by Charles Todd
Rutledge remembered the first corpses he’d seen in France, obscene, smelling things, inhuman grotesques that haunted his dreams. Stiff, awkward, ugly—you couldn’t feel compassion for them, only disgust, and the dreadful fear that you’d turn out like them, carted off in the back of a truck, like boards.
“Death is seldom tidy,” he said after a moment. “Sometimes for the very old, perhaps. Nothing is finished by a murder, whatever the killer may expect.”
She shook her head. “Laurence Royston told me that he had killed a child once. Quite accidentally. She’d run in front of his motorcar, there was nothing he could do, it was over in an instant. But he still remembers it quite vividly, the faces of the parents, the grief, the small crumpled body. Two children, playing a game, and suddenly, death.” She smiled wryly at Rutledge. “It was meant to help me see that none of us is spared pain. Meant kindly. He’s a very kind man. But it was small comfort.” A bird began to sing in the trees beyond an open window. The sound was sweet, liquid, but oddly out of place as a background to a quiet discussion of death.
“Do you still wish to see Charles’s murderer hang?” He watched her face.
Lettice sighed and asked instead, “Do you truly believe Catherine Tarrant could have killed him?”
“I don’t know. The field is still wide. Catherine Tarrant? Mark Wilton? Or Mrs. Davenant. Royston. Hickam. Mavers.”
She made a dismissive gesture. “Then you’ve made no progress at all. You’re whistling in the dark.”
“You, then.” He couldn’t decide if the scent that wafted to him on the slight breeze coming in the window was her perfume or from the flowers.
“Me?”
Rutledge said only, “I must keep an open mind, Miss Wood.”
“If I were planning to kill anyone—for any reason—I would not have used a shotgun! Not in the face!”
“There are many ways to kill,” he said, thinking suddenly of Jean. “Cruelty will do very well.”
Her face flamed, as if he’d struck her. On her feet in an instant, she stood there poised to leave. “What are you talking about? No, I don’t want to hear it! Please—just leave, I’ve nothing more to say to you.” Her odd eyes were alight with defensive anger, giving her face a wild and passionate force. “Do what you came to do, and go back to London!”
“I’m sorry—that wasn’t what I intended to—” He found himself apologizing quickly, a hand out as if to stop her from ringing the bell for Johnston.
Hamish stirred. “She’ll enchant ye, wait and see! Go while you can!”
But Rutledge paid him no heed. “Look at this from my point of view,” he went on. “So far, the best evidence I can find leads me to Mark Wilton. I don’t want to make a mistake, I don’t want to arrest him now and then have to let him go for lack of proof. Can you see what that could do to his life? Or yours, if you marry him, now or later. Chances are, you knew Charles Harris as well if not better than anyone. The man, not the soldier, not the landowner, not the employer. Help me find the Colonel’s killer! If you loved him at all.”
She stared at him, still very angry. But she hadn’t rung the bell. Instead, she walked with that long graceful stride toward the window, swinging around, making him turn as well to see her. “What is it you want, then? For me to damn someone else?”
“No. Just to help me see that last evening as clearly as I can.”
“I wasn’t there when the quarrel began!”
“But you can judge what might have happened. If I ask the right questions.”
She didn’t answer him, and he made himself think clearly, made himself consider what might have happened.
Three women. Three men. Catherine Tarrant, Lettice Wood, Sally Davenant. Charles Harris, Mark Wilton, and a German called Linden. He hadn’t found a link that satisfied him. And yet there were ties between them, of love and hate. Linden was dead. Harris was dead. And if Hickam’s testimony in court was damning enough, Wilton would be hanged. The men gone. All three of them.
Which in a way brought him back again to Catherine Tarrant….
“Is it possible,” he began slowly, “that, whatever they may have discussed just after you went up to your room, your guardian and Captain Wilton argued that night over Miss Tarrant? That somehow the subject of Miss Tarrant—or Linden, for that matter—came up after they’d finished the discussion of the wedding?”
The defensive barrier was there again. She answered curtly, “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about! Why should they’ve argued about Catherine?”
“Could the Colonel have warned the Captain that Catherine Tarrant still felt strongly about Linden’s death and was likely to do something rash? To harm one of them? To spoil the wedding, perhaps? Could the Captain have refused to hear anything said against her? Defended her, and made Harris very angry with him?”
“If Charles had been worried, he would have said something to me. But he didn’t—”
“But you didn’t go riding with him that morning. There was no opportunity to tell you what was on his mind.”
She opened her mouth to say something, and decided against it. Instead, she replied, “You’re chasing straws!”
“A witness saw them together, still arguing, that morning shortly before the Colonel died. If they weren’t arguing over the wedding, then over what? Or over whom?”
With her back to the windows, her eyes shadowed by the halo of her dark hair, she said, “You’re the policeman, aren’t you?”
“Then what about Mrs. Davenant?”
“Sally? What on earth does she have to do with anything?”
“She’s very fond of her cousin. Your guardian might have worried about that. Or conversely, Mark Wilton might have been jealous of the place Harris held in your life—”
Lettice turned to the flowers in the vase, her fingers moving over them as if she were blind and depended on touch to know what varieties were there. “If Mark had wanted to marry Sally, he could have done it any time these last eight years. When he had leave during the war, she went to London to meet him. He’s fond of her, of course he is. He’s fond of Catherine Tarrant, as well. As for Charles, Mark knows how I feel—felt—about him.” She bit her lip. “No, feel. I won’t put it in the past tense, as if everything stopped with his death! As if you stop caring, stop giving someone a place in your life. I want him back again, so desperately I ache with it. And yet I’m afraid to think about him—I can only see that awful, terrible thing—”
She lifted her head, forced back the tears. “Do you dream of the corpses you’ve seen?”
Taken aback, he said before he thought, “Sometimes.”
“I dreamed about my parents after they died. But I was too young to know what death was. I saw them as shining angels floating about heaven and watching me to see if I was good. In fact, the first time I saw the Venus above the hall here at Mallows, I thought it was my mother. It was a great comfort, oddly enough.” After a moment she said in a different voice, “You’ll have to chase your straws without me. I’m sorry. There’s nothing else I can do.”
This time he knew he had to go. He stood up. “I’d like to question your staff again before I leave. Will you tell Johnston that I have your permission?”
“Question them, then. Just put an end to this.” It was a plea; her anger had drained away into pain and something else that he couldn’t quite identify.
And so he spent the next hour talking to the servants, but his mind was on the lonely woman shut up in grief a few walls, a few doors from wherever he went in that house.
Mary Satterthwaite nervously told him she wasn’t sure what the master and the Captain were arguing about, but Miss Wood had said they were discussing the wedding, and it appeared to have given her the headache; she wanted only to go to bed and be left alone.
“Was it common for the Colonel and the Captain to argue?”
“Oh, no sir! They never did, except over a horse race or how a battle was fought, or the like. Men often quarrel rather than
admit they’re wrong, you know.”
He smiled. “And who was wrong in this instance? The Colonel? The Captain?”
Mary frowned, taking him seriously. “I don’t know, sir.” She added reluctantly, “I’d guess, sir, it was the Colonel.”
“Why?”
“He threw his glass at the door. I mean, he couldn’t throw it at the Captain, being as he was already gone. But he didn’t like it that the Captain had had the last word, so to speak. So he threw his glass. As if there was still anger in him, or guilt, or frustration. Men don’t like to be wrong, sir. And I doubt if the Colonel was, very often.”
Which was a very perceptive observation. He asked about relations between the Captain and the Colonel. Cordial, he was told. Two quite different men, but they respected each other.
In the end, he asked to be taken upstairs to any rooms overlooking the hillside where the Colonel had been riding.
In theory, the hill was in view from a number of windows, both in the family quarters and on the servants’ floor. At this time of year, with the trees fully leafed out, it was different. You’d have to be lucky, Rutledge thought, peering out from one of the maids’ windows—the best of the lot—to catch a glimpse from here. You’d have to know where the Colonel was riding, and be watching for the faintest flicker of movement, and then not be certain what you’d seen was a horse and man. Possible, then. But not likely.
Tired, with Hamish grumbling in the back of his mind, Rutledge left the house and began the walk back to the meadow, the far hedge, and the lane where he’d left his car two hours or more before.
He glimpsed Maggie, the quiet Sommers cousin, hanging out a tablecloth on the line. He waved to her, but she didn’t see him, the breast-high wall and the climbing roses blocking her view. He walked on. Somewhere behind her he could hear the goose honking irritably, as if it had been shut away for the morning and was not happy about it. Rutledge smiled. Served the damned bird right!
Back in the meadow where Charles Harris had been found, Rutledge ignored Hamish and began to quarter the land carefully. But there was nothing to be learned. Nothing that was out of the ordinary. Nothing of interest. He went back over the land again, moving patiently, his eyes on the ground, his mind concentrating on every blade of grass, every inch of soil. Then he moved into the copse where the killer might have stood waiting.
Still nothing. Frustrated, he stood there, looking back the way he’d come, looking at the lie of the land, the distant church steeple. Hamish was loud in his mind, demanding his attention, but he refused to heed the voice.
Nothing. Nothing—
Except—
In the lee of the hedge, near where he and the Sergeant had cut through on their first visit. Something dull and gray and unidentifiable. Something he hadn’t been able to see from any other part of the meadow. What was it?
He walked down to the hedge, keeping his bearings with care, and found the place, the thing he’d seen. He squatted on his heels and looked at it, thinking it was a scrap of rotting cloth. Nothing…Ignoring the brambles, he pushed his way nearer to it. Closer to, it had shape, and staring eyes.
Reaching into the brambles, he touched it, then pulled it forward.
A doll. A small wooden doll, in a muddy, faded gown of pale blue flowered print, the kind of cloth that could be bought in any shop, cheap, cotton, and favored by mothers for children’s clothes. A girl’s dress, with the leftover cloth sewn into a gown for her favorite doll.
Hadn’t Wilton said something about seeing a child who had lost her doll?
Rutledge picked up the little bundle of cloth and stared down at it.
Hickam might not be fit to testify against the Captain. Would a child be any more reliable as a witness? He swore. Not bloody likely!
Making his way through the hedge, Rutledge went striding down to the lane, ignoring the high grass and brambles, his mind working on how to deal with the child, and with Wilton. Hamish was silent now, but somewhere he still moved about restlessly, waiting.
When he got to his car, left in the brushy, overgrown lane, Rutledge swore again. With infinite feeling.
One of his tires was torn. As if viciously slashed with a knife or a sharp stick. Deliberately and maliciously damaged.
Rutledge didn’t need a policeman to tell him who had done this.
Mavers.
13
Rutledge sent the blacksmith to bring his car back to the village and then went to find Inspector Forrest. But he wasn’t in—he’d been called back to Lower Streetham on the matter of the lorry accident. Fortuitously, Rutledge told himself irritably.
It was long past time for luncheon, and Rutledge turned back toward the Inn. After a hasty meal, he crossed to Dr. Warren’s surgery to look in on Hickam. He was no better—awake, but without any awareness in his eyes. A dead man’s stare was focused on the ceiling of the tiny room, blank and without knowledge or pain or grief.
Dr. Warren came in as Rutledge was leaving. “You’ve seen him? Well, it’s something that he’s still alive, I suppose. I’ve got enough on my hands—I can’t stand over him. You might see if the Vicar will pray for him”—he snorted—“it’s about all he’s good for!”
“Can you tell me if any young children live near the meadow where Harris was found?”
“Children?” Dr. Warren stared at him.
“Girls, then. Young enough to play with something like this.” He held out the muddy wooden doll.
Dr. Warren transferred his gaze to the object in Rutledge’s hand. “There must be seven or eight on the estate itself, servants’ and tenants’ children. More, scattered on the farms thereabouts. The gentry have china dolls, not wooden ones. As a rule. Why?”
“I found this under a hedge. Captain Wilton says he saw a child that morning, that she’d lost her doll.”
“Then ask the Captain to find her for you! I’ve got a breech birth to see to, and after that, a farmer whose ax slipped and damned near took off his foot. If I save the limb, it’ll be a miracle. And he won’t have the Army to provide him with a false one if I don’t.”
Rutledge stood aside and let him walk into the small surgery, where Warren restocked his bag and then set it on the scrubbed table. “You understand, don’t you, that if Hickam lives, he may not have enough of a mind left to testify at all? Everything that’s happened could be wiped out?”
Rutledge replied, “Yes. I know. You’ve served the people of this town for most of your life. Who do you believe might have killed Charles Harris?”
Warren shrugged. “Mavers, of course. That would be my first thought. I don’t know your Captain well enough to judge him. Still, Lettice was going to marry him, and Charles was damned careful where she was concerned; he wouldn’t have stood by and let a fool sweep her off her feet.”
“Catherine Tarrant?”
Warren shook his head. “Because of the German? Don’t be an idiot, man. I can’t see her lurking behind a tree with a shotgun, can you? If she had wanted Harris dead, she’d have come for him at Mallows, the first day he was back from the war. Why wait until now? But I’m not paid to find murderers. That’s your job. And if you ask me, you’re damned slow going about it!”
Hamish, chuckling deep in his mind, said derisively, “You’re half the man you were, that’s what it is. Ye left the better half in the mud and terror, and brought back only the broken bits. And London knows it!”
Rutledge turned on his heel and strode out, the doll still in his hand.
He tracked down Wilton having a whiskey in the Inn’s bar, morosely staring at the glass in his hand. Rutledge sat down at the small corner table and said, “Early in the day for that?”
“Not when you’ve come from the undertaker’s,” Wilton said, turning his glass around and around in his fingers. “The fool had never dealt with a headless man before. He was half titillated, half revolted. Would we be wanting the Colonel in his dress uniform? And how was that cut, sir, with a high collar or low? Would we wish a silk scarf to cov
er what was—er—the remains? Would we wish for a pillow in the coffin? To rest the shoulders upon, of course, sir. And will you be wanting to inspect the—er—deceased, before the services?” The Captain shuddered. “My good God!” He looked at Rutledge. “When Davenant died, the old vicar was still alive, and he went with me to attend to matters. Before we left, Davenant’s valet handed us a box with suitable clothing in it, and that was that. It was civilized, simple.”
“An ordinary death.” Rutledge shook his head as Redfern started toward them, to indicate that he didn’t wish to be disturbed. Then he put the doll on the table.
Mark Wilton stared at it, frowning. “What the hell is that?”
“A child’s doll.”
“A doll?”
“You told me that on the morning Harris was killed, you ran into a child who’d lost her doll. On the path near the meadow.”