A Test of Wills (7 page)

“Yes.”

She nodded. “I know where it is then. I followed a pair of nesting robins there one afternoon. I wouldn’t have been very likely to hear any sounds from there, I’m afraid.”

“Did you see anyone?”

“Captain Wilton,” she answered with some reluctance. “I didn’t speak to him, but I did see him, and he waved.”

“At what time was this?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Early, I think. Around eight, I imagine, or a little after. I was engrossed in tracking a cuckoo and was mainly glad that Wilton wasn’t the sort who’d want to stop and chatter.”

“Which way was he going?”

“The same way you are.”

“Toward the old mill, then.”

“Yes, I suppose so. I wasn’t really paying much attention, he was just walking along here. I saw him, realized who it was, waved, and then went on my way.”

“Did you know the Colonel well?”

“Hardly at all. We’ve been here since April, and he very kindly asked us to dinner one evening. But my cousin is shy, almost a recluse, and she didn’t want to go. I did, enjoyed the evening, and that was that. We spoke to each other on the High Street, and I waved if I saw him out riding, but that’s about all I can tell you.”

“And you know the Captain well enough to be certain you did see him and not someone else?”

She smiled, the gray eyes lighting within. “A woman doesn’t forget Mark Wilton, once she’s seen him. He’s very handsome.”

“How would you describe the Colonel?”

She considered his question, as if she hadn’t given much thought to the Colonel before now. “He was younger than I expected. And rather attractive in a quiet way. Widely read for a military man—we had a very interesting discussion over dinner about American poets, and he seemed to know Whitman quite well.” She brushed a strand of windblown hair out of her face. “He seemed a likable man, on short acquaintance. A very gracious host. I can’t tell you much more, because I talked mostly to Lettice Wood after dinner and then to Mrs. Davenant, and shortly after that, the party broke up.”

“How would you describe relations between Wilton and Colonel Harris?”

“Relations? I hardly know.” She thought back to that evening for a moment, then said, “They seemed comfortable with each other, like men who have known each other over a long period of time. That’s all I can remember.”

“Thank you, Miss Sommers. If you should think of anything else that might help us, please get in touch with Sergeant Davies or me.”

“Yes, of course.” She hesitated, then asked, “I’ve gone on with my walks. I suppose that’s all right? My cousin frets and begs me to stay home, but I hate being cooped up. There’s no—well, danger—is there?”

“From the Colonel’s killer?”

She nodded.

“I doubt that you have anything to fear, Miss Sommers. All the same, you might exercise reasonable caution. We still don’t know why the Colonel was killed, or by whom.”

“Well, I wish you luck in finding him,” she said, and went striding off.

“A pleasant lady,” Davies said, watching her go. “Her cousin, now, she’s as timid as a mouse. Never shows her face in the village, but keeps the cottage as clean as a pin. Mrs. Haldane was saying that she thought the poor girl was a half-wit at first, but went over to the cottage one day to ask how they were settling in, and saw that she’s just shy, as Miss Sommers said, and on the plain side.”

Rutledge was not interested in the shy Miss Sommers. He was tired and hungry, and Hamish had been mumbling under his breath for the last half hour, a certain sign of tumult in his own mind. It was time to turn back.

What bothered him most, he thought, striding along in silence, was the Colonel himself. He’d actually seen the man, heard him inspire troops who had no spirit and no strength left to fight. A tall persuasive figure in an officer’s greatcoat, his voice pitched to carry in the darkness before dawn, his own physical force somehow filling the cold, frightened emptiness in the faces before him. Convincing them that they had one more charge left in them, that together they could carry the assault and take the gun emplacement and save a thousand lives the next morning—two thousand—when the main thrust came. And the remnants of a battered force did as he had asked, only to see the main attack fail, and the hill abandoned to the Hun again within twenty-four hours.

Yet here in Upper Streetham Charles Harris seemed to be no more than a faint shadow of that officer, a quiet and “thoroughly nice” man, as Mrs. Davenant had put it. Surely not a man who was likely to be murdered.

How do you put your fingers on the pulse of a dead man and bring him to life? Rutledge had been able to do that at one time, had in the first several cases of his career shown an uncanny knack for seeing the victim from the viewpoint of the murderer and understanding why he or she had had to die. Because the solution to a murder was sometimes just that—finding out why the victim had to die. But here in Warwickshire the Colonel seemed to elude him….

Except to acknowledge the fact that once more he would be dealing with death, he, Rutledge, had never really thought through the problems of resuming his career at the Yard. At least not while he was still at the clinic, locked in despair and his own fears. To be honest about it, he’d seen his return mainly as the answer to his desperate need to stay busy, to shut out Hamish, to shut out Jean, to shut out, indeed, the shambles of his life.

Even back in London, he had never really considered whether or not he was good enough still at his work to return to it. He hadn’t considered whether the skills and the intuitive grasp of often frail threads of information, which had been his greatest asset, had been damaged along with the balance of his mind by the horrors of the war. Whether he could be a good policeman again. He’d simply expected his ability to come back without effort, like remembering how to ride or how to swim, rusty skills that needed only a new honing….

Now, suddenly, he was worried about that. One more worry, one more point of stress, and it was stress that gave Hamish access to his conscious mind. The doctors had told him that.

He sighed, and Sergeant Davies, clumping along through the grass beside him, said, “Aye, it’s been a long morning, and we’ve gotten nowhere.”

“Haven’t we?” Rutledge asked, forcing his attention back to the business in hand. “Miss Sommers said she did see Wilton walking this track. But where was he coming from? The churchyard, as he claims? Or had he walked by way of the lane, as Hickam claims, met the Colonel, and then crossed over this way? Or—did he go after Harris, follow him to the meadow, with murder on his mind?”

“But this way leads to the ruins by the old bridge, just as he told us, and Miss Sommers saw him here around eight, she thought. So we’re no nearer to the truth than we were before.”

“Yes, all right, but since Miss Sommers saw him here, he’d be bound to tell us that he was heading for the mill, wouldn’t he? No matter where he’d actually been—or was actually going.”

“Do you think he’s guilty, then?” Sergeant Davies couldn’t keep the disappointment out of his voice.

“There isn’t enough information at this point to make any decision at all. But it’s possible, yes.” They had reached the car again, and Rutledge opened his door, then stopped to pick the worst of the burrs from his trousers. Davies was standing by the bonnet, fanning himself with his hat, his face red from the exertion.

Still following a train of thought, Rutledge said, “If Miss Sommers is right and Wilton was up there in the high grass early on, say eight o’clock, he might well have been a good distance from the meadow by the time the Colonel was shot. Assuming, as we must, that the horse came straight home and the Colonel died somewhere between nine-thirty and ten o’clock, when Royston went down to the stables looking for him.”

“Aye, he would have reached the ruins and the bridge in that time, it’s true. So you’re saying then that it still hangs on Hickam’s word that Captain Wilton was in the lane, and when that was.”

“It appears that way. Without Hickam, there’s no evidence where the Captain had come from before he ran into Miss Sommers. No evidence of a further quarrel. And no real reason except for what Johnston and Mary overheard in the hall at Mallows for us to believe that the Captain had any cause to shoot Harris.”

Sergeant Davies brightened. “And no jury in this county is going to take a Daniel Hickam’s word over that of a man holding the Victoria Cross.”

“You’re forgetting something, Sergeant,” Rutledge said, climbing into the car.

“What’s that, sir?” Davies asked anxiously, coming around and peering into the car from the passenger side so that he could see Rutledge’s face.

“If Wilton didn’t shoot Harris, then who did? And who turned the corpse over?”

After lunch at the Shepherd’s Crook, Rutledge took out the small leather notebook, made a number of entries, and then considered what he should do next. He had sent Davies home to his wife for lunch, while he lingered over his own coffee in the dining room, enjoying the brief solitude.

What was Harris like? That seemed to be the key. What lay buried somewhere in the man’s life that was to bring him to a bloody death in a sunlit meadow?

Or to turn it another way, why did he have to die that morning? Why not last week—last year—ten years from now?

Something had triggered the chain of events that ended in that meadow. Something said—or left unsaid. Something done—or left undone. Something felt, something glimpsed, something misunderstood, something that had festered into an angry explosion of gunpowder and shot.

Royston, Wilton, Mrs. Davenant, Lettice Wood. Four different people with four vastly different relationships to the dead man. Royston an employee, Wilton a friend, Mrs. Davenant a neighbor, and Lettice Wood his ward. Surely he must have shown a different personality to each of them. It was human nature to color your moods and your conversations and your temperament to suit your company. Surely one of the four must have seen a side to his character that would lead the police to an answer.

It was hard to believe that Charles Harris had no sins heavy on his conscience, no faces haunting his dreams, no shadows on his soul. There was no such thing as a perfect English gentleman—

Hamish had started humming a tune, and Rutledge tried to ignore it, but it was familiar, and in the way of songs that run unbidden through the mind, it dragged his attention away from his own speculations. And then suddenly he realized what it was—a half-forgotten Victorian ballad called “The Proper English Gentleman” written by a less well known contemporary of Kipling’s—less popular perhaps because his sentiments were bitter and lacked Kipling’s fine sense of what the reading public would put up with, and what it would turn from. But the ballad had been popular enough in the trenches during the war:

He’s a proper English gentleman who never spills
his beer.

He dines with all the ladies and never shows his fear

Of picking up the wrong fork or swearing at the soup

When it’s hot enough to burn him, or jumping
through the hoop

Of English society, and all it represents.

But he’s a damned good soldier in front of all the
troops

And marches like a gentleman in his fine leather
boots

And eats in the reg’lar mess and calls the men by
name

And shares the dirty work with ’em, what’s called
the killing game

Of English Imperialism and all it represents.

But by his own hearthside he’s a very different sort

And he beats his tenants quarterly and no one dares
retort,

He takes their wives and daughters, and never stops
to think

That a man might someday shoot him when he’s
had enough to drink!

Of English duplicity, and all it represents,

He’s the finest of examples, and there’s others of his
kind

Who keep their secrets closely and never seem to mind

That the man who sits at table and has their deepest
trust

Might carry in his bosom the foulest kind of lust,

Not English respectability, and all it represents.

So watch your step, my laddies, keep your distance,
ladies dear,

Watch out for English gentlemen and don’t ever let
them near.

Their faces won’t betray them, their deeds are fine
and true,

But put them near temptation and it really will not
do—

For certain English gentlemen and all they represent.

What was the secret behind Charles Harris’s very proper face? What had he done, this apparently “thoroughly nice” man, that had made someone want to obliterate him, and to choose a shotgun at point-blank range to do it?

Barton Redfern was just removing the coffee things and turning to limp back to the kitchen when Dr. Warren came through the dining-room door and, seeing Rutledge at the table by the window, crossed hurriedly to him.

“You’d better come,” he said. “They’re about to lynch that stupid devil Mavers!”

5

Mavers, sprawled in the dust by the worn shaft of the village’s market cross, was bloody and defiant, spitting curses as a dozen men tried to kick and drag him toward the broad oak tree that stood outside a row of shops. There was murder in the angry faces encircling him, and someone had found a length of rope, although Rutledge wasn’t sure whether the initial intent was to hang Mavers or tie him to the tree for a sound thrashing. One man was carrying a horsewhip, and when in the confusion a heavy blow intended for Mavers caught him on the shin instead, he wheeled and lashed out in retaliation. The whip flicked across several heads, and for an instant it looked as if a general battle might ensue, while Mavers called them all every unprintable name he could think of. It was noisy, dangerous chaos on the verge of turning even nastier as other men came running toward the scene, shouting encouragement.

Women had hurried into the safety of the nearest shops, their pale faces peering out of windows in horror, while the shopkeepers stood in their doorways, demanding that this nonsense stop. Children clinging to their mothers’ skirts were crying, and four or five dogs attracted by the din had begun to bark excitedly.

As Hamish growled over the odds in some far corner of his mind, Rutledge reached the melee and began forcing his way through with rough disregard for victim or victimizer. He used his voice with coldly calculated effect, the officer commanding discipline, Authority in the flesh, a man to be reckoned with. “That’s enough! Let him go, or I’ll have the lot of you up before the magistrate for assault! Touch me with that whip, you fool, and you’ll be flat on your back with your arm broken….”

His unexpected onslaught scattered the attackers for an instant, and Rutledge quickly had Mavers by his collar, yanking him to his feet with blistering impatience. “Now what’s this all about?”

Dr. Warren had followed Rutledge as fast as he could, and reaching the market cross, began catching men by the arm and calling them by name. “Matt, don’t be stupid, put that whip down. Tom, George, look at the lot of you! Your wife will take a flatiron to you for ripping that coat, Will, wait and see if she doesn’t!”

Mavers, wiping his bloody nose on the sleeve of his shirt, said to Rutledge, “I don’t need the likes of you to fight my battles for me! A policeman stinks of his masters, and I can smell oppression, London’s bourgeois fist in the backs of the people—”

Rutledge gave a jerk of his collar that silenced Mavers with a choking grunt. Warren had stopped tongue-lashing the disgruntled villagers still milling around the market cross and was already casting a professional eye over cuts and bruises and one swelling lip.

Then the affair was over as quickly as it had begun, and Warren said, “Take Mavers to my surgery. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

Rutledge’s eyes swept the circle of faces, grimness changing slowly to sullen mortification on most of them, and decided that there would be no more trouble here. With one hand still gripping the rumpled collar, he marched Mavers down the street and across to the doctor’s surgery, ignoring the man’s protests and the stares of latecomers. Warren’s housekeeper, prim and neat in starched black, was waiting in the doorway. She looked at Mavers’s condition with disgust and said, “Don’t you dare drip blood on my clean floor!” before going off to fetch cold water and a handful of cloths.

“What the hell were you trying to do out there, take on half the village?” Rutledge asked, standing in the entrance hall waiting for the housekeeper to come back, one eye on the street.

“I told the fools what they didn’t want to hear. I told them the truth.” His voice was thick and muffled from the swelling nose, like a man with a head cold.

“Which was?”

“That they were too blind to see their chance and take it. That their precious war hero had feet of clay. That the Colonel was nothing but an oppressor of the workingman and deserved what he got.” Warming to his theme, he went on, “It’s the fate of all landlords, to be taken out and shot and their lands given to the peasants. And here somebody has already gone and done the peasants’ bloody work for them.”

“I’m sure Matt Wilmore liked being called a peasant,” Dr. Warren said, coming through the door behind Rutledge, “just when he’s bought his own farm and is proud as punch of it.” His housekeeper arrived with a basin of water and wads of lint to use packing Mavers’s nose, but it wasn’t broken, only thoroughly bloodied. “That was Tom Dillingham’s fist, I’ll wager,” Warren said with some satisfaction as he cleaned up Mavers’s truculent face. “He’s something of a legend around here,” he added to Rutledge, “made enough money as a pugilist to buy a bit of land down by the Ware. He’s not likely to take to being called a peasant either. Even those who are tenants—Haldane’s or Mrs. Crichton’s—aren’t going to swallow it. Peasants went out with Wat Tyler in 1340 or whenever the hell it was.”

Rutledge smiled. Mavers said, “Can I go now?”

Warren washed his hands. “Yes, be off with you, I’ve got more important things to do. Ungrateful fool!”

Rutledge led him outside and said, “Don’t be in any hurry, Mavers, I want to talk to you.”

“About the Colonel’s death?” He grinned, the bloodshot eyes as yellow as a goat’s. Mavers was not a big man, and had the wizened look of poor food and bad health in early childhood, his face pointed and sallow, his hair thin and a dusty brown. But his eyes were vivid, their color giving his face its only character. “You can’t accuse me of touching him. I was here in Upper Streetham that morning, lecturing all those busy market goers on the evils of capitalism. Ask anybody, they’ll tell you as much.”

But there was a gloating in the way he said it that made Rutledge wonder what he was hiding. Mavers was very pleased with himself, and not above taunting the police.

A born troublemaker, just as everyone had said. Still, such a man could put that sort of reputation to good use, hiding behind it quite easily. People might shake their heads in disgust, but their perception of Mavers gave him the freedom to make a nuisance of himself without fear of retribution. “What do you expect? That’s Mavers for you!” or “What’s the damned fool going to get up to next?” People ignored him, expecting the worst and getting it. Half the time not seeing him, seeing only their own image of him…

“What do you do for a living?”

Caught off guard, Mavers shot Rutledge a glance out of the corner of those goat’s eyes. “What do you mean?”

“How do you find the money to live?”

Mavers grinned again. “Oh, I manage well enough on my pension.”

“Pension?”

Sergeant Davies came running toward them, a smear of mustard like a yellow mustache across his upper lip. “I’ve taken care of that lot,” he said. “Damned fools! What have you been about this time, Mavers? The Inspector yonder should have let them hang you and be done with it!”

Mavers’s grin broadened. “And you’d get fat, wouldn’t you, without me to keep you from your dinner?”

“The trouble is,” Davies went on, paying no heed to Mavers, “they’ve all been in the war, or had family that was, and the Colonel was looked up to. He tried to tell them the Colonel had squandered the poor sod in the trenches while keeping his own hide safe, but they know better. The Colonel kept up with every man from the village, and visited them in hospital and saw to the families of the ones that didn’t come back, and found work for the cripples. People remember that.”

“Money’s cheap,” Hamish put in suddenly. “Or was he thinking of standing for Parliament? Our fine Colonel?”

But no one heard him except Rutledge.

It was decided to take Mavers home, to give the villagers time to cool off without further provocation, and Rutledge went back to the Shepherd’s Crook for his car. He had just reached the walk in front of the door when someone called, “Inspector?”

He turned to see a young woman astride a bicycle, her cheeks flushed from riding and her dark hair pinned up inside a very becoming gray hat with curling pheasant’s feathers that swept down to touch her cheek.

“I’m Rutledge, yes.”

She dismounted from the bicycle and propped it up against the railing by the horse trough. “I’m Catherine Tarrant, and I’d like to talk to you, if you have the time.”

The name meant nothing to him at first, and then he remembered—she was the woman Captain Wilton had courted before the war. He led her inside the Inn and found a quiet corner of the old-fashioned parlor where they wouldn’t be interrupted. Waiting until she seated herself in one of the faded, chintz-covered chairs, he took the other across from her and then said, “What can I do for you, Miss Tarrant?” Behind him a tall clock ticked loudly, the pendulum catching sunlight from the windows at each end of its swing.

She had had the kind of face that men often fall in love with in their youth, fresh and sweet and softly feminine. Rutledge was suddenly reminded of girls in white gowns with blue sashes around trim waists, broad-brimmed hats pinned to high-piled curls, who had played tennis and strolled on cropped green lawns and laughed lightheartedly in the summer of 1914, then disappeared forever. Catherine Tarrant had changed with them. There was a firmness to her jaw and her mouth now, signs of suffering and emerging character that in the end would make her more attractive if less pretty. Her dark eyes were level, with intelligence clearly visible in their swift appraisal of him.

“I have nothing to tell you that will help your enquiries,” she said at once. “I don’t know anything about Colonel Harris’s death except what I’ve heard. But my housekeeper is Mary Satterthwaite’s sister, and Mary has told her about the quarrel between the Colonel and Captain Wilton. I know,” she added quickly, “Mary shouldn’t have. But she did, and Vivian told me. I just want to say to you that I’ve known Mark—Captain Wilton—for some years, and I can’t imagine him killing anyone, least of all Lettice Wood’s guardian! Lettice adored Charles, he was her knight in shining armor, a father and brother all in one. And Mark adores Lettice. He’d never let himself be provoked into doing anything so foolish!”

“You think, then, that the quarrel was serious enough to make us believe that the Captain is under suspicion?”

That shook her quiet intensity. She had come in defense of Wilton and found herself apparently on the brink of damning him. Then she collected her wits and with a lift of her chin, she said, “I’m not a policeman, Inspector. I don’t know what is important in a murder enquiry and what isn’t. But I should think that a quarrel between two men the night before one of them is killed will be given your thorough consideration. And you don’t know those two as well as I do—did.”

“Then perhaps you should tell me about them.”

“Tell you what? That neither of them had a vile temper, that neither of them would hurt Lettice, that neither of them was the sort of man to resort to murder?”

“Yet they quarreled. And one of them is dead.”

“Then we’ve come full circle again, haven’t we? And I’m trying to make you understand that however angry Charles might have made him at the moment, Mark wouldn’t have harmed him—least of all, killed him so savagely!”

“How do you know what might drive a man to murder?” he asked.

She studied him for a moment with those dark, clear eyes, and said, “How do you? Have you ever killed a man? Deliberately and intentionally? Not counting the war, I mean.”

Rutledge smiled grimly. “Point taken.” After a moment he added, “If we scratch Wilton from our list of suspects, have you got a name to put in his place?”

“Mavers,” she said instantly. “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could see him!”

“But he was in the village on Monday morning. In plain view of half a hundred people.”

She shrugged. “That’s your problem, not mine. You asked me who might have shot Charles, not how he did it.”

“It appears that Wilton was seen by several witnesses in the vicinity of the meadow where Harris died.”

“I don’t care where he was seen. I tell you he wouldn’t have touched Charles Harris. He’s madly in love with Lettice. Can’t I make you understand that? Why would he risk losing her?”

“Are you still in love with him?”

Color rose in her face, a mottled red under the soft, fair skin. The earnestness changed to a clipped tension. “I was infatuated with Mark Wilton five years ago. He came to Upper Streetham one summer, and I fell in love with him the first time I saw him—any girl with eyes in her head must have done the same! Mrs. Davenant’s husband had just died, and Mark stayed with her for a while, until the estate was settled and so on. I envied her, you know, having Mark’s company every day, from breakfast to dinner. She’s only a few years older than he is, and I was sure he’d fall in love with her, and never notice me. Then we met one Sunday after the morning service, he called on me later, and for a time, I thought he was as in love with me as I was with him.”

She stopped suddenly, as if afraid she’d said too much, then went on in spite of herself. “We made quite a handsome pair, everyone said so. He’s so fair, and I’m so dark. And I think that was part of my infatuation too. The trouble was, Mark wanted to fly, not to find himself tied down with a wife and family, and at that point in my life I wanted a rose-covered cottage, a fairy-tale ending.”

For a moment there was a flare of pain in her dark eyes, a passing thought that seemed to have no connection with Wilton but was directed at herself—or at her dreams. “At any rate, I had several letters from Mark after he went away, and I answered a few of them, and then we simply didn’t have anything more to say to each other. It was over. And it wouldn’t have done. For either of us. Does that answer your question?”

“Not altogether.” Her color was still high, but he thought that it was from anger as much as anything else. And that intrigued him. He found himself wondering if Mark Wilton had been having an affair with his widowed cousin—and using Catherine Tarrant as a blind to mislead a village full of gossips. If she’d guessed that, her pride might have suffered more than her heart. And she might defend him now to protect herself, not him. “Are you still in love with him?” he asked again.