by Charles Todd
“I don’t see what else I could have done. Sergeant Davies reported the conversation, and after that I had to pursue the matter,” Forrest answered defensively, “whether Hickam is mad or not. But that doesn’t mean we have to believe him. I can’t see how Wilton could be guilty of this murder. You’ve met him. It’s just not like the man, is it?”
“From what I can see, it wasn’t like the Colonel to find himself the victim of a murder either.”
“Well, no, not when you get right down to it. But he is dead, isn’t he? Either his death was accidental or it was intentional, and we have to start with murder because no one has come forward to tell us any differently. No one has said, ‘I was standing there talking to him and the horse jostled my arm, and the gun went off, and the next thing I knew the poor devil was dead.”
“Would you believe them if they did?”
Forrest sighed. “No. Only an idiot carries an unbroken shotgun.”
“Which brings us back to Mavers and his weapon. If Wilton was on either of those tracks on the morning of the murder, he could have taken the gun from Mavers’s house, fired it, then put it back before Mavers came home from the village. Hickam’s evidence is still important.”
“And if Captain Wilton could do that, so could anyone else in Upper Streetham for all we know,” Forrest retorted doggedly. “There’s still no proof.”
“There may be,” Rutledge said thoughtfully. “Captain Wilton came to stay with his cousin when her husband died. He undoubtedly knew about the Will, and the provision regarding the old shotgun. It caused some problems at the time, I understand.”
“I knew about it as well, and had forgotten it—so might he have. It’s all circumstantial! Guessing—”
“What if the Colonel was the wrong victim?”
That sent Forrest’s eyebrows up in patent disbelief. “What do you mean, ‘wrong victim’? You don’t shoot a man at point-blank range and get the wrong one! That’s foolery!”
“Yes, so it is,” Rutledge answered. “It’s also foolery that the Colonel was flawless, a man with no sins on his conscience. When people begin to tell me the truth, Captain Wilton will be far safer. Assuming, of course, that you’re right and he’s innocent.”
Leaving Sergeant Davies to check on Royston’s dental appointment in Warwick, Rutledge went searching for Hickam on his own, but the man seemed to have disappeared.
“Drunk somewhere, like enough,” Hamish said. “Yours is a dry business, man. I’d as soon have a bottle myself.”
Which was the only time Rutledge had found himself in agreement with the voice in his mind.
He turned the car toward the Inn and his thoughts toward dinner.
Which turned out to be interesting in its own way. He had hardly cut into his roast mutton when the dining room’s glass doors opened and a man with a clerical collar came in, stood for a moment surveying the room, then made his way across to where Rutledge sat.
He was nearing thirty, of medium height, with fair hair, a polished manner, and a strong sense of his own worth. Stopping by the table, he said in a rich baritone, “Inspector Rutledge? I’m Carfield. The vicar. I’ve just called again at Mallows, and Miss Wood is still unwell. Then I thought perhaps it might be wiser to ask you anyway. Can you tell me when the Colonel’s body will be released for burial?”
“We haven’t held an Inquest yet, Mr. Carfield. Sit down, won’t you? I’d like to talk to you, now that you’re here.”
Carfield accepted the offer of coffee and said, “Such a tragic business, the Colonel’s death.”
“So everyone says. Who might want to kill him?”
“Why, no one that I can think of!”
“Yet someone did.”
Studying Carfield as the man stirred cream but no sugar into his cup, Rutledge could see that he had the kind of face that would show up well on the stage, handsome and very masculine beyond the twentieth row, but too heavily boned to be called more than “strong” at close quarters. The voice too was made to carry, and grated a little in ordinary conversation. The actor was lurking there, behind the clerical collar, Sergeant Davies had been right about that.
“Tell me about Miss Wood.”
“Lettice? Very bright, with a mind of her own. She came to Mallows several years back—1917, after she’d finished school. And she’s been an ornament to the community ever since. We’re all very fond of her.”
Over the rim of his cup, Carfield was quickly assessing the Inspector, noting his thinness, the lines of tiredness about the mouth, the tense muscles around the eyes that betrayed the strain behind his mask of polite interest. But Carfield misunderstood these signs, putting them down to a man out of his depth, one who might prove useful.
“She’s taken her guardian’s death very hard.”
“After all, he was her only family. Girls are often very attached to their fathers, you know.”
“Harris could hardly be termed that,” Rutledge commented dryly.
With a graceful wave of his hand, Carfield dismissed the quibble over ages. “In loco parentis, of course.”
“From all I hear, he may well have walked on water.”
Carfield laughed, but it had an edge to it. “Harris? No, if anyone fits that description it’s Simon Haldane, not the Colonel. He was too good at killing, you know. Some men become soldiers because they’ve no imagination, they don’t know how to be afraid. But Charles Harris had an uncanny aptitude for war. I asked him about that once, and he said that his skills, such as they were, came from reading history and learning its lessons, but I found that hard to believe.”
“Why?”
“The Colonel was the finest chess player I’ve ever met, and I have no mean skills at the game myself. He was born with a talent for strategy that few of us are given, and he made the choice about how to use it. He fully understood that choice, that war meant playing with men’s lives, not with prettily carved pieces on a game board, but battle was an addiction he couldn’t rid himself of.”
Rutledge said nothing. Carfield sipped his coffee, then added as if he couldn’t stop himself, “Men from Warwickshire who served under him worshiped him; they tell me that on the battlefield he was charismatic, but I call it more a gift for manipulation. I don’t suppose you were in the war, Inspector, but I can tell you that sending other men into battle must rest heavily on one’s soul in the end.”
Hamish stirred but made no remark. He had no need to. Rutledge found himself saying, “Then the Kings of Israel must not be sleeping peacefully in Abraham’s bosom. As I remember, they were at war most of the time.”
Carfield nodded graciously to parishioners who had just come in, a man and his wife, then turned back to Rutledge. “Make light of it if you wish. But something deep down in Charles Harris was frightened by the man he was. He was a Gemini, you see, two forces in one body. In my opinion he needed to come home to Mallows from time to time because it brought him peace, a sense of balance, proof that he wasn’t a man who actually enjoyed killing, however good he might be at it. His much-vaunted devotion to the land was perhaps merely a charade for his troubled conscience.”
“And Captain Wilton? What do you think of him?”
“An intelligent man. And a brave one—one would have to be to fly, don’t you think? When Ezekiel saw the wheel, high in the middle of the air, he claimed it was God at work. We’ve come a long way since then, haven’t we? Man has finally set himself on a par with the archangels. The question is, are we morally ready for such heights?”
Hamish made a derisive snort and Rutledge busied himself with the caramel flan. When he had choked down his amusement, Rutledge asked, “But would he kill a friend?”
“Wilton? None of us can see into the souls of others, Inspector, least of all me. I’ve always tried to understand my parishioners, but they still have the power to surprise me. Just the other day—”
“Is that a yes or a no?” Rutledge asked, looking up and catching an expression in Carfield’s eyes that interested him
. The man was ably playing the role of wise village priest, enamored by the part, but his eyes were cold and hard as he answered Rutledge’s question.
“I would be lying if I said I liked the man. I don’t. He’s a private person, keeps himself to himself. I think that may be why he enjoys flying—he’s there alone in his aeroplane, out of reach and accountable to no one. And a man who likes his own company more than he ought is sometimes dangerous. Hermits have been known to come out of their isolated cells and lead crusades, haven’t they? But murder?” He shook his head. “I don’t know. Possibly. If he were angry enough and determined enough, or if it was the only possible way to get exactly what he wanted. I think he’s been used to that, getting his own way. People tend to idolize handsome daredevils.”
For “people,” substitute Lettice Wood, Rutledge thought to himself. But discounting the jealousy, Carfield had offered a better evaluation of Harris and Wilton than anyone else.
Sometimes hatred saw more clearly than love.
And it might be a very good idea to add Carfield’s name to the very short list of possible suspects, though what purpose Harris’s death might have served in the Vicar’s eyes was yet to be seen.
He went over his notes after dinner, sitting in his room until the walls seemed to close in on him. No illumination came, no connections. Faces. Voices. Yes. But so far leading nowhere. Except, possibly, to Wilton? He remembered his father saying once, after a tiring day in court, “It isn’t actually a question of guilt or innocence, is it? It’s a matter of what the jury believes, once we’ve told them what evidence there is on either side. Given the proper evidence, we could probably convict God. Without it, Lucifer himself would walk free!”
It was late when he got up to walk off a restlessness that prodded him into activity, useful or not.
Before the war it had been the case that drove him night and day—partly from a gritty determination that murderers must be found and punished. He had believed deeply in that, with the single-minded idealism of youth and a strong sense of moral duty toward the victims, who could no longer speak for themselves. But the war had altered his viewpoint, had shown him that the best of men could kill, given the right circumstances, as he himself had done over and over again. Not only the enemy, but his own men, sending them out to be slaughtered even when he had known beyond any doubt that they would die and that the order to advance was madness.
And partly from his fascination with a bizarre game of wits. Like the Colonel, who was far too good at strategy, he’d had a knack for understanding the minds of some of the killers he had hunted, and he had found the excitement of the hunt itself addictive. Man, he’d read somewhere, was the ultimate prey. And the police officer had the reinforcement of Society to indulge in that chase.
Rutledge had tried to explain his reasons to Jean once, when she had begged him to leave the Yard and take up law instead, like his father before him. But she’d stared at him as if he had spoken to her in Russian or Chinese, then laughed and said, “Oh, Ian, do stop teasing me and be serious!”
Now it was his own uncertainties that left him with no peace, his illusions as shattered as his mind. Why could he feel nothing about this murderer? Why?
He heard something in the shadowy alley to his left, between the baker’s shop and a small bootery, a muffled cough. And then Hickam stumbled out, singing to himself. Drunk again. If anything, worse than before, Rutledge thought with exasperation. But at least he wasn’t back in an imaginary France, and there might still be a chance of getting a little sense out of him.
Overtaking him in five strides, Rutledge put a hand on the man’s shoulder to stop him, speaking his name. Hickam shrugged it off irritably. “I want to talk to you. About Colonel Harris,” Rutledge said firmly, prepared to block his retreat down the alley or a dash across the street. “I’ve come from London—”
“London, is it?” Hickam asked, slurring the words, but Rutledge suddenly had the feeling that he wasn’t as drunk—yet—as he wished he was. “And what does London want now? A pox on sodding London! A pox on sodding everybody!”
“The morning that the Colonel died, you were in the lane, drunk. That’s where Sergeant Davies found you. Do you remember?” He forced the man to face him, could smell the alcohol on his breath, the unwashed body. The fear.
Hickam nodded. His face was ghastly in the moonlight, tired and strained and hopeless. Rutledge looked into eyes like black plums in a pudding, and flinched at what he read there, a torment much like his own. “Did you see the Colonel? Charles Harris. Or anyone else?”
“I didn’t shoot him. I had nothing to do with it!”
“No one claims you did. I’m asking if you saw him. Or saw anyone else that Monday morning.”
“I saw them—the two of them.” He frowned. “I saw them,” he added, with less certainty. “I told Forrest—”
“I know what you told Forrest. Now tell me.”
“He was angry. The Captain. Pleading. They were sending us across to take the guns, and he didn’t like it. You could hear the shells—the bombardment had started.” He was beginning to shake. “‘I won’t give up that easily,’ he said. ‘I’ll fight. Whatever you’ve done, I’ll fight you every step of the way!’ The guns were ours at first, but then the Hun answered, and they were close, I could hear the screaming and I couldn’t find my helmet. And the Colonel said, ‘Don’t be a fool. Whether you like it or not, you’ll have to learn to live with it.’ And I saw the Captain’s face, and knew we were going to die—”
He was crying, tears running down his face like the shiny trails left by garden slugs, his mouth turned down in an agony of terror. “They sent me down the sunken road, to see that the flankers found their way, and the Colonel rode off, leaving the Captain behind, and I knew he’d kill me if he caught me hiding there from the guns—I didn’t want to die—God help me—”
Arms wrapped protectively around his body, he bowed his head and wept with a bottomless grief that silently racked him, his shoulders shaking, all dignity and identity gone.
Rutledge couldn’t take any more. He fished in his pocket for coins and gave them to the man, forcing them into the hand nearest him. Hickam lifted his head, staring at him, bewildered by this interjection of reality into his desolation, feeling the coins with his fingers like a blind man. “Here. Buy yourself something else to drink, and go home. Do you hear me? Go home!”
Hickam continued to stare at him, at a loss. “They’re moving up, I can’t leave—”
“You’re out of it,” Rutledge said. “Go find the aid station and tell them you need something to drink. Tell them I said you could have it. Tell them—for God’s sake, tell them to send you home!”
And without a backward glance, Rutledge wheeled and strode angrily down the walk to the Inn, Hamish hammering at his senses like all the Furies.
Rutledge lay awake for hours, listening to the murmurs of a pair of doves nesting under the eaves. They were restless, as if a prowling cat or an owl worried them. The village was quiet, the public bar had closed, and only the big church clock, striking the quarters, disturbed the stillness of the night. He had himself under control again, and only Redfern had seen him return, taking the stairs three at a time. He’d nearly stopped to tell the man to bring him a bottle of whiskey, but had enough sense left to remember where—and who—he was.
Staring at the ceiling, he decided he would call for an immediate Inquest and have it adjourned.
Hickam had been too befuddled to know what he was saying, and God alone could imagine what sort of witness he would make in court. Yet Rutledge was sure now that there was something locked in his mind, tangled with the war, tangled with his confusion and the fumes of alcohol, and if Dr. Warren could get the man sober—and sane—long enough to question, they might get to the bottom of this business.
For all they knew, it might clear Wilton as easily as it might damn him, in spite of Forrest’s dithering.
The trouble was, there was too much circumstanti
al evidence and not enough hard fact. The quarrel with Harris at Mallows, the possible—probable—encounter with Harris again in the lane the next morning, the shotgun sitting in Mavers’s unlocked house, the direction Wilton had chosen for his walk, all appeared to point to the Captain. And the time sequence itself fit, all quite neatly.
But this hadn’t been a neat killing. It had been angry, vengeful, passionate, bloody.
Where, except for Mavers’s tired rhetoric, had there been such passion on a quiet June morning?
And where had it disappeared, once Charles Harris had been cut down with such savage fury? That was the mystery he was going to have to solve before he could find the killer. So much passion…it had to be there still, banked like a fire…and aroused, it might kill again….
He fell asleep on that thought, and didn’t hear the bustle in the street at two o’clock in the morning.
7
Although Rutledge went out directly after breakfast in search of him, Hickam was nowhere to be found.
After a fruitless waste of time, Rutledge decided that the man probably didn’t want to be found, and gave up, cursing his own maudlin stupidity for not hauling him directly to the doctor’s surgery last night while he had the chance, and forcibly sobering up the poor devil.
Picking up Sergeant Davies at the station after giving Forrest instructions for the Inquest, Rutledge said as they got into the motorcar, “I’ve been to the cottage, checked every street in town, and the outlying lanes as well, not to mention the churchyard and the livery stables. Is there any place I haven’t thought of?”
Davies scratched his chin. “That about covers it, I’d guess. But there’s high grass, hedgerows, and any number of sheds about, and we could send half the army out looking and still not find him. Drunks have a way of vanishing, but when he’s slept this one off and needs more gin, he’ll surface soon enough.”