by Charles Todd
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.”
“Money’s cheap,” Hamish put in suddenly. “Or was he thinking of standing for Parliament? Our fine Colonel?”
But no one heard him except Rutledge.
It was decided to take Mavers home, to give the villagers time to cool off without further provocation, and Rutledge went back to the Shepherd’s Crook for his car. He had just reached the walk in front of the door when someone called, “Inspector?”
He turned to see a young woman astride a bicycle, her cheeks flushed from riding and her dark hair pinned up inside a very becoming gray hat with curling pheasant’s feathers that swept down to touch her cheek.
“I’m Rutledge, yes.”
She dismounted from the bicycle and propped it up against the railing by the horse trough. “I’m Catherine Tarrant, and I’d like to talk to you, if you have the time.”
The name meant nothing to him at first, and then he remembered—she was the woman Captain Wilton had courted before the war. He led her inside the Inn and found a quiet corner of the old-fashioned parlor where they wouldn’t be interrupted. Waiting until she seated herself in one of the faded, chintz-covered chairs, he took the other across from her and then said, “What can I do for you, Miss Tarrant?” Behind him a tall clock ticked loudly, the pendulum catching sunlight from the windows at each end of its swing.
She had had the kind of face that men often fall in love with in their youth, fresh and sweet and soft
ly feminine. Rutledge was suddenly reminded of girls in white gowns with blue sashes around trim waists, broad-brimmed hats pinned to high-piled curls, who had played tennis and strolled on cropped green lawns and laughed lightheartedly in the summer of 1914, then disappeared forever. Catherine Tarrant had changed with them. There was a firmness to her jaw and her mouth now, signs of suffering and emerging character that in the end would make her more attractive if less pretty. Her dark eyes were level, with intelligence clearly visible in their swift appraisal of him.
“I have nothing to tell you that will help your enquiries,” she said at once. “I don’t know anything about Colonel Harris’s death except what I’ve heard. But my housekeeper is Mary Satterthwaite’s sister, and Mary has told her about the quarrel between the Colonel and Captain Wilton. I know,” she added quickly, “Mary shouldn’t have. But she did, and Vivian told me. I just want to say to you that I’ve known Mark—Captain Wilton—for some years, and I can’t imagine him killing anyone, least of all Lettice Wood’s guardian! Lettice adored Charles, he was her knight in shining armor, a father and brother all in one. And Mark adores Lettice. He’d never let himself be provoked into doing anything so foolish!”
“You think, then, that the quarrel was serious enough to make us believe that the Captain is under suspicion?”
That shook her quiet intensity. She had come in defense of Wilton and found herself apparently on the brink of damning him. Then she collected her wits and with a lift of her chin, she said, “I’m not a policeman, Inspector. I don’t know what is important in a murder enquiry and what isn’t. But I should think that a quarrel between two men the night before one of them is killed will be given your thorough consideration. And you don’t know those two as well as I do—did.”
“Then perhaps you should tell me about them.”
“Tell you what? That neither of them had a vile temper, that neither of them would hurt Lettice, that neither of them was the sort of man to resort to murder?”
“Yet they quarreled. And one of them is dead.”
“Then we’ve come full circle again, haven’t we? And I’m trying to make you understand that however angry Charles might have made him at the moment, Mark wouldn’t have harmed him—least of all, killed him so savagely!”
“How do you know what might drive a man to murder?” he asked.
She studied him for a moment with those dark, clear eyes, and said, “How do you? Have you ever killed a man? Deliberately and intentionally? Not counting the war, I mean.”
Rutledge smiled grimly. “Point taken.” After a moment he added, “If we scratch Wilton from our list of suspects, have you got a name to put in his place?”
“Mavers,” she said instantly. “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could see him!”
“But he was in the village on Monday morning. In plain view of half a hundred people.”
She shrugged. “That’s your problem, not mine. You asked me who might have shot Charles, not how he did it.”
“It appears that Wilton was seen by several witnesses in the vicinity of the meadow where Harris died.”
“I don’t care where he was seen. I tell you he wouldn’t have touched Charles Harris. He’s madly in love with Lettice. Can’t I make you understand that? Why would he risk losing her?”
“Are you still in love with him?”
Color rose in her face, a mottled red under the soft, fair skin. The earnestness changed to a clipped tension. “I was infatuated with Mark Wilton five years ago. He came to Upper Streetham one summer, and I fell in love with him the first time I saw him—any girl with eyes in her head must have done the same! Mrs. Davenant’s husband had just died, and Mark stayed with her for a while, until the estate was settled and so on. I envied her, you know, having Mark’s company every day, from breakfast to dinner. She’s only a few years older than he is, and I was sure he’d fall in love with her, and never notice me. Then we met one Sunday after the morning service, he called on me later, and for a time, I thought he was as in love with me as I was with him.”
She stopped suddenly, as if afraid she’d said too much, then went on in spite of herself. “We made quite a handsome pair, everyone said so. He’s so fair, and I’m so dark. And I think that was part of my infatuation too. The trouble was, Mark wanted to fly, not to find himself tied down with a wife and family, and at that point in my life I wanted a rose-covered cottage, a fairy-tale ending.”
For a moment there was a flare of pain in her dark eyes, a passing thought that seemed to have no connection with Wilton but was directed at herself—or at her dreams. “At any rate, I had several letters from Mark after he went away, and I answered a few of them, and then we simply didn’t have anything more to say to each other. It was over. And it wouldn’t have done. For either of us. Does that answer your question?”
“Not altogether.” Her color was still high, but he thought that it was from anger as much as anything else. And that intrigued him. He found himself wondering if Mark Wilton had been having an affair with his widowed cousin—and using Catherine Tarrant as a blind to mislead a village full of gossips. If she’d guessed that, her pride might have suffered more than her heart. And she might defend him now to protect herself, not him. “Are you still in love with him?” he asked again.
“No,” she said after a moment. “But I’m still fond enough of him to care what happens to him. I’ve got my painting, I’ve made quite a success of that, and any man in my life now would take second place.” He could hear a bleak undercurrent of bitterness behind the proud declaration.
“Even the fairy-tale prince?”
She managed a smile. “Even a prince.” She had stripped off her soft leather gloves when she came into the Inn, and now she began to draw them on again. “I have the feeling I’ve only made matters worse. Have I?”
“For Captain Wilton? Not really. So far you haven’t told me anything that would point in his direction—or away from it. Nothing has changed, as far as I can see.”
Frowning, she said, “You must believe this, if nothing else. Mark wouldn’t have harmed Charles Harris. Of all people.”
“Not even if Lettice now inherits Mallows?”
Startled, she laughed. “Mark inherited his own money years ago, quite a lot of it. That’s what made it possible for him to learn to fly, to buy his own aeroplane. He doesn’t need hers!”
As she rose and said good-bye, he considered for a moment whether she had come for Captain Wilton’s sake—or for some private motive. And what that motive might be. Not her own guilt, as far as he could see. If she still loved Wilton, killing Charles Harris was not the way to bring the Captain back to her. And jealousy would have been better served by shooting Wilton himself. Or Lettice.
Then why was it that the bitterness and pain he’d read in Catherine Tarrant’s voice seemed far more personal than the altruistic act of coming to a friend’s defense?
“Women,” Hamish said unexpectedly. “They always ken the cruelest way to torment a man for what’s he’s done, witting or no’.”
Rutledge thought of Jean and that day in the hospital when she had abandoned him to his nightmares. She’d intended to be kind—that’s what had hurt him most.
Outside, picking up her bicycle and leading it away from the railing, Catherine Tarrant paused, biting her lower lip, busy with her own thoughts. Mrs. Crichton’s estate agent came out of the Inn and spoke to her as he passed, but she didn’t hear him.
“Oh, damn,” she accused herself silently, “you’ve muddled everything. You should have had the sense to leave well enough alone, to stay out of it. Now he’ll start to pry and probe—” If Inspector Forrest had been handling the enquiry, he would have listened to her. He’d known her family for ages, he would have believed her without bringing up what happened in the war. Why on earth had they sent for someone from London instead of leaving this business to the local people!
But she knew the reason. The finger of suspicion must be strongly pointing toward Mar
k already, and everyone in Warwickshire was running for cover. There had been a dozen photographs of the King and Mark together, he’d dined with the Prince of Wales, was invited to Scotland to shoot, had even accompanied the Queen to a home for soldiers disabled by mustard gas—and questions were going to be asked when he was arrested for a bloody murder involving another war hero. Buckingham Palace would be icily furious.
Then where was their case? Not just that stupid quarrel. Surely you wouldn’t arrest a man simply because he had a roaring argument with the victim the night before. There had to be more damning evidence against him than that. And who were these people who claimed to have seen Mark near the place where Charles Harris had died? What else had they seen, if someone had the wit to ask them the right questions?…
For a moment she debated going straight to the Davenant house and asking Mark himself who the witnesses were. But Sally Davenant would be there, smiling and pretending not to notice how badly Catherine wanted to speak to Mark alone. Making the unexpected visit seem more like a ploy, an emotional excuse to come back into his life. And that would be hard to explain away.
She hadn’t told Rutledge the whole truth about Mrs. Davenant either. But she didn’t care about anyone else if Mark could be protected. She still wasn’t certain why she was so determined to help him. In the wild tangle of her emotions, he was the man who had opened her eyes to passion and prepared her for what had come later. And for that alone perhaps she owed him something.
