A Test of Wills (12 page)

“Which woman?” Rutledge asked, getting into the car. “Or haven’t you made up your mind? The witch? The painter? Or the widow?”

Hamish growled softly. “Oh, aye, I’ve made up my mind. It’s you that won’t see where the wind’s blowing. You’re the wrong man for this murder, and if you had any wit left, you’d drive straight to London and ask to be relieved!”

“I can’t—if I quit now, you’ll have won. I’ve got to see it through or put a pistol to my head.”

“But you know what will happen if you drag that poor sod, Hickam, into court. They’ll crucify him, and you along with him. Because the women will protect yon fine Captain, mark my words! And there’s no one left to protect you.”

Turning out of the gates, Rutledge said between his teeth, “When I’ve finished, there won’t be any need to drag Hickam anywhere. I’ll have other proof.”

Hamish’s derisive laughter followed him the rest of the way back to Upper Streetham.

Bowles had called from Scotland Yard.

When Rutledge rang him back, Bowles said, “You’ve had two days, what’s happened?”

“We’re holding the Inquest tomorrow. And it will be adjourned. I need more time,” he answered, trying to keep the tenseness, the uncertainty out of his voice.

There was an appreciative silence at the other end of the line, and then Bowles asked, “I’m being pushed for results myself, you know; I can’t put them off with ‘Rutledge needs more time.’ What kind of progress have you made?”

“We’ve found the shotgun. At least, I think we have. The owner has witnesses that place him elsewhere at the time of the murder, but the general consensus is, he’s got the best motive for killing the Colonel. The problem is, I don’t see what it achieved—why now? This feud between them is of long standing. Why not twenty years ago, when it all started? But the man’s house is unlocked, it’s isolated, and anyone who knew about the shotgun could have walked in and taken it. And several people did know. It would have been a simple matter to put it back afterward. I’m presently exploring who had the best opportunity.”

“Not Captain Wilton, I do hope?”

Rutledge answered reluctantly. “Among others, yes.”

“The Palace will have a collective stroke if word of that leaks out. For God’s sake, say nothing until you’re absolutely sure!”

“Which is why I need more time,” Rutledge pointed out reasonably. “Can we afford to make a mistake? Either way?”

“Very well. But keep me informed, will you? I’ve got people breathing down my neck. I can go out on a limb for you at the moment, but we’ll need something soon or heads may start to roll. Mine among them!”

“Yes, I understand. I’ll call you on Monday morning. At the latest.”

He waited, let the silence drag on, but Bowles had finished and cut the connection.

Rutledge hung up, unable to see the pleased smile at the other end of the line as Bowles replaced the receiver. The situation in Warwickshire, in Bowles’s opinion, was progressing exactly as he had planned.

Still turning their conversation over in his mind, Rutledge told himself that the exchange had gone well enough. The Yard wanted answers, yes, but it was also prepared to accept his judgment in the field rather than forcing him into hasty decisions. A sign that nothing had been held back intentionally?

Badly needed encouragement, then, whether the Yard realized it or not—he should feel only a sense of relief.

But Hamish, who had a knack for cutting to the heart of Rutledge’s moods, asked softly, “Why hasn’t he asked about Hickam, then?”

Stopping by Warren’s surgery as he walked toward the Inn, Rutledge asked the housekeeper for a report on Hickam.

“He’s still alive, if that’s any help. But he just lays there, for all the world a dead man. Do you want to know what I think?” She gave him a penetrating look. “He’s gone away, so far back into that mad war he came from that he can’t find his way home again. While he’s there on the bed, not moving, not seeing, not hearing, I keep wondering what’s happening inside his head. Where we can’t follow him.”

“God only knows,” Rutledge answered her, not wanting to think about it.

She frowned. “Do you suppose he’s afraid? I watched him on the street sometimes, and saw the anger in him, and the strangeness that unsettled everybody—well, of course it was unsettling, we didn’t know what to do about it, whether to ignore him or shout at him or lock him up! But when he was sober I saw the fear too, and that worried me. I’d not like to think that wherever he’s gone, he’s taken the fear with him, as well as the horrors of the war. When he can’t move, he can’t run from it.”

Rutledge considered her. “I don’t know,” he told her honestly. “You’re probably the only person in the town who cares.”

“I’ve seen too much suffering in my life not to recognize it, even in a drunkard,” she said. “And that man suffered. Whatever he did in the war, good or evil, he’s paid for it every hour since. You’ll remember that, won’t you, when and if you can talk to him? I don’t suppose you were in the war, but pity is something even a policeman ought to understand. And like him or not, that man deserves pity.”

She grasped the door firmly, ready to shut it, her face suddenly still as if she regretted offering opinions to a stranger. “Call again after dinner, if you want. I don’t expect he’ll come around before then, if he comes around at all.” Her voice was crisp again, businesslike. “It won’t do any good to try before that, mind!” She closed the door, leaving him standing there on the pavement.

Hamish, stirring again, said, “If he dies, and it’s proved you gave him the money that brought him to his grave, a man with your past, what do you suppose they’ll do to you?”

“It will be the end of my career. If not worse.”

Hamish chuckled, a cold, bitter sound. “But no firing squad. You remember those, now, don’t you? The Army’s way of doing things. A cold gray dawn before the sun rises, because no man wants to see a shameful death. That bleak hour of morning when the soul shrivels inside you and the heart has no courage and the body shrinks with terror. You remember those, don’t you! A pity. I’d thought to remind you….”

But Rutledge was striding toward the Inn, head down, nearly blundering into a bicycle, ignoring the woman who hastily moved out of his path and the voice of someone saying his name. The world had narrowed down to the agony that drove him and the memories that devoured him. Back in France, back to the final horror, the disintegration of all he had been and might be, in the face of blazing guns.

The machine gunner was still there, and the main assault was set for dawn. He had to be stopped before then. Rutledge sent his men across again, calling to them as he ran, and watched them fall, his sergeant the first to go down, watched the remnants turn and stagger back to their lines through the darkness, cursing savagely, eyes wild with pain and fury.

“It’s no’ the dying, it’s the waste!” Corporal MacLeod screamed at him, leaping back into the trench, faces turning his way. “If they want it taken out so badly, let them shell it!”

Rutledge, pistol in hand, shouted, “If we don’t silence it, hundreds of men will die—it’s our lot coming, we can’t let them walk into that!”

“I won’t go back—you can shoot me here, I won’t go back! I won’t take another man across that line, never again, as God’s my witness!”

“I tell you, there’s no choice!” He looked at the mutiny in the wild eyes surrounding him, looked at the desolation of spirit in weary, stooped shoulders, and forced himself to ruthless anger: “There’s never a choice!”

“Aye, man, there’s a choice.” The Corporal turned and pointed to the dead and dying, caught in a no-man’s-land between the gunner and the lines. “But that’s cold-blooded murder, and I’ll no’ be a part of it again. Never again!”

He was tall and thin and very young, burned out by the fighting, battered and torn by too many offenses and too many retreats, by blood and terror and fear, tormented by a strong Calvinistic sense of right and wrong that somehow survived through it all. It wasn’t courage he lacked; Rutledge knew him too well to think him a coward. He had quite simply broken—but others had seen it. There was nothing Rutledge could do for him now, too many lives were at stake to let one more stand in the way. Grief vied with anger, and neither won.

He’d had Hamish MacLeod arrested on the spot, and then he’d led the last charge out into the icy, slippery mud, challenging them to let him do it alone, and they’d followed in a straggle, and somehow the gun had been silenced, and there was nothing left afterward but to see to the firing party. Then he’d sat with Hamish throughout what was left of that long night, listening to the wind blowing snow against the huts they’d somehow rigged in the trenches. Listening to Hamish talk.

A hideously long night. It had left him drained beyond exhaustion, and at the end of it he’d said, “I’ll give you a second chance—go out there and tell them you were wrong!”

And Hamish had shaken his head, eyes dark with fear but steadfast. “No. I haven’t got any strength left. End it while I’m still a man. For God’s sake, end it now!”

The shelling had started down the line when Rutledge summoned six men to form the firing party. It rocked the earth, shook men to their souls, pounding through the brain with a storm of sound until there was no thought left. He’d had to shout, had to drag them, reluctant, unwilling, through the falling snow, had to position them, and will them to do his bidding. And then he’d gone to fetch Hamish.

One last time, he’d said, “It isn’t too late, man!”

And Hamish had smiled. “Is it my death you’re fearing, then? I don’t see why; they’ll all die before this day’s out! What’s one more bloody corpse on your soul? Or do you worry I’ll haunt you? Is it that?”

“Damn you! Do your duty—rejoin your men. The Sergeant’s dead, they’ll need you, the push will come in less than an hour!”

“But without me. I’d rather die now than go out there ever again!” He shivered, shrugging deeper into his greatcoat.

It was the darkness that blinded them, and the snow. But dawn would come soon enough, and Rutledge had no choice, the example had to be made. One way or another. He took Hamish’s arm and led him up the slick, creaking steps and to the narrow, level place where men gathered before an assault.

“Do you want a blindfold?” He had had to bring his mouth to Hamish’s ear to be heard. He was shaking with cold, they both were.

“No. And for the love of God, untie me!”

Rutledge hesitated, then did as he asked.

There was a rumble of voices, strangely audible below the deafness of the shelling. Watchers he couldn’t see, somewhere behind the firing party. The six men didn’t look around, standing close together for comfort. Rutledge fumbled in his pocket and found an envelope to mark the center of Hamish’s breast, moving by rote, not thinking at all. He pinned it to the man’s coat, looked into those steady eyes a last time, then stepped away.

He could hear Hamish praying, breathless words, and then a girl’s name. Rutledge raised his hand, dropped it sharply. There was an instant in which he thought the men wouldn’t obey him, relief leaping fiercely through him, and then the guns blazed, too bright in the darkness and the snow. He turned, looked for Hamish. For a moment he could see nothing. And then he found the dark, huddled body. He was on the ground.

Rutledge reached him in two swift strides, barely aware of the shifting of the noises around him. The firing party had melted away quickly, awkward and ashamed. Kneeling, he could see that in spite of the white square on the man’s breast, the shots had not entirely found their mark. Hamish was bleeding heavily, and still alive. Blood leaked from his mouth as he tried to speak, eyes dark pools in his white, strained face, agony written in the depths, begging.

The shelling was coming closer—no, the Germans were responding, rapidly shifting their range, some falling short. But Rutledge knelt there in the dirty snow, trying to find the words to ask forgiveness. Hamish’s hand clutched at his arm, a death grip, and the eyes begged, without mercy for either of them.

Rutledge drew his pistol, placed it at Hamish’s temple, and he could have sworn that the grimacing lips tried to smile. The fallen man never spoke, and yet inside Rutledge’s skull Hamish was screaming, “End it! For pity’s sake!”

The pistol roared, the smell of the powder and blood enveloping Rutledge. The pleading eyes widened and then went dark, still, empty. Accusing.

And the next German shell exploded in a torrent of heat and light, searing his sight before the thick, viscous, unspeakable mud rose up like a tidal wave to engulf him.

Rutledge’s last coherent thought as he was swallowed into black, smothering eternity was, “Direct hit—Oh, God, if only—a little sooner—it would have been over for both of us—”

And afterward—afterward, London had given him a bloody medal—

10

It was an hour or more later that Rutledge walked down the stairs to the dining room for his lunch. He wasn’t sure how he had reached the Inn, how he’d made it to his room, whom he might have encountered on the way. It had been the worst flash of memory he’d suffered since he left the hospital, and it had unnerved him, shaken his fragile grip on stability. But as the doctor had promised him, in the end it had passed, leaving him very tired, very empty.

Bracing himself as he opened the French doors, he was prepared for Redfern to comment, or worse still, for the other diners to stare at him in speculation and disgust. But the room was nearly empty, and Redfern had a tight, inward look about his eyes. The limp was more pronounced as he came to take Rutledge’s order, and he leaned against the table.

“Been on it too much,” he said, aware of Rutledge’s perception. Then he shrugged. “It’s the stairs that are the worst. The doctors say it will pass in time.”

But he sounded dejected, as if he had stopped believing in them.

Rutledge spent what was left of the afternoon talking to Inspector Forrest in his office about the names in his notebook. It was better than being alone, better than letting Hamish reach him again too soon, and it was a way of thinking aloud that might lead to something that the local man knew and he didn’t. An idle hope, he realized, when he’d finished and Forrest sat there in silence, reflectively scratching his chin and staring at the ceiling as if half expecting to find an answer written there.

“What do you think?” Rutledge repeated, trying to keep his impatience out of his voice.

“None of them is likely to be your murderer,” Forrest said, unwittingly emphasizing your as if setting himself apart from the whole business. “Take Miss Wood, for a start. I’ve never seen a cross word pass between her and the Colonel, no, nor ever heard of one. And he’d have given her whatever she wanted; there’d be no need for trouble over it.”

“What if she wanted what he couldn’t give her?”

Forrest laughed. “And what would that be? I can’t think of a thing she didn’t already have! She’s a lovely girl, nothing mean or selfish or strong-headed about her.”

“Well, then, Wilton?”

“He was marrying the girl. The surest way to lose her would be doing a harm to the Colonel, much less killing him. Here, just before the wedding? It would be insanity! And what if they did argue the night before the murder? What if it is true? You can’t make much out of that—not enough for murder, if you ask me! Not without more evidence than we’ve got.”

“Then why won’t Wilton come straight out with the truth and tell me what caused the quarrel?”

Forrest shrugged. “It could be something that happened in France, something only the two of them know about. Maybe something that Captain Wilton thinks the Colonel wouldn’t want known, even after his death. A personal matter.”

“Yes, that’s what he said,” Rutledge replied, and got up to pace, unable to sit still while he talked. “But we don’t know, do we, and as long as we don’t, I intend to keep the quarrel in mind. Mrs. Davenant?”

“A very well respected lady. She wouldn’t be very likely to have a hand in murder. And what reason could she have for it anyway?”

“I don’t know. Was she ever in love with the Colonel? Or with Wilton?”

“There’s never been a hint of gossip. If she was in love with anyone but her husband, she kept it to herself. And somehow I can’t picture her stalking the Colonel with a loaded shotgun in her hand. If she was jealous of Lettice Wood, killing the Colonel wouldn’t help her any.”

“Unless the Captain—or Lettice Wood—was blamed for it.”

“If the Captain’s blamed for it, she’s going to lose him to the hangman, isn’t she? And I can’t see how she’d put the blame onto Miss Wood. Besides, if there was any real threat to Miss Wood, I can see Wilton stepping in and saying it was his doing, the Colonel’s death—to protect the girl. And Mrs. Davenant ought to know that as well as I do. It would be a risk, wouldn’t it? One she’d have to consider.”

“And Catherine Tarrant?”

Forrest was suddenly wary. “What’s she got to do with this, then?”

“I know about the German. Linden. She wanted to marry him, and she wanted Harris to clear the way for them. Instead, Linden was taken away and he died. Women have killed for less, and what she felt for Linden wasn’t a girl’s infatuation, it was passionate and real.”

“You’re on the wrong track! Miss Tarrant might have wanted somebody else to suffer too, once she found out what had happened to the German—she was that upset. Yes, I’ll grant you that much. But you don’t bide your time, you don’t wait for a year or two, not when you feel the way she did then! You come in a rage for revenge, hot and furious.”

“Then you think she’s capable of seeking revenge?”

Forrest flushed. “Don’t put words into my mouth where Catherine Tarrant is concerned! I said she was that hurt, she might have done something foolish straightaway, out of sheer mad grief and shock. But not murder.”

Rutledge studied him. “You like her, don’t you? You don’t want to think of her as a killer.”

Forrest answered stiffly, “I’ve always been fond of the girl, there’s nothing wrong in that. And you don’t know how people in Upper Streetham shunned her when they found out about her and the German. Treated her like dirt, the lot of them. My wife among them. As if she’d done something unforgivable.”

“How did they find out? About Linden?”

“I never did learn how. But I had my suspicions. She tried to move heaven and earth to find out where they’d sent the German, and people started to talk. Gossip, speculation, but nothing anybody could pin the truth on. So I think Carfield was to blame—he was in Warwick when she came back from London on the train, and he offered to drive her home. She was half sick with grief—she may have blurted out the whole story without thinking. And he’s one to pry, he could have gotten around her. At any rate he made some pious remarks on the next Sunday about loving our enemies and healing the wounds of war, just when the reality of the war was coming home to all of us, the cripples and the wounded—and the dead. And the next thing I knew, the story was racing all over Upper Streetham that Catherine had been expecting to marry the prisoner, only he’d died. That there had been something between them. That she’d even slept with him. And the damage was done.”

“I’ve heard Carfield was courting Lettice Wood.”

“Oh, yes, indeed. He’d have liked to marry the Colonel’s ward—but how much he cared for Miss Wood is anybody’s guess. There are those would say it was little enough, that he isn’t capable of loving anybody but himself. And it’s true, I’ve never seen a man so set on his own comfort.” His mouth turned down in distaste. “All right, he’s a man of God, but I don’t like him, I never have.”

“Royston? What do you know about him?”

“A good man. Hardworking, reliable. There was a time when he sowed his share of wild oats, his place at Mallows going to his head a bit, and he was one for the girls too. But he settled down and got on with his life soon enough.” Forrest smiled. “Well, we’re none of us free of that charge.”

“Nothing between him and the Colonel that you know about, which might have led to murder?”

“I can’t think of any reason for Mr. Royston to shoot anybody.”

“He hasn’t married?”

“He’s married to Mallows, you might say. There was a girl years back. When he was about twenty-six or-seven. Alice Netherby, a Lower Streetham lass, pretty as they come and sweet with it, but frail. She died of consumption and that was that. He’s always gotten on very well with Catherine Tarrant, but he’s not her sort, if you know what I mean. A countryman. And she’s a lady. A famous artist. I’ve a cousin, living in London. He says her work’s all the rage.”

“Which brings us back to Mavers, doesn’t it?”

“Aye,” Forrest answered with regret. “And it doesn’t seem very likely that we’ll prove anything against him, worst luck!”

The interview with Forrest left Rutledge feeling dissatisfied, a mood reinforced by an encounter with Mavers on his way back to the Inn.

“You don’t look like a successful man,” Mavers said, his goat’s eyes gleaming with maliciousness. “You’ve got my shotgun, but you haven’t got me. And you won’t, mark my words. I’ve got witnesses, as many as you like.”

“So you keep reminding me,” Rutledge said, taking his own malicious pleasure in the sight of Mavers’s swollen nose. “I wonder why?”

“Because I enjoy seeing the oppressors of the masses oppressed in their turn. And you might say that I have an interest in this business—a professional interest, you could even call it.”

Rutledge studied him. “You enjoy trouble, that’s all.”

“The fact is, I like to think I can take some of the credit for the Colonel’s death. That all those hours of standing in the market square speaking out against the landlords and capitalists—while those village fools reviled me—weren’t wasted. Who knows, I might have put the idea into some mind, the first glimmer of the Rising to come, and the salvation of the masses from the tyranny of the few.” He cocked his head, considering the possibility. “Aye, who knows? It might just have its roots in my words, the Colonel’s killing!”

“Which makes you an accessory, I think?”

“But it won’t stand up in a court of law, will it? I bid you a good day—but I hope you won’t be having one!” He started to walk off, pleased with himself.

Rutledge stopped him. “Mavers. You said something the other day. About your pension. Is that how you live? A pension?”

Mavers turned around. “Aye. The wages of guilt, that’s all it is.”

“And who pays you?”

The grin widened. “That’s for me to know and you to discover. If you can. You’re the man from London, sent here to set us all straight.”

There was a little dogcart standing in the road outside the Inn when Rutledge strode up the steps, and Redfern came to meet him in the hall, hastily wiping his hands on a towel. “Miss Sommers, sir. I’ve put her in the back parlor. Second door beyond the stairs.”

“Has she been here long?”

“Not above half an hour, sir. I brought her tea when she said she’d wait awhile.”

Rutledge went down the passage to the small back parlor and opened the door.

It was a pleasant room, paneled walls and drapes faded to mellow rose at the long windows. There was a writing desk in one corner, several chairs covered in shades of rose and green, and a small tea cart on wheels.

Helena Sommers stood, back straight, at one of the windows, which overlooked a tiny herb garden busy with bees. She turned at the sound of someone at the door and said, “Hallo. Maggie told me you wanted to see me. Strangers at the house make her uncomfortable, so I thought it best to come into town.”

Rutledge waited until she sat down in one of the chairs and then took another across from her.

“It’s about Captain Wilton. The morning you saw him from the ridge. The morning of the murder.”

“Yes, of course.”

“What was he carrying?”

“Carrying?” She seemed perplexed.

“A rucksack. A stick. Anything.”

Helena frowned, thinking back. “He had his walking stick. Well, he always does, and that morning was no different from the other times I’ve glimpsed him.”

“Nothing else. You’re quite sure?”

“Should he have had something else?”

“We’re trying to be thorough, that’s all.”

She studied him. “You’re asking me, aren’t you, if the Captain carried a shotgun. Has your investigation narrowed down to him? Why on earth would he kill Colonel Harris? The Captain was marrying the Colonel’s ward!”

“Wilton was there, not a mile from the meadow, shortly before the murder. We have reason to think he wasn’t on the best of terms with Colonel Harris that morning.”

“And so the Captain marched up the hill hoping to run into Charles Harris, carrying a shotgun through the town with him, in the unlikely event he’d have an opportunity to use it? That’s absurd!”

Rutledge was very tired. Hamish was growling restlessly at the back of his mind again.

“Why is it absurd?” he snapped. “Someone killed the Colonel, I assure you; we’ve got a body that’s quite dead and quite clearly murdered.”

“Yes, I understand that,” she said gently, seeming to understand too his frustration. “But why—necessarily—is the murderer someone in Upper Streetham? Colonel Harris served in a regiment on active duty. He was in France for five years, and we’ve no idea what went on in his life during the war—the people he met, the things that might have happened, the soldiers who died or were crippled because of his orders. If I wanted revenge—and expected to get away with it, of course!—I’d shoot the man on his home ground but not on mine. You can take a train to Warwick from anywhere in Britain, then walk to Upper Streetham.”

“Carrying a shotgun?”

She was momentarily at a loss, then rallied. “No, certainly not. Not out in the open. But people do have things they carry without arousing suspicion. A workman with his kit of tools. Salesmen with sample cases. Whatever. And you don’t wonder what’s inside, do you, when you see someone carrying something that belongs with him. You assume, don’t you, that it’s all aboveboard?”

Rutledge nodded grudgingly. She was right.

“I’m not suggesting that it happened this way. I’m merely pointing out that Mark Wilton needed a very powerful reason to kill his fiancée’s guardian, practically on the eve of their wedding.

And he had heard Lettice, only hours ago, putting off the marriage. Because she was in mourning.

It made sense, what Helena Sommers had said. And it gave him a very sound excuse for ignoring Hickam’s statement. But her argument also left him with the whole of England to choose from, and nothing to go on in the way of motive or evidence. Bowles would not be happy over that!

Helena seemed to appreciate his dilemma. She said ruefully, “I’m sorry. I have no business interjecting my views. I’m an outsider here, I don’t know any of these people very well. But I have met them, and I’d hate to think one of them is a murderer. ‘Not someone I know, surely!’ You must have heard that often enough!”

He had. But he answered, “I suppose it’s human nature.”