“It’s a bloody show,” Hamish was saying. “We stacked our dead like lumber, or buried them to keep them from smelling. And here’s a right spectacle that’d shame an honest soldier.”
Rutledge ignored him, scanning the gathering crowd as they moved through the lych-gate and up the walk toward the open doors of the church. Overhead the bell began to count the years of the dead man’s life, and he saw Lettice stumble. Wilton took her arm to steady her, and then she was herself again.
He let them go inside and walked down to where the Mallows car had been parked near the lych-gate, ready to take Lettice back in time for the reception.
“Where’s Royston?” Rutledge asked the neatly uniformed groom sitting in the driver’s seat. “Has he already arrived?”
“I don’t know, sir. I haven’t seen him at all,” the man said, touching his cap. “Mr. Johnston was looking for him just before we left.”
Inspector Forrest came hurrying by on his way to the service. The tolling had stopped, and from inside the church the organ rose in solemn majesty, the lower notes carrying the sense of loss and sorrow that marked the beginning of a funeral’s salute to the dead.
Rutledge called to him, “Keep an eye on Wilton. Don’t let him out of your sight. It’s important.”
“I’ll do that, sir,” he promised over his shoulder, not stopping.
Uncertainty, that same sense of time passing, of tension and of waiting, swept him. He wasn’t sure why. Looking up, he saw Mavers hurrying past the end of the Court, head down and shoulders humped.
Dr. Warren’s car, turning in to the Court, moved quickly to a space in front of one of the houses across from the lych-gate. Warren got out, saying to Rutledge as he passed, “Hickam’s the same—neither better nor worse, but holding on and eating a little. Why aren’t you in the church?”
“I don’t know,” Rutledge answered, but Warren had gone on, not hearing.
On impulse, Rutledge walked around the church, trying to see if Mavers had taken the path up to his house in the fields. But the man had vanished. He kept on walking, climbed over the churchyard wall, and struck out into the fields. But by the time he’d reached the crossbar of the H that led to the other path—the one that skirted Charles Harris’s fields and Mallows land—he turned that way instead, his back to Mavers’s house. Soon he came to the hedge, and the meadow and the copse of trees where the body had been found. It had seemed very different last night in the dark. Somehow thicker, more sinister, full of ominous shadows. Now—it was a copse, open and sunlit, shafts of light like spears lancing down through the trees. Butterflies danced in the meadow.
Rutledge moved on. Dozens of feet and two rainstorms had swept the land clean of any signs that might have led him to the answer he needed. Where had Charles Harris died? Where was the blood, the small fragments of bone?
The sun was warm, the air quiet and still. Some quirk of the land brought the sound of singing to him from the church, a hymn he remembered from childhood. “A Mighty Fortress.” Appropriate to a soldier’s death.
Hamish, who had been quiet, tense, and watchful in his mind, like something waiting to pounce in the vast, secretive recesses of emotion, said suddenly, “I don’t like it. I’ve been on patrol on nights when the Huns were filtering like smoke out of the trenches, and my skin crawled with fear.”
“It isn’t night,” Rutledge said aloud. The sound of his voice was no comfort, only intensifying his sense of something wrong.
He moved from field to field. It hadn’t taken long, not more than twenty minutes since he’d left the churchyard. Unconsciously he’d lengthened his stride early on, and now he was sweating with the effort. But he couldn’t slow down, it was almost as if something drove him. The saplings were not far now.
But what was it? What was behind this dreadful sense of urgency?
From the start he’d been afraid he’d lost any skills he’d once had. He’d tried to listen—too hard perhaps—for any signs that they’d survived. And found only emptiness. And yet—last night he’d come close to feeling the intuition that had once been his gift. He’d followed his instincts, not the dictates of others. They’d been certain Harris had died where he’d fallen. They’d been certain that no one in the village could have killed the Colonel. They’d been certain there was no case against Wilton, and he’d found one.
He had his murderer. Didn’t he? Then why didn’t he feel the satisfaction that ordinarily came with the solution of a vicious crime? Because his evidence was circumstantial, not solid? Or because there was still something he’d overlooked, something that he’d have seen, five years ago. Something that—but for his own emotional tensions—he’d have thought of long before this?
He went through the stand of saplings without being aware of them, his feet guiding him without conscious volition.
Something was missing. Or someone? Yes, that was it! He’d spoken to everyone of consequence in his interviews—except one.
He’d never asked Maggie Sommers what she’d seen or heard that last morning of Charles Harris’s life. He’d assumed she knew nothing. And yet she lived across a stone wall from Mallows land, and Colonel Harris sometimes rode that way—she’d learned to return his wave, shy as she was.
Had Harris passed the cottage that last morning? Had Maggie seen anyone else!
Rutledge swore. Impatient with her timidity, he’d treated her—as everyone else did!—as all but witless.
He was in the fields now, heavy with the scent of raw earth and sunlight.
What did she know that no one had thought to ask? She would be the last person to come forward voluntarily. That would have been unbearable agony for her. And yet—now that he was sure the murder had happened somewhere other than the meadow—her evidence could easily be critical. It could damn Wilton to the hangman—or free him, for that matter.
Maggie, he realized, could very well hold the key to this murder, and he’d overlooked it. He glanced toward the distant stone wall, seeing it with new eyes. Maggie, hanging clothes on the line on Monday mornings. Maggie working in her overgrown garden. Maggie, always at home and close enough to Mallows here to hear a horseman in the fields. Or a shotgun going off nearby. Maggie seeing the murderer, for all he knew, waiting among the trees or in the dell or coming over the rise. Maggie, anxious and afraid of strangers, watchful and wary, so that she could hide herself inside the cottage before she herself was seen. And a lurking killer, unaware of a witness he’d never even glimpsed.
And this was the time to speak to her, while Helena was at the funeral. He doubled his pace, as if afraid, now that he’d remembered her, that she might be gone before he got there. Cursing himself for his blindness, for seeing with his eyes and not with that intuitive grasp of people he’d always had.
Ahead he could hear something, unidentifiable at first, a loud, insistent, repetitive—
It was the goose at the Sommers cottage. Something had upset the bird, he could tell from the wild sound, rising and falling without so much as a breath in between.
Rutledge broke into a run, ignoring the neat rows of young crops under his feet, stumbling in the soft earth, keeping his balance with an effort of will, his eyes on the rose-draped wall that separated Mallows from Haldane land and the Sommers cottage.
Helena was coming into town for the services. Maggie was alone—
He could hear screams now, high and wordless, and a man’s bellow of pain. He was no longer running, he was covering the ground with great leaps, risking his neck he knew, but unable to think of that as the screams reached a crescendo of something beyond pain.