Emberverse Short Stories Read online

  Rutherston caught a look of mild enjoyment on the noncom’s face before it gave way to his usual seriousness.

  “You may have found His Majesty a recruit there,” he said.

  “Worse things than going for a soldier, sir,” Bramble said. “If you’ve the inclination.”

  “True enough.”

  They passed out of the village proper; beyond it were the allotments—plots of a few acres came along with the rental of a cottage. Many of the villagers were at work there, hoeing and weeding, or harvesting vegetables and fruit into woven-withe baskets. Some of them nodded to the two outsiders; others just glanced at them.

  “You or I would be grockles in Eddsford if we lived here thirty years, married local girls and were buried in the churchyard,” Rutherston said.

  “Probably, sir. Not quite as bad as that where I come from; we weren’t resettled until a decade or so later. Still had new folk moving in until around the time I was born.”

  A few two-wheeled carts went by, loaded high with billets of firewood cut in the coppices; this was the season to start laying it in for the winter. It was also the season for milling some of the recently harvested grain, of course, though not all of it; besides taking time to thresh, it kept better in the kernel. The tall overshot steel wheel was turning as water dropped onto the curved metal vanes from the millrace. That wound out of sight along the hillside and into a patch of dense forest.

  Ah, Rutherston thought, looking at a series of heavy metal shapes, forged steel and cast iron; they rested by the newer section of the long rectangular building. That will be the parts Sir James mentioned from Portsmouth. Odd that Miss Medford didn’t mention doing Jon’s correspondence.

  In mourning for a brother or no, the world’s work had to go on; as they approached, a sling full of the sacks was hoisted up to the top story, to be poured into the hopper and eventually emerge as flour—and sacks of that were being unloaded into empty wagons from a doorway lower down. The groaning sound of burr millstones turning on each other ran under the rush of the water and the rumble of the big gearwheels meshing. There was a mealy, dusty smell in the air, despite the dampness.

  A tall man with thinning sandy hair was overseeing operations. He turned as Rutherston and Bramble approached and nodded at them:

  “Been expecting you. I’ve a bit t’ do furst, sir.” Then he shouted upwards at his workmen: “Awroi, keep her running! Light on the lever! There’s nei way for even biyani like you t’ bugger it up now, so don’t!”

  Rutherston introduced them; the miller had a hand like something carved from bacon-rind, and a gravely respectful manner that might be hiding resentment… or possibly relief. He led them into the rambling ivy-covered house that stood near the mill and offered refreshment—nammit was the word he used for the pound-cake and rosehip tea that his wife brought in and slammed down with a nervous irritation that made the husband wince.

  “Where’s mother?” he said to her. “And the kids?”

  “She’s in Jon’s room, with his things,” she said with a waspish note.

  Eric Wooton looked surprised. “How’d she get in? It’s locked! There’s the guard! She were fussing about it all yesterday, and yelling at the so’jer.”

  “The squaddie’s asleep, and she used a strip of tin!”

  Oh, my, Rutherston thought, and exchanged a glance with Bramble as they both rose.

  Mrs. Wooton the younger was a woman of about her husband’s age, somewhere between thirty and forty, with bright blonde hair and sharp intelligent features and tourmaline-green eyes. She went on with a snap:

  “Margrethe and Sally and Tom are staying with Jenny. And that’s where I’m. going now. Call me when your Jon isn’t mucking up our lives any more. I didn’t marry him, you know.”

  Eric Wooton winced as the door slammed, and went on as he trailed after the two King’s Men down a corridor toward the stairs.

  “Jenny’s her sister…” he sighed, then went on: “You talked with the Squire, I suppose, inspector? Jon… ee allus was a strange boy, off alone with his books or fiddling with some bit of gearwork, but he changed when the Squire closed the fulling mill. First he goes off to sea; then he comes back with money and big plans, talking all fess about how he’d settle everyone who ever crossed him, and then he goes and buys the mill!”

  “Which will be yours now, I suppose, Mr. Wooton?” Rutherston said over his shoulder, as they came to a landing.

  The square Saxon face went slack. “I hadn’t thought!”

  The detective blinked. He’d been on the receiving end of a great many attempts at innocence, and that was the real thing if he’d ever seen it.

  And now the poor fellow has more guilt to add to the relief he’s trying not to feel, Rutherston thought; the Wootons had ratcheted up two steps on the local social ladder. Now, how to interrupt his mother…

  Eric Wooton visibly put the dawning realization that he now had his beloved mill in fee simple and rent-free aside and continued:

  “I didn’t think any good would come of it, nor of those friends of his.”

  Aha, Rutherston thought. That’s new.

  “Friends?” he said.

  “Foreign,” Eric Wooton said shortly.

  The problem is, foreign could just mean someone from Warwickshire, or even Winchester, Rutherston thought. I doubt they were from outside the Empire.

  “And they came by night. Jon would go out and talk to ‘em, I suppose he went with them on his trips away, but he wouldn’t bring them into the house—not that I wasn’t glad of it. Wouldn’t want them around my kids. Then when they left he’d have more—”

  Suddenly he stopped and sniffed the air. Rutherston did too; there was a hint of smoke, not likely from a hearth in this season, but it could be from the iron stove in the kitchen.

  “Mother!” Wooton bellowed, and tried to bolt past them.

  Bramble had his sword out. Rutherston made a gesture and the noncom sheathed it as they went pounding up the last flight of stairs. The trooper who’d been on guard lay slackly on the floor with a cup beside him; drugged, not drunk or asleep, but Rutherston didn’t envy him when he eventually met Corporal Bramble again in his official capacity.

  The door had been locked once more; the miller rattled the handle and shouted incoherent pleas, threats, and curses at his mother. Smoke leaked underneath it; Rutherston shoulder-checked the agitated man neatly out of the way, and Bramble hit the oak planks with his shoulder tucked in. That was practical, if you had a lot of bone and muscle behind the shove, and a mail-coat and padding to protect it. The lock tore out of the jamb with a crunch, and the door banged open.

  “No!” a woman screeched.

  That was probably Kristin Wooton; at least she was stout and middle-aged. She went for Rutherston with a creditable tackle, but he dodged aside—he’d been a very good rugby fly-half once—and picked up a jug of water by the side of an unmade bed still marked with the dried blood and fluids of Jon Wooton’s hard dying. Smoke turned to steam as he threw it into a metal box where flames ran. Behind him Bramble had the mother in an unbreakable grip— despite her attempts to kick and gouge—and Eric Wooton was…

  A wringin’ of his hands, Rutherston thought, as he opened a window and waved a pillowcase to disperse the smoke. If I had to pick a recruit for a commando operation, I’d take Eric’s mother Kristin over him any day of the week.

  The basket held charred papers. And charred photographs as well. The detective picked one up between thumb and forefinger.

  For a moment the shapes made no sense. Then his brows rose as he mentally untangled the interlocked limbs and saw what was going where; he hadn’t seen anything like it since a handful of pre-Change magazines were handed eagerly around after lights-out in the dormitory at Winchester College… Then the brows rose again, to, an almost painful level. Those photographs were modern, and not posed; they’d been taken at some distance, through an open window—with a camera hooked up to a telescope. It took him a moment to recogn
ize Delia Medford, and a moment more to identify pretty Aud; facial features weren’t the most immediately apparent part of the overall composition.

  No wonder his mother had wanted to burn them! Rutherston thought. And no wonder that Delia Medford was willing to handle his business correspondence… and she certainly had a motive for murder.

  “Good God almighty,” Bramble said in reverent tones.

  Rutherston turned, automatically holding the photograph closer to his chest with the back outwards. A large trunk stood by the bed—evidently pulled from beneath it, and with the large, complex and extremely strong-looking lock hammered off. At a guess, Jon Wooton’s mother had done it when she realized that the police were on the doorstep. Part of the contents had gone into the metal waste-basket and been set on fire; the rest had been tossed on the bed. They included some diagrams… and several neat bundles of banknotes, with many noughts in their numbers. Buying the mill and ordering equipment from Portsmouth hadn’t exhausted young Jon’s profits from his putative illegal salvage trips by any means.

  “I don’t want the money!” Kristin screeched. “Take the money! Just don’t you slander my Jon! Jon was a good boy!”

  No, he was a man, and a very bad one, Rutherston thought. But that doesn’t mean it was all right to murder him.

  Then he looked at the plans. A steam engine, right enough, he thought. There was the big rocking beam, the circular boiler, the huge six-foot piston, and the separate condenser. The rest of it made less sense. The channels for water were labeled cooling system. Surely the point was to heat the water up, though? And there was no provision for a coal store; simply a rectangular object with pipes running through it labeled heat source. And a weird geared arrangement to lower rods into it from above, each fitting neatly into a cylinder.

  They were neatly titled control rods, with graphite in brackets after that and a note: test composition? Add fuel elements gradually to check necessary mass.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” he said to himself, baffled. “But Jon was brilliant at mechanical things; it’s the one virtue he had, and everyone agrees on it. What could—”

  He felt his face go pale. “That’s impossible,” he added.

  No, he realized after a moment. It’s just very implausible. Anything else is impossible.

  “Dammit, I should have known better!” he said softly.

  Kristin Wooton’s screeches had subsided into sobs. Bramble heard the older man’s words.

  “Sir?” he said.

  “Known that you see what you expect to find!”

  “What was it you expected, exactly?” said Bramble, letting the woman down on her feet; she stumbled to a chair and dropped her face into her hands.

  “I expected to find a murder.”

  “The trail’s as plain as plain, sir,” Bramble said. “Now that we’ve got one end of it, I can follow it.”

  The olive face was phlegmatic as usual, but there was a slight sheen of sweat on it. It was near sunset, and they’d been quartering the hanger northeast of Eddsford’s mill all afternoon. Half the corporal’s squad were helping—the ones with the best field-craft, as Bramble put it.

  Or the ones that did the most poaching, Rutherston thought mordantly.

  “Best get the rest of them out, then,” he said aloud. “We don’t need numbers to check on something.”

  The detective and the non-commissioned officer looked at each other in perfect unspoken understanding; if you were a leader of King’s Men you didn’t send them where you wouldn’t go yourself. Or send them at all instead of going yourself, if accomplishing the mission was simply a matter of one man walking into danger. He’d been honor-bound to tell the corporal what he thought they were looking for. Corporal Bramble wouldn’t let him go in after it alone.

  It felt eerily strange to walk through an English beechwood with the smooth gray bark dappled by the sun and feel this way. You were meant to feel like this amid a landscape of arid rock, knowing that hating black eyes were peering at you and quivering-eager hands gripped spears, while the armor was like a vise around your chest and the long clatter of boots and hooves on rock echoed back from the sides of the wadi. His hand ached for the hilt of his longsword, but there was nothing here from which a sword could protect him.

  “Here,” he said.

  Whatever-it-was had been buried skillfully, but you couldn’t sink a dozen boxes bigger than coffins into the dirt without leaving some trace. Rutherston forced his mind and memory back from a time more than a decade distant, swallowed, cleared his throat.

  “This one,” he said.

  They scrabbled at the duff with their gloved hands. The steel top of the box was still covered in chipped, faded olive-green paint, with faint black traces where words and code-sequences had been stenciled on. The rope handle was modern, though. Rutherston licked his lips again and bent to pull at it. The effort made him stagger, taken off-guard; the weight was far greater than a four-by-three section of stamped steel should be. Bramble stepped nearer and gave him a hand; there was room for both on the loop of hemp.

  The lid began to creak upwards. As soon as it was open at all. he could see that the chest had been lined with thick plates of lead and then something else—graphite, he thought. Then he saw what was within, dull-shining metallic wedges, and he jumped back. Bramble did an instant later, and the lid fell back with an echoing whutnp. The softness of the sound meant that the fit must be very good, sealing the boxes airtight.

  Thank God for Jon Wooton’s clever hands, Rutherston thought, scraping the back of one hand across his face. And damn him for a lunatic!

  “Corporal, get your man out to the semaphore line. Code Seven-Seven-Eight, and send it emergency priority.”

  “Yes sir!”

  That gave Bramble a reason to run. Rutherston turned and walked instead. He couldn’t outrun what waited in those lead-lined boxes behind him… and you could never really outrun fear, anyway.

  “He wanted to what?” Sir James said.

  “Build a steam engine,” Ingmar Rutherston said.

  He looked around the parlor in Royston Hall. Only the essential people were there: the Squire, his brother the vicar, and District Nurse Delia Medford, SRN. And Corporal Bramble, of course. The sheer normalcy of it was inexpressibly comforting, down to the tea-tray the maid had left, and the sheen on the mahogany of the table, the leather of the sofa and chairs and the large and rather bad oil of William the Great’s victory over the Moors at Tenerife that hung by the door.

  “That is mad!” the Reverend Frances Broxby said.

  The nurse stirred her cup, genteelly holding out the little finger of that hand. She nodded as the detective went on:

  “Not if he had the right fuel,” Rutherston said. He lit one of his cigarillos and leaned an elbow on the mantelpiece. “Plutonium, I believe it was called, Father?”

  The scholarly priest shook his head. “Plutonium—you’re all familiar with the name?—plutonium won’t explode any more. Even if the chemical explosives to drive the pieces together would work, or the electronic control mechanisms functioned. It won’t even get hot enough to melt. And thank God for that. Otherwise it would have poisoned half of England as it burned through the containment structures.”

  “Thank God indeed. From my dimly recalled lessons one sort turns into another sort as it runs down, somehow, and only God and a few boffins know what it is by now.”

  “Radium, cobalt-60, other decay products,” the priest said quietly. “Wooton’s chests probably came from an old power station. Whoever dug it out probably did so under duress, and died very quickly.”

  Rutherston nodded; even if the slave laborers had been Wild Lands savages, it was an unpleasant thought. He went on:

  “As you say, Padre. But though it won’t melt down, in concentrated form it will sit there and glow at about seven hundred degrees… which is quite hot enough to boil water, and to keep doing so for a very long time. I remember that from a course on the Dangerous Substan
ces Act. Generally we leave the old reactors strictly alone—they’re safer repositories for the stuff than anything we can build now.”

  He could see that the priest followed him, and Delia Medford was unsurprisingly unsurprised; it took Sir James a little longer.

  “You mean… you mean it would have worked?” he said at last, blinking his one eye.

  “In theory. In practice, no, and Jon Wooton would have killed everyone in Eddsford trying. It’s been looked into exhaustively, back around the turn of the century, though the studies were kept secret. The resources of the whole realm couldn’t do it, not with the machines we can make. That stuff is hellish dangerous.”

  “Good God,” the baronet said, and drank blindly from his cup, looking as if he’d prefer something much stronger.

  “Fortunately, the disposal squad says that nothing significant escaped. The boxes will be put in larger boxes, those will be encased in seamless lead castings, and the whole will be cast into very deep parts of the sea. What the boffins call a subduction zone, where evidently we won’t have to worry about it again this side of doomsday.”

  Father Frances crossed himself. “So there was no murder here in Eddsford,” he said slowly. “Thank God indeed! Jon Wooton simply killed himself… by accident.”

  All those present signed themselves as well, as the cleric murmured “Amen.”

  “And no harm done to the village or the people,” Sir James said, with a gusty sigh. “I think, Frances, that a thanksgiving mass is in order… not that we need be too specific about the cause.” He looked at Rutherston. “And no crime was committed after all.”

  “Oh, there were several crimes: smuggling, violation of the Treasure Trove Act, the Dangerous And Prohibited Substances Act… but all by the very late, and extremely unlamented, Jon Wooton. So my report will make plain.”