A Test of Wills

by Charles Todd

  There must be a better way of getting to the bottom of this. She’d find Inspector Forrest and make him tell her everything she wanted to know. He wouldn’t be like the Londoner, stark and unfeeling. A man to watch, that one!

  Steadying the bicycle, she began to pedal, absorbed in the question of how best to handle Forrest.

  Catherine met him just coming home from Lower Streetham and looking tired. He was middle-aged, thin and stooped, more the university don than a village policeman. He smiled when she hailed him, and waited by the steps of his house.

  “Miss Tarrant. That’s a fetching hat you’ve got on, my dear. Don’t let my wife catch a glimpse of it or she’ll be pestering me for one just like it.”

  Which was kind of him, because his wife, like many of the women in Upper Streetham, cared nothing for Catherine Tarrant, with or without a fetching hat on her head. And it gave her the excuse she needed to say, “Then will you walk along with me a little way? I’d like to speak to you.”

  “I’ve missed my lunch and I’ve got a headache you could toss the churchyard through. Will it take long, this talking?”

  “No, not really.” She gave him her most winning smile, and he said, “All right, then. Ten minutes!”

  She had dismounted and he took the bicycle from her, leading it himself as she strode down the quiet street beside him. “What’s this all about then?”

  And Catherine Tarrant began to work her wiles.

  Mavers and Sergeant Davies were glaring at each other by the time that Rutledge finally drove up in front of the doctor’s surgery. They climbed into the car in silence, and Rutledge said, “How do I find your house, Mavers?”

  “Like the birds in the air, you’ll have to fly to it. Or walk. I live up behind the churchyard. There’s a path to the house that way. Did you buy this car from the wages of wringing the necks of felons, or have you got private means?”

  “Does it matter either way? I’m still an oppressor of the poor.”

  Mavers grinned nastily, his goat’s eyes alight with the zeal of his favorite subject. “Horses earn their keep. What does this bleeding motorcar do for mankind?”

  “It keeps workmen employed putting it together, and others earn their livings in the factories that supply the materials to those workmen. Have you considered that? Every person driving a motorcar is a benefactor.” He turned into the short street leading to the church.

  “And those workmen could be better employed building homes for the poor and growing food for the hungry and making clothes for the naked.”

  “Which of course you spend every free moment of your time doing, a shining example to us all?”

  Mavers growled, “You’ll have to leave the motor here, by the lych-gate, and get your boots dirty on the path like the rest of us poor devils.”

  Which they did, marching behind Mavers up the bare track that Rutledge had seen just that morning. It had begun to dry out in the sun, although a thin coating of mud clung halfheartedly to their shoes. But soon they turned off on a small, rutted path that went over another rise and across an unplowed field to a shabby cottage standing in a clump of straggling beech trees. The yard before it was bare of grass and a dozen equally shabby chickens scratched absently there, paying no heed to their owner or his visitors when the three men arrived at the cottage door.

  From somewhere around back a pig grunted, and Mavers said, “He’s not mine, he belongs to one of the farmers over on the Crichton estate. Too ill-tempered an old boar to keep within sight of a sow, but he still breeds fine. And I’m not home long enough to notice the smell.” Which was a good thing, all in all. As the breeze shifted, the essence of pig was nearly breathtaking.

  He went inside, and Rutledge followed. The cottage—surprisingly—was not dirty, though it was as shabby inside as the exterior and the chickens. There were four rooms opening off a short central hall, the doors to each standing open. In the first of them on the left side the only windows were overhung by beech boughs, cutting off the sunlight, and Rutledge blinked in the sudden dimness as he crossed the threshold. Papers were scattered everywhere, most of them poorly printed political tracts and handwritten tirades, covering floor and furnishings impartially like grimy snow. Mavers walked through and over them, regardless, and flung himself down in a chair by a small mahogany table at the corner of the hearth. There was a lamp on it, its smoke-blackened chimney surrounded by stacks of books, an inkstand of brass, and a much-used blotter.

  “Welcome to Mavers Manor,” he said, adding with heavy sarcasm, “Are you planning to stay to dinner? We don’t dress here, you’ll do as you are.” He didn’t ask them to sit.

  “Who killed Colonel Harris?” Rutledge asked. “Do you know?”

  “Why should I? Know, I mean?”

  “Somebody knows something. It might be you.”

  “If I knew anything I’d more likely shake the fool’s hand than turn him in to you.”

  Which Rutledge believed. “Why did you feud with the Colonel? All those years?”

  Suddenly Mavers’s face turned a mottled red, which gave the darkening bruises a garish air, and he snarled, “Because he was an arrogant bastard who thought he was God, and never cared what he did to other people. Send that great lump, Davies, out into the yard with the rest of the dumb animals and I’ll tell you all about your fine Colonel Harris!”

  Rutledge glanced over his shoulder and nodded at Davies, who clumped out and slammed the door behind him, as near as he could ever come to insubordination.

  Mavers waited until he could see Davies fuming in the yard, well out of hearing, and then said, “He thought he was lord and master around here, Harris did. Mrs. Crichton never comes to Upper Streetham, she’s so old she hardly knows her arse from her elbow, and the Haldanes—well, the Haldanes were so well bred they’ve nearly vanished, a bloodless lot you can’t even be bothered to hate. But the Colonel, now he was something else.”

  There was pent-up venom in the thick voice, and Mavers was having trouble breathing through his nose as his anger mounted, almost panting between words. “He came into his own early, after his father had a stroke and wound up being confined to a chair for the rest of his life—which wasn’t all that long—and in his eyes his precious son could do no wrong. Harris had the first motorcar in this part of Warwickshire, did you know that? Drove like a madman, terrified old ladies and horses and half the children. Then he got his commission in the family’s Regiment, and he came home swaggering in his fine uniform, telling every man he met that the army life was for them. Had any girl he wanted, paid his way out of trouble, and raised hell whenever he felt like it. My older brother joined the Army to please him, and he died in South Africa with a Boer musket ball in his brain.”

  He stopped, but Rutledge said nothing, and after a time, Mavers went on more quietly. “My mother never got over that—he was her favorite. A big strapping lad like her own father. And my sister drowned herself in the pond one day because Harris stopped fancying her. I went to Mallows to horsewhip him and got thrashed by the grooms instead. Ma called me a worthless whelp for daring to blame Harris for Annie’s weakness. So I ran off to join the Army myself, and somehow he found out about it, and he had me sent home for lying about my age. But he wouldn’t give me my job back in the stables at Mallows—he told that bootlicking fool Royston that they didn’t want me there anymore because I was a troublemaker. So that’s just what I became, trouble. A thorn in his flesh! And if you believe that one fine morning I’d shoot him down, depriving myself of that lifelong pleasure, you’re a greater fool than you look!”

  Rutledge heard two things in Mavers’s diatribe—the ring of truth, and the echo of envy. “You’re talking about a boy. Twenty, perhaps? Not much older than that. And you were what? Fourteen? Fifteen?” he said carefully.

  The red flush returned to Mavers’s face. “What does age have to do with it? Is there some special dispensation for cruelty if you’re rich and under twenty?”

  “You know there isn’t. But
a man generally isn’t judged by what he did as a boy, he’s judged by what he did as a man.”

  Mavers shrugged. “Boy or man, he’s the same. Besides, the damage is done, isn’t it? And the man at forty may be a saint, but the rest of us are still bleeding from what he did when he was twenty. Who’s to put that right? Who’s to bring Annie back, or Jeff? Or Ma. Tell me!”

  Rutledge looked around the room, at the worn, plain furniture and the threadbare carpet on the floor, half hidden by the papers, at the damp-stained walls and the windows streaked with dust, all of it dappled by the tree leaves outside as a passing wind stirred them and let in a little light. He’d met men like Mavers before. Hungry for something they didn’t have, and ignorant of how to go about getting it, hating those who had had life given to them easily. Lost men, angry men, dangerous men…because they had no pride of their own to bolster their self-esteem.

  “Hating doesn’t put it right either, does it?”

  The goat’s eyes were hard. “It does give life a purpose, all the same.”

  Preparing to go, Rutledge said, “As long as it doesn’t lead to murder. There’s never an excuse for murder.”

  He was nearly out the door into the hall when Hamish said under his breath, “But who’s a murderer, then? The man who carried that shotgun yonder, or the officer who shoots his own men?”

  Startled, Rutledge half turned as if Mavers had spoken, not the voice in his own head. And as he looked back, he saw what had been concealed behind Mavers’s chair and by Mavers’s body and by the books piled on the table—a shotgun, leaning against the wall where it met the jutting corner of the hearth, almost lost in the deep shadow there.

  6

  Satisfied after her conversation with Inspector Forrest, Catherine Tarrant rode slowly back down the High Street, threading her way through the late-afternoon shoppers and the workmen going about their business. Her eyes quickly scanned their faces, but no one spoke to her and she didn’t stop to ask the whereabouts of the one person she sought. Turning her head to glance down Smithy Lane, she almost ran down a small boy dragging his dog behind him on a rope. The dog was too interested in the smells along their route to pay much heed to its master, and looked up with a wide, sloppy grin when she braked hastily to avoid them.

  “George Miller, you’ve got that rope too tight,” she said, but the boy gave her a frightened glance and tugged all the harder. The dog followed him good-naturedly, and she sighed in exasperation. Then she saw Daniel Hickam come out of one of the run-down houses beyond the smithy.

  Upper Streetham turned a blind eye to the profession of the two women who occupied this particular house as long as they comported themselves with reasonable dignity elsewhere. It was whispered that they made a very good living at their trade because they could be depended on to pass their best customers on the High Street the next day without a flicker of recognition. Catherine had once tried to hire the older of the two, who had hair black as coal and eyes the color of the sea, to pose for a portrait she was painting of an aging courtesan, but the woman had turned her away in a fury.

  “I don’t care what you’re painting, I have my pride, Miss Tarrant, and I’d rather starve than take money from the likes of you.”

  The words had hurt. Catherine had gone to London for her model, but within three weeks had abandoned the portrait because her vision of it had somehow gone astray. The face on the canvas had become a mockery, color and lines without a soul, technical skill without depth of expression.

  Pretending to inspect her tire to give Hickam a head start, Catherine waited until he was beyond the last house, finally disappearing among the shadows cast by the first of the hawthorns, at the end of the stand of long grass. Then she began to pedal slowly after him, taking her time so that no one would suspect what she was about to do.

  “Whose weapon is that?” Rutledge asked, his eyes on Mavers’s face now. “Yours?”

  “What weapon?”

  “The one just behind you,” Rutledge snapped, in no mood for the man’s agile tongue. Why the hell hadn’t Forrest found this shotgun? If Mavers was a suspect, then he could have obtained a warrant, if necessary.

  “What if it is?” Mavers asked belligerently. “I’ve a right to it, if it was left in a Will!”

  “In whose Will?”

  “Mr. Davenant’s Will, that’s whose.”

  Rutledge walked across the room and carefully broke open the gun. It had been fired recently, but when? Three days ago? A week? Like the rest of the cottage, it was worn, neglected, the stock scratched and the barrel showing the first signs of rust, but the breech had been kept well oiled, as if Mavers was not above a bit of quiet poaching.

  “Why did he leave the gun to you?”

  There was a brief silence; then Mavers said with less than his usual abrasiveness, “I expect it was my father he meant. My father was once his gamekeeper, and Mr. Davenant’s Will said, ‘I leave the old shotgun to Bert Mavers, who is a better birdman than any of us.’ My father was dead by then, but the Will hadn’t been changed, and Mrs. Davenant gave the gun to me, because she said it was what her husband wanted. The lawyer from London wasn’t half pleased, I can tell you, but the Will didn’t say which Bert Mavers, did it? Alive or dead?”

  “When was the last time it was fired?”

  “How should I know? Or care? The door’s always open, anybody can walk in here. There’s naught to steal, is there, unless you’re after my chickens. Or need a shotgun in a bit of a hurry.” His normal nastiness resurfaced. “You can’t claim I used it, can you? I’ve got witnesses!”

  “So everyone keeps telling me. But I’ll take the gun for now, if you don’t mind.”

  “First I’ll have a piece of paper saying you’ll bring it back!”

  Rutledge took a sheet from his notebook and scribbled a sentence on it, then signed it under the man’s baleful eye. Mavers watched him leave, and then folded the single sheet carefully and put it in a small metal box on the mantel.

  Inspector Forrest was waiting for them in the magpie cottage beyond the greengrocer’s shop that served as the Upper Streetham police station. There was a small anteroom, a pair of offices, and another room at the back used as a holding cell. Seldom occupied by more serious felons than drunks and disturbers of the peace, an occasional wife beater or petty thief, this cell still had a heavy, almost medieval lock on its door, with the big iron key hanging nearby on a nail. The furnishings were old, the paint showing wear, the color of the carpet on the floors almost nondescript now, but the rooms were spotless.

  Leaning across a battered desk to shake hands, Forrest introduced himself to Rutledge and said, “I’m sorry about this morning. Three dead in Lower Streetham, another in critical condition, two more seriously injured, and half the village in an uproar. I didn’t like to leave until things had settled a bit. I hope Sergeant Davies has told you everything you wanted to know.” He saw the shotgun in Rutledge’s left hand and said, “Hello, what have we here?”

  “Bert Mavers says this was left to him in a Will—or rather, left to his father.”

  “Good Lord! So it was! I’d forgotten about that. And Mrs. Davenant didn’t mention it either, when I went to see her about her husband’s Italian guns. It’s been years—” His face was a picture of shock and chagrin.

  “We probably can’t prove it’s the murder weapon, but I’m ready to wager it was.”

  Reaching for the shotgun, Forrest said with sudden enthusiasm, “Used by Mavers, do you think?”

  “If so, why didn’t he have the wit to put it out of sight afterward?”

  “You never know with Mavers. Nothing he does makes much sense.” Forrest examined it carefully, as if half expecting it to confess. “Yes, it’s been fired, you can see that, but there’s no saying when, is there? Still—”

  “Everyone claims he was in the village all morning. Is that true?”

  “Unfortunately, it appears to be.” Forrest fished in the center drawer of his desk and said, “Here’s a
list of people I’ve talked to. You can see for yourself.”

  Rutledge took the neatly written sheet and glanced at the names, nearly two dozen of them. Most were unfamiliar to him, but Mrs. Davenant’s was among them, and Royston’s. And Catherine Tarrant’s.

  “Each of these people heard him ranting. That’s clear enough,” Forrest went on. “He was plaguing everyone who came within earshot, and each one will swear to that. Although the shopkeepers were too busy to pay much heed to him, they remember that he was making the usual nuisance of himself, and their customers were commenting on it. Putting it all together, you can see that he arrived in the market square early on and was still there at midmorning.” He rubbed his pounding temples and gestured to the two barrel-backed oak chairs across from the desk. “Sit down, sit down.”

  Rutledge shook his head. “I must find Daniel Hickam.”

  Inspector Forrest said, “Surely you don’t intend to take his statement seriously? There’s bound to be other evidence more worthy of your time than anything Hickam can say! If we keep looking hard enough?” He could see that the man from London was far from well, and suddenly found himself worrying about that. You don’t have the patience and the energy to give to a thorough investigation, is that it? he thought to himself. You want an easy answer, then back to the comforts of London. That’s why the Yard sent you, then, to sweep it all under the rug for them. And it’s my fault….

  “I won’t know that until I’ve spoken to him, will I?”

  “He can’t tell you what day of the week it is half the time, much less where he came from before you ran into him or where he might be going next. Mind’s a wasteland. Pity he didn’t die when that shell exploded—no good to himself or anyone else in his condition!”

  “You took down his statement,” Rutledge pointed out. Hamish, relishing Forrest’s remark, was repeating it softly, an echo whispering across a void of fear. “…no good to himself or anyone else in his condition….” He turned away abruptly to shield his face from Forrest’s sharp gaze, and unintentionally left the impression that he was putting the blame squarely where it belonged.