Cold Comfort (4 page)
Authors: Charles Todd
T
HE DAY OF
the wedding in Ely, a small crowd had gathered to watch the arrival of the wedding party.
A barricade had been set up so that only the bride, her father, and her attendants could drive directly to the Cathedral door. The bridegroom and the wedding guests would walk across the grassy Palace Green to the church, a parade of handsomely dressed gentlemen and their ladies, a sprinkling of men in uniform, and a dash of clergymen, for the bride’s family included several deacons and a Bishop.
By the Cathedral clock, it was two hours before the ceremony. Last-minute preparations were under way, flowers and candles being carried in, a carpet being laid down the long aisle, the organist practicing for the following Sunday’s service. But for the most part, the afternoon was quiet, an island of serenity before the excitement of the ceremony.
No one noticed the elderly man on an equally elderly bicycle who came up the street from the direction of the school and the Cathedral offices, his thin white hair blowing in the light wind as he pedaled. It wasn’t unusual for pedestrians coming up the road to pass in front of the West Door on their way to the busy streets on the far side of the church.
He paused by the wall enclosing the Cathedral precincts and wiped his brow, looking tired and thirsty. But he mounted the bicycle once more and got as far as the abutments that reached up to the tower. There was a narrow recess there where he could leave his bicycle out of sight.
The old man appeared to be a knife and scissors sharpener, his clothes threadbare and his canvas carryall dusty from the roads. He started to leave the carryall on his handlebars, walking away before thinking better of it. He went back, picked it up, and put it firmly under his arm, then stepped into the shadow of the Galilee Porch that led to the west doorway, leaning there, as if the shade was welcome, this warm afternoon.
No one challenged him. No one paid him any attention. Behind his back, the enormous Cathedral seemed to crouch, waiting.
After a while he turned and went inside, into the wide space beneath the towers. Beyond, in the nave, the choir was just finishing a last rehearsal, and someone was putting a final touch to the flowers, pinching off any wilted blossoms. No one turned to look up the long handsome aisle to see who had entered. The sound hardly reached the nave.
He stood there for a moment, then turned and made his way to the right, where there was a door to the tower. It was a long walk, fifteen feet or more, and he was at his most exposed.
No one came out of the nave to call to him, to ask his business or demand that he clear off.
The tower door was unlocked, as it had been the last three times he’d tested it. He looked back over his shoulder. No one was in sight.
The old man slipped inside the tower door, closing it quietly behind him, then began to make his way up the long flights of stairs, taking his time. It was dim and musty in the shaft, the bell ropes swaying a little, making him feel light-headed, and he dared not look down. The canvas carryall seemed to grow heavier with every step. He was winded when at last he reached the stone parapet just above the chamber where the bells were hung.
They wouldn’t ring until the wedding party was leaving the sanctuary. He would be gone by then. One way or another.
Sitting down on the warm, sloping cone of the roof, he waited for a quarter of an hour, letting his heart rate settle again. Then he opened his carryall and began to assemble the rifle. It had served men like him well in France. It would serve him now. Better than the older versions.
A pigeon landed on the parapet, staring unwinking at him, and he stayed where he was. Finally satisfied that the carryall held nothing edible, the pigeon took off again.
He waited with infinite patience, as he’d been taught to do. There was no hurry. His quarry would come to him. Finally he heard the great organ begin to play once more, this time the first of the set pieces selected by the bride’s family. There was a stir below as onlookers who had gathered behind the barricades to watch the guests arrive saw the first motorcar pull up. A ripple of applause quickly followed.
It was time.
Getting carefully to his feet, keeping low, he made his way to the outer wall, peering between the battlements. A motorcar moved away as several more behind it took its place. As the guests alighted, others moved up in line. Unseen from below, he took out the German scope and attached it to the rifle. They hadn’t used scopes during his training. And the Germans in France had taken great care to prevent theirs from being captured and turned against them. The first time he’d looked through this one, he’d been surprised by the clarity it had added to his own keen eyesight.
He scanned the guests as they crossed the Palace Green toward the west door, but he didn’t recognize any of them. Earlier in the week he’d paced the distance from where the motorcars stopped and where he himself would be waiting. He knew he was well within range of his target. He could take his time and wait for the perfect angle.
Not too soon. Not too late. He knew, almost to the blade of grass, where he wanted his victim to be. He could see the Russian gun clearly, at the opposite end of the Green from the West Tower, the long muzzle of the cannon pointing outward, as if its intent was to protect the Cathedral from the townspeople.
Kneeling there, his weapon beside him, he was fairly sure he was invisible from the ground, but to be safe, he pulled an old dark gray hood out of the scissor sharpener’s blouse and draped it over his head and shoulders. It was, he knew, almost exactly the same color as the stone around him.
Once more, he settled down to wait.
It was ten minutes to the hour when he saw his quarry alight from a motorcar that had just pulled up. Another man and a woman arrived with Hutchinson, chatting quietly as they turned toward the Cathedral. He could see the man’s face clearly now, smug and satisfied with himself, a slight smile lifting his lips as he spoke to the woman beside him.
The angle was excellent. The target unsuspecting. He let the Captain come a little closer across the greensward, just clear of where the motorcars were stopping, steadied his breathing and emptied his mind of any emotion. Then he took careful aim, almost without thinking adjusting to the man’s measured pace and the light wind. Old habits die hard.
And calmly, slowly, he squeezed the trigger.
The echoes against the stone were deafening, but he took no notice, his scope still trained on the quarry as Hutchinson’s body reacted to the hit before he could even flinch from the sound of the shot. Without a word, he crumpled to the ground and did not move. Only the red stain spreading across his stiff white shirtfront showed that he had been struck.
The woman, her hands to her face, was screaming, and everyone at the barricade turned to stare in her direction, then looked wildly around for the source of the shot. The other man was kneeling, frantically trying to loosen Hutchinson’s cravat and open his shirt. But it was useless. That had been a heart shot, there was nothing to be done. Still the man kept working, unable to believe that it was hopeless.
Satisfied, the scissor sharpener ejected the single cartridge casing and began to disassemble his rifle, taking his time, ignoring the screams and cries below. He knew what was happening, he didn’t need to look. Some were running to the assistance of the fallen man, others fleeing toward the street behind them, toward The Lamb Inn, out of range for fear there would be a second shot. A few would be scanning the rooftops and windows of buildings on either side of the grass, looking in vain for the shooter. The greeters at the door had rushed into the sanctuary, crying havoc. He could hear the unnerved guests as they hurried out to see, and all the while, the organ music went on, as if in the loft, the organist was unaware of what was happening below in the nave. Then the last notes trailed off as he must have realized something was wrong.
The scissors grinder made his way to the stairs and started down them, taking his time, careful not to lose his footing. When he reached the bottom step, he peered out a crack in the door, then opened it wider. No one. Either they were cowering in the nave or already outside. The bride’s motorcar was just arriving, adding to the chaos.
He began that long walk again, taking his time, reaching the Galilee Porch and the open doorway. Appearing bewildered and afraid, he stared vacantly around. No one paid him any heed. He inched sideways, making his way to his left. His bicycle was where he’d put it, but he didn’t mount it. Instead he walked it down the quiet street, back the way he’d come, toward the school. Several people from there were running toward the Cathedral, and one or two called out to him, asking what had happened.
He shook his head. “Terrible,” he said, “terrible.” His voice was shaking, he looked as if he might fall down from the shock, and they ran on. He continued his slow, painful way to the arch by the school. There just as the police were passing, he mounted his bicycle and pedaled sedately off, a graying scarecrow with a lined face and bony knees.
T
HE POLI
CE SPENT
five hours searching the streets around the Cathedral, searching inside it despite the anxious wedding guests waiting to have their statements taken.
A constable reached the church tower, walking out into the narrow space around the battlements. He was an older man, staying on because the men who should have replaced him had long since rotted in the graveyards of Flanders or had come home without a limb or with other injuries. He looked down from this height at the target area and felt his stomach lurch as a wave of dizziness overcame him. Swiftly concluding that it was impossible to make such a shot from this position without being seen, he hurried back to the stairs, staring anxiously into the dim abyss, and nearly lost his dinner. By the time he’d reached the last step his heart was jumping in his chest.
“Nothing up there but the bats,” he told another constable on his way to climb to the Lantern tower over the crossing where the transepts met.
When it came time to take statements from those by the barricade, everyone’s attention had been focused on the arriving guests. They had seen nothing. As one constable put it, “A herd of green pigs could have come by, and if they were dressed to the nines, no one would have taken a bit of notice.”
In the end, the wedding went off at six o’clock, the bride red-eyed from hysterics, the bridegroom grim-faced. Captain Hutchinson had been in his family’s party. It was generally accepted that only a madman could have done such a thing, with so many people to witness it.
Wherever the madman was, he had cast a pall over the day, and more than one guest leaving after the ceremony had felt his hackles rise as he skirted the place where Hutchinson had fallen, expecting to hear the report of a rifle once more.
Two weeks after the murder, the police had made no progress at all. It was then that they called in Scotland Yard.
But not before the killer had struck again.
CHARLES TODD is the author of the Inspector Ian Rutledge series, the Bess Crawford mysteries, and two stand-alone novels. A mother-and-son writing team, they live in Delaware and North Carolina, respectively.
www.charlestodd.com
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The Ian Rutledge Mysteries
Wings of Fire
Search the Dark
Legacy of the Dead
Watchers of Time
A Fearsome Doubt
A Cold Treachery
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The Murder Stone
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from
Hunting Shadows
copyright © 2014 by Charles Todd.
CO
LD COMFORT.
Copyright © 2013 by Charles Todd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780062315724
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