A Test of Wills (14 page)

But that didn’t work, did it? If Harris had been in the lane speaking to Wilton, he must have been returning to Mallows, not starting out on his ride! And why hadn’t Lettice chosen to go riding with her guardian that morning? Why had she said, with such pain, “I didn’t go riding with him,” as if in her mind this time had been somehow different?

He walked on, following the contour of the land, using his sense of direction to lead him toward the house. In the distance he could see the chimneys of the cottage the two Sommers women had rented for the summer, and from one particular spot, the church steeple rising among the treetops, marking the village. Could you also see this part of Mallows’ land from the church tower? It was an interesting thought….

And farther along, the distant rooftops of Mallows itself, and the stables. What could be seen of the hillside from that vantage point?

Could you follow Colonel Harris’s progress and be certain of meeting him at one particular place? Or had the encounter been happenstance? No, because the killer had come armed, ready to kill….

Skirting the plowed fields where new growth was dark green and strong, he found the orchards, and the stile, and a shrub-bordered path. At a fork that divided into one path of hard-packed earth pointing in the direction of the stables and sheds, the other paved now and passing through a hedge to the landscaped grounds, he came first to the kitchen gardens, the herbs, the flowers for cutting, and then the formal beds that marked the lawns.

Sure of his way now, Rutledge strode around a hedge, badly startling a gardener on his knees in a patch of vegetables. The man scrambled to his feet, pulled off his cap, and stared. Rutledge smiled. “I’ve come to see Mr. Royston.”

“I—he’s not at home, sir, Mr. Royston isn’t, he hasn’t come back from the Inquest that I know.”

“Then I’ll go along to the house and wait. Thank you.” He nodded, and the gardener stood staring after him, perspiration unheeded running into the frown lines on his sun-red forehead.

Rutledge crossed the lawns to the drive and rang the bell, finding himself asking to see Lettice, not Laurence Royston.

12

To Rutledge’s surprise, Lettice Wood asked him to come up to the small sitting room and was waiting for him there in the sunlight from the windows.

“The Inquest is over, Miss Wood,” he said formally. “I haven’t any information to give you.”

“No, I can see that,” she told him quietly, gesturing for him to be seated. There was a large crystal bowl of flowers on the table. From Sally Davenant’s gardens? Or from Mallows’? Next to the severe black of her mourning the colors were richly bright, making her face all the paler. “Is it so hard a thing, to find a murderer?”

“Sometimes. When he—or she—doesn’t want to be found, and the trail is cold, as it were.” He sat down in the chair facing her, back to the window.

Her eyes were dark with pain. “Have you seen my—the Colonel’s body?”

Caught off guard, he said, “No. I haven’t.”

“Neither have I.” She stopped. “I read a story once, when I was a child. It was about medieval Norway or perhaps Scotland—an outlandish place, it sounded to me, where people didn’t behave as Englishmen did. There was a death in the village, and the chief couldn’t discover who’d killed the person. And so he ordered everyone who came to the funeral to walk past the bier where the body lay, and put their hand on the wound. Everyone did, and nothing happened. But the chief wasn’t satisfied, and then he found a man hiding under an overturned boat. He didn’t want to see or touch the dead, he was afraid of what might happen if he did. Afraid the wound would cry out and accuse him of a sin that had nothing to do with murder. And so he’d run away. I was too young to understand when I read the story. I thought the frightened man was wiser than the rest—not to want to touch the dead.” She had been toying with a small silver box she had taken up from the table beside her. Now she looked up at him. “But I wanted to go to Charles. Hold him—tell him again that I loved him—tell him good-bye. That’s when the doctor explained what had been done to him. And now I can’t bear the thought of it—I can’t bear to think of Charles at all, because when I do, I see a—a monster. You can’t imagine how guilty it makes me feel—how bereft of comfort of any kind.”

Rutledge remembered the first corpses he’d seen in France, obscene, smelling things, inhuman grotesques that haunted his dreams. Stiff, awkward, ugly—you couldn’t feel compassion for them, only disgust, and the dreadful fear that you’d turn out like them, carted off in the back of a truck, like boards.

“Death is seldom tidy,” he said after a moment. “Sometimes for the very old, perhaps. Nothing is finished by a murder, whatever the killer may expect.”

She shook her head. “Laurence Royston told me that he had killed a child once. Quite accidentally. She’d run in front of his motorcar, there was nothing he could do, it was over in an instant. But he still remembers it quite vividly, the faces of the parents, the grief, the small crumpled body. Two children, playing a game, and suddenly, death.” She smiled wryly at Rutledge. “It was meant to help me see that none of us is spared pain. Meant kindly. He’s a very kind man. But it was small comfort.” A bird began to sing in the trees beyond an open window. The sound was sweet, liquid, but oddly out of place as a background to a quiet discussion of death.

“Do you still wish to see Charles’s murderer hang?” He watched her face.

Lettice sighed and asked instead, “Do you truly believe Catherine Tarrant could have killed him?”

“I don’t know. The field is still wide. Catherine Tarrant? Mark Wilton? Or Mrs. Davenant. Royston. Hickam. Mavers.”

She made a dismissive gesture. “Then you’ve made no progress at all. You’re whistling in the dark.”

“You, then.” He couldn’t decide if the scent that wafted to him on the slight breeze coming in the window was her perfume or from the flowers.

“Me?”

Rutledge said only, “I must keep an open mind, Miss Wood.”

“If I were planning to kill anyone—for any reason—I would not have used a shotgun! Not in the face!”

“There are many ways to kill,” he said, thinking suddenly of Jean. “Cruelty will do very well.”

Her face flamed, as if he’d struck her. On her feet in an instant, she stood there poised to leave. “What are you talking about? No, I don’t want to hear it! Please—just leave, I’ve nothing more to say to you.” Her odd eyes were alight with defensive anger, giving her face a wild and passionate force. “Do what you came to do, and go back to London!”

“I’m sorry—that wasn’t what I intended to—” He found himself apologizing quickly, a hand out as if to stop her from ringing the bell for Johnston.

Hamish stirred. “She’ll enchant ye, wait and see! Go while you can!”

But Rutledge paid him no heed. “Look at this from my point of view,” he went on. “So far, the best evidence I can find leads me to Mark Wilton. I don’t want to make a mistake, I don’t want to arrest him now and then have to let him go for lack of proof. Can you see what that could do to his life? Or yours, if you marry him, now or later. Chances are, you knew Charles Harris as well if not better than anyone. The man, not the soldier, not the landowner, not the employer. Help me find the Colonel’s killer! If you loved him at all.”

She stared at him, still very angry. But she hadn’t rung the bell. Instead, she walked with that long graceful stride toward the window, swinging around, making him turn as well to see her. “What is it you want, then? For me to damn someone else?”

“No. Just to help me see that last evening as clearly as I can.”

“I wasn’t there when the quarrel began!”

“But you can judge what might have happened. If I ask the right questions.”

She didn’t answer him, and he made himself think clearly, made himself consider what might have happened.

Three women. Three men. Catherine Tarrant, Lettice Wood, Sally Davenant. Charles Harris, Mark Wilton, and a German called Linden. He hadn’t found a link that satisfied him. And yet there were ties between them, of love and hate. Linden was dead. Harris was dead. And if Hickam’s testimony in court was damning enough, Wilton would be hanged. The men gone. All three of them.

Which in a way brought him back again to Catherine Tarrant….

“Is it possible,” he began slowly, “that, whatever they may have discussed just after you went up to your room, your guardian and Captain Wilton argued that night over Miss Tarrant? That somehow the subject of Miss Tarrant—or Linden, for that matter—came up after they’d finished the discussion of the wedding?”

The defensive barrier was there again. She answered curtly, “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about! Why should they’ve argued about Catherine?”

“Could the Colonel have warned the Captain that Catherine Tarrant still felt strongly about Linden’s death and was likely to do something rash? To harm one of them? To spoil the wedding, perhaps? Could the Captain have refused to hear anything said against her? Defended her, and made Harris very angry with him?”

“If Charles had been worried, he would have said something to me. But he didn’t—”

“But you didn’t go riding with him that morning. There was no opportunity to tell you what was on his mind.”

She opened her mouth to say something, and decided against it. Instead, she replied, “You’re chasing straws!”

“A witness saw them together, still arguing, that morning shortly before the Colonel died. If they weren’t arguing over the wedding, then over what? Or over whom?”

With her back to the windows, her eyes shadowed by the halo of her dark hair, she said, “You’re the policeman, aren’t you?”

“Then what about Mrs. Davenant?”

“Sally? What on earth does she have to do with anything?”

“She’s very fond of her cousin. Your guardian might have worried about that. Or conversely, Mark Wilton might have been jealous of the place Harris held in your life—”

Lettice turned to the flowers in the vase, her fingers moving over them as if she were blind and depended on touch to know what varieties were there. “If Mark had wanted to marry Sally, he could have done it any time these last eight years. When he had leave during the war, she went to London to meet him. He’s fond of her, of course he is. He’s fond of Catherine Tarrant, as well. As for Charles, Mark knows how I feel—felt—about him.” She bit her lip. “No, feel. I won’t put it in the past tense, as if everything stopped with his death! As if you stop caring, stop giving someone a place in your life. I want him back again, so desperately I ache with it. And yet I’m afraid to think about him—I can only see that awful, terrible thing—”

She lifted her head, forced back the tears. “Do you dream of the corpses you’ve seen?”

Taken aback, he said before he thought, “Sometimes.”

“I dreamed about my parents after they died. But I was too young to know what death was. I saw them as shining angels floating about heaven and watching me to see if I was good. In fact, the first time I saw the Venus above the hall here at Mallows, I thought it was my mother. It was a great comfort, oddly enough.” After a moment she said in a different voice, “You’ll have to chase your straws without me. I’m sorry. There’s nothing else I can do.”

This time he knew he had to go. He stood up. “I’d like to question your staff again before I leave. Will you tell Johnston that I have your permission?”

“Question them, then. Just put an end to this.” It was a plea; her anger had drained away into pain and something else that he couldn’t quite identify.

And so he spent the next hour talking to the servants, but his mind was on the lonely woman shut up in grief a few walls, a few doors from wherever he went in that house.

Mary Satterthwaite nervously told him she wasn’t sure what the master and the Captain were arguing about, but Miss Wood had said they were discussing the wedding, and it appeared to have given her the headache; she wanted only to go to bed and be left alone.

“Was it common for the Colonel and the Captain to argue?”

“Oh, no sir! They never did, except over a horse race or how a battle was fought, or the like. Men often quarrel rather than admit they’re wrong, you know.”

He smiled. “And who was wrong in this instance? The Colonel? The Captain?”

Mary frowned, taking him seriously. “I don’t know, sir.” She added reluctantly, “I’d guess, sir, it was the Colonel.”

“Why?”

“He threw his glass at the door. I mean, he couldn’t throw it at the Captain, being as he was already gone. But he didn’t like it that the Captain had had the last word, so to speak. So he threw his glass. As if there was still anger in him, or guilt, or frustration. Men don’t like to be wrong, sir. And I doubt if the Colonel was, very often.”

Which was a very perceptive observation. He asked about relations between the Captain and the Colonel. Cordial, he was told. Two quite different men, but they respected each other.

In the end, he asked to be taken upstairs to any rooms overlooking the hillside where the Colonel had been riding.

In theory, the hill was in view from a number of windows, both in the family quarters and on the servants’ floor. At this time of year, with the trees fully leafed out, it was different. You’d have to be lucky, Rutledge thought, peering out from one of the maids’ windows—the best of the lot—to catch a glimpse from here. You’d have to know where the Colonel was riding, and be watching for the faintest flicker of movement, and then not be certain what you’d seen was a horse and man. Possible, then. But not likely.

Tired, with Hamish grumbling in the back of his mind, Rutledge left the house and began the walk back to the meadow, the far hedge, and the lane where he’d left his car two hours or more before.

He glimpsed Maggie, the quiet Sommers cousin, hanging out a tablecloth on the line. He waved to her, but she didn’t see him, the breast-high wall and the climbing roses blocking her view. He walked on. Somewhere behind her he could hear the goose honking irritably, as if it had been shut away for the morning and was not happy about it. Rutledge smiled. Served the damned bird right!

Back in the meadow where Charles Harris had been found, Rutledge ignored Hamish and began to quarter the land carefully. But there was nothing to be learned. Nothing that was out of the ordinary. Nothing of interest. He went back over the land again, moving patiently, his eyes on the ground, his mind concentrating on every blade of grass, every inch of soil. Then he moved into the copse where the killer might have stood waiting.

Still nothing. Frustrated, he stood there, looking back the way he’d come, looking at the lie of the land, the distant church steeple. Hamish was loud in his mind, demanding his attention, but he refused to heed the voice.

Nothing. Nothing—

Except—

In the lee of the hedge, near where he and the Sergeant had cut through on their first visit. Something dull and gray and unidentifiable. Something he hadn’t been able to see from any other part of the meadow. What was it?

He walked down to the hedge, keeping his bearings with care, and found the place, the thing he’d seen. He squatted on his heels and looked at it, thinking it was a scrap of rotting cloth. Nothing…Ignoring the brambles, he pushed his way nearer to it. Closer to, it had shape, and staring eyes.

Reaching into the brambles, he touched it, then pulled it forward.

A doll. A small wooden doll, in a muddy, faded gown of pale blue flowered print, the kind of cloth that could be bought in any shop, cheap, cotton, and favored by mothers for children’s clothes. A girl’s dress, with the leftover cloth sewn into a gown for her favorite doll.

Hadn’t Wilton said something about seeing a child who had lost her doll?

Rutledge picked up the little bundle of cloth and stared down at it.

Hickam might not be fit to testify against the Captain. Would a child be any more reliable as a witness? He swore. Not bloody likely!

Making his way through the hedge, Rutledge went striding down to the lane, ignoring the high grass and brambles, his mind working on how to deal with the child, and with Wilton. Hamish was silent now, but somewhere he still moved about restlessly, waiting.

When he got to his car, left in the brushy, overgrown lane, Rutledge swore again. With infinite feeling.