A Test of Wills (4 page)

“Go on.”

“Mary was coming down the stairs, and she said when I came into view that she was looking to see if the banisters and the marble floor needed polishing the next morning. If not, she was going to put Nancy to polishing the grates, now that we were no longer making up morning fires.”

“And?”

“And at that moment,” Johnston answered heavily, “the door of the drawing room opened, and the Captain came out. I didn’t see his face—he was looking over his shoulder back into the room—but I heard him say quite distinctly and very loudly, ‘I’ll see you in hell, first!’ Then he slammed the drawing-room door behind him and went out the front door, slamming that as well. I don’t think he saw me here, or Mary on the stairs.” He seemed to run out of words.

“Finish your story, man!” Rutledge said impatiently.

“Before the front door had slammed, I heard the Colonel shout, ‘That can be arranged!’ and the sound of glass shattering against this door.”

His hand drew their eyes to the raw nick in the glossy paint of one panel, where the glass had struck with such force that a piece of it must have wedged in the wood.

“Do you think Captain Wilton heard the Colonel?”

In spite of himself, Johnston smiled. “The Colonel, sir, was accustomed to making himself heard on a parade ground and over the din of the battlefield. I would think that the Captain heard him as clearly as I did, and slammed the front door with added emphasis because of it.”

“It was a glass that shattered, not a cup?”

“The Colonel usually had a glass of brandy with his coffee, and the Captain always joined him.”

“When you cleaned this room the next morning, did you find that two glasses had been used?”

“Yes, sir,” Johnston answered, perplexed. “Of course.”

“Which means that the two men drank together and were still on comfortable terms at that point in the evening.”

“I would venture to say so, yes.”

“Had you ever heard a quarrel between them before this particular evening?”

“No, sir, they seemed to be on the best of terms.”

“Had they drunk enough, do you think, to have become quarrelsome for no reason? Or over some petty issue?”

“With respect, sir,” Johnston said indignantly, “the Colonel was not a man to become argumentative in his cups. He held his liquor like a gentleman, and so, to my knowledge, did the Captain. Besides,” he added, rather spoiling the lofty effect he’d just created, “the level in the decanters showed no more than two drinks had been poured, one each.”

“Do you feel, having witnessed the Captain’s departure, that this was a disagreement that could have been smoothed over comfortably the next day?”

“He was very angry at the time. I can’t say how Captain Wilton might have felt the next morning. But I can tell you that the Colonel seemed in no way unsettled when he came down for his morning ride. Very much himself, as far as I could see.”

“And Miss Wood was in her bedroom throughout the quarrel? She didn’t rejoin the men in the drawing room, to your knowledge?”

“No, sir. Mary looked in on her before she came down the stairs, to see if she needed anything more, and Miss Wood appeared to be asleep. So she didn’t speak to her.”

“What did the Colonel do after the Captain left?”

“I don’t know, sir. I thought it best not to disturb him at that moment, and I came back twenty minutes later. By that time, he had gone up to bed himself, and I went about my nightly duties before turning in at eleven. Would you like to see Mary now, sir?”

“I’ll talk to Mary and the rest of the staff later,” Rutledge said, and walked to the door. There he turned to look back at the drawing room and then at the staircase. Under ordinary circumstances, Wilton would have noticed Johnston and the maid as soon as he came out of the drawing-room door. But if he had been looking back at Charles Harris instead, he might not have been aware of either servant, silent and unobtrusive behind him.

With a nod, Rutledge opened the front door before Johnston could reach it to see him out, and with Sergeant Davies hurrying after him, walked down the broad, shallow stone steps and across the drive to the car.

Hamish, growling irritably, said, “I don’t like yon butler. I don’t hold with the rich anyway, or their toadies.”

“It’s a better job than you ever held,” Rutledge retorted, and then swore under his breath. But Davies had been getting into the car and heard only the sound of his voice, not his words. He looked up to say, “I beg pardon, sir?”

The heavy drapes of the sitting room upstairs parted a little, and Lettice Wood watched Rutledge climb into the car and start the engine. When it had passed out of sight around the first bend of the drive, she let the velvet fall back into place and wandered aimlessly to the table where the lamp still burned. She flicked it off and stood there in the darkness.

If only she could think clearly! He would be back, she was certain of that, prying into everything, wanting to know about Charles, asking about Mark. And he wasn’t like the elderly Forrest; there would be no deference or fatherly concern from him, not with those cold eyes. She must have her wits about her then! The problem was, what would Mark tell them? How was she to know?

She put her hands to her head, pressing cold fingers into her temples. He looked as if he’d been ill, this inspector from Scotland Yard. And such people were often difficult. Why had Forrest sent for him? Why had it been necessary to drag London into this business, awful enough already without strangers trampling about.

Why hadn’t they left it to Inspector Forrest?

“Will we speak to Mavers now, sir?”

“No, Captain Wilton next, I think.”

“He’s staying with his cousin, Mrs. Davenant. She’s a widow, has a house just on the outskirts of town, the other end of Upper Streetham from Mallows.”

He gave Rutledge directions and then began to scan his notebook as if checking to make certain he had put down the salient points of the conversations with Lettice Wood and Johnston.

“I thought,” Rutledge said, “that the servants claimed that the argument between the Colonel and the Captain concerned the wedding. Johnston said nothing about it.”

“It was the maid, Mary Satterthwaite, who mentioned that, sir.”

“Then why didn’t you say so while we were there? I’d have spoken to her straightaway.”

Davies flipped back through his notebook to a page near the beginning. “She said she went up to Miss Wood’s room to bring a cold cloth for her head, and Miss Wood was telling her that she had left the gentlemen to discuss the marriage. But the way Miss Wood said it led Mary to think it wasn’t going to be a friendly discussion.”

“And then, having seen the end of the quarrel, the maid merely jumped to the conclusion that that was what they were still talking about?”

“Apparently so, sir.”

Which was no evidence at all. “When is the wedding?”

Davies flipped several more pages. “On the twenty-second of September, sir. And Miss Wood and the Captain have been engaged for seven months.”

Rutledge considered that. In an hour’s time—from the moment that Lettice Wood left the pair together until Johnston had seen Wilton storming out of the house—the subject of conversation could have ranged far and wide. If there had been a discussion of the wedding at nine-fifteen, surely it would not have lasted an hour, and developed into a quarrel at this stage, the details having been ironed out seven months ago and the arrangements for September already well in hand….

Without warning, he found himself thinking of Jean, of their own engagement in that hot, emotion-torn summer of 1914, a lifetime ago. Of the endless letters passing back and forth to France as they dreamed and planned. Of the acute longing that had kept him alive when nothing else had mattered. Of the wedding that had never taken place—

Of Jean’s white face in his hospital room when he had offered her the chance to break off the engagement. She had smiled nervously and taken it, murmuring something about the war having changed both of them. While he sat there, still aching with love and his need for her, trying with every ounce of his being to hide it from her, she’d said, “I’m not the girl you remember in 1914. I loved you so madly—I think anything would have been possible then. But too much time has passed, too much has happened to both of us—we were apart so long…. I don’t even know myself anymore…. Of course I still care, but—I don’t think I should marry anyone just now—it wouldn’t be fair to marry anyone….”

Yet despite the quiet voice and the scrupulously chosen words that tried desperately to spare both of them pain, he could see the truth in her eyes.

It was fear.

She was deathly afraid of him….

3

Mrs. Davenant lived in a Georgian brick house standing well back from the road. It was surrounded by an ivy-clad wall with ornate iron gates and set in a pleasant garden already bright with early color. Roses and larkspur drooped over the narrow brick walk, so heavy with rain from the night before that they left a speckled pattern of dampness on Rutledge’s trousers as he brushed past them on his way to the door.

Surprisingly, Mrs. Davenant answered the bell herself. She was a slender, graceful woman in her thirties, her fair hair cut becomingly short around her face but drawn into a bun on the back of her neck. Tendrils escaping its rigorous pinning curled delicately against very fine skin, giving her a fragile quality like rare porcelain. Her eyes were dark blue with naturally dark lashes, making them appear deep set and almost violet.

She nodded a greeting to Sergeant Davies and then said to Rutledge, “You must be the man from London.” Her eyes scanned his face and his height and his clothes with cool interest.

“Inspector Rutledge. I’d like to speak to you, if I may. And to Captain Wilton.”

“Mark has gone for a walk. I don’t think he slept well last night, and walking always soothes him. Please, come in.”

She led them not into the drawing room but down a passage beyond the stairs to a comfortable sitting room that still had a masculine ambience, as if it had been her late husband’s favorite part of the house. Paintings of hunting scenes hung above the fireplace and on two of the walls, while a collection of pipes in a low, glass-fronted cabinet stood beneath a small but exquisite Canaletto.

“This is a dreadful business,” she was saying as Rutledge took the chair she offered him. Sergeant Davies went to stand by the hearth, as if her invitation to be seated had not included him. She accepted this without comment. “Simply dreadful! I can’t imagine why anyone would have wanted to kill Charles Harris. He was a thoroughly nice man.” There was a ring of sincerity in the words.

An elderly woman in a black dress and white apron came to the doorway, and after glancing toward her, Mrs. Davenant asked, “Would you care for coffee, Inspector? Sergeant?” When they declined, she nodded to the woman and said, “That will be all, then, Grace. And close the door behind you, please.”

When the woman had gone, Rutledge said, “Do your servants live in, Mrs. Davenant?”

“No, Agnes and Grace come in daily to clean and to prepare meals. Agnes isn’t here just now, her granddaughter is very ill. Ben is my groom-gardener. He lives over the stables.” She lifted her eyebrows in a query, as if expecting Rutledge to explain his interest in her staff.

“Can you tell me what state of mind Captain Wilton was in when he came home from Mallows the evening before the Colonel was killed?”

“His state of mind?” she repeated. “I don’t know, I had already gone to bed. When he dined with Lettice and the Colonel, I didn’t wait up for him.”

“The next morning, then?”

“He seemed a little preoccupied over his breakfast, I suppose. But then I’ve grown used to that. Lettice and Mark are very much in love.” She smiled. “Lettice has been good for him, you know. He was so changed when he came home from France. Dark—bitter. I think he hated flying then, which is sad, because before the war—before the killing—it had been his greatest passion. Now Lettice is everything to him. I don’t think Charles could have stood in the way of this marriage if he’d wanted to!”

Rutledge could see that she was fond of her cousin—and from her unguarded comments he gathered that it hadn’t yet occurred to her that Wilton might have killed Harris. It was interesting, he thought, that she spoke freely, warmly, and yet with an odd—detachment. Was that it? As if her own emotions were locked away and untouched by the ugliness of murder. Or as if she had held them in for so very long that it had become second nature to her. It was a response to widowhood in some women, but there could be many other reasons.

“Did Captain Wilton go for a walk on Monday morning?”

“Of course. He likes the exercise, and since the crash—you knew that he crashed just before the war ended?—since then riding has been difficult for him. His knee was badly smashed, and although it’s hardly noticeable now when he walks, controlling a horse is another matter.”

Rutledge studied her. An attractive woman, with the sort of fair English beauty that men were supposed to dream about in the trenches as they died for King and Country. She was dressed in a soft rose silk that in the light from the long windows gave her skin a warm blush. The same blush it might have when stirred by passion. He found himself wondering if Charles Harris had ever been drawn to her. A man sometimes carried a picture in his mind when he spent long years abroad—a tie with home, whether real or fancied.

“Where does Captain Wilton usually walk?”

She shrugged. “I can’t tell you that. Where the spirit takes him, I daresay. One day as I came home from the village, I saw a farm cart dropping him off at our gate, and he told me he had walked to Lower Streetham and halfway to Bampton beyond! Along the way he’d picked a small posy of wildflowers for Lettice, but it had wilted by then. A pity.”

“I understand that he had a quarrel with Charles Harris on Sunday evening after dinner. Do you have any idea what that was about?”

With a sigh of exasperation, she said, “Inspector Forrest asked me the same question, when he came about the shotguns. I can’t imagine Charles and Mark quarreling. Oh, good-naturedly, about a horse or military tactics or the like, but not a serious argument. They got along famously, the two of them, ever since they met in France, on leave in Paris.”

“I understand that the Captain had spent some time here before 1914. He and Colonel Harris weren’t acquainted then?”

“Charles was in Egypt, I think, the summer my husband died. And Lettice of course was away at school.”

“The wedding arrangements, then. They appeared to be progressing smoothly?”

“As far as I know. Lettice has ordered her gown, and next week she was to go to London for the first fitting. The invitations have been sent to the printer, flowers chosen for the wedding breakfast, plans for the wedding trip made—I doubt if Mark would have objected if Lettice had wished to go to the moon! And Charles doted on her, he wouldn’t have begrudged her anything her heart desired. She only needed to ask. What was there to quarrel about?”

Mrs. Davenant made the marriage sound idyllic, such a piece of high romance that even death couldn’t stand in its way. And yet in the three days since Charles Harris had been found murdered, Lettice had apparently not asked to see Wilton. Nor, as far as he, Rutledge, knew, had Wilton gone to Mallows.

He was about to pursue that line of thought when the sitting-room door opened and Captain Wilton walked across the threshold.

He was wearing country tweeds, and they became him as well as his uniform must have done, fitting his muscular body with an air of easy elegance. The newspaper photographs of him standing before the King had not done him justice. He was as fair as his cousin, his eyes as dark a blue, and he fit the popular conception of “war hero” to perfection.

“Wrap a bluidy bandage around his forehead, gie him a sword in one hand and a flag in the other, and he’d do for a recruitment poster,” Hamish remarked sourly. “Only they bombed poor sods in the trenches, those fine airmen, and shot other pilots down in flames. I wonder now, is burning to death worse than smothering in the mud?”

Rutledge shivered involuntarily.

Wilton greeted Rutledge with a nod, making the same comment that his cousin had made earlier. “You must be the man from London.”

“Inspector Rutledge. I’d like to talk to you, if you don’t mind.” He glanced at Mrs. Davenant. “If you would excuse us?”

She rose with smiling grace and said, “I’ll be in the garden if you want to see me again before you go.” She gave her cousin a comfortable glance, and left the room, shutting the door gently behind her.

“I don’t know what questions you may have,” Wilton said at once, setting his walking stick in a stand by the door and taking the chair she had vacated. “But I can tell you that I wasn’t the person who shot Charles Harris.”

“Why should I think you were?” Rutledge asked.

“Because you aren’t a fool, and I know how Forrest danced around his suspicions, hemming and hawing over my abrupt departure from Mallows on Sunday evening and wanting to know what Charles and I were discussing that next morning when that damned fool Hickam claims to have seen us in the lane.”

“As a point of interest, did you and the Colonel meet on Monday morning? In the lane or anywhere else, for that matter?”

“No.” The single word was unequivocal.

“What was your quarrel about after dinner on the night before the murder?”

“It was a personal matter, nothing to do with this enquiry. You may take my word for it.”

“There are no personal matters when it comes to murder,” Rutledge said. “I’ll ask you again. What were you discussing that Sunday evening after Miss Wood went up to her room?”

“And I’ll tell you again that it’s none of your business.” Wilton was neither angry nor irritated, only impatient.

“Did it have anything to do with your marriage to Miss Wood?”

“We didn’t discuss my marriage.” Rutledge took note, however, of the change in wording. My, not our.

“Then did you discuss the settlement? Where you’d live after the wedding? How you’d live?”

Muscles around his mouth tightened, but he answered readily enough. “That had all been worked out months before. The settlement was never a problem. Lettice has her own money. We’d live in Somerset, where I have a house, and visit here as often as she liked.” He hesitated, then added, “I’d expected, after the war, to go into aircraft design. Next to flying it’s what I wanted most to do. Now—I’m not as sure as I was.”

“Why not?” When Wilton didn’t answer immediately, Rutledge continued, “For reasons of money?”

Wilton shook his head impatiently. “I’m tired of killing. I spent four years proving that the machines I flew were good at it. And that’s all His Majesty’s ministers want to hear about aeroplanes at the moment, how to make them deadlier. My mother’s people are in banking; there are other choices open to me.” But there was a bleakness in his voice.

Rutledge responded to it, recognizing it. He himself had debated the wisdom of returning to the Yard, coming back to the business of murder. Before the war it had been another facet of the law his father had given a lifetime to upholding. Now—he had seen too many dead bodies…. Yet it was what he knew best.

Then, bringing himself up sharply, he said more harshly than he had intended, “Have you seen Miss Wood since her guardian’s death?”

Wilton seemed surprised that it should matter to Rutledge. “No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t.”

“She apparently has no other family. Under the circumstances, it would be natural for you to be at her side.”

“And so I would be, if there was anything I might do for her!” he retorted stiffly. “Look, I went to Mallows as soon as I heard the news. Dr. Warren was already there, and he said she needed rest, that the shock had been severe. I sent up a message by Mary—one of the maids—but Lettice was already asleep. Warren warned me that it could be several days before she recovered sufficiently to see anyone. I’ve made an effort to respect his judgment. Under the circumstances, as you so aptly put it, there isn’t much else I can do, as long as she’s asleep in her bedroom.”

But she hadn’t been asleep when Rutledge called….

“Dr. Warren has been sedating her, then?”

“What do you think? She was wild at first, she insisted that she be taken to Charles at once. Which of course Warren could hardly do! And then she collapsed. She lost both her parents when she was four, and I don’t suppose she remembers them clearly. Charles has been the only family she’s known.”

Rutledge took the opening he’d been given. “Tell me what sort of person Charles Harris was.”

Wilton’s eyes darkened. “A fine officer. A firm friend. A loving guardian. A gentleman.”

It sounded like an epitaph written by a besotted widow, something Queen Victoria might have said about Prince Albert in a fit of high-flown passion.

“Which tells me absolutely nothing.” Rutledge’s voice was quiet, but there was a crackle to it now. “Did he have a temper? Was he a man who carried a grudge? Did he make enemies easily, did he keep his friends? Was he a heavy drinker? Did he have affairs? Was he honest in his business dealings?”

Wilton frowned, his elbows on the chair arm, his fingers steepled before his face, half concealing it. “Yes, he had a temper, but he’d learned long ago to control it. I don’t know if he carried grudges or not, but most of his friends were Army, men he’d served with for many years. I don’t know if he had enemies—I never heard of any, unless you wish to include that idiot Mavers. As for his drinking, I’ve seen Charles drunk—we all got drunk in France, when we could—but he was a moderate drinker as a rule, and affairs with women must have been discreet. I’ve never heard him described as a womanizer. You’ll have to ask Royston about business matters, I’ve no idea how they stand.”

“You met Harris during the war?”

“In France just at the end of 1914. In spite of the differences in age and rank we became friends. A year ago, when he heard I was coming out of hospital, he brought me to Mallows for the weekend. That’s when I met his ward. If he had secrets, he managed to keep them from me. I saw nothing vicious, mean, or unworthy in the man.” The hands had come down, as if the need for them as a shield had passed.

This was a better epitaph, but still no help to Rutledge, who wanted the living flesh and blood and bone of the man.

“And yet he died violently in a quiet English meadow this past Monday morning, and while everyone tells me he was a good man, no one seems to be in any particular haste to find his killer. I find that rather curious.”

“Of course we want the killer found!” Wilton responded, coloring angrily. “Whoever it is deserves to hang, and what I can do, I shall do. But I can’t think of any reason why Charles should have been shot, and you damned well wouldn’t thank me for muddying the waters for you with wild, useless conjectures!”