Free No Shred of Evidence: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery by Charles Todd Page A

walking past if they could point out where Harry Saunders kept his smaller boat, they shook their heads.
    “I expect it’s too busy here in the harbor to tie it up,” one man told him, anxious to be on his way.
    “Didn’t know there was one here,” another told him.
    And a third suggested that it might be tied up at a private dock instead.
    He walked the length of the harbor but saw nothing that he could say with any certainty belonged to Saunders. And the first man had been right, the harbor was busy.
    A fourth pointed out the larger Saunders boat, at anchor in the roads. A sailboat that Rutledge estimated could accommodate one or two people in its tiny cabin.
    It was pleasant here in the sun, surprisingly warm now that the omnipresent wind had dropped, or because this was a sheltered place. Rutledge stood for a time with his back to the town, looking out to sea beyond the low headlands. One of his informants had told him there was a dangerous shoal out there, not a likely place for a small boat.
    He had asked if it were possible to row upstream to Heyl, and he was told that it was a long pull if the tide was running out.
    So where had Harry Saunders kept his boat, and why had he been rowing past the village that Saturday afternoon?
    And then he turned and retraced his steps, looking for a salvage yard. Constable Pendennis had promised to see to it, but Rutledge wasn’t convinced it would be a priority for the Heyl police.
    He found what he was looking for and made arrangements for the yard to send someone upriver to find Harry Saunders’s boat. The owner, a stocky man with a beard, brought out a map and asked Rutledge to pinpoint the area to be searched. He did that to the best of his ability, adding, “I was not there when the boat sank. It may have been left or right of the mark I’ve made. But I shouldn’t think you will have too much difficulty locating it.”
    The man nodded. “We’ll do our best. Why did it sink, do you know?”
    “That’s the point of retrieving it,” he replied. “To find out.”
    Walking to where he’d left his motorcar, Rutledge took a detour to Church Street to see the church of St. Petroc.
    It had been a great pilgrimage center, until the bones of St. Petroc had been taken away to Bodmin—and then stolen from there and carried off to Brittany. Henry II had restored them to Bodmin. And Padstow became a backwater. The church was more a chapel, with gray stone, a square tower, and a churchyard full of tombstones tilting and leaning in the high grass. The mounded graves, the grass around them still thinner and shorter, marked where those who had died of their wounds in England lay buried alongside influenza victims.
    He could feel Hamish stirring as he looked at them, and so he turned away, not lingering there.
    It was on the way back to Heyl that Hamish finally spoke for the first time that day. A cloud had crossed over the sun, leaving a gray light behind that made the scenery more suitable to the time of year, a dreary dampness that promised rain.
    “Yon man in the bed didna’ look verra’ good. It’s a matter of attempted murder now. What if he dies? What then? His father will press for a trial. And it willna’ go well for the lasses.”
    “It won’t come to that.” But he could see in his mind’s eye a picture of Elaine St. Ives standing in the dock, in tears as she was being cross-questioned by the prosecutor. Any trial would be held in Padstow, where the Saunders name carried weight.
    “You canna’ be sure. And there’s the Gordon lass.”
    He didn’t want to think about Kate, charged with a murder. They would hold her and the others in gaol if Harry Saunders died. And he, Rutledge, would be responsible in a way, if he couldn’t uncover a clearer answer to what had occurred there in the rowboat.
    Kate didn’t resemble Jean at all. They were very different in so many ways. Kate, if anything, was the plainer of the two, although very attractive. And added to