As he opened a drawer stuffed full of letters and began to sort through them, Rutledge groaned inwardly, thinking it would take most of the day to find anything.
But haphazard as the man’s system might appear to anyone else, he quickly found the packet of letters he was looking for, took them out, and began to thumb through them. Near the end, he pulled one out.
“Yes, here it is. Banner. He took over when the owner retired and added his name to the sign. Llangollen.” He looked up. “That’s in Wales. Do you know it?”
Rutledge had in fact passed through it. And it sat on the River Dee not far from the village where Roddy had caught the body with his fishhook. “Yes.”
He showed Rutledge the letterhead. It read BANNER and beneath it was the direction: 113 High Street.
Rutledge thanked him for his help and promised to give Banner the man’s regards, then left the shop.
He drove back the way he’d come, through flat farm country that spread out before him, fallow fields already plowed and waiting to be sown. After crossing the border into Wales, the land began to roll more as Rutledge neared Llangollen.
It was a prosperous but hilly town, and after he’d found a place to leave his motorcar, he walked uphill toward the center. He found 113 with no difficulty, and looked at the window on the street. There was a tasteful display of shirts and ties, an array of shoes, and several bolts of cloth. Stepping through the door, he saw that Banner must have prospered, because one side of the shop held haberdashery goods, while the other was clearly for tailoring.
A young assistant came out to greet him, and Rutledge asked to speak to the owner. He was led to an office no larger than the one in Chester, filled to the ceiling with files and bits of cloth in every color and of every quality.
Banner was seated at the desk in the center of the room but made to rise as his assistant spoke to him.
He was fair, with a ruddy complexion and light blue eyes. As he rose, Rutledge realized that he had a club foot. He came forward, limping but smiling, and asked, “Good afternoon. How may I help you, sir?”
Rutledge glanced toward the assistant, and Banner said quietly, “I think you might have a look at that new bolt of tweed. I’m not sure it’s up to our standards.”
The assistant left, and Banner turned expectantly toward Rutledge.
He held out his identification and explained what had brought him to the shop.
Banner frowned. “I’ve many clients who ask for custom-made shirts.”
Rutledge described the dead man and the shirt that he’d been wearing. “And it had a label in the collar with your name on it. At a guess, the shirt was made in the last year or so. There was very little wear.”
“Yes, that’s very likely my work. But I’m afraid it doesn’t help me find a name for you. We’ve served a fair number of Bantams, you see. That description could fit half of them.”
He opened his notebook and showed Banner the sketch he’d made. “A needle. Have you always used that? Or is it recent?”
His eyebrows rising, Banner said, “I use no mark. Just my name.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “But I did put that symbol in the label of a shirt. Once. It was during the war, the man’s wife wished to have new shirts and a suit of clothes made up for her husband as a surprise when he came home from France. She told me he’d broadened out in the Army, and she had his new measurements. She wanted him to know everything was bespoke.” He smiled deprecatingly at the memory. “She was rather pretty, reminded me of my late wife. I saw no harm in giving her a mark.”
“Then you must know who she is,” Rutledge persisted.
“Indeed.” He opened another drawer, sorted through some papers there, and brought out a folded sheet. “I was hoping to do more business with her.” He opened it, glanced at it, then passed the sheet to Rutledge.
“And did you?” he asked as he read the name written there in elegant copperplate script. Mrs. Ruth Milford. The Mill. Crowley. Shropshire. The date of purchase was there as well. Looking up at Banner, he said, “That’s rather a long way to come for a tailor. How did she discover you?”
“Sadly, no.” Banner shrugged. “I never saw her again. I believe she told me she was in Llangollen visiting a friend. I expect that’s how she found me.”
“Do you know her name, this friend?”
“I never met him.”
“Him?”
“I saw him once, he was waiting outside to carry her purchases. He was an officer. That’s all I recall.”
“He wasn’t her husband?”
“Not if the measurements she provided me were those of her husband. He was quite short. This man was a good ten inches or so taller.”
4
Walking back to his motorcar, Rutledge considered what Banner had told him. Who was the other man? A relative? If he was willing to wait outside the tailor’s shop, he could be a friend. Or a lover. And what had brought Ruth Milford to Llangollen, if she lived in Shropshire? The village where the dead man had been found was only a handful of miles away from Llangollen, just a little farther down the River Dee . . . Was he her husband? Finally wearing a shirt she had ordered for him years earlier?
What was the connection with Wales? It had to be more than coincidence.
He consulted his watch. If he left straightaway for Shropshire, he could be out of the worst of the Welsh hills by dusk, then find somewhere to stay the night.
Taking a map from the pocket in the driver’s door, he spread it out across the bonnet and looked at the roads.
The village where Mrs. Milford lived was, in a way, familiar ground, for the Long Mynd and the Stiperstones were fairly close by. He’d never been there, but he knew where they were and what they were. The Long Mynd was a great gash between two ridges, popular with hikers, and the Stiperstones were a strange jagged rock formation jutting from the ground and said to be haunted by the Devil.
Satisfied that he knew his way, he folded the map again and put it back in the pocket.
It took him ten minutes to find a shop where he could order sandwiches and fill his Thermos with tea, then he set out.
The flat countryside had vanished, and the roads seemed to have been designed to thwart any driver intent on making good time. They twisted and turned with the land, were interrupted by crossroads without fingerposts, and twice he made the wrong choice and had to turn back. He was still north of Oswestry when at last he found an inn for the night.
Late the next morning he was held up short of Shrewsbury by a puncture in a tire. A hole in the roadway, masked by rainwater, was deeper than it appeared. The miracle, he told himself after swearing at the delay, was that it hadn’t happened in the desolate hills in Wales. But by the time he’d found a garage and the mechanic had found a replacement for his tire, he’d lost most of the day.
And so it was well after dusk when he reached the outskirts of Crowley. It was, he realized, hardly more than a hamlet. Lamps were already lit in the windows of several farmhouses along the road, and then it turned slightly, and he found himself among a dozen or more small houses. They were more the size of cottages, in fact, only a handful boasting an upper story. There were no names on any of them, and instead of being clustered around a village church or green, these were strung out on the road. In fact, there was no church, nor a green. And although he drove through twice, carefully searching, there wasn’t a cottage called The Mill. What’s more, in this failing light, he couldn’t see a pond or a stream that would support a waterwheel.