A False Mirror - Charles Todd [121]
His voice, like Hamish’s sometimes, came out of nowhere. They had turned down the lamps and set them inside the nearest room, to preserve their night sight.
Rutledge finally answered him: “No.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’ve told you, I don’t want to discuss the war.”
“I have to talk about it. It’s the only way I stay sane.”
“Not to me, you don’t.”
“Tell me about Hamish and the rest of the men I knew. How they died.”
“No!”
“I need to hear it.”
“I need to forget.”
There was a long stretch of silence, then Mallory asked, “If I didn’t attack Hamilton, who did?”
“A good question. What I’m wondering now is if we’ve got two separate problems. The initial attack—and what it might have set in motion.”
“Yes. Like running over Bennett’s foot. It wasn’t intentional, but I did it, and I’m paying for it. What I don’t understand is, why Hamilton, in the first place? If you’d asked me, I’d have said he’s the last man to find himself in trouble in Hampton Regis.”
Rutledge’s chair creaked as he tried for a more comfortable position. “Which explains why Bennett came to question you at the start. There’s been gossip, Mallory. You should have considered that, for her sake if not your own.”
A sigh answered him. And then, “Yes, well, you haven’t been in love. You don’t know what it’s like to pin your hopes on someone throughout that bloody war, and then discover that she’s learned to love someone else.”
But he did. And it was none of Mallory’s business.
“Did you expect her to wait for you? That was where you went wrong.”
“I had hoped she would. But I left her free to make that choice.”
“And she made it. You failed her by not accepting it and walking away.”
“When I was released from hospital, my doctor made me swear I wouldn’t come to Hampton Regis. But then I thought, what harm can it do, to live near her? And soon it was, what harm can it do to see her? I convinced myself I’d been extraordinarily careful, that no one would guess how I felt.”
“In a village the size of Hampton Regis? Where you can’t cross the road without being seen?”
“If Hampton Regis is a hotbed of gossip and general nosiness,” Mallory demanded with some heat behind the words, “why hasn’t someone come forward to give you the information you need about Matthew Hamilton’s disappearance?”
Felicity Hamilton’s voice came through the door panel. “What is it, what has happened?”
“My apologies, Mrs. Hamilton,” Rutledge said at once. “Mallory and I were engaged in an argument over how gossip works. We didn’t intend to disturb you.”
Mallory said in a lower tone, “You haven’t answered me.”
“I don’t know why we haven’t got what we need. It was late at night. Most decent people are in their beds. The pubs are closed. The milk wagon hasn’t gone round. The fishermen haven’t gone out—”
He broke off. From a room downstairs had come the sound of someone or something scratching at a window.
“Stay here. Don’t leave Mrs. Hamilton, whatever happens. And for God’s sake, don’t shoot me as I come back up the stairs,” Rutledge told him.
But when he finally located the source, it was a limb blowing back and forth across the glass panes of a drawing room window as the slender trunk of an ornamental fruit tree just outside dipped and swayed in the wind.
He stood there, looking out at the blustery night, and thought, He’s not coming. Not on a night like this. He needs his ears as much as we need ours.
Hamish answered him in the darkness, “I wouldna’ go back up the stairs.”
“I don’t have much choice. Mallory will come down here if I don’t return.”
He wondered how his watchers were faring. But there was no method of communicating with them. A field telephone would have been useful tonight, he told himself, turning away from the window.
He went to the hall and called up the stairs, “It’s Rutledge. Nothing but the wind.”
Mallory’s voice surprised him, rolling down from the head of the steps, invisible in the well of darkness there.
“I was beginning to worry. You’re a perfect target, you know. Against the panels of the door. I’d keep that in mind if I were you.”
Rutledge