A Test of Wills

by Charles Todd

  That elicited no response, although Agnes tried several variations on that theme too. But Lizzie began to pluck restlessly at the front of Agnes’s apron.

  “It’s no good, sir!”

  “We’ll try a different tack, then. Ask her—ask her if she saw the big horse.”

  Agnes crooned to the child to soothe her, and then said softly in the same tones, “Was there a big horse, my lamb? A big shining horse in the meadow? Was he standing still or riding along? Did you see the big horse?”

  Lizzie stopped sucking her thumb, eyes wide, tense. Listening.

  Rutledge could hear Meg in the kitchen, speaking to someone in a low voice or singing to herself. He couldn’t tell which it was. He swore silently, irritated by the distraction. “And a man on its back?”

  “Did the big horse carry a man on its back? High in the saddle the way you ride with your pa? Did you see the man, love? Just like Papa on the horse? Did you see his face—”

  The words were hardly out of her mouth before Lizzie went rigid and began to scream. The sudden change was alarming in the quiet room, and Agnes cried out, “Now, now, lovey—don’t fret! Sir!”

  “Papa! Papa! Papa! Papa! No—no—don’t!” Lizzie screamed, the words tumbling over one another, the doll clutched tight as she struggled in her grandmother’s arms.

  Meg came running, and behind her were other footsteps.

  Rutledge had gone to Agnes, his back to the door and was bending over the child, speaking to her, when he was caught from behind and thrown hard against the wall, scraping his cheek and all but knocking the breath out of him. A man’s voice was roaring, “Don’t touch her—let her be! Damn you, let her be!” Rutledge wheeled, and Ted Pinter, face distorted with rage, charged at him again. Lizzie was standing rigidly in her grandmother’s lap, eyes squeezed shut, shrieking, “No—no! No!” over and over again.

  Rutledge was grappling with Pinter, Meg was shouting, “Ted! Don’t!”, and her husband was yelling, “She’s suffered enough, God blast you, I won’t have her hurt anymore!”

  And then the little girl stopped screaming so suddenly that the silence shocked them all, halting Pinter in his tracks. Over his shoulder, Rutledge could see the child’s face, startled, mouth wide in a forgotten scream. Her eyes were half scrunched closed, half opened. But the lids were lifting, until they were wide, unbelieving. And then she was holding her arms out, straining against her grandmother’s shoulder, a huge and shining smile on her tear-streaked face. Ted had turned toward her, and as she said in wonder, “Papa?” he made a wordless sound in his throat and went to her, pulling her into his arms against his chest. His features were crumpled with tears, his head bent over his daughter. Meg was hanging on his arm, half cradling both of them, weeping too.

  Agnes, both hands over her heart as if to keep it from leaping out of her chest, was on her feet also, staring at Rutledge with consternation in her eyes.

  Rutledge, as stunned as they were, stared back, uncertain what he’d done.

  Behind his eyes, Hamish was saying over and over again, “She’s naught but a child—a child!”

  19

  The sunset was a thin red line on the western horizon as Rutledge drove back into Upper Streetham. His body was tired, his mind a tumult of images and probabilities. He made his way though the quiet Inn and upstairs to his room, shutting the door behind him and standing there, lost in thought.

  If the child’s evidence was right—and he would have wagered his life that it was—Mavers couldn’t have shot Harris. Well, he’d been almost sure of that from the perspective of timing! An outside possibility, a dark horse, attractive as Mavers was as a suspect, but a close-run thing if he’d actually done the killing.

  But what else had Lizzie changed?

  The doll had been beside the hedge at the edge of the meadow, half hidden under the spill of branches and leaves. From that vantage point, then, Lizzie had seen a horse and rider.

  The man she was most accustomed to seeing on a horse was her own father. Living in the little cottage over on the other side of the hill, at the end of a long and rutted road, the Pinter family was more or less out of the mainstream of village life. Yes, Lizzie had seen any number of horses, Lizzie had seen any number of men—and women—riding. But the man she was most accustomed to seeing…

  And when she heard the horse coming toward her out there in the fields where she’d been searching for wildflowers, she had run toward the sound, expecting to find her father.

  But it wasn’t Tom Pinter on that horse, it was Charles Harris thundering toward her, his horse already frightened and bolting.

  Only she hadn’t known that, for she hadn’t been able to see the rider’s face.

  Instead she’d seen only a bloody stump on a man’s body. And if her sudden screams had startled the horse, making it shy away from her, the gruesome burden on its back might finally have fallen out of the saddle.

  Face—or rather chest—down on the grass?

  But Lizzie, in terror, believing that the awful thing covered in blood was her own father, had fled, dropping the doll….

  Or had she been in the meadow earlier, dropped the doll, remembered where she’d left it, and on her way to fetch it, encountered the specter of death?

  He wasn’t sure it mattered. What did matter was that Lizzie had been in the meadow, had seen Charles Harris on horseback, already dead. But she hadn’t seen the gun, she hadn’t seen Wilton, she hadn’t been frightened by a loud noise at close range.

  And the killer hadn’t seen her….

  Which meant that Charles Harris might not have been killed in that meadow.

  Sergeant Davies had said from the beginning that he wasn’t sure exactly where Harris had been shot, but assuming that the pellets driving into his head and body had thrown him violently out of the saddle, he would have dropped no more than a few feet either way from the scene of the killing.

  I should have looked at the body—

  And something else—the fact that Harris had been found on his chest, not his back. If he’d been shot out of the saddle, he’d have gone down on his back. If he fell out of the saddle after his horse had bolted, the dead man’s knees spasmodically gripping the animal’s sides in the muscle contractions of death…if he fell out, he might well have gone down on his face.

  Hamish, whispering in the darkness that filled the room, said, “You remember Stevens, don’t you? He was hit and ran on for a yard or more, without a head to lead him, and you had to pry the rifle out of his hands, they were gripping it so tight. As if he were still killing Germans, even though he didn’t know it. And MacTavish, who was heart shot, and Taylor, who got it in the throat. Death seized them in an instant, but they held on!”

  It was true, he’d seen it happen.

  Moving toward the bed, he turned up the lamp and then walked across to the windows, rested his hands on the low sill, and looked out into the silent street. A cool breeze touched the trees, then brushed his face in the open window, but he didn’t notice.

  Where had Harris been killed?

  Not that it mattered—if the Colonel hadn’t been shot in the meadow, it simply gave Wilton more time to reach Mavers’s cottage, pick up the gun, and track him down.

  But closer to the house, someone might have seen him pull the trigger or heard the shot. Yet no one had come forward.

  Mark Wilton had the best possible motive. Still, Rutledge had been involved with other cases where the best motive wasn’t necessarily the one that counted. Mark Wilton was, by his own admission, near the scene. He’d quarreled with the Colonel because the wedding was going to be called off…which made the timing of the death right: to kill Harris before he’d made public what he’d decided to do.

  All the same, Rutledge knew he’d feel better when he’d answered the final two questions: One, why had Harris called off the wedding? And two, where precisely had Harris been shot?

  Rutledge straightened, pulled off his tie, and took off his coat. There wasn’t very
much he could do tonight. In the dark. When everyone else was sound asleep…

  But he found himself retying his tie, picking up the coat again. Almost driven to action, when it wasn’t possible to take any action at all. Buffeted by the strongest feeling that time was running out.

  Wilton had said he wouldn’t shoot himself, he wouldn’t take the gentleman’s way out before he was arrested, convicted, and hanged. But that was assuming he was innocent, and could see that there was truly a chance for a very bright barrister to prove that there wasn’t enough evidence to bring in a conviction. If he was guilty, however—

  Rutledge was almost sure that Wilton wouldn’t do anything rash before the funeral. For Lettice’s sake, rather than his own. But afterward…

  Bowles and the Yard—and the King—would probably rejoice if Wilton never came to trial. But Rutledge, far from wanting his pound of flesh, was determined to have that trial. To prove or disprove his evidence, to finish what he’d begun. With a carefully constructed suicide note left behind, Wilton could appear to be the victim, not the villain. He could leave behind enough doubt to overshadow anything Hickam and that child and Mrs. Grayson might say. The case couldn’t be closed in such uncertain circumstances.

  Without turning down the lamp, Rutledge walked out of the room, down the stairs, and out the garden door to his car. It made a racket starting up in the stillness, but there was nothing he could do about it. The first of the funeral guests to arrive were probably sleeping and wouldn’t hear it anyway.

  He turned toward Mallows, driving fast, his headlamps scouring the road with brightness. But at the estate gates, he changed his mind and stopped just inside them, turning off his headlamps and pulling off into the rhododendrons that grew high and thick under the trees. Getting out of the car, he stood still for a time, listening.

  A dog barking off in the far distance. A lonely bark, not an alarm. An owl calling from the trees behind the house. The light breeze sighing overhead. He started to walk then, giving the house as wide a berth as he could, and soon found himself in the fields above it, lying between Mallows proper and the Haldane lands.

  Moving through the darkness, minding where he put his feet, he kept the house to his right. It was dark, and the windows of Lettice’s rooms shone like black silver in the night. In the back there was a single light in one of the upper rooms, where he’d seen the servants’ quarters. He could hear horses moving quietly in the stables, stamping a foot, rustling about in the straw, and somewhere a groom coughed. He’d done enough reconnaissance missions during the war to move as silently as the night around him, his dark clothes blending with the trees and the shrubs and the hedges, and he was careful never to cast long shadows or hurry.

  For an hour or more he roamed the fields above Mallows, looking for a likely place where a killer was safe, out of sight of the house, out of hearing, where none of the tenants might stumble over him accidentally and see that shotgun. But there was nothing that spoke to him, no vantage point that caught his fancy.

  Look at it again, Rutledge told himself. You were a ground soldier. You’d see it differently. Wilton flew. His eye for terrain might not be as sharp as yours.

  All right, then. A clump of saplings here. A high hedge full of summer-nesting birds there. A dip in the land, like a bowl or dell, where someone might quietly loiter. A section of the rose-clotted wall that separated the Haldane land from Mallows. They were all possibilities. The saplings in particular offered a shield from the house and thick brambles in which to conceal a shotgun. And the hedgerow in one or two spots was almost as good. For the most part the wall was too open, especially on this side, and the dell had no cover at all.

  Another thought struck him. Betrothed to Lettice or not, Wilton would attract more notice on Mallows land than would, say, Royston, who had every reason to move about in his daily tasks. Or Lettice, who lived there and had had the run of the place since she was a child. In the spring with the fields plowed and the crops growing, you left tracks—

  But Davies and Forrest had assumed that Charles was killed in the meadow, and hadn’t looked for tracks. Or blood. Or bits of flesh and bone…

  Finally he turned back, still uneasy, still driven by something he couldn’t define. Not so much knowledge as a sense of alarm, a distinct frisson that rippled along his nerves like the breeze rippling softly through his hair.

  In front of Mallows, in the open where there was just enough ambient light, he looked at his watch. It was after two.

  “Decent Christian folk are all in their beds,” Hamish began.

  Rutledge ignored him. Mallows was a house of mourning, and Charles had no close relatives. Most of the funeral’s guests would be staying the night in Warwick, or at the Shepherd’s Crook in Upper Streetham. Lettice would be alone, as she had been for the past week since her guardian’s death.

  There wouldn’t be an opportunity to see her in the morning before the services began—and it would be callous to try. Afterward there was the reception that the Vicar had his heart set upon. No opportunity to speak to her then…and after the reception, time might have run out….

  He turned and walked across the gravel of the drive to the front door with its black wreath darker than the night on the wooden panels. After a moment, he rang the bell, and in the stillness, fancied he heard it echo through the house like some gothic tale of late-night callers bringing bad tidings. His sister had gone through a stage of reading them just before bedtime, shivering under the covers with a mixture of horror and delight, or scratching at his door for comfort when she’d succeeded in terrifying herself too much to sleep.

  Rutledge was still smiling when Johnston opened the door, eyes heavy with sleep, clothes stuffed on haphazardly.

  He stared at Rutledge, recognizing him after a moment, then said, “What’s happened?”

  “I have to speak to Miss Wood, it’s urgent. But don’t frighten her, there’s nothing wrong.”

  “Inspector! Do you know what time it is, man! I can’t wake Miss Wood at this hour—there’s the funeral tomorrow, she’ll need her sleep!”

  “Yes, I know, and I’m sorry. But I think she’d rather see me now than just as she’s leaving for the church.”

  It took persuasion, and a pulling of rank, but in the end Johnston went up the stairs into the darkness, leaving Rutledge in the half-lit hall.

  After a time he could hear someone coming, heels tapping on the floor. It was Lettice, face still flushed with sleep, hair falling in dark waves down her back, a dark green dressing gown on over her night wear. She came slowly down the stairs with her eyes on him, and he said, “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have come if it hadn’t been so important. It won’t take long, I promise you.”

  “What’s wrong, is something wrong?” she asked.

  “No. Yes. I’m in a quandary of sorts. I need to talk to you.”

  She hesitated at the foot of the stairs, looked toward the door of the drawing room, then made up her mind. “Come this way. To the small parlor.”

  He followed her there, and she found the lights, bringing an almost blinding brightness into the room. Turning in the middle of the floor, she gestured to a chair for him and then curled up on the sofa, drawing her legs under her as if for warmth. Without the sun the room did seem chill, comfortable to him after his long walk in the fields, but cold to her after the warmth of bed. As he sat down he saw that the soles of his shoes and one trouser leg had mud on them. She saw it too, and asked, “Where have you been?”

  “Walking. Thinking. Look, I’ll tell you what’s bothering me. I went to arrest Captain Wilton this—yesterday—morning, and he asked me to wait until after the funeral tomorrow—this—morning. It made sense. I could see no reason to cause any more grief or embarrassment for you.”

  Frowning, she said, “Yes, that’s true, I’d rather not face it alone. But you’re telling me that the man who’s accompanying me to the services is Charles’s murderer. The man who’ll be sitting beside me while I grieve—I don’t
see how that will make it any easier for me. Or for Mark! Do you think I only care about appearances? I survived last Monday morning alone. I can survive this.”

  “I hadn’t expected to be telling you any of this. Not until afterward. But you know where my suspicions—and the evidence—have been pointing.”

  She brushed a heavy fall of hair out of her face and said quietly, “Yes.”

  “You know I’ve learned about the source of the quarrel. That the marriage was being called off. You told me yourself that Charles had decided to do it.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s motive, Miss Wood. It explains why Charles had to die that particular morning—that Monday, not seventeen years ago or six months from now or next Friday.”

  “All right. I can see that. I—I’d considered it myself.”

  Which brought him back to his first impression of her—that she’d known who the killer was.

  “But I need to know why your guardian called off the marriage.”

  “What does Mark say?” she countered.

  Rutledge leaned forward in his chair, trying to reach her with his words, with the sense of haste driving him. “He says the reason isn’t important. That it died with Charles. But I think it may be very important. In fact, it’s crucial. I’m concerned, you see, that if the cause was serious enough, Wilton might prefer not to stand trial and have it brought out into the open, afraid that in the end we’d discover what it was and use it in court, and the whole world would hear what it was. I’m afraid that he might—choose the gentleman’s solution instead.”

  “Shoot himself?” Tears came to her eyes, darkening them, but hovered behind the lids, not spilling over. “Are you quite sure, Inspector?”

  “I wouldn’t have come tonight if I hadn’t been sure it could happen. Not that it would—but that it could,” he said, forcing himself to honesty.

  “But if I tell you—you’re the police, you’ll know what it is, and then it’ll happen just as he’s afraid it might. And I’ll be the cause of it!” Before he could deny it, she said, “No, I can’t tell you something, and then afterward say that I didn’t mean it, that you must forget I’d said it. You can’t forget it. It’s your job, you see—there’s no separating the man from the job!”