A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [134]
“It’s in a room upstairs. A delaying tactic, if you will.”
“Leave it then. You must drive. I’ve done all that I can this day.”
Rutledge came down the last half dozen steps. In the darkness, the face of Raleigh Masters was shadowed with grief and pain, a caricature of the man who had ruled courtrooms like his predecessor, Sunderland.
They walked together through the hall, into the kitchen passage, and out into the night. Masters was limping heavily, leaning on his cane, as if in great pain.
The night air smelled of damp, as if rain was on the way. Underfoot the scurrying of mice rustled the leaves. There was no wind; the trees were stark against the black sky.
Rutledge cranked the motorcar, while Masters heaved himself with difficulty into the passenger’s seat, drawing his bad leg in after him.
The other vehicle stood halfway down the drive, where Masters had left it, and Rutledge was forced onto the lawns to drive around it.
“Did she use the motorcar, offering them a lift? And a little wine to keep out the cold? I didn’t know she could drive. You always had someone do that.”
“She learned, when my leg first began to trouble me. Porter, the chauffeur, is half senile. We use him only when there’s no one else.”
They had turned out of the stone gates, passing the tree where Will Taylor had been found.
Neither man spoke of it.
After a time Raleigh Masters said, “I would like very much to kill you, you know. It’s strange to admit, after years of serving the law, that I could so easily break the most weighty of them.”
“It’s all too easy to kill,” Rutledge answered, remembering Hamish.
“That was the war. It’s not the same.”
Rutledge didn’t argue.
Silence followed them the rest of the way. At the Brereton cottage, a lonely constable stood guard, touching his hat as he recognized Rutledge’s car. Somewhere among the trees the search for Brereton must be continuing, but there was no sign of lights or men. A mile or so farther on, as he turned into the drive that led up to Raleigh Masters’s house, Rutledge said, “Tell me about Brereton.”
“She went to kill him, you know, but he wasn’t at home. She believed, after you’d called on him, that he must surely have witnessed her coming and going. The wine was there on the table, the first glass poured, when I walked in. She’d just sat there, waiting. She looked so tired. We argued, and when I reached for the wine, to pour it out, her face seemed to fall apart, like shattered porcelain. It was rather horrible. I tried to calm her down, and instead she fought me, like a tigress. As if taking her fear and her grief and her anger out on me. I was hardly her match. And I really thought she intended to kill me there and then. I fell twice, and the last time I lay on the floor as still as I could, until she’d gone.”
The scene, violent and shocking, was vivid in Rutledge’s mind.
Masters took a deep, shuddering breath. “I suspected. I didn’t know. But I suspected—”
“It was a practice for death.”
“Yes. She thought—God forgive her—she thought that it would be easier, when they removed the rest of my leg, just to end it. But she wasn’t sure how to go about that. It took her two attempts before she got the mixture right. The first man, Taylor, was hours dying—she told me this afternoon. It must have been dreadful to watch. And I had a nurse—she dared not risk arousing the woman’s suspicions by making me unexpectedly ill. Webber was easier, but to make absolutely certain, she tried again. Bartlett, that was. She chose men who were suffering. As I was. Not someone who was healthy—until Brereton. But there was his blindness, you see. It would have masked the real reason for killing him.”
He stopped.
Hamish demanded, “Do you believe him then?”
Rutledge silently answered him. “I’ll see what his wife has to say first. If she’s coherent. Please God, Dr. Pugh is still at Brereton’s cottage!”
“Aye.”
As the motorcar drew up in front of the house, Rutledge asked Masters, “Where are the servants? Is someone with her?”
“They were given the