A Test of Wills

by Charles Todd

  In the dark recesses of his mind he heard Hamish laughing, and finished his whiskey at a gulp. It burned going down, almost bringing tears to his eyes as he fought to keep from choking. Or were the tears for himself?

  Think of anything, he commanded himself roughly. Anything but that! His mind roiled with emotion, then settled into the dull pain of grief and despair. Think, man, for God’s sake!

  What was it they’d been talking about? No, who? Catherine Tarrant.

  What to do about Catherine Tarrant, then, how to find a key to her? Waving Redfern away and getting to his feet, the whiskey still searing his throat, he walked out of the bar.

  The person to answer that question was another woman. Sally Davenant.

  11

  The next morning just before the Inquest Rutledge had an opportunity to ask Inspector Forrest if he knew the source of Mavers’s pension. But Forrest shook his head.

  “I didn’t know he had one. But that explains why he’s never had to lift his hand to a stroke of work if he didn’t feel like it. His father served the Davenants. Ask Mrs. Davenant if she knows anything about it.”

  The Inquest, held in one of the Inn’s parlors, was crowded with a cross-section of spectators who settled in early for the best seats and waited with patient expectation for something interesting to happen. They quietly took note of who was—and was not—present, and wondered aloud how the man from London would present his findings, and more importantly, what they would be. No one knew anything about an arrest—never a good sign—but rumor claimed that Sergeant Davies had spent most of the night in Warwick, and this could mean that the killer hadn’t been an Upper Streetham man after all. More than a few had pinned their hopes on Bert Mavers. Such expectations were destined for disappointment.

  The Coroner’s Court progressed with smooth timeliness, from the finding of the body to the request for an adjournment while the police pursued their inquiries. Half an hour, and it was finished. The coroner, an elderly man from Warwick, agreed to the police request, stood up with decision, and said, “That’s it, then,” before nodding to Forrest and walking out to find his carriage. A murmur of dissatisfaction trailed him like ghostly robes as he went.

  Sergeant Davies had returned from Warwick around six o’clock that morning, since he had to give evidence about finding the Colonel’s body. It had been a long night, he was tired and irritable, and his trip had been for nothing.

  “There’s no reason to believe the killer came on the trains,” he said. “All strangers are accounted for, and there aren’t any reports of stragglers along the road from Warwick. That’s not to say someone couldn’t have come from another direction, but I’d give you any odds you like that he didn’t arrive from Warwick.”

  Which was more or less what Rutledge had expected. He thanked the Sergeant and then hurried to catch up with Sally Davenant, who was walking along with another woman, dark haired and neatly dressed in gray. They parted just as Rutledge reached them, and Sally turned to him, smiling politely.

  “Good morning, Inspector.”

  It was a beautiful morning, the sky that particular shade of blue that comes only in June. The air was scented with roses, wild in the hedgerows and blooming in gardens, birds everywhere, children laughing. Not a day to consider the ramifications of a man’s death.

  “I’d like to speak with you,” he said. “May I offer you a cup of tea?”

  “Yes, I’d like one, after that ordeal.” She turned to walk with him back toward the Shepherd’s Crook. “I only came for Mark’s sake. I’m glad you didn’t require Lettice’s presence. Mark says she’s had a very rough time.”

  Refusing to be drawn, Rutledge said, “I wanted to ask you about Mavers. About a pension he may have received from your husband. Or rather, a pension that might have been left to his father, as the shotgun was.”

  Sally frowned. “I don’t know anything about a pension, Inspector. Hugh had a very high regard for the man’s father—he was dependable, honest, and knew his job. Quite different from his son. In every respect. I can tell you, Hugh had no such regard for the Mavers you’ve met.”

  “Yet he left him a shotgun.”

  “He left it to the father, and no one ever thought to change that article in the Will. When the Will was read, I made no objection to letting the shotgun go to the son because it was easier at the time than trying to fight over it. I had many problems with my husband, Inspector. He was a man who could charm anyone, but he wasn’t easy to live with. That doesn’t mean I didn’t love him—I did. But his death was a difficult time for me. Emotionally. I was torn between grief and relief, to be honest. And the problem of dealing with someone like Mavers was beyond me. I’d never have heard the end of it anyway, whatever the lawyers promised, and I wasn’t going to put up with a lifelong vendetta, as Charles did. How that man endured the endless bickering and trouble I’ll never know! Probably because he was never here long enough to be driven crazy. But I was, you see.”

  When they were seated in the dining room, where Redfern was trying to keep up with the demand for refreshment, Rutledge ordered tea, then said to Mrs. Davenant, “What can you tell me about Catherine Tarrant?”

  Her surprise showed in her face. “Catherine? Whatever does she have to do with Charles’s death?”

  “I don’t know. I’d like a woman’s opinion of her.”

  Sally Davenant laughed wryly. “Ah yes, the men flock to her defense, don’t they? I don’t know why. Not that they shouldn’t, you understand!” she added quickly. “It’s just that men and women see things quite differently.”

  Which still told him very little about Catherine.

  When the tea things had been set before them, and Sally had poured, Rutledge tried again. “Did you know the German? Linden?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did. He worked on her land, and several times when I went to call he came around to take my horse. Tall, fair, quite strong.” She hesitated, then added, “He was a little like Mark, you know. I don’t know quite how to put my finger on the likeness. I’d never have mistaken one for the other. But a fleeting resemblance—something you felt rather than saw?”

  Rutledge said nothing, reaching for one of the little cakes on a gold-rimmed china plate. They were amazingly good, he discovered.

  After a moment, she went on, “He was an educated man—a solicitor, I was told later—and in the ordinary way, an acceptable suitor. If he’d been one of the refugees, Belgian or French, there wouldn’t have been any comment at all. Well, very little! But he was German, you see, those horrible monsters who shot Edith Cavell, spitted babies on their bayonets, killed and maimed British soldiers—the casualty lists were awful, and when they came out, you sighed with relief because someone you loved or knew wasn’t on it this time—then felt guilty for feeling relieved! We hated the Germans, and to think of loving one—of marrying one—seemed—unnatural.” A woman coming through the dining room spoke to Sally and walked on.

  Rutledge waited until she was out of hearing. “I understood that no one knew of their relationship at the time Linden was taken away.”

  “That’s true. But there was no doubt how Catherine felt, after the war. She went a little mad, trying to find him, and then when she learned he was dead, she was hardly herself for months. Carfield made matters worse by trying to make them better, and the town has shunned her ever since. Most of the women, and more than a few of the men, won’t even speak her name.”

  “You said that Linden reminded you of Mark. Did he remind Catherine too? Was she, do you think, still in love with Mark?”

  Sally Davenant shook her head. “No, that was over long ago. I could have told you at the time that it wouldn’t last. Mark always falls in love with the wrong women—” She stopped, her mouth closing firmly, her eyes defying him.

  Rutledge waited. She shrugged after a moment and went on. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounds, of course.”

  But he thought she had. “What did you mean?”

  “Cath
erine hadn’t discovered her talent when she met Mark. She painted, yes, but it wasn’t the focus of her life, if you see what I mean. I think it would have come between them, when she did. And she hated his flying. Even if the war hadn’t come along to separate them, what chance would such a marriage have?” Carfield came in, smiled warmly at Mrs. Davenant, then nodded briskly to Rutledge.

  “And Lettice?”

  She hesitated, then answered carefully. “I don’t think it would have worked. Not in the end. There was Charles, you see, and Lettice was devoted to him. No man enjoys living in the shadow of such a devotion. If he’d been older, yes, Mark could have relegated him to the father’s role. Mark could never bear to be second best. It would have been ‘Charles this’ and ‘Charles that’ every time he turned around.”

  “Did Lettice fall in love with Wilton because he was the handsome hero her guardian had brought home for her? An infatuation, like Catherine’s, years ago?”

  “No, of course not. She’s rather mature for her years, have you noticed? Probably it has to do with being orphaned so young, she had to learn to be independent early on. Charles more or less cultivated that too. Well, he could have been killed at any time, and he wanted her to be capable of carrying on alone! She wasn’t a dewy-eyed girl, and I think that’s what attracted Mark to her. He’s been through too much to fall in love with a silly twit who thought he was dashing and exciting. And Mark is a very private man, he would have to be, to spend so much time alone in the air. Charles seemed so—open. Where Hugh had devastating charm, shallow though it was, Charles was the most—I don’t know, the most physically compelling man. He could walk into a room and somehow dominate it just by being there. Men deferred to him, women found him sympathetic. That combination of strength and tenderness that’s quite rare.”

  “But of the three, Mark Wilton was surely the most attractive?”

  She laughed as she poured herself another cup of tea, then refilled his cup. “Oh, by far. If he came in here right now, every woman in the room would be aware of it! And preen. I’ve seen it happen too many times! Hugh had charm, Mark has looks, Charles had charisma. The difference is that Hugh and Charles knew how to wield what they’d been given. Mark isn’t a peacock, and never has been. It’s his greatest failing. People expect too much from beauty.”

  “Which is why you feel he couldn’t have lived in Charles Harris’s shadow.”

  “Of course. I think that’s why he never fell in love with me—Hugh was one of those men who dominated with charm. To tell you the truth, Hugh used it as a weapon to have his own way. Sending you to the skies one minute, tearing your heart out the next. And although I was close to hating him at the end, it was too late, I’d lost the ability to trust. I’d have made a shrew of a wife for Mark Wilton! And he knew it.”

  The words were said lightly, with a smile, but there was pain behind them, in her eyes and in her voice. Rutledge heard it, but his mind was occupied by what she’d told him the first day he’d spoken to her—that Mark Wilton would have been a fool to harm Lettice’s guardian, it was the surest way to lose her.

  And yet just now she’d contradicted that.

  Whether she had realized it or not, she’d given him a motive for murder—not her own motive, but Mark Wilton’s.

  Unless you turned it the other way about—and asked yourself if the most complete revenge was to destroy all three of them, Lettice, Charles, and the Captain, in one single bloody act whose repercussions would leave Lettice as alone and empty as Sally Davenant herself. Could she also have betrayed Catherine and her German lover? Women often sensed such things—his sister Frances always knew before the gossips what the latest scandal was.

  Almost as if she heard his thoughts, Sally said quietly, “But you wanted to hear about Catherine, not me. Her father taught her to shoot, you know. If she’d wanted to shoot Charles, she’d have known how to go about it. But why now? Why after all this time? I’d always thought of her as hot-blooded, to paint like that. Not cold-blooded…” She let the thought trail off.

  It was a wearing day. Hickam was still too ill to question, and Dr. Warren was testy from lack of sleep. A child he was tending was dying, and he didn’t know why. When Rutledge tried to prod him over Hickam, he said, “Come with me and see this child, and then tell me, damn you, that Hickam’s life is worth hers!”

  So Rutledge went back to the meadow, walking up and down it, trying to see the murder, the frightened horse, the falling man. He tried to feel the hatred that had led to murder, worked out angles to see how the horseman and the killer had come together here in this one spot. How long had the killer waited? How sure had he been that Charles Harris would come this way? Had he known, somehow, where the Colonel was riding that morning? Which would bring suspicion back to Royston, surely. Or Lettice. Unless, before the quarrel, something had been said over dinner about his plans, and Wilton had remembered. Or perhaps the killer had simply followed Harris from the lane. Wilton again. Or Hickam? What would bring Catherine Tarrant out so early on that particular June morning, shotgun in hand, murder on her mind? Or Mrs. Davenant?

  The damnable thing was, except for Catherine Tarrant’s dead lover and Mark Wilton’s quarrel, and possibly Mrs. Davenant’s jealousy, there was nothing to make Colonel Harris a target. Not if Mavers was out of the running, and Rutledge had to admit there was too little chance there of proving opportunity.

  Why couldn’t he get a grip on the emotions of this case?

  Because there was something he hadn’t learned? Questions he should have asked and hadn’t? Relationships he hadn’t found?

  Or because his own ragged emotions kept getting in his way?

  Why had he lost that strong vein of intuition that once had made him particularly good at understanding why the victim had to die? At understanding why one human being had been driven to kill another. Was it lost innocence, the knowledge that he himself was now no better than the killers he hunted? No longer siding with the angels, cut off from what he once had been?

  He laughed sourly. Maybe it had only been a trick, a game he was good at when he could stand back dispassionately from the searing flame of emotions. A trick he’d used so often he’d come to believe in it himself. He could hardly bring back an image of the man he’d been in 1914. A realist, he’d told himself then, accustomed to the darkest corners of human experience. Well, he’d discovered in the trenches of France that hell itself was not half so frightening as the darkest corners of the human mind.

  Not that it mattered. All they expected of him now was that he do his job. No frills, no flamboyance, no magician’s artifice, just answers.

  If he couldn’t do his job, what would he do with his life?

  He began to walk, making his way from the meadow down to Mallows, trying to think which way the horse might have come, what path had led Harris here.

  But that didn’t work, did it? If Harris had been in the lane speaking to Wilton, he must have been returning to Mallows, not starting out on his ride! And why hadn’t Lettice chosen to go riding with her guardian that morning? Why had she said, with such pain, “I didn’t go riding with him,” as if in her mind this time had been somehow different?

  He walked on, following the contour of the land, using his sense of direction to lead him toward the house. In the distance he could see the chimneys of the cottage the two Sommers women had rented for the summer, and from one particular spot, the church steeple rising among the treetops, marking the village. Could you also see this part of Mallows’ land from the church tower? It was an interesting thought….

  And farther along, the distant rooftops of Mallows itself, and the stables. What could be seen of the hillside from that vantage point?

  Could you follow Colonel Harris’s progress and be certain of meeting him at one particular place? Or had the encounter been happenstance? No, because the killer had come armed, ready to kill….

  Skirting the plowed fields where new growth was dark green and strong, he found the orchards, and
the stile, and a shrub-bordered path. At a fork that divided into one path of hard-packed earth pointing in the direction of the stables and sheds, the other paved now and passing through a hedge to the landscaped grounds, he came first to the kitchen gardens, the herbs, the flowers for cutting, and then the formal beds that marked the lawns.

  Sure of his way now, Rutledge strode around a hedge, badly startling a gardener on his knees in a patch of vegetables. The man scrambled to his feet, pulled off his cap, and stared. Rutledge smiled. “I’ve come to see Mr. Royston.”

  “I—he’s not at home, sir, Mr. Royston isn’t, he hasn’t come back from the Inquest that I know.”

  “Then I’ll go along to the house and wait. Thank you.” He nodded, and the gardener stood staring after him, perspiration unheeded running into the frown lines on his sun-red forehead.

  Rutledge crossed the lawns to the drive and rang the bell, finding himself asking to see Lettice, not Laurence Royston.

  12

  To Rutledge’s surprise, Lettice Wood asked him to come up to the small sitting room and was waiting for him there in the sunlight from the windows.

  “The Inquest is over, Miss Wood,” he said formally. “I haven’t any information to give you.”

  “No, I can see that,” she told him quietly, gesturing for him to be seated. There was a large crystal bowl of flowers on the table. From Sally Davenant’s gardens? Or from Mallows’? Next to the severe black of her mourning the colors were richly bright, making her face all the paler. “Is it so hard a thing, to find a murderer?”

  “Sometimes. When he—or she—doesn’t want to be found, and the trail is cold, as it were.” He sat down in the chair facing her, back to the window.

  Her eyes were dark with pain. “Have you seen my—the Colonel’s body?”

  Caught off guard, he said, “No. I haven’t.”

  “Neither have I.” She stopped. “I read a story once, when I was a child. It was about medieval Norway or perhaps Scotland—an outlandish place, it sounded to me, where people didn’t behave as Englishmen did. There was a death in the village, and the chief couldn’t discover who’d killed the person. And so he ordered everyone who came to the funeral to walk past the bier where the body lay, and put their hand on the wound. Everyone did, and nothing happened. But the chief wasn’t satisfied, and then he found a man hiding under an overturned boat. He didn’t want to see or touch the dead, he was afraid of what might happen if he did. Afraid the wound would cry out and accuse him of a sin that had nothing to do with murder. And so he’d run away. I was too young to understand when I read the story. I thought the frightened man was wiser than the rest—not to want to touch the dead.” She had been toying with a small silver box she had taken up from the table beside her. Now she looked up at him. “But I wanted to go to Charles. Hold him—tell him again that I loved him—tell him good-bye. That’s when the doctor explained what had been done to him. And now I can’t bear the thought of it—I can’t bear to think of Charles at all, because when I do, I see a—a monster. You can’t imagine how guilty it makes me feel—how bereft of comfort of any kind.”