Read A Lonely Death for Free Online Page B

see that Walker, whose quiet village must seldom produce violence of any kind, had been appalled by the brutality of Jeffers’s death.
    “Dr. Gooding had brought a blanket, and we wrapped the body in it and I helped to set it in the cart. I drove back with Mr. Black, and the doctor took the body to his surgery. Mr. Black gave me his statement, and I found that Mrs. Sanders, across from the hotel, had spent a restless night and had seen the goods van come down the street just when Mr. Black had said it came, and it was very likely that his statement of finding the body when he did was true. I went back to the scene later and still found nothing that would tell me who or why murder had been committed.”
    Walker paused. Rutledge thought that if the constable had been in his own office he would have got to his feet and begun to pace. There was more on his mind than the death, and Rutledge waited patiently to hear the rest of the story.
    “Dr. Gooding came to see me at half past ten,” Walker went on reluctantly. “He asked me to come with him to the surgery. I found that he’d removed the victim’s clothing, and it was obvious that he had been garroted, although neither Dr. Gooding nor I had ever seen a case before. But that was not what he wanted me to see. He had probed the mouth of the victim and found that inside it, almost dried to his tongue, was an identity disc.”
    Rutledge turned to stare at him. “From the war?” he asked in surprise.
    “Yes, sir. From the war. I recognized it. But it wasn’t Mr. Jeffers’s disc, if he ever had one. There was another name on it. One I didn’t know—” He reached into his pocket and brought out an oiled cloth, setting it on the low table in front of the hearth before unwrapping it.
    Inside were three flat fiberboard discs. In the war, both the Army and soldiers themselves had come up with ways to identify the dead and wounded, but none of them had been successful enough to see widespread use. Some men had simply sewn their names in their uniforms, a time-honored method. A variety of discs had been introduced as well, some on string, some on thin rope. These particular discs had an interesting history.
    Stamped from thin layers of compressed wood fibers, they came in pairs and were worn around the neck on a thin length of rope. If a man was killed, one of the discs was placed in his mouth for the burial detail to use in marking his grave. The other of the pair was collected and sent back with his kit, eventually ending up with his family.
    But the war had been over for nearly two years. Why would such a disc be placed in the mouth of a murder victim?
    Hamish, who had been quiet for a time, said quite clearly, “Revenge.”
    Rutledge suppressed a start, for it seemed that the soft Scots voice had echoed around the room, obvious to everyone. But when neither of the other men responded to it, he said after a moment, “There are three discs here.”
    “One was also found in the mouth of Jimmy Roper, who was sitting with a cow suffering from colic when he was killed. There was no one else in the barn, no sign of forced entry, and no one in the house—Roper’s father or the maid who kept house and cooked for the two men—had heard anything,” Pierce answered. “As for my son, he was discovered on the ground floor of the brewery, just by the stairs. Dr. Gooding examined his mouth there and then, and found the third one.” Rutledge could hear the undercurrent of rage in the quiet voice.
    Rutledge looked closely at the names on the discs. One belonged to a corporal in a Yorkshire regiment, the second to a Welsh sapper, and the third to a private from Cheshire. Turning to Pierce, he asked, “Was your son an officer?”
    “Yes, of course.”
    “Officers weren’t issued identity discs,” he pointed out. “I wonder if these men survived the war?” He shook his head. “Three different regiments. What could these three soldiers have had in common with three men living