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!”