered, and see his men shivering in a trench, deathly afraid of going over the top one more time, too exhausted to fire their weapons, and yet driven to climb the ladders out of the greater fear of letting their comrades down.
“’Ware!”
A motorcar’s horn blew in his face, jolting him into the realization that he and the dog were in the middle of the street, vehicles swerving to miss them.
Rutledge swore, pulled the dog’s lead closer, and managed to get them to the far side of the road as Hamish told him roundly to mind what he was about.
And what would Chief Inspector Phipps think of half of London staring at the madman and dog intent on getting themselves killed on The Mall? If that didn’t attract the attention of the murderer, nothing Phipps had planned would distract him.
But the shock of what had just happened reminded Rutledge that it was cowardly to ask another man, even his godfather, to hear what no one should have to hear, just to buy a little peace for himself. He’d managed on his own thus far. He could manage a little longer. But dear God, it was lonely!
Round and round it went, the circle that had nowhere to end.
They had reached Green Park, he and the dog, and Rutledge could see Bevins courting the police matron in her demure nanny’s uniform. The hardness of her face betrayed her, but Bevins was the epitome of a lovesick young clerk, leaning earnestly toward the woman, as if pleading with her. His Welsh charm was evident.
Thrusting his wretched mood aside, Rutledge slowly walked the dog through the park, giving the animal time to explore the smells frozen in the grass. The very image of a man with time on his hands, an ex-soldier, perhaps, down on his luck, the greatcoat and an old hat betraying his reduced circumstances. He made himself stoop a little, to change his appearance and fit his role.
The dog caught sight of Bevins, but the constable was prepared for that, leaping to his feet and coming to kneel by the animal, petting it while looking up at Rutledge, asking questions about the breed. When Rutledge called the dog to heel, Bevins got to his feet, touched his hat to Rutledge, and went back to his wooing. A good man.
During the interlude, Rutledge had glimpsed someone entering the park. It was Phipps, walking too fast for a man strolling, his eyes everywhere. He took in the nanny and the constable, looked across at a corporal who was leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette, and a heavyset sergeant in a checked tweed coat, seated on a bench casually reading the morning papers. But the Chief Inspector passed through without speaking to anyone. It was clear he had come to judge the authenticity of his actors, and was satisfied.
Rutledge finished his tour of the park and returned to the Yard, the dog thoroughly pleased with its outing.
He met Inspector Mickelson on the stairs, and they passed without speaking. Mickelson was dressed as a banker, furled umbrella, hat set squarely on his head, on his way to take his own part in Phipps’s play.
The dog growled deep in his throat as Mickelson went by, and Rutledge patted the massive head. Mickelson was a stickler for the rules, and one of Bowles’s favorites. He had also nearly got Rutledge killed in Westmorland. It was with some satisfaction that Rutledge accepted the dog’s judgment corroborating his own.
After half an hour, Bevins also returned, his face flushed with the cold wind.
“Any luck?” Rutledge asked, meeting him in the corridor.
“No, sir.” Then he grinned. “I’m a chimney sweep next. Got the clothes off a man we took up for housebreaking last week. Pray God there’s no lice in them.”
Rutledge had walked the dog the third time, glimpsing the sweep working on his brushes as if something about them troubled him. The nanny was now unrecognizable as a shopgirl flirting with a young army private. Another man was arguing with a friend, and Rutledge caught part of what Sergeant Gibson was saying so earnestly-his views on the Labor Party and what the government ought to do about people out of work.
We’ve got the same number of actors-Rutledge thought, bringing the dog to heel again after allowing it to explore among the trees along the edge of the grass. It doesn’t vary.
No murderer worth his salt would walk into such a carefully managed trap.
And then Phipps was there again, carrying his umbrella, a folded copy of The Times under his arm. He looked like a retired solicitor, his nose red from the cold, his attention fixed on the distant traffic, just barely heard here in the park.
It was a waste of time, Hamish was saying.
Rutledge answered, “One of the murder victims sold pipes in a shop. The other was a conductor on an omnibus. What did they have in common, that made them a target?”
“It wilna’ be how they earned their living.”
“True enough.” Rutledge let the dog walk ahead to the base of one of the great trees that had given the park its name. “This was a place where men dueled, once. A long time ago.”
“Oh, aye? But to use a garrote properly, you must come from behind. No’ face-to-face. It’s no’ an honorable encounter!”
“A woman, then?”
Hamish answered, thoughtful. “There’s no woman, else yon Chief Inspector would ha’ had her name by now fra’ someone eager to turn her in for prostitution.”
“A gaming debt?”
“A warning,” Hamish countered.
And that, thought Rutledge, was very likely the case. A warning to stay in line-or die.
But for what? From whom?
He had come to the end of the park, Buckingham Palace gleaming in soot-streaked glory in the late-afternoon sun. His father had brought him here as a child to watch the Changing of the Guard. The ceremony had impressed him, and for a week he’d wanted nothing more than to be a soldier, with a bearskin hat. He smiled at the memory. He’d fallen in love with pageantry, not war. Just as so many young men had done in August 1914. And they’d learned the difference soon enough in France.
There was a man leaning against a lamppost, his face shadowed by his hat. Rutledge saw him but kept walking. From where this man stood, he could watch the comings and goings in Green Park, the bare limbs of the trees offering none of the protection of summer’s shade.
Rutledge passed him by, ignoring him. A hundred yards farther on, he found a constable and surprised him by handing over the dog to him. And then Rutledge cut through St. James’s Park, made his way back again to The Mall, and found a bench from which he could watch the man still leaning against the lamppost.
A low profile.
The wind was cold, and he could feel his feet growing numb, but he sat still, his hat tilted over his eyes as if asleep.
When the man finally left his post and turned away, Rutledge followed at a discreet distance.