A Test of Wills (22 page)

“Shoot himself?” Tears came to her eyes, darkening them, but hovered behind the lids, not spilling over. “Are you quite sure, Inspector?”

“I wouldn’t have come tonight if I hadn’t been sure it could happen. Not that it would—but that it could,” he said, forcing himself to honesty.

“But if I tell you—you’re the police, you’ll know what it is, and then it’ll happen just as he’s afraid it might. And I’ll be the cause of it!” Before he could deny it, she said, “No, I can’t tell you something, and then afterward say that I didn’t mean it, that you must forget I’d said it. You can’t forget it. It’s your job, you see—there’s no separating the man from the job!”

“Lettice—” He wasn’t even aware that he’d used her name.

“No! I’ve lost Charles, nothing will ever bring him back. I’m going to lose Mark, one way or another. I feel enough guilt already, I won’t add to it, I tell you I won’t!” The tears spilled over, and she ignored them, her eyes on his face. “Have you ever been in love, Inspector, so in love that your very life’s blood belonged to someone else, and then just when it seemed that everything was wrapped in joy, and you were the luckiest, most fortunate, most cherished person in the world, had it snatched away without warning, stripped from you without hope or sense or explanation, just taken?”

“Yes,” he said, getting to his feet and walking to the window where she couldn’t see his face. “It would be easy to say that the war came between us, Jean and me. All those years of separation. But I know it’s something deeper than that. She’s frightened by the—the man who came back. The Ian Rutledge she wanted to marry went away in 1914, and the Army sent a stranger home in his place five years later. She doesn’t even recognize him anymore. As far as that goes, I’m not sure that she’s the girl I remember. Somehow she’s grown into a woman who lives in a world I’ve lost touch with. And I can’t find my way back to it. I came home expecting to turn back the clock. You can’t. It doesn’t work that way.” He stopped, realizing that he’d never even told Frances that much.

“No,” she said simply, watching him, seeing—although he wasn’t aware of it—his reflection in the dark glass. “You can’t turn back the clock. To where it’s safe and comfortable again.”

His back was still toward her, his thoughts far away. She said, “Don’t put this burden on me, Inspector Rutledge. Don’t ask me to make a decision for Mark Wilton.”

“I already have. Just by coming here.”

“Damn you!”

He turned, saw the flush of anger and hurt on her face.

And then, out of nowhere he had his answer, as if it had come through the night to touch him, but he knew how it had come—from his own recognition of the pain and the loss he’d sensed from the start in her.

Lettice Wood wasn’t grieving for Mark Wilton. She was grieving for Charles Harris. And it was Charles Harris that she loved, who had come between her and the wedding in September, who had called off the wedding because he wanted his ward and—she wanted him.

She saw something in his expression that warned her just in the last split second. She was off the sofa in a flash, on her way out of the room, running away from him to the safety and comfort of her own apartments.

Rutledge caught her arm, swung her around, held her with a grip that was bruising, but she didn’t notice, she was struggling to free herself, her dark hair flying in swirls around his face and hands.

“It’s true, isn’t it? Tell me!”

“No—no, let me go. I won’t be a part of this. I’ve killed Charles, I’ve got his blood on my soul, and I won’t kill Mark as well! Let me go!”

“You loved him—didn’t you!” he demanded, shaking her.

“God help me—oh, yes, I loved him!”

“Were you ever in love with Mark?”

She stopped struggling, standing almost frozen in his hands. Then she began speaking, wearily, disjointedly, as if it took more strength than she could muster. And yet she didn’t try to hide her face or those strange, remarkable eyes.

“Did I ever love him? Oh, yes—I thought I did. Charles brought him home, he believed I’d like him, love him. And I did. I told myself that what I’d felt for Charles was only a girl’s crush, a silly thing you grow out of, and I’d better hurry before I’d harmed what we’d had between us since the beginning, when I was a small, frightened child—an affection that was deep and caring and wonderfully comforting.”

She took a deep breath as if steadying herself. “But Tuesday—two weeks ago now—I was in the drawing room, just finishing with flowers for the vases there, and Charles came in, and I—I don’t know, one of the bowls slipped somehow as I was lifting it back onto the bookshelf, and he reached for me before it could fall on me and hurt me, and the next thing I knew—I was in his arms, I was being held against his heart and I could hear it beating as wildly as mine, and he kissed me.”

Her eyes closed for a moment, reliving that kiss; then they opened, and he saw emptiness in them, pain. “He stopped, swearing at himself, telling me it was nothing—nothing! And he was gone, just like that. I searched everywhere. I finally found him, he was having lunch at the Inn, and he took me outside into the garden where no one could overhear and he said it wasn’t love. It was just that he’d been away from London too long, he’d needed a woman too long, and touching me had made him forget who I was, it was only his need speaking. But it wasn’t true, it wasn’t Charles, it was what we both felt, and I was sure of it. He wouldn’t speak to me about it for days, wouldn’t listen to me, stayed away from me as if I had the plague or something, and then on Saturday—I waited until he’d gone up to his room, and I came to the door and said I wasn’t marrying Mark, that it wasn’t fair to Mark, and that the wedding would have to be called off anyway. And he just said, ‘All right,’ as if I’d told him the cat had just had kittens or the rain had brought grasshoppers with it—something that didn’t matter…. But on Sunday—on Sunday I went to his room again when he was dressing for dinner, and he didn’t hear me come in, I caught him by surprise, standing there buttoning his cuff links, and when he looked up—and I saw his face—I ran. There was such—such depth of love in his eyes as he looked up at me, I couldn’t bear it. He came after me, told me he was sorry he’d frightened me, and then he was kissing me again, and the room was whirling about, and I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think—Mark had never, ever made me feel like that, he—he was aloof, somehow, as if his head was still in the clouds, with his planes. As if his heart was shut off somewhere and I couldn’t touch it. But Charles wasn’t that way, and I didn’t care then whether Charles married me or not, there wouldn’t be anyone else in my life. He let me go, he told me to think clearly and carefully, not to make a quick judgment, that there was such a difference in our ages that I couldn’t be sure, and neither could he, what we were feeling. He talked about honor and duty—about going away for a while—and I smiled and said I’d not be hasty. But I knew I didn’t need to consider, and I was the happiest—the happiest woman on earth at that moment. I didn’t even think about Mark! And I paid for it the next morning, because we had one night together, Charles and I, and that was all. All that I’ll have to take with me as far as my grave, because it was beyond anything I’ve ever known and could ever hope to feel, whatever happens to me….”

“I didn’t go riding that morning….” Rutledge heard those words again in the far corners of his mind, Lettice answering his question about how Charles had behaved on the morning after the quarrel. She hadn’t lied, she’d told him the truth, only in a fashion that she alone knew was an evasion. For she had seen him that morning.

“I didn’t want pity. I didn’t want people pointing at me, saying I’d had a love affair with Charles and was the cause of his death. I thought there would be enough evidence—something—witnesses—that would lead you to his killer without me. When you came that first time, I thought the only happiness I’d ever have again was seeing Mark hang. And then I realized, with Sergeant Davies standing there by the door, that anything I said would be common knowledge in the village before dinner.”

“And now? How do you feel about Wilton now?” Rutledge asked, breaking the silence.

Lettice shook her head. “I know he must have killed Charles. It makes sense, the way it happened. But—I still can’t see Mark shooting him down in hot blood, obliterating him, wreaking such a terrible vengeance. He’s not—devious by nature, not passionate or impulsive. There’s an uprightness in him, a strength.”

“He wouldn’t have fought to keep you?”

“He’d have fought,” she said quietly. “But in his own way.”

20

It was after eight when Rutledge woke up the next morning, head heavy with sleeplessness that had pursued him most of the night. He’d heard the church clock chime the hours until it was six o’clock and light enough to see the birds in the trees outside his window before he’d drifted into a drowsing sleep that left him as tired as he’d been when he went to bed.

He’d stayed with Lettice an hour or more, sitting with her until she felt able to sleep. He thought it had been a relief to talk, that she’d feel better afterward. But her last words to him, as he began to close the heavy front door behind him, were, “If I had it to do over, I’d have loved him just the same. I only wish I hadn’t lost my courage now, and said more than I meant to say.”

“I know.”

She’d cocked her head to one side, looking at him, her eyes sad. “Yes. I think you do. Don’t humiliate Mark. If he’s guilty, hang him if you must, but don’t break him.”

“I give you my word,” he’d said, and Hamish had quarreled with him all the way back to Upper Streetham.

Rutledge had a hasty breakfast and went directly to the Davenant house. But Grace, the maid, informed him that the Captain had already left for Mallows, and Mrs. Davenant had gone with him as far as the church, to see to the flowers. He came back to town and found that there was already a gathering of people in the lane near the church, though it was only a little after nine. Cars and carriages were lined up, having brought guests from Warwick and elsewhere, and small groups were standing about talking quietly.

The church bell began to toll soon after nine-thirty, deep, sonorous, welling out over the countryside. The hearse had already drawn up, and the casket, oak and bronze, had been carried inside by men from Charles’s Regiment acting as pallbearers, their uniforms red as blood in the sunlight.

Rutledge walked about, looking to see if Sally was indeed in the church, and found her giving instructions about the placement of wreaths in front of the coffin. Carfield, magnificent in flowing robes, was already greeting the mourners, moving among them like a white dove in flocks of crows. He went back outside.

Catherine Tarrant arrived, saw him, nodded, and walked quickly to the church, not looking to the right or left. The women from Upper Streetham made a point of cutting her dead as she passed, but several people from London spoke to her as if they knew her.

Rutledge stopped Sergeant Davies when he arrived and asked, “Have you seen Royston? I need to speak to him.” He wanted an invitation to the reception, to keep an eye on Wilton. And he wanted to ask Royston about the place where Charles might have been killed.

Davies shook his head. “He was supposed to be here and greet these people. Mr. Haldane is over there, speaking to some of them. Beyond Carfield. The one with the fair hair.”

Rutledge could see the tall, slim figure moving quietly from group to group. Sally Davenant came out to join Haldane just as the car arrived with Lettice Wood and Mark Wilton. She got out, swathed in veils of black silk, moving gracefully toward a half dozen officers who had turned to meet her. She spoke to them, nodding, her head high, back straight, Wilton just behind her with a quiet, thoughtful expression. Someone from the War Department came over—Rutledge recognized him from London—and then she moved on, impressively calm and leaving behind her looks of admiration and warmth.

“It’s a bloody show,” Hamish was saying. “We stacked our dead like lumber, or buried them to keep them from smelling. And here’s a right spectacle that’d shame an honest soldier.”

Rutledge ignored him, scanning the gathering crowd as they moved through the lych-gate and up the walk toward the open doors of the church. Overhead the bell began to count the years of the dead man’s life, and he saw Lettice stumble. Wilton took her arm to steady her, and then she was herself again.

He let them go inside and walked down to where the Mallows car had been parked near the lych-gate, ready to take Lettice back in time for the reception.

“Where’s Royston?” Rutledge asked the neatly uniformed groom sitting in the driver’s seat. “Has he already arrived?”

“I don’t know, sir. I haven’t seen him at all,” the man said, touching his cap. “Mr. Johnston was looking for him just before we left.”

Inspector Forrest came hurrying by on his way to the service. The tolling had stopped, and from inside the church the organ rose in solemn majesty, the lower notes carrying the sense of loss and sorrow that marked the beginning of a funeral’s salute to the dead.

Rutledge called to him, “Keep an eye on Wilton. Don’t let him out of your sight. It’s important.”

“I’ll do that, sir,” he promised over his shoulder, not stopping.

Uncertainty, that same sense of time passing, of tension and of waiting, swept him. He wasn’t sure why. Looking up, he saw Mavers hurrying past the end of the Court, head down and shoulders humped.

Dr. Warren’s car, turning in to the Court, moved quickly to a space in front of one of the houses across from the lych-gate. Warren got out, saying to Rutledge as he passed, “Hickam’s the same—neither better nor worse, but holding on and eating a little. Why aren’t you in the church?”

“I don’t know,” Rutledge answered, but Warren had gone on, not hearing.

On impulse, Rutledge walked around the church, trying to see if Mavers had taken the path up to his house in the fields. But the man had vanished. He kept on walking, climbed over the churchyard wall, and struck out into the fields. But by the time he’d reached the crossbar of the H that led to the other path—the one that skirted Charles Harris’s fields and Mallows land—he turned that way instead, his back to Mavers’s house. Soon he came to the hedge, and the meadow and the copse of trees where the body had been found. It had seemed very different last night in the dark. Somehow thicker, more sinister, full of ominous shadows. Now—it was a copse, open and sunlit, shafts of light like spears lancing down through the trees. Butterflies danced in the meadow.

Rutledge moved on. Dozens of feet and two rainstorms had swept the land clean of any signs that might have led him to the answer he needed. Where had Charles Harris died? Where was the blood, the small fragments of bone?

The sun was warm, the air quiet and still. Some quirk of the land brought the sound of singing to him from the church, a hymn he remembered from childhood. “A Mighty Fortress.” Appropriate to a soldier’s death.

Hamish, who had been quiet, tense, and watchful in his mind, like something waiting to pounce in the vast, secretive recesses of emotion, said suddenly, “I don’t like it. I’ve been on patrol on nights when the Huns were filtering like smoke out of the trenches, and my skin crawled with fear.”

“It isn’t night,” Rutledge said aloud. The sound of his voice was no comfort, only intensifying his sense of something wrong.

He moved from field to field. It hadn’t taken long, not more than twenty minutes since he’d left the churchyard. Unconsciously he’d lengthened his stride early on, and now he was sweating with the effort. But he couldn’t slow down, it was almost as if something drove him. The saplings were not far now.

But what was it? What was behind this dreadful sense of urgency?

From the start he’d been afraid he’d lost any skills he’d once had. He’d tried to listen—too hard perhaps—for any signs that they’d survived. And found only emptiness. And yet—last night he’d come close to feeling the intuition that had once been his gift. He’d followed his instincts, not the dictates of others. They’d been certain Harris had died where he’d fallen. They’d been certain that no one in the village could have killed the Colonel. They’d been certain there was no case against Wilton, and he’d found one.

He had his murderer. Didn’t he? Then why didn’t he feel the satisfaction that ordinarily came with the solution of a vicious crime? Because his evidence was circumstantial, not solid? Or because there was still something he’d overlooked, something that he’d have seen, five years ago. Something that—but for his own emotional tensions—he’d have thought of long before this?

He went through the stand of saplings without being aware of them, his feet guiding him without conscious volition.

Something was missing. Or someone? Yes, that was it! He’d spoken to everyone of consequence in his interviews—except one.

He’d never asked Maggie Sommers what she’d seen or heard that last morning of Charles Harris’s life. He’d assumed she knew nothing. And yet she lived across a stone wall from Mallows land, and Colonel Harris sometimes rode that way—she’d learned to return his wave, shy as she was.

Had Harris passed the cottage that last morning? Had Maggie seen anyone else!

Rutledge swore. Impatient with her timidity, he’d treated her—as everyone else did!—as all but witless.

He was in the fields now, heavy with the scent of raw earth and sunlight.

What did she know that no one had thought to ask? She would be the last person to come forward voluntarily. That would have been unbearable agony for her. And yet—now that he was sure the murder had happened somewhere other than the meadow—her evidence could easily be critical. It could damn Wilton to the hangman—or free him, for that matter.

Maggie, he realized, could very well hold the key to this murder, and he’d overlooked it. He glanced toward the distant stone wall, seeing it with new eyes. Maggie, hanging clothes on the line on Monday mornings. Maggie working in her overgrown garden. Maggie, always at home and close enough to Mallows here to hear a horseman in the fields. Or a shotgun going off nearby. Maggie seeing the murderer, for all he knew, waiting among the trees or in the dell or coming over the rise. Maggie, anxious and afraid of strangers, watchful and wary, so that she could hide herself inside the cottage before she herself was seen. And a lurking killer, unaware of a witness he’d never even glimpsed.

And this was the time to speak to her, while Helena was at the funeral. He doubled his pace, as if afraid, now that he’d remembered her, that she might be gone before he got there. Cursing himself for his blindness, for seeing with his eyes and not with that intuitive grasp of people he’d always had.

Ahead he could hear something, unidentifiable at first, a loud, insistent, repetitive—

It was the goose at the Sommers cottage. Something had upset the bird, he could tell from the wild sound, rising and falling without so much as a breath in between.

Rutledge broke into a run, ignoring the neat rows of young crops under his feet, stumbling in the soft earth, keeping his balance with an effort of will, his eyes on the rose-draped wall that separated Mallows from Haldane land and the Sommers cottage.

Helena was coming into town for the services. Maggie was alone—

He could hear screams now, high and wordless, and a man’s bellow of pain. He was no longer running, he was covering the ground with great leaps, risking his neck he knew, but unable to think of that as the screams reached a crescendo of something beyond pain.

Reaching the wall, he rested his palms on the edge of it, swung his body over in one movement, paying no heed to the long thorn-laced roses that pulled at his clothes. His feet landed among Maggie’s pathetic little flowers on the far side of the wall, trampling them heedlessly.

There was a motorcar in the drive, down by the gate. It was empty, and he ignored it, springing for the cottage.

Seeing him coming, the goose wheeled from her stand near the cottage door and sailed toward him, wings out, neck low, prepared for the attack.

He brushed her roughly aside, and was ten yards from the door when it burst open and a man came reeling out, his face a mask of blood, his shirt torn and soaked to crimson, his trousers slashed and smeared.

It was Royston. Something had laid open his shoulder—Rutledge could see the blue-white sheen of bone there—and he plunged heavily off the steps and into the grass, hardly aware of Rutledge sliding to a halt almost in his path.

Regardless of the pain he was inflicting, Rutledge caught him by his good shoulder and swung him around, anger twisting his face into a grimace as he shouted, “Damn you! What have you—”

Inside, the screaming went on.

“Watch her!” Royston cried. “She’s got—got an ax—” His knees buckled. “The child—the child—”

Rutledge managed to break his fall, but Royston was losing blood rapidly, his words weaker with every breath. “The child—I killed—”

Without waiting for any more, Rutledge was through the door, eyes seeing nothing after the glare of the sun, but ahead of him was something, a figure barely glimpsed. A woman in black, huddled on the floor at the end of the brown sofa, two darknesses blending into one like some distorted parody of humanity, humped and ugly. A primeval dread lifted the hairs along his arms.

Reaching her, he grasped her shoulders, saying, “Are you all right? Has he hurt you? What has he done to you?”

She stared up at him, face chalk white, eyes large and wild. In one bloody hand was an ax. His own eyes were adjusting rapidly now. The room was empty except for Maggie and the assorted furnishings of a rented house.

He got her up on the sofa, and she leaned back, eyes closed. “Is he dead?” she asked breathlessly, in the voice of a terrified child.

“No—I don’t think so.”

She tried to get up, but he pressed her back against the sofa, holding her there, trying to determine how much of the blood was hers, how much Royston’s.

“I’ll have to get help—I’ll find Helena and bring her to you—she’s at the church—”

But Maggie was shaking her head, dazed but at least able to understand him. Her eyes turned toward the closed door at the far end of the room. “She’s in there,” Maggie whispered.

Rutledge felt his blood run cold.

“I’ll go—”

“No—leave her! I hope she’s dead!”

He mistook her meaning, thinking that she was saying that death was preferable to the cataclysm of rape.

“I saw her kill him,” she went on, not taking her eyes from the bedroom door. “I saw her! She shot Colonel Harris. And it was for nothing, it wasn’t the right man—she’d thought it was, but Mavers said—and then that man out there admitted it was true, that he’d killed the child.”