What was the secret behind Charles Harris’s very proper face? What had he done, this apparently “thoroughly nice” man, that had made someone want to obliterate him, and to choose a shotgun at point-blank range to do it?
Barton Redfern was just removing the coffee things and turning to limp back to the kitchen when Dr. Warren came through the dining-room door and, seeing Rutledge at the table by the window, crossed hurriedly to him.
“You’d better come,” he said. “They’re about to lynch that stupid devil Mavers!”
5
Mavers, sprawled in the dust by the worn shaft of the village’s market cross, was bloody and defiant, spitting curses as a dozen men tried to kick and drag him toward the broad oak tree that stood outside a row of shops. There was murder in the angry faces encircling him, and someone had found a length of rope, although Rutledge wasn’t sure whether the initial intent was to hang Mavers or tie him to the tree for a sound thrashing. One man was carrying a horsewhip, and when in the confusion a heavy blow intended for Mavers caught him on the shin instead, he wheeled and lashed out in retaliation. The whip flicked across several heads, and for an instant it looked as if a general battle might ensue, while Mavers called them all every unprintable name he could think of. It was noisy, dangerous chaos on the verge of turning even nastier as other men came running toward the scene, shouting encouragement.
Women had hurried into the safety of the nearest shops, their pale faces peering out of windows in horror, while the shopkeepers stood in their doorways, demanding that this nonsense stop. Children clinging to their mothers’ skirts were crying, and four or five dogs attracted by the din had begun to bark excitedly.
As Hamish growled over the odds in some far corner of his mind, Rutledge reached the melee and began forcing his way through with rough disregard for victim or victimizer. He used his voice with coldly calculated effect, the officer commanding discipline, Authority in the flesh, a man to be reckoned with. “That’s enough! Let him go, or I’ll have the lot of you up before the magistrate for assault! Touch me with that whip, you fool, and you’ll be flat on your back with your arm broken….”
His unexpected onslaught scattered the attackers for an instant, and Rutledge quickly had Mavers by his collar, yanking him to his feet with blistering impatience. “Now what’s this all about?”
Dr. Warren had followed Rutledge as fast as he could, and reaching the market cross, began catching men by the arm and calling them by name. “Matt, don’t be stupid, put that whip down. Tom, George, look at the lot of you! Your wife will take a flatiron to you for ripping that coat, Will, wait and see if she doesn’t!”
Mavers, wiping his bloody nose on the sleeve of his shirt, said to Rutledge, “I don’t need the likes of you to fight my battles for me! A policeman stinks of his masters, and I can smell oppression, London’s bourgeois fist in the backs of the people—”
Rutledge gave a jerk of his collar that silenced Mavers with a choking grunt. Warren had stopped tongue-lashing the disgruntled villagers still milling around the market cross and was already casting a professional eye over cuts and bruises and one swelling lip.
Then the affair was over as quickly as it had begun, and Warren said, “Take Mavers to my surgery. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
Rutledge’s eyes swept the circle of faces, grimness changing slowly to sullen mortification on most of them, and decided that there would be no more trouble here. With one hand still gripping the rumpled collar, he marched Mavers down the street and across to the doctor’s surgery, ignoring the man’s protests and the stares of latecomers. Warren’s housekeeper, prim and neat in starched black, was waiting in the doorway. She looked at Mavers’s condition with disgust and said, “Don’t you dare drip blood on my clean floor!” before going off to fetch cold water and a handful of cloths.
“What the hell were you trying to do out there, take on half the village?” Rutledge asked, standing in the entrance hall waiting for the housekeeper to come back, one eye on the street.
“I told the fools what they didn’t want to hear. I told them the truth.” His voice was thick and muffled from the swelling nose, like a man with a head cold.
“Which was?”
“That they were too blind to see their chance and take it. That their precious war hero had feet of clay. That the Colonel was nothing but an oppressor of the workingman and deserved what he got.” Warming to his theme, he went on, “It’s the fate of all landlords, to be taken out and shot and their lands given to the peasants. And here somebody has already gone and done the peasants’ bloody work for them.”
“I’m sure Matt Wilmore liked being called a peasant,” Dr. Warren said, coming through the door behind Rutledge, “just when he’s bought his own farm and is proud as punch of it.” His housekeeper arrived with a basin of water and wads of lint to use packing Mavers’s nose, but it wasn’t broken, only thoroughly bloodied. “That was Tom Dillingham’s fist, I’ll wager,” Warren said with some satisfaction as he cleaned up Mavers’s truculent face. “He’s something of a legend around here,” he added to Rutledge, “made enough money as a pugilist to buy a bit of land down by the Ware. He’s not likely to take to being called a peasant either. Even those who are tenants—Haldane’s or Mrs. Crichton’s—aren’t going to swallow it. Peasants went out with Wat Tyler in 1340 or whenever the hell it was.”
Rutledge smiled. Mavers said, “Can I go now?”
Warren washed his hands. “Yes, be off with you, I’ve got more important things to do. Ungrateful fool!”
Rutledge led him outside and said, “Don’t be in any hurry, Mavers, I want to talk to you.”
“About the Colonel’s death?” He grinned, the bloodshot eyes as yellow as a goat’s. Mavers was not a big man, and had the wizened look of poor food and bad health in early childhood, his face pointed and sallow, his hair thin and a dusty brown. But his eyes were vivid, their color giving his face its only character. “You can’t accuse me of touching him. I was here in Upper Streetham that morning, lecturing all those busy market goers on the evils of capitalism. Ask anybody, they’ll tell you as much.”
But there was a gloating in the way he said it that made Rutledge wonder what he was hiding. Mavers was very pleased with himself, and not above taunting the police.
A born troublemaker, just as everyone had said. Still, such a man could put that sort of reputation to good use, hiding behind it quite easily. People might shake their heads in disgust, but their perception of Mavers gave him the freedom to make a nuisance of himself without fear of retribution. “What do you expect? That’s Mavers for you!” or “What’s the damned fool going to get up to next?” People ignored him, expecting the worst and getting it. Half the time not seeing him, seeing only their own image of him…
“What do you do for a living?”
Caught off guard, Mavers shot Rutledge a glance out of the corner of those goat’s eyes. “What do you mean?”
“How do you find the money to live?”
Mavers grinned again. “Oh, I manage well enough on my pension.”
“Pension?”
Sergeant Davies came running toward them, a smear of mustard like a yellow mustache across his upper lip. “I’ve taken care of that lot,” he said. “Damned fools! What have you been about this time, Mavers? The Inspector yonder should have let them hang you and be done with it!”
Mavers’s grin broadened. “And you’d get fat, wouldn’t you, without me to keep you from your dinner?”
“The trouble is,” Davies went on, paying no heed to Mavers, “they’ve all been in the war, or had family that was, and the Colonel was looked up to. He tried to tell them the Colonel had squandered the poor sod in the trenches while keeping his own hide safe, but they know better. The Colonel kept up with every man from the village, and visited them in hospital and saw to the families of the ones that didn’t come back, and found work for the cripples. People remember that.”