A Test of Wills

by Charles Todd

  “But the Colonel isn’t the primary landholder in Upper Streetham, is he?”

  “No, the Haldanes are. The Davenants used to be just about as big, but Hugh Davenant was not the man his father was, and he lost most of his money in wild schemes, then had to sell off land to pay his debts. That’s Mrs. Davenant’s late husband I’m speaking of. She was lucky he died when he did. He hadn’t learned a lesson as far as I could tell, and she’d have been penniless in the end. But he had no head for business, it was as simple as that.”

  “Who bought most of the Davenant land? Harris?”

  “He bought several fields that ran along his own, but Haldane and Mrs. Crichton’s agent took the lion’s share. She lives in London, she’s ninety now if she’s a day, and hasn’t set foot in Upper Streetham since the turn of the century.”

  “Which leaves us with Mavers wanting to shoot the Czar and a choice between Harris and the Haldanes.”

  “People like Mavers don’t think the way you and I do. He had a running feud with Harris, and if he wanted to kill anyone, he’d probably choose the Colonel on principle. In fact, he once said as much when the Colonel threatened to put him away if he tried to poison the dogs again. He said, ‘Dog and master, they deserve the same fate.’”

  “When did this happen? Before the war or later on?”

  “Yes, before, but you haven’t met Mavers, have you?”

  “He has witnesses who say he was here in the village on Monday morning, making one of his speeches to people coming in to market.”

  Royston shrugged. “What if he was? Nobody pays any heed to his nonsense. He could have slipped away for a time and never be missed.”

  Rutledge considered that. It was a very interesting possibility, and Mrs. Davenant had made much the same comment. “Do you think Captain Wilton killed Harris?”

  Royston firmly shook his head. “That’s ridiculous! Whatever for?”

  “Daniel Hickam claims he saw the Colonel and the Captain having words on Monday morning, shortly before the shooting. As if a quarrel the night before had carried over into the morning and suddenly turned violent.”

  “Hickam told you that?” Royston laughed shortly. “I’d as soon believe my cat as a drunken, half-mad coward.”

  Prepared for the reaction this time, Rutledge still flinched.

  The words seemed to tear at his nerve endings like a physical pain. Through it he asked, “Did you see the body yourself, when word was brought that the Colonel had been found?”

  “Yes.” Royston shuddered. “They were babbling that the Colonel had been shot, and that there was blood everywhere, and my first question was, ‘Has any one of you fools checked to see if he’s still breathing?’ And they looked at me as if I’d lost my wits. When I got there I knew why. I tell you, if I’d been the one who’d done it, I couldn’t have gone back there. Not for anything. I couldn’t believe it was Charles at first, even though I recognized his spurs, the jacket, the ring on his hand. It—the body—looked—I don’t know, somehow obscene—like something inhuman.”

  When Royston had gone, Rutledge finished his coffee and said gloomily, “We’ve got ourselves a paragon of all virtues, a man no one had any reason to kill. If you don’t count Mavers—who happens to have the best alibi of the lot—you’re left with Wilton and that damned quarrel. Tell me, Sergeant. What was Harris really like?”

  “Just that, sir,” the Sergeant replied, addressing the question as if he thought it slightly idiotic. “A very nice man. Not at all the sort you’d expect to end up murdered!”

  Very soon after that they found Daniel Hickam standing in the middle of the High Street, intent on directing traffic that no one else could see. Rutledge pulled over in front of a row of small shops and studied the man for a time. Most of the shell shock victims he’d seen in hospital had been docile, sitting with blank faces staring blindly into the abyss of their own terrors or pacing back and forth, hour after hour, as if bent on outdistancing the demons pursuing them.

  The violent cases had been locked away, out of sight. But he had heard them raving at night, the corridors echoing with screams and obscenities and cries for help. That had brought back the trenches so vividly he had gone for nights without sleep and spent most of his days in an exhausted stupor that made him seem as docile and unreachable as the others around him.

  And then his sister Frances had had him moved to a private clinic, where he had mercifully found peace from those nightmares at any rate, and been given a doctor who was interested enough in his case to find a way through his desolate wall of silence. Or perhaps the doctor had been one of Frances’s lovers—oddly enough, all of them seemed to remain on very good terms with her when the affair ended and were always at her beck and call. But he had been too grateful for help to care.

  Watching, it was easy to see that Hickam was used to vehicles coming from every direction, and he directed his invisible traffic with efficient skill, sorting out the tangle as if he stood at a busy intersection where long convoys were passing.

  He sent a few one way, then turned his attention to the left, his hand vigorously signaling that they were to turn and turn now, while he shouted to someone to get those sodding horses moving or called for men to help dig the wheels of an artillery caisson out of the sodding mud. He snapped a smart salute at officers riding past—there was no mistaking his pantomime—then swiftly turned it into a rude gesture that would have pleased tired men slogging their way back from the bloody Front or the frightened men moving forward to take their place.

  In France Rutledge had seen dozens of men stationed at junctions in the rain or the hot sun, keeping a moribund army moving in spite of itself, yelling directions, swearing at laggards, indicating with practiced movements exactly what they expected the chaos around them to do. Many had died where they stood, in the shelling or strafing and bombing, trying desperately to keep the flow of badly needed arms and men from bogging down completely.

  But the carts, carriages, and handful of cars of Upper Streetham merely swerved a little to miss Hickam, used to him and leaving him standing where he was in the middle of the road as if he were something nasty that a passing horse had left behind. Some of the women on foot hesitated before crossing near him, drawing aside their skirts with nervous distaste and turning their faces in fear. Yet none of the village urchins mocked him, and Rutledge, noticing that, asked why.

  “For one thing, he’s been home nearly eleven months now, since the hospital let him go. For another, he took a stick to the ringleader, shouting at him in bastard French. Broke the boy’s collarbone for him.” He kept his eyes on Hickam as he swung around to face another direction, jerking his thumb at a line of convoy traffic, locked in a past that no one else could share.

  “The lad’s father told us the boy deserved what he got, but there were others who felt Hickam ought to be shut up before he harmed anyone else. People like Hickam—well, they’re not normal, are they? But the Vicar wouldn’t hear of an asylum, he said Hickam was an accursed soul, in need of prayer.”

  “God Almighty,” Hamish said softly. “That’s you in five years—only it won’t be traffic, will it, that you remember? It’ll be the trenches and the men, and the blood and the stink, and the shells falling hour after hour, until the brain splits apart with the din. And you’ll be shouting for us to get over the top or take cover or hold the line while the nurses strap you down to the bed and nobody heeds your frenzied screams when Corporal Hamish—”

  “I’ll see us both dead first,” Rutledge said between clenched teeth, “I swear—”

  And Davies, startled, looked at him in confusion.

  4

  You can see he’s half out of his head,” Davies said again uneasily, as Rutledge sat there, rigidly staring at the disheveled figure in the middle of the sunlit, busy High Street. The Sergeant wasn’t sure he’d understood the London man, and wondered if perhaps he had misquoted what the Captain had said to the Colonel: “I’ll see you in hell first.” Should he correc
t Rutledge then? Or pretend he hadn’t noticed? He wasn’t sure how to take this man—on the other hand, he hadn’t seemed to be in haste to arrest Captain Wilton, and that counted for something.

  “Out of his head? No, locked into it. Hickam must have been directing traffic when the shelling started, and stayed with it until one came too close. That’s why he’s behaving this way,” Rutledge said, half to himself. “It’s the last thing he remembers.”

  “I don’t know about that, sir—”

  “I do,” Rutledge said curtly, recollecting where he was, and with whom.

  “Yes, sir,” Davies answered doubtfully. “But I can tell you there’s no talking to him now. He won’t hear you. He’s in his own mad world. We’ll have to come back later.”

  “Then we’ll see the meadow where the body was found. But first I want to find the doctor. Dr. Warren.”

  “He’s just down there, past the Inn. You can see his house from here.”

  It was a narrow stone-faced building that had been turned into a small surgery, and Dr. Warren was just preparing to leave when Rutledge came to his door and introduced himself.

  “I want to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

  “I do,” Warren said testily. He was elderly, stooped and graying, but his blue eyes were sharp beneath heavy black brows. “I’ve got a very sick child on my hands and a woman in labor. It’ll have to wait.”

  “Except for one of the questions. Are you prescribing sedatives for Miss Wood?”

  “Of course I am. The girl was beside herself with grief, and I was afraid she’d make herself ill into the bargain. So I left powders with Mary Satterthwaite to be given three times a day and again at night, until she’s able to deal with this business herself. No visitors, and that includes you.”

  “I’ve already seen her,” Rutledge answered. “She seemed rather—abstracted. I wanted to know why.”

  “You’d be abstracted yourself on what I’ve given her. She wanted to see the Colonel’s body—she thought he’d been shot neatly through the heart or some such. Well, his head had been blown off at nearly point-blank range, leaving a ragged stump of his neck. And I had to tell her that before she’d listen to me. Oh, not that bluntly, don’t be a fool! But enough to deter her. That’s when she fainted, and by the time we got her to bed, she was just coming out of it. So I gave her a powder in some water, and she drank it without knowing what it was. And now there’s a baby that’s going to be born while I stand here discussing sedatives with you. A first baby, and the husband’s worthless, he’ll probably faint too at the first sign of blood. So get out of my way.”

  He went brusquely past Rutledge and out toward the Inn, where he apparently left his car during surgery hours. Rutledge watched him go, then ran lightly down the steps to his own car, where Davies was still sitting.

  Driving on down the High Street, Rutledge slowed as Davies pointed out the track that began behind the tree-shaded churchyard, the one that Wilton claimed he had taken. It climbed up through a neat quilt of plowed fields, mostly smallholdings according to the Sergeant, that ran to the crest of a low ridge, and then it made its way down the far side to a narrow stone bridge and the ruins of an old mill. A three-mile walk in all, give or take a little.

  The church sat not on the High Street itself but just off it, at the end of a small close of magpie houses that faced one another on what Davies called Court Street. Rutledge thought these might be medieval almshouses, for they were of a similar size and design, all fourteen of them. He turned into the close and stopped at the far end, by the lych-gate in front of the church. Leaving the motor running, he walked to the rough wall that encircled the graveyard, hoping for a better look at the track. He wanted a feeling for how it went, and whether there might be places from which a plowman or a farm wife feeding chickens might overlook it. He needed witnesses, people who had seen Wilton out for his morning walk and climbing this hill with nothing in his hand except a walking stick. Or—had not seen him at all, which might be equally important…

  The start of the track was empty except for a squabbling pair of ravens. The rest of it ran out of sight of the village for most of its length, for it followed the line of trees that bordered the cultivated fields, and their branches shaded it this time of year. He could see a cow tied out to graze, and that was all.

  Returning to the car, he asked, “Can you reach the meadow where the body was found, from this track?”

  “Aye, you can’t see it from here, unless you know where to look, but there’s a smaller track that branches off from this one, about two fields away from us. If you follow that, you’ll come to the hedgerow that runs along the boundary of the Colonel’s land. It’s there that the smaller track connects with another one running up from Smithy Lane—I’ll show you that, because it’s where I found Hickam, drunk as a lord. Think of it as a rough H, sir, this track by the church and the other by Smithy Lane forming the legs and climbing to the ridge, whilst the bar of the H is the smaller one cutting across.”

  “Yes, I follow you. Once you’ve reached the hedgerow, what then?”

  “Find a break in it and you’ll be in the fields where the Colonel raises corn. Above them there’s a patch of rough land that’s put to hay, between the hedgerow and a copse of trees. On the far side of those trees lies the meadow. That’s the scene of the murder.”

  Rutledge reversed. Back on the High Street again, he saw Hickam weaving an uncertain path along the pavement. His head down, he was muttering to himself, once or twice flinging out an arm in a gesture of disgust. He looked half drunk now, a man without pride or grace or spirit. Neither Rutledge nor Davies made any comment, but both could see that there was no need to stop.

  Still driving in the direction he had taken to Mallows earlier, Rutledge saw Smithy Lane some thirty feet ahead, just as Davies pointed it out to him. An unpaved street, it ran between the busy blacksmith’s shop and a livery stable on the right and the ironmonger’s on the left. Beyond these businesses were six or seven run-down houses straggling up the slope of the hill toward the fields beyond. Where the last house stood, the lane became a cart track and soon the cart track narrowed into a country path of ruts and mud puddles. Rutledge drove gingerly, his attention on tires and axles.

  But then the cart track eventually lost its way in a tangle of hawthorns and wild cherry, and here they left the car. As Davies got out, he said, “It’s here I found Hickam—he’d fallen asleep in the leaves yonder. And there,” he said, pointing to the last open ground before the track faded into the path, “is where he claims he saw the Colonel talking to Captain Wilton.”

  “Did you look for signs of a horseman here? Or the prints of Wilton’s boots in the dust?”

  “Inspector Forrest came to look the next morning, and then said we’d best leave this business to Scotland Yard.”

  “But were there signs of the two men?”

  “Not that he could see.”

  Which probably meant that he hadn’t wanted to find anything. Rutledge nodded and they moved on, soon afterward passing the point where the rather overgrown track from the east met this one.

  “And that’s the bar of the H, sir, like I said.”

  Skirting a field of marrows, they came at length to the hedgerows. Sergeant Davies quickly found his way through them, into the fields of young wheat beyond.

  “We’re on Mallows land now,” he said. The edges of the fields where they walked were still heavy with wet earth, clinging to their boots in great clots. The hayfield higher up was a wall of tall wet stalks rimmed with weeds. Burrs stuck to their trousers and wild roses caught at their coats. Davies swore once with fervent imagination as he was stung by nettles, and then they were in the copse, where walking was easier, almost silent on a cushion of damp leaves. They came out of the stand of trees into a small, sunny meadow, where the sound of bees filled the air.

  The rain had washed away any signs of blood, but the grass was still bruised and trampled from the many feet that ha
d milled around the body.

  “He lay just about there, chest down, toward the wood, one arm under him and the other out-flung. His legs were straight, slightly bent at the knees but that’s all. I’d say he fell from the horse and never moved, not even a twitch. So his attacker must have come out of the trees, just as we did. Say, just here,” Davies explained, moving a few feet away from where the body had been found. “Not more than ten feet, anyway, from where the body fell, depending on whether the shot knocked him out of the saddle or he fell out of it.”

  “If he was knocked out of it, why was he on his face—chest? If he was shot from the front, the force of the blast would have driven him out of the saddle backward. Even if the horse had bolted in terror, his feet would slip out of the stirrups and he’d have come off backward. On his back, Sergeant! Or his side. But not facedown.”

  Davies chewed his lip. “I thought about that myself. That Harris must have been shot from the back, to fall forward on his chest. But that doesn’t fit with the horse—I saw it, there was blood all over the saddle and its haunches, but not on its ears or mane. You’d have thought, if Harris’s head had exploded from behind, not the front, that the horse’s mane would have been matted with blood and brains.”

  “Then someone turned him over. The search party?”

  “They swear they never touched the corpse. And there was no question but that he was dead—they didn’t need to move him.”

  “The killer, then?”

  Davies shook his head. “Why would he do that? He’d be wanting to get as far away as he could, in case someone heard the shot and came to see what it was.”

  Rutledge looked around. “We’ve come two miles, or thereabouts. How far is the other track from this wood?”

  “Two miles, a little more than that. Shorter if you don’t mind rougher going than we just had.”