A Test of Wills

by Charles Todd

  “Oh, yes. I remember her. She’d been picking flowers or some such thing, and then couldn’t find the doll—she’d put it down somewhere or other. I see she found it.”

  “I found it. Now I want to find her.”

  Wilton smiled tiredly. “To ask her if I was carrying a shotgun when she and I crossed paths? First a drunken madman, then a child. Good God!”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “I have no idea who she was, or what her name was. Small, fair, cheerful—a child. I’ve had very little experience with them. I’m not even certain I’d know her again if I saw her.”

  “But you won’t mind accompanying the Sergeant to visit the tenants on Mallows’ land and in the farms above the church.” It was not a question.

  Wilton regarded him for a time. “You’re quite serious about this?”

  “Entirely.”

  Mark Wilton sighed. “Very well.”

  “That night, when Lettice Wood left you and Harris together in the drawing room, she said you were discussing the wedding. Where did the conversation turn after that? To Catherine Tarrant?”

  Wilton was surprised. “Catherine? Why on earth should we have discussed her—much less quarreled over her? Charles and I admired her.”

  “If not Catherine Tarrant, what about Mrs. Davenant?”

  Wilton laughed. “You are in desperate straits, aren’t you? Did you think I’d shoot Harris over the good name of my cousin? What has she done to merit your attention?”

  Rutledge shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I grasp at straws?” He realized that he was quoting Lettice Wood. Had her words rankled that much? “There hasn’t been a rush of people breaking down the police-station door to volunteer information about Harris’s killer, has there? I’ve decided there’s a conspiracy to keep me from finding out what’s best hidden.”

  Wilton stared at him, eyes sharp and searching. The thin, weary face before him was closed and unreadable. What had made this man so ill, consumption? War wounds? The sickly often had a way of piercing to the heart of a matter, as if their close brush with death made them more sensitive to the very air around them.

  Rutledge had spoken out of irritation, exasperated with Wilton and himself. But the reaction had been completely unexpected.

  “Yon pretty hero isn’t what he seems,” Hamish growled. “Unlucky in love and good for nothing but killing. But very good at that….”

  Finally Wilton said carefully, “A conspiracy to murder Harris?”

  “A conspiracy to hide the truth. Whatever it may be,” Rutledge amended.

  Wilton finished his whiskey. “I thought you were an experienced man, one of the best London had. That’s what Forrest told us. If you can find one person in Warwickshire—other than that fool Mavers—who wanted Harris dead, I’ll willingly be damned to the far reaches of hell! Meanwhile, I’ll find the Sergeant and we’ll tour the nurseries of Upper Streetham for this child who lost a doll. Little good may it do you!”

  He left, lifting a hand to summon Redfern. Rutledge sat where he was, watching the stiff, angry set of his shoulders as the Captain stalked off. “Unlucky in love,” Hamish had said.

  He considered that again. Catherine Tarrant’s German. Lettice Wood’s guardian. And Sally Davenant, who might not have forgotten what had become of her husband’s old shotgun.

  If Charles Harris had died of poison, Rutledge might believe in simple jealousy more easily. But a shotgun? That took rage, hatred, a need to obliterate, as Lettice had put it.

  He could feel the fatigue dragging at him, the stress and the loneliness. The fear. Looking around for Redfern, Rutledge saw that he was alone in the bar. And then Carfield was coming through the doorway, glancing his way.

  “Inspector. I’ve spoken with Mark Wilton,” he said, crossing over to Rutledge’s table. “We’ve settled on Tuesday for the services. I understand that Dr. Warren hasn’t lifted his embargo on visits to Lettice. I really feel, as her spiritual adviser, I should go to her, offer her comfort, prepare her for the very difficult task of attending the funeral. Could you use your good offices to persuade him that seclusion is the worst possible thing for a young woman with no family to support her?”

  Rutledge smiled. Pompous ass didn’t begin to describe the Vicar. “I have no right to overturn a medical decision unless it has a bearing on my duties,” he said, remembering Lettice’s dread of having to cope with Carfield.

  “And there’s the matter of the reception after the service. It should be held at Mallows. I sincerely believe Charles would have wished that. Naturally I shall take charge; I know the staff well enough, they’ll do my bidding.”

  “Why not at the Vicarage?” Rutledge asked. “After Miss Wood has greeted the guests, she can go quietly home. Wilton will see to that, or Royston.”

  Carfield sat down uninvited. “My dear man, one doesn’t serve the funeral’s cold baked meats at the Vicarage for a man like Charles Harris, who has his own quite fine residence! That’s what staff is for, you know, to do the labor. One doesn’t expect dear Lettice to shoulder such a burden.”

  “Have you suggested to Wilton that you wish to arrange the reception at Mallows?”

  Carfield’s eyebrows rose. “It isn’t his home, is it? The decision is for others to make, not for Captain Wilton.”

  “I see.” He considered the Vicar for a moment. “Who told Upper Streetham that Miss Tarrant was in love with a German prisoner of war and wished to marry him?”

  The heavily handsome face was closed. “I have no idea. I tried to make the village see that she had done nothing wrong, that loving our enemies is part of God’s plan. But people are sometimes narrow-minded about such matters. Why do you ask?”

  “Could she have killed Charles Harris?”

  Carfield smiled. “Why not ask me if Mrs. Davenant did it?”

  “All right. Did she?”

  The smile disappeared. “You’re quite serious?”

  “Murder is a serious business. I want to solve this one.”

  “Ah, yes, I can understand your dilemma, with Wilton so closely connected to the Royal Family,” Carfield answered with a shrewdness that narrowly escaped shrewishness as well. “I shouldn’t have thought that a shotgun was a woman’s weapon.”

  “Nor should I. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a woman. Behind it at the very least, even if she never touched the trigger.”

  With a shake of his head, Carfield replied, “Women are many things, but obliterating a man’s face in that fashion is a bloody, horrible business even for a man. Catherine, Mrs. Davenant, Lettice—they are none of them farmwives who can take an ax to a chicken without blinking.”

  “Catherine Tarrant ran her father’s estate throughout the war.”

  “Ran it, yes, but do you suppose she butchered cattle or dressed a hen?”

  “Perhaps she didn’t know how bloody the results would be. Perhaps she intended to aim lower, but the kick of the weapon lifted the barrel.”

  Carfield shrugged. “Then you must take into account the fact that during the last three years of the war, Sally Davenant volunteered to nurse the wounded at a friend’s house in Gloucestershire, which had been turned into a hospital. She has no formal training, you understand, but Mrs. Davenant did tend her husband through his last illness, and the—er—intimacies of the sickbed were familiar to her. Dressing wounds, taking off bloody bedclothes, watching doctors remove stitches or clean septic flesh—I’m sure you learn to face many things when you have to.”

  No one, least of all Sally Davenant, had seen fit to mention that. Rutledge swore under his breath.

  “But I can’t think that it would lead her to commit a murder!” Carfield was saying. “And why should she wish to kill the Colonel, I ask you!”

  “Why did anyone want to kill him?” Rutledge countered.

  “Ah, now we’re back to why. Whatever the reason, I’m willing to wager that it was deeply personal. Deeply. Can you plumb that far into the soul to find it?”

  “Are you tel
ling me that as a priest you’ve heard confessions that give you the answer to this murder?”

  “No, people seldom confess their blackest depths to anyone, least of all to a priest. Oh, the small sins, the silly sins, even the guilty sins, where a clean conscience relieves the weight of guilt. Adultery. Envy. Anger. Covetousness. Hate. Jealousy.”

  He smiled, a rueful smile that belittled himself in a way. “But there’s fury, you know. Where someone acts in a blind rage, and only then stops to think and feel. Or fright, where there’s no time for second thoughts. Or self-defense, where you must act or be hurt. I hear of those afterward. From the man who hits a neighbor in a rage over a broken cart wheel. From the woman who takes a flatiron to her drunken husband before he beats her senseless. From the child who lashes out, bloodying a bully’s nose. And sometimes these things can also lead to murder. Well, you’ve seen it happen, I needn’t tell you about that! But what’s deeply burned into the soul, what’s buried beneath the civilized layers of the skin, is the more deadly because often there’s no warning it even exists. No warning, even to a priest.”

  Which was more truth than Rutledge had expected to hear from the Vicar.

  “However,” Carfield went on before Rutledge could answer him, “I’m not here to solve your problems but to attend to my own. Which brings me back again to Mallows.”

  “I’d speak to Royston or to Wilton, if I were you. I’d leave Miss Wood out of it. If they agree, they can break the news to her.”

  “I’m her spiritual adviser!”

  “And Dr. Warren is her physician. It’s his decision, not yours.”

  Carfield rose, eyes studying Rutledge, the tired face, the lines. “You carry your own heavy burdens, don’t you?” he said quietly. “I don’t envy you them. My God, I don’t! But let me tell you this much, Inspector Rutledge. When you return to London, this will still be my parish, and I must still face its people. The reception will be at Mallows. I promise you that.”

  He turned and strode through the bar, ignoring Redfern. The younger man came limping across to Rutledge’s table. “Now there’s a man I’d not want to cross,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the sound of the outer door slamming. “I’d turn Chapel before I’d tell him what was going on in my head!”

  Rutledge laughed wryly. He wondered if Redfern had overheard part of the conversation or was simply, unwittingly, confirming the Vicar’s words.

  Redfern picked up the empty glasses and wiped the table with his cloth. “It isn’t easy, is it? Being from London and not knowing what’s happening here. But I’ll tell you, there’s no reason I can think of for any of us to shoot Colonel Harris. Save Mavers, of course. Born troublemaker! There was a private in my company, a sour-faced devil from the stews of Glasgow, who was bloody-minded as they come! Never gave us any peace, until the day the Germans got him. I heard later that the ambulance carrying him to hospital was strafed. Everybody killed. I was sorry about that, but I was relieved that Sammy wasn’t coming back. Ever. Tongue as rough as the shelling, by God!”

  “I understand that Mrs. Davenant was a nurse during the war. Is that true?”

  It was Redfern’s turn to laugh, embarrassed. “You could have knocked me over with a feather when she walked into the ward the day I was brought in, still too groggy from what they’d been doing to my foot to know where I was. God, I thought somehow I’d landed back home! The next day she was there again, changing dressings. I told the sister on duty I’d not hear of her touching me! Sister said that was enough nonsense out of me. Still, they must have spoken of it, because she left me alone.”

  “You recognized her?”

  “Oh, aye, I did. Well, why not? I grew up in Upper Streetham!”

  “And she never said anything? Then or later, when you’d both come back here, to the village?”

  “No, and I can tell you it was a relief the first time she passed me on the High Street without so much as a blink! We’ve spoken since, of course, when she’s been here to dine, just good evening, and what will you have, and thank you—no more nor less than is needed.”

  “Did she work primarily with the surgical patients, or only wherever she was most useful?”

  “I asked one of the younger sisters about her. She said that Mrs. Davenant had shown a skill with handling the worst cases, and the doctors often asked for her. No nonsense, and no fainting, Tilly said. She was best with fliers, she knew how to talk to them. And we got any number of those. Of course, with her own cousin one of them, I expect it was natural for her to find it easy to talk to them.”

  “Amputations, cleaning septic wounds, burns—she didn’t shirk them?”

  “No, not that I ever saw. But she’s not one the lads would feel free to chat up and laugh with, not the way you did with Tilly. Good-natured nonsense, that’s all it was, but not with the likes of Mrs. Davenant!”

  “Yet the fliers were comfortable with her?”

  “Yes. She’d ask news of the Captain, and then they’d soon be easy around her.”

  She’d ask news of the Captain….

  It always came back to the Captain. But he was beginning to think that whatever her feelings about Mark Wilton, it would take more skill than he possessed to bring them to the surface.

  Rutledge went upstairs and along the passage to his room. The sun was bright, showing the worn carpet to worst advantage, dust motes dancing in the light as he passed the windows. The vegetable garden looked like a vegetable garden again, not a sea of temples. He thought the onions had grown inches since his arrival. Even the flowers in the small private garden between the Inn and the drive, surrounded by shrubbery, were no longer flat and drooping from the rain, but stood tall and full of blossom heads. The lupines were particularly glorious. His mother had liked them and filled the house with them as soon as they began to bloom. She’d had a way with flowers, a natural instinct for what made them thrive. His sister Frances, on the other hand, couldn’t have grown weeds in a basket. But she was known throughout London for her exquisite flower arrangements, and was begged to lend her eye for color and form to friends for parties and weddings and balls.

  His door was ajar, the maid finishing making his bed. She apologized shyly when he stepped in, saying that luncheon had been such a busy time they’d needed her in the kitchens.

  “No matter,” he said, but she hastily finished her task, picked up her broom and the pile of dirty linens, and bobbed a curtsy of sorts as she left. Rutledge sat down by the windows, wondering what he would say to Bowles on Monday.

  Possibilities weren’t evidence. Possibilities weren’t guilt. Bowles would have a fit if he knew how few facts Rutledge possessed.

  He wondered what luck Wilton would have tracking down the child who’d lost the doll. He set it on the windowsill and looked at it. Too bad you couldn’t bring a doll into the courtroom. What could it tell? What had it seen, lying there in the hedgerow? Or heard? Rutledge grimaced. A drunken, shell-shocked man, a small child, and a doll, versus a war hero wearing the ribbon of the Victoria Cross. Every newspaper in the country would have a field day!

  He needed a motive…a reason for murder. A reason why the Colonel, riding out that sunny morning, had to die. What had brought about his death? Something now, something in the war, something in a life spent largely out of England? So far such questions had gotten him nowhere.

  Rutledge leaned his head against the back of the chair, then closed his eyes. He needed to find a young sergeant at the Yard and train him. Someone he could trust. He’d ask Bowles for names of likely men. Someone who could work with him. Davies was too busy trying to stay out of sight. Davies had his own commitments to Upper Streetham, and like the Vicar, he had to live here long after Rutledge was gone. It was understandable. But he needed someone to talk to about this case. Someone who was impartial, whose only interest was finding the killer and getting on with it. Someone to share the loneliness—

  “And what would you tell yon bonny Sergeant about me? Would you be honest with him?
I’ll not go away, you can’t shut me out, I’m not your unhappy Jean, who wants to be shut out. I’m your conscience, man, and it wouldn’t be long before yon bonny young Sergeant knows you for what you are!”

  Getting quickly to his feet, Rutledge swore. All right, then, he’d do it alone. But do it he would!

  Outside the Inn, he met Laurence Royston. Royston nodded, and was about to walk on, when Rutledge said, “Have you spoken with the Vicar?”

  Royston turned. “Damned fool! But yes, I have, and yes, he’s right. Charles would have expected to have the reception at Mallows. I’ve told him I’ll take the responsibility, and I’ll see to the arrangements. He needn’t disturb Lettice. Miss Wood.”

  “Can you tell me if Sally Davenant worked as a nurse during the war? At a convalescent hospital?”

  “Yes, she did. In a friend’s home in Gloucestershire. Charles ran into her there once or twice, visiting one of his wounded staff officers. He felt she was very capable, very good at what she did.”

  “Why do you think she volunteered?”

  “Actually, she spoke to me about it before she wrote to Mrs. Carlyle.” He grinned. “I told her she’d hate it. Well, I thought she might, you see, and if she expected to hate it, it wouldn’t be quite such a letdown. She said then that she wasn’t cut out to run a farm the way Catherine Tarrant was doing, and she was damned if she’d roll bandages or serve tea to the troop trains leaving London—ladies’ make-work, she called it. But she thought she might be useful with the wounded. And she was worried about her cousin. Pilots didn’t have a long life expectancy; by rights Wilton should have been killed in the first year—eighteen months. She felt that staying busy would make the news easier to bear. When it came.”

  There was a commotion in the street as two boys came swooping past, chasing a dog with a bone nearly as large as its head in its mouth. A woman on the other side of the street called, “Jimmy! If you’ve let that animal into the house—”

  Royston watched the boys. “Father died on the Somme. They’re growing up wild as hellions. What was I saying? Oh, about Mrs. Davenant. I couldn’t serve,” he went on quietly. “I have only the one kidney, as I told you. The army wouldn’t have any part of me, and I suppose it was for the best. Hard on a man, when everyone else is serving, even the women. Charles told me I was doing my bit keeping Mallows and the Davenant lands productive.”