Home > A Fatal Lie (Inspector Ian Rutledge #23)

A Fatal Lie (Inspector Ian Rutledge #23)
Author: Charles Todd

 

1

 

The River Dee, Llangollen Valley

Early Spring 1921

 

On his sixth birthday, Roddy MacNabb was given a fishing pole by his pa, with promises to teach him how to use it. That was late July 1914, before the Bloody Hun started the war, and his pa had left the village with four of his friends and enlisted. He’d promised to be back before the end of the year, but the war had dragged on, and in 1915, his father had been killed at Bloody Passiondell, wherever that was.

The pole, long since put away, was in his granny’s attics, and Roddy had only just found it last week, when he’d gone up there to fetch a box for her. He’d brought it down with him, but his mum had told him to take the Bloody Pole out to the shed and leave it there.

“There’s to be no fishing,” she’d told him. “Not while you’re in school.”

He’d watched his granny’s mouth tighten at his mother’s words. She didn’t hold with cursing, but Mum had come from Liverpool, and he’d heard his Aunt May say that she’d been no better than she ought to be. Still, his father had somehow fallen in love with her and brought her home, and she’d stayed.

He didn’t remember his real mum, she’d died when he was born. But his pa had told him this was his mum now, and he was to call her that. And so he had, because his pa was the best in the village, and he would have done anything to make him happy.

On Saturday, with no school and the schoolmaster ill with a chest, Roddy slipped away while his mum was having her usual late breakfast, took the fishing pole from the shed, and went off to the river.

The Dee here was within walking distance of the farm, and Roddy found himself thinking about his pa and fishing. He’d gone with his father a few times and still had a vague memory of what to do with the pole, once the hook was affixed to the line and a worm was put on it. He’d surreptitiously dug some worms out of the kitchen garden last night and put them into a tin. Most had crawled out, but there were still three left.

Whistling now, he could glimpse the river shining in the noon sun beyond the line of trees, and he told himself his father would be happy if he could see how tall his son had grown, and only twelve. And off to fish at last.

The sun was warm, but under the trees—their bare branches crossing over his head like the bones of wood holding up the church roof—the air was cooler. Or perhaps it was the water—he could hear it and smell it now. He came out onto the bank, stiff with the dried grasses of winter, and stood looking down at the drifting current. Too steep here to fish, he thought, and moved downstream a little, beyond the Telford Aqueduct soaring high above the valley. Everyone knew the Aqueduct, but unlike the Roman ones he’d read about in school, which were intended to carry drinking water, it bridged the wide gap between two cliffs, and made it possible for the narrowboats traveling along the canal up there to float right across from one side to the other. He’d heard the horses that pulled the narrowboats, the hollow sound their hooves made as they stepped out onto the path that ran beside the trough of water. It echoed, on a quiet day. He’d been afraid the first time he’d heard it, but his pa had told him about the horses, and once had even taken him up there to see the long boats and the ducks too. He barely remembered it now, that trip, but his father had bought him an ice and told him not to tell Mum.

Ahead was a lower spot on the bank, and Roddy moved quickly toward it, eager to try out the pole and catch his fish. He didn’t notice what was in the water, not at first. He wasn’t interested in the river, only the pole.

After two attempts he got the line on the pole, tied the hook to the end, then pushed the wriggling worm onto the hook. On his first try at casting, he caught the bush behind him, untangled the line finally, and tried again. This time he managed better, and the hook actually sailed out over the water and sank into the sunny depths.

Smiling, he wiggled the pole a little, felt it catch, and burst out laughing. He’d caught a fish, first thing! What would his pa think of that?

But when he tried to pull the line in, it wouldn’t come, and as he pulled harder, he saw something move in the water, just below the surface. From where he stood, it appeared to be a rock or even a tangle of roots.

Whatever it was, it bobbed a little as he went on pulling, harder now, desperate to save his only hook, then it suddenly came free from whatever was holding it down.

And as it did, a face rose slowly out of the water. A face unlike any other he’d ever seen, white and torn and no longer human. Like something the water had taken and hadn’t ever wanted to give back. The lump of whatever was attached to it rolled a little again, making the head move as well, and for an instant Roddy thought it was coming directly out of the water at him. He screamed as he dropped the pole and ran.

But no one on the narrowboat crossing high above his head heard him.

 

 

2


Chief Superintendent Markham was in a fine mood. He had been congratulated twice on the successful conclusion of a rather nasty murder inquiry in Norfolk—once by the Home Office, and again in an article in the Times.

Inspector Carlton had brought in the killer, covering himself with glory as well as the Yard, and he was currently basking in the Chief Superintendent’s smile.

Inspector Rutledge, on the other hand, was still in his office, buried in paperwork. His last inquiry had stirred up a mare’s nest, and Markham was apparently still smarting from that, because he’d seen to it for several weeks that Rutledge wasn’t given a new assignment.

Rutledge had not complained—much to Markham’s annoyance, according to Sergeant Gibson.

When the Chief Constable in a northern Welsh county asked the Yard to take charge of an inquiry into the death of a man found in the River Dee, Markham summoned Rutledge to his office, brusquely told him what was required of him, and said, “Sergeant Gibson will see that someone takes over the reports you were reviewing.” He passed the file across the desk, nodded, and began to read another report already open on the green blotter. The air was chill with Markham’s dislike.

Rutledge extricated himself from the office as smoothly as he could, collected what he needed from his own room, and informed Sergeant Gibson of the status of the reports on his desk.

Gibson grimaced. “Does this mean you’re back in his lordship’s good graces?”

“I doubt it. Northern Wales is rather like being sent to Coventry—out of sight and out of mind.”

Gibson nodded. “There’s that.”

It was a Monday morning, overcast, cold. As he walked out of the Yard to his motorcar, Rutledge could smell the Thames, fetid with the receding tide. At his flat, he packed a valise, left a note for the daily, and then headed west through dreary outskirts and a succession of small towns before he reached open countryside.

By that time he was no longer able to ignore the voice coming from the rear seat.

It wasn’t there, that voice. He knew it as clearly as he could see the ruts in the road unwinding ahead of the motorcar’s bonnet. Corporal Hamish MacLeod was buried in the black mud of Flanders, and Rutledge had once stood by that grave and contemplated his own mortality.

It was the manner of Hamish’s death that haunted him, and the guilt of that had turned into denial. By the end of the war he had brought Hamish home to England in the only way possible, knowing he was dead, but unable to free himself of the voice that had stayed with him in the trenches from the Battle of the Somme to the Armistice. It had followed him relentlessly, sometimes bitter, sometimes angry, and sometimes, for a mercy, even bearable. But always there. And with it, the memories of the war.

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