Free The Dark Lady by Sally Spencer Page B

them.”
    â€œSo, bein’ scared to death, he goes wanderin’ off on his own in the dark?” Woodend asked sceptically. “Besides, I think you’re forgettin’ exactly how that Simon Hailsham feller phrased it. He said that it was when he first mentioned the Dark Lady that Gerhard Schultz was worried. As soon as he’d explained that she was nothin’ but a local ghost, the German calmed down.”
    â€œSo you’re saying that Schultz must have thought the words applied to something else?”
    â€œExactly.”
    â€œBut what?”
    â€œHe hadn’t read his Dickens, but maybe he was a Shakespeare fan,” Woodend speculated.
    â€œA Shakespeare fan?” Rutter repeated, mystified. “What’s Shakespeare got to do with this?”
    Woodend shook his head in mock disgust. “You young coppers amaze me sometimes,” he said. “For all your fancy grammar-school education, you still know bugger all. Shakespeare wrote a lot of sonnets – that’s like limericks, only with more lines.”
    Rutter made a wry, long-suffering face. “Thank you for putting me right on that point, sir.”
    â€œHe was married, as you probably know, to a woman called Anne Hathaway, but a lot of these poems were written to a woman who wasn’t exactly his wife. Well, over the years she’s come to be known to the people who’ve studied him as his Dark Lady.”
    â€œI don’t see where this is leading us,” Rutter confessed.
    â€œSay Gerhard Schultz had a woman in his past who he thought of as
his
Dark Lady – a woman he’d treated badly, an’ either felt guilty about or was afraid of. When Simon Hailsham mentions the name, Schultz thinks that’s who he’s talkin’ about, an’, naturally, he’s very shocked. Then he realises it’s only a local legend that Hailsham’s talkin’ about, an’ he calms down immediately. How does that strike you as an idea?”
    â€œIt’s a possibility I wouldn’t be willing to dismiss out of hand,” Rutter said cautiously.
    The chief inspector took a gulp of his beer. “I like havin’ you around on an investigation, lad,” he said. “An’ there’s two main reasons for that. The first one is that you’re a good person to bounce ideas off. The second is that when I let my enthusiasm for a theory send me in chargin’ off in all directions at once – an’ don’t deny it, lad, because I do . . .”
    Rutter grinned. “Quite honestly, it would never have occurred to me to deny it, sir.”
    Woodend frowned, but only for a second. “When I let my enthusiasm run away with me, you’re there to pull me back. So we make a bloody good team – an’ we’ve got the results to prove it – but it looks like we’re goin’ to have to split up on this case.”
    â€œI beg your pardon, sir?”
    â€œThere’s a strong possibility that the killer is local. Not poor old Fred Foley – though where he’s disappeared to is a mystery in itself – but somebody from the camp. He could be one of the Italians, like I said to Bernadelli. Or one of Poles. But this whole Dark Lady business has got me thinkin’, an’ I’ve realised the murderer could just as easily be somebody out of Schultz’s past. Somebody he knew down in Hereford, for example. An’ that’s our problem, you see. We don’t really know anythin’ about his past.”
    â€œSo you want me to go down to Hereford?”
    â€œIt’s either that, or leave it up to the local Mr Plods,” Woodend said. “An’ I’ve a lot more confidence in you than I have in them.”
    Rutter grinned again. “I don’t know if you intended it, but that was almost a compliment.”
    â€œAye, it was –
almost
,” Woodend agreed. “An’ I did intend it. But