Emberverse Short Stories Read online

  A Murder in Eddsford

  Detective Inspector Ingmar Rutherston of New New Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department looked up from his copy of the preliminary report as the coach began to slow; he’d had the vehicle to himself for the last three stops. The document was signed Corporal Bramble, Ox. & Bucks Light Infantry, but it was as well written, terse and concise as most constables could have managed. The description of the dead man’s condition made Rutherston’s brows rise; the soldier’s dismay showed through the flat official prose, as well.

  “Peaceful country to all appearances,” he mused to himself, forcing his mind to stop worrying the scanty data. “But this Jon Wooton is very dead indeed. Beyond that, there’s nothing to be done until I’ve some fresh information.”

  He tucked the semaphore-telegraph form into a pocket of his jacket and focused on the view out the window instead. It was a warm afternoon turning into evening, late in August this year of grace AD 2049. A little white dust smoked up from under the hard rubber treads of the wheels, but the vehicle was well sprung on good Shropshire steel. The coach was the weekly from the capital, Winchester, to sleepy little Dover over in Kent, much slower than the British Rail pedalcar but stopping at places not so served, such as his destination, the Hampshire village of Eddsford.

  The landscape of the Downs passed by at a good round trot, long shadows falling from the roadside trees as the sun declined toward the west; rolling chalk hills, green close-cropped pasture dotted with off-white sheep, fields of grass and clover and reaped grain on the lower slopes, beech-plantations and coppice-woods and low-trimmed hedges where red admiral and peacock and tortoiseshell butterflies fluttered. An occasional white-walled farmhouse stood in a sheltered spot, thatched in golden straw, surrounded by barn and stable and cart-shed, wool-store, stock-pond and whirling wind-pump and gnarled orchards.

  Looking about, you’d never dream that the trackless tangled wildwood of Andredesweald lay only a few miles eastward, home to boar and wolf and the odd tiger down from the Wild Lands, and perhaps an outlaw or highwayman now and then. The New Forest to the west was almost as savage, more than it had ever been in the Conqueror’s time. Here the nearest to nature in the raw were hovering kestrels and a buzzard now and then, and flocks of swallows and house martins crowding the uppermost branches of trees, getting ready for their migration to Africa.

  Rutherston smiled at the sight; his father had never seen that without reminiscing about how they’d used the wires strung from pole to pole for roosting when he was a young boy in the Old Days.

  The detective rolled the window down the rest of the way and peered out, welcoming the fresh air and the scents of baked earth and growing things with the slightly faded, tattered smell that said summer was past its peak and autumn rains might hit at any moment. A farmer and his workers in the field beyond the roadside hedge were pitching the last of the wheat-sheaves into a wagon drawn by two big chestnut Shires. Men and women and horses alike stopped to look at the high-stepping black geldings that drew the coach, male farmhands with stolid sunburned faces above their smock-frocks, and women in loose pants and blouses and sometimes canvas field-aprons.

  A straw-covered jug went from hand to hand as the coach pulled away, and then the pitchforks went back to work. The road dipped down toward the valley of the Rother, showing a glint of sun-struck water in the distance and flatter country southward. Partridges whirred up from the roadside verge…

  “No, y’ daft rassgat!” the driver cursed; probably his assistant leveling her crossbow—she was young and enthusiastic. “Just your luck there’d be some kiddie behind a bush!”

  The top of the south-facing slope was planted in undulating rows of shaggy goblet-trained grapevines; beyond, the village proper was bowered in trees and followed the riverbank at a cautious distance, separated by water-meadows and a low bank against spring floods.

  And that’s the miller’s house where the body was discovered, he thought, looking north. There’s the roof through the trees, and you can just see the water from the millrace.

  The assistant tooted again and again on her brass horn, and the driver pulled up to a walk with a woah-woah, there!, to his team; children and dogs and chickens and the odd passer-by afoot or on a bicycle or on horseback made way, and the usual curious crowd started to gather at the inn. The houses were mostly white-walled, roofed in shingle or thatch, slate or tile, along a street still paved with old-style asphalt and lined with big beeches and horse chestnuts.

  The lane opened out into a green at the other end, with the tavern on one side and a stretch of grass in the center, and a church further on near the water-meadows. It was unique in the ordinary manner—a handsome battlemented tower of flint and stone obligingly labeled AD 1599 over the west door, and other parts that looked to be anything from Victorian to Norman; a Georgian brick rectory stood a little to one side, nearly hidden in oaks and beeches.

  The inn was long and low and rambling, plaster over brick with a higher two-story section in its middle, and an irregular studding of chimneys through its mossy shingles. A brass plaque with the royal arms by the door proclaimed that it was a mail inn, where the coaches stopped for a change of teams and to drop and pick up letters and parcels—usually a profitable sideline for the innkeeper. Three or four shops stood across the green; so did the village post office, flanked by a reading-room and small public library marked by its sign and extravagant stretch of window.

  A sign also swung from an iron bracket over the main entrance of the inn, showing a Moor’s severed head on a silver platter, and a branch of dried holly above it. There was a smell of wood smoke and cooking as households prepared their evening meal, mingling with the homely aroma of middens and the odd whiff from pigs kept behind cottages. A toddler tried to climb into a horse-trough by the side of the street, and a harassed-looking woman in an apron ran out of the door and pulled him inside, smacking him smartly on the bottom while she did.

  The gate to the inn’s courtyard opened, and an ostler in a leather apron came out, ready to lead out the fresh team. The driver’s assistant unspanned her crossbow with a sharp tunnggg, racked it and jumped down from the seat to open the door as the coach came to a halt. Rutherston sprang down without waiting for the folding step, ignoring a slight twinge where the old wound in his right leg reminded him of that evening in the foothills of the Riff Atlas. She handed down his carpetbags and took a sixpence with a bob of her head before turning to unload the mail-sack and several parcels labeled Eddsford, Hants. The ostler and the driver unharnessed the team and led it over into the courtyard.

  And a stout man with a waistcoat straining over a considerable belly and graying muttonchops came out of the front door, smiling and fingering the chain of his watch. The taverner’s experienced eye flicked up and down the detective’s long lanky form and saturnine beak-nosed face; quietly expensive but well-worn traveling tweeds and half-cloak, wide-brimmed panama hat, light cravat of white Irish linen, longsword and belt of good quality but plain and worn, half-boots. Just a touch of gray in at the temples of the yellow hair. And two carpetbags, but no valet…

  Rutherston smiled to himself as he saw the quick expert evaluation running through the man’s guileless blue eyes:

  Gentleman, but not rich; still, better than a bagsman or commercial traveler. Not a professor, or a doctor, nor a merchant, surely; and not stopping at the Hall with the Squire. Some King’s Man out of Winchester, perhaps, or an officer on leave? Not here for the fishing, though, nei rods…

  It was accurate enough, and he spoke with precisely calculated deference:

  “Mark Eyvindsson,” he pronounced it Evinson, in the modern manner, “at your service, sir. I’m landlord of the Moor’s H
ead. Will you be wanting a room for the night then?”

  In fact what he said sounded more like: Oi’m the laandlorrd o’ the Moo-er’s ‘Ead. Will ye be tvantin’ a room, fer the noight, then?

  If he’d been born in Winchester instead of just living there the last ten years the detective might have suspected the innkeeper of deliberately coming it the heavy rustic. But Rutherston had been born in Short Compton in the Cotswolds himself, about a hundred miles north and a little west of here, where the local dialect was just as heavy and only slightly different.

  “Detective Inspector Ingmar Rutherston, of the Yard,” he replied crisply. “I would like a room; for several days, at least.”

  The innkeeper managed not to look too startled; several of the oldsters sitting with their pints along the bench beside the inn’s door gaped at him; a pipe nearly fell out of one wrinkled mouth. A babble of voices rose and died away.

  “Ah, you’ll be here about young Jon Wooton; quick work for you to get here so soon, all the way from Winchester. A bad business, sir, a very bad business.”

  “It usually is, when a man’s murdered,” Rutherston said grimly.

  The interior of the inn’s main room was L-shaped: a long space with tables, a hearth—swept and garnished with pots of flowers now—and a row of windows that looked down on a water-meadow and a stretch of the Rother flowing slowly between willows beyond.

  There was a fair scattering of regulars trickling in for a pint or two—it was after harvest, after all, the high point of a laborer’s year… and pocket. A man in a good country suit was talking business with some obvious farmers in cords in the snug, and there were a scattering of everything from cottagers in smocks to tradesmen and their families.

  The ones that caught his eye obviously weren’t locals: five army troopers and a corporal, hobelars in green-enameled chain-mail shirts and leather breeches and riding-boots, with their open-faced sallet helms propped on tables. The longbows and quivers, swordbelts and bucklers hung on pegs by the door. They all had mugs of beer before them, and they all looked dusty and tired, as if they’d been on road patrol, which they probably had.

  Rutherston walked over to their table as the innkeeper and his staff saw to the baggage and took his hat and half-cloak and his own sword—even on a murder investigation, he wasn’t going to wear a long blade inside the village. The soldiers looked up, polite but not more than that—they were the King-Emperor’s men, after all. Then he reached into his coat-pocket and flipped open the wallet to show his Warrant Card, and handed their squad-leader his letter of authorization from the War Office.

  That brought them to their feet, saluting smartly amidst a scrape of chairs. The troopers were ordinary enough, strong-built youngsters with open countrymen’s faces, distinguished only by one’s startling red roach of hair or another’s freckles and jug ears. The corporal with the chevrons riveted to the short sleeve of his mail shirt was a few years older than his men. He was about six feet— Rutherston’s own height—but broader, with dark blunt features unusual for an Englishman and curly hair so black it had highlights like a raven’s feathers.

  “Corporal Bramble, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, currently out of Castle Aldershot,” he said in a deep rumbling voice

  The accent was a strong yokel burr but with a slight trace of something different, a yawny-drawly lilt that had a teasing half-familiarity. Then he placed it.

  Ah, I’ve heard something like that from Jamaican sailors in Portsmouth and Bristol, Rutherston thought. Though he’s definitely English born and bred; yeoman-farmer’s son, I’d say.

  He’d half-expected a southern-provinces twang; those looks could be Gibraltarian, but a touch of Caribbean a couple of generations back would account for it just as well.

  The noncom went on: “We were told to expect you. I’m to assume this is aid-to-the-civil-power, sir?”

  “You are, corporal; dull work, probably, I’m afraid. Your commanding officer has been informed I’d commandeer you; it saves time and trouble. I’ll want to talk to you later tonight. You can quarter your men here at the Moor’s Head, and I’ll handle the requisition slips.”

  None of the hobelars looked unhappy about it. They’d be spared fatigues and drills, the food and drink would be free but much better than ration-issue, and the chance of finding a girl interested in the glamour of a uniform rather than hard cash was distinctly better here than near a garrison town like Aldershot.

  “Thank you, sir. I’ve a man at the miller’s house, of course, guarding the place where we found the body. I’ll rotate the duty.”

  “Good work, that, corporal,” Rutherston said, nodding.

  It had saved him an undignified scramble, and he had reasons for not heading straight to the scene of the—possible—crime.

  “Permission to ask a question?” the noncom said.

  The detective nodded, raising a brow.

  “You were army yourself, sir, weren’t you?”

  Rutherston smiled thinly. Good. He has a sharp eye, this one.

  He nodded. “Yes; in the Blues and Royals. Tours in the Principality on the Provoland border, and out of Rabat and Marrakech. It still shows, eh?”

  “It does, inspector.”

  “And you’re not from this shire, are you, corporal? A bit further north and east, I’d say.”

  “My dad’s place is just north of Woburn, sir; Jamaica Farm, it’s called, after Granddad. Near Wavendon, if you know Buckinghamshire.”

  “I do,” he said.

  Better and better, he thought

  That area was northerly and a little wild, though not quite on the frontier of settlement any more; that ran just south of Nottingham these days.

  But still close to the Wild Lands, and still a smuggler’s paradise, up the Ouse from the Wash.

  The Moor’s Head wasn’t large, but it had all the modern conveniences you’d expect so close to Winchester and right next to a good trout-and-salmon stream; running water in the bathroom on the first floor brought up by a hydraulic ram from the river, flush toilets, and a big copper boiler that supplied plentiful hot water. The maid had unpacked his bags, all but a small locked case set on the table, and the sitting room had a pleasant view of the Rother; the detective found his two rooms to be very comfortable in a country-inn fashion. Both smelled of clean linen and dried-lavender sachets, and the alcohol lanterns were bright enough for reading, even to one accustomed to the capital’s incandescent-mantle gaslights.

  Rutherston wallowed gratefully in a tub of the hot water—at thirty-two, sitting all day in a coach was no longer perfectly comfortable—and set out his boots and traveling suit to be taken and dealt with. He took a moment to write a letter as well; Janice was in her eighth month and naturally hadn’t wanted him to leave town just then.

  Then he dressed and came down to an excellent dinner: grilled trout right out of the river, a pie of veal and ham and truffles, sprouts, raudkal, salad, chips, followed by a fruit tart with cream. There was a glass of a perfectly acceptable local Cabernet Franc to go with it.

  Bramble’s troopers were plowing their way through much the same, with a roast chicken each added. It reminded Rutherston of the sort of appetite you had when you were twenty years old and spending ten hours a day in the saddle or marching on your own feet under seventy pounds of armor and gear. Instead of his more recent fate, having a city’s pavements under his boots, or worse still, an office chair beneath his backside while he filled out endless reports.

  Most of the patrons were quiet, talking with their heads together, but the soldiers were merry enough; it wasn’t their village, after all. He even caught a snatch of song from them:

  “For forty shillings on the drum

  Who’ll ‘list and volunteer to come?

  And stand and face the foe today:

  It’s over the hills and far away…”

  When he’d finished his own meal, he signed Corporal Bramble over.

  “Sit, man. I’m an officer in the po
lice now, not the Blues.”

  “Inspector.”

  The big soldier sat, and Rutherston raised his hand for the barmaid—a statuesque blonde a decade younger than himself, with a forty-inch bust displayed to advantage by her low-cut blouse and a pouting lower lip that might have been promising under other circumstances, along with the lack of a wedding-band.

  But you do have one on now, Ingmar, at long last. Keep it in mind. Janice can’t see you but God can.

  He’d spent a long time as a footloose and fancy-free bachelor, and shedding the habits came a little hard sometimes despite a happy marriage; they crept back while you weren’t looking, especially away from home.

  “Now,” he said, opening his notebook. “Let’s get the details. Your report was informative, but short.”

  “You won’t be questioning anyone else tonight, sir?” Bramble asked.

  Rutherston nodded. “Why am I sitting on my arse waiting for the villains to scarper, you mean?” he said, and smiled at the look of blank innocence the noncom put on. “What I’m doing, corporal, is letting them get good and nervous. Winchester has seventy thousand people, but here in Eddsford there are six-hundred-fifty-odd and they all know each other. If anyone runs, they identify themselves for me. If they don’t, they’ll probably make other mistakes.”

  “Hmmm, the guilty flee where nei man pursueth, eh, sir? My dad’s a deacon in our parish,” he added in an aside. “You’re letting them come ripe, as it were.”

  “Quite. Tell me what you’ve seen and heard. Then tell me what you think of it.”

  The barmaid returned with their mugs. She smiled at the policeman as she put them down, then turned the full wattage on Bramble when it didn’t bring any result. He grinned back at her reflexively— he was, after all, still several years short of thirty himself—and then cleared his throat and returned to business.

  “Yessir.” Bramble’s face went blank as he replayed memories in his mind’s eye. “My men and I ‘ave been on standard road patrol along the South Downs; we vary the route unpredictable-like.”