A Lonely Death by Charles Todd Page B

others. The youngest trying to prove his mettle.”
    “What sort of escapades?” Rutledge pressed. He could sense that Walker was uncomfortable now, but he ignored him.
    “He probably thought it was quite a lark, the things he got up to. One summer three or four boys dressed in sheets and moved about the churchyard one moonless night. They gave the sexton’s wife and two young people courting in the church porch one hell of a fright. On Guy Fawkes night, they made their own bonfire—the old mill on the edge of town. It was a shambles anyway, no one lived there. They torched it. Still, it could have caused a general conflagration if the wind had blown the sparks about. There were demands that the ringleaders spend a night in jail. Cooler heads prevailed, and they were marched home under escort.”
    “These hardly seem to be boyish pranks to me.”
    Walker said, “I was here then. They weren’t intending to do harm. On the other hand, the summer before the mill incident, there was a near drowning. The father of the boy in the witch’s chair was asked if he wished to press charges, but his son wouldn’t hear of it. He told me they’d drawn lots to see who would play the witch. They’d been reading about the Reformation in school. And the pond wasn’t deep enough to drown the boy, but they hadn’t accounted for his being tied to a chair and took fright when his head went under.”
    “Does this boy still live here in Eastfield?”
    “Oh, no, sir,” Walker answered. “He hasn’t for these past fifteen years. His father was a bookkeeper at the furniture maker’s, and as I remember, he found another position in Staffordshire, closer to his late wife’s family.”
    Which brought him full circle to Daniel.
    “Did Daniel serve with the rest of the Eastfield Company?”
    “Like his brother, he qualified as an officer, and he chose to join the sappers.”
    Remembering what Walker had told him about Daniel’s taste for adventure, that made perfect sense to Rutledge. It had been dangerous work, tunneling under German lines to lay charges. The miners were often buried alive when the powder went off prematurely or the tunnel supports failed, or they were killed going back inside to find out why the tunnel hadn’t blown on schedule.
    “Anything else you can tell me about the three men?” Rutledge asked.
    “Jeffers was very drunk. He wasn’t an habitual drinker, mind you. It was just his habit to mark the anniversary of his war wound by going to the pub and taking on as much beer as he could hold. He told me once how close he’d come to dying, and he couldn’t quite put the fear of that behind him.”
    “Then all three of the dead men had been wounded in France.”
    “Yes, I’ve received copies of their medical records. Nothing suspicious there, if that’s what you’re asking me. I suspect the anniversary was not as important to the killer as the opportunity to catch Jeffers alone on a dark road.”
    Rutledge turned to Walker. “Did you ask at the pub, was there a stranger there that night? Or anyone who showed undue interest in Jeffers?”
    “Only the regulars, as it happened. And everyone knew it was Jeffers’s night to remember. They generally left him to it.”
    Dr. Gooding pointedly glanced at the clock again, and Rutledge thanked him for his time.
    He left Walker at the police station after picking up copies of the statements the constable had taken prior to his arrival, and went back to the hotel to read them.
    As he walked into Reception, the man behind the desk said, “Mr. Rutledge? You have a visitor, sir.”
    Surprised, Rutledge asked who it was.
    But the clerk said only, “He’s waiting in the room beyond the stairs.”
    Rutledge thanked him and went on to the door of the room used sometimes as a parlor for hotel guests or as a dining room for small private groups.
    The man standing there, looking out a side window toward a small garden, turned as he heard Rutledge come in. He was tall and