Hunting Shadows: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery Read Free Page A

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 police 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.

 
    Chapter 3
    T he by-election was scheduled for the next week. The popular Tory candidate, Herbert Swift, arranged a torch-lit parade down the High Street, to end with a speech at the market cross. It was Medieval, the cross, the last seven feet missing. But the base was still intact, and Swift was to stand on it so that he could be seen as well as heard.
    All went according to plan. The parade began at the pub named for Hereward the Wake, the eleventh-century hero of the Fens, and some thirty supporters followed their candidate down to the cross, chanting his name, their torches smoking and leaving a reeking trail behind them. The constable, a man named McBride, walked along with them, with an eye to keeping the peace, but the marchers were orderly and in good spirits.
    It was all very dramatic, Swift thought, enjoying the spectacle. His rival, the Liberal candidate, was a dour man with no sense of style in his dress, his voice rough and his language rougher, and his meetings in a hired hall were enlivened only by the occasional snore from one of his audience.
    Swift reached the plinth of the cross and prepared to step up on the base. He looked at the gathering crowd, many of them villagers come for the show, and felt a sense of satisfaction. It was a better turnout than he’d expected.
    The torchlight flickered in the darkness, casting lurid shadows up and down the street and across the eager faces waiting for the speech to begin. The shops on either side of the two village Commons had closed for the day, their windows unlit and blank. Above the shops most of the shopkeepers or their tenants had already drawn their curtains. And the trees by the pond were dark sentinels at the far end of the second Common. This had been an ideal