Free A Lonely Death by Charles Todd Page A

Her voice was husky. “You can find your own way out, I think?”
    He thanked her and rose to leave.
    The image he took away from the interview that stayed with him as he walked back to the hotel was of her face as he glanced back at her just before closing the door.
    Desolation was writ large there. But for herself, he thought, not for the dead.
    T he long day was drawing to a close when Rutledge went back to the police station, intending to return the sheaf of statements.
    Walker was standing by a window, looking out at the last shafts of light that touched the rooftops on the opposite side of the street, and he turned to greet Rutledge as the man from London stepped through the door.
    “Any progress?” he asked.
    “Not much that’s helpful. Tomorrow, I’d like to speak to some of the other men from Eastfield’s contingent. Can you arrange it?”
    “That’s easily done,” Walker said, but his mind was clearly on something else.
    “What is it?” Rutledge asked, suddenly alert. “What’s happened?”
    “That’s just it. Nothing has happened. So far. But tonight’s the third night after Pierce was murdered. I’m wondering if that will change, once darkness falls.”
    “I see your point. The problem is, our friend out there has the advantage. He has a better knowledge of where and when to strike, because he’s obviously laid his plans well. Otherwise you and Inspector Norman would have caught him without my help. All you can expect to do is get in his way and force him to alter those plans. That means patrolling not the village itself but back gardens, barnyards, the brewery precincts, the lanes, anywhere a man might be outside alone. Meanwhile, I’d ask everyone to stay in after dark.”
    “I don’t know if he’ll alter his plans, or just wait until we’ve passed by,” Walker said, clearly still worried. “It depends, doesn’t it, on what’s driving the man?”
    “Yes, I grant you that. Garroting is a very physical way to kill. More so even than a knife. Whoever it is may not be able to stop, now that he’s started. Unless he only intended to kill those three men. No one else.”
    “There’s that,” Walker answered, considering the matter. “Although for the life of me I can’t see how they’re connected.”
    “It may only be in the murderer’s mind,” Rutledge said.
    Walker turned to him in surprise. “I hadn’t considered that.”
    “It’s possible that whoever it is uses a garrote because the face of the victim isn’t important,” Rutledge said.
    But that would indicate random killings.

7
    I n the morning, Inspector Norman in Hastings sent a man to Eastfield with the message. He was held up first by the heavy rain and then having to wait for Walker.
    Constable Petty, standing in the window of the police station, finally saw his fellow constable coming down the street. Walker, just returning from another round of the village, in an effort to reassure himself that indeed nothing had happened in the night, came through the doorway, nodded, and began to strip off his rain gear.
    “A cup of tea, Petty?”
    “Much as I could use one, I don’t think there’s time,” the man replied, and he said what he’d been told to say, refusing to answer any of Walker’s questions.
    Walker, growling in frustration, pulled on his gear again and set out for the hotel.
    When he began his rounds the night before, he had had no way of knowing that Rutledge, awake at two and again at three o’clock, had also gone quietly out of the hotel and with only Hamish for company, had also walked through the darkness, pausing now and again to listen to the night sounds around him. It was amazing, he thought as he moved through the silent streets, that a habitation with so little history to scar it could seem so ominous in the broken moonlight. If there had been rape and pillage and fire and sword here at some time in the distant past, it had not left its mark. Except perhaps during those hours between