Read Online Hunting Shadows: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery by Charles Todd - Free Book Online Page A

Lowell, wasn’t it?”
    “Nothing there. He didn’t know Hutchinson at all.”
    “But he was with the police at every turn. I’d like to speak to him.”
    Warren quickly added that name to the list. “Anything else?”
    “Just tell me how to find The Deacon. That will do for now.”
    H e was unpacking his valise, putting his clothes into the armoire, when Hamish spoke into the silence. “Ye ken, he’s washed his hands o’ these murders.”
    “At least he’s been helpful.”
    He crossed to the window and realized that it looked out toward the Cathedral.
    “Ye ken, if a woman knows her husband has a rifle, she’s too afraid to report it, for fear of losing him to the hangman.”
    “There’s that,” Rutledge agreed. Over the rooftops, the Cathedral’s Lantern gleamed in the late afternoon sun, its windows holding the light. It dominated the town, although Ely was building out from its center, as many prosperous towns were beginning to do before the war and would surely continue to do. Did the killer live here? Or was he a Wriston man? Or had he come from the half-dozen other villages scattered over the Fens where the ground was high enough for habitation.
    Where then to begin? He took a deep breath.
    The bride and bridegroom. Their marriage had set the wheels of murder turning. Or at least it appeared to have done so.
    He shaved and changed his clothes, leaving the wrinkled suit to be pressed while he was out. After asking directions from the clerk behind the desk he decided it was too far to walk and went to his motorcar.
    The Fallowfields had returned from a brief wedding trip and were staying with the bride’s family before traveling on to London. The house was in a fashionable part of the town, and when he’d been admitted and asked to wait in the drawing room, he could see that there was old money here.
    The furnishings were elegant and the carpet was new, replaced, he thought, for the wedding. The walls were a lovely shade of blue, set off by white trim, and the hearth was white Italian marble. A dark blue vase filled with white roses graced the small table beneath the windows.
    Fallowfield had done well for himself, Rutledge found himself thinking as he waited. Was that why the man had expected to be the victim rather than Captain Hutchinson? That his good fortune was too good to last?
    After several minutes, the door opened and a young, fair-haired man came into the room.
    “Inspector? Jason Fallowfield. I’m sorry to keep you waiting. My wife asks to be excused. She’s tried to put the events that day out of her mind, and it hasn’t been very easy for her.” He gestured to one of the chairs and took another just across from it. “She arrived after the event, there’s nothing she can add.”
    “I can understand her distress. A wedding should be memorable for its joy.”
    “Yes, thank you. I don’t know how I can help you. But I’m at your service.”
    “How long have you known Captain Hutchinson?”
    “I saw him from time to time when we were children, and to tell the truth never really took to him. Then we served together in France. At Passchendaele. Sort of thing you don’t forget, surviving that. We kept in touch afterward. Both of us live—lived—in London, and there was the occasional dinner or a weekend where we were houseguests at the same party. Tennis. Golf. The usual sort of thing when you move in the same circles.”
    “Tell me a little about his background. We’re looking for anything that could point toward his killer.”
    “When I stop to think about it, I realize I didn’t know him very well. And yet I thought I had. He was a private person, you see. He told me his father left him enough to be comfortable, and then before the war he married a rather wealthy woman. I never met her. She died while we were in France. There was some gossip at the time—I’m not precisely sure what it was about, but I gathered it had to do with her possible suicide. At any rate, Gordon