A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [94]
“Is that why you’re courting Elizabeth Mayhew?”
The German moved too quickly and swore furiously. “I am not going to hurt her! But she has been kind, and I didn’t know where else to turn tonight.”
I’m not going to hurt her—
How many men had said that—and then had done it anyway?
Hamish insisted, “I canna’ believe a word he’s told you!”
“You’ve already hurt her,” Rutledge replied as he turned the motorcar. “She’s vulnerable, and she thinks she’s in love. Is there a wife back in Germany?”
“She died when my son was born. I have not made love to Mrs. Mayhew!”
“No. But you didn’t need to. She’s already compromising herself for your sake. If you don’t find this cup of yours, will you convince her to marry you, and use her money instead?”
“I tell you, I have not hurt her! I can’t—I won’t. I’ve come—believe me or not as you choose. But I swear she will come to no harm through me!”
The damage, Rutledge thought, had been done. Small wonder that Elizabeth Mayhew had never had the courage to tell him where her heart lay.
IT WAS ALONG the Marling road near a burned-out oast house that the German roused himself, and said, “Just there. I was stabbed there.” He pointed clumsily with his good arm. “See for yourself, there is no body lying about—not even mine!”
Rutledge stopped the motorcar and got out to examine the road in the light of his headlamps. But there was not much to see. Several scuff marks, but no blood.
Hamish commented, “The sweater would have soaked first.”
Which was true enough.
Rutledge walked along the verge on either side of the road, finding himself a sturdy stick with which he could probe the tall grasses and bushes, laying them aside to look beyond them. If a body had been left here, it was gone now. Or had crept away—
He got back into the motorcar, and the German demanded, “Did you see?”
“I’ll come back at first light. There’s nothing now. Neither your blood nor anyone else’s.”
The German grunted. “Then you must be blind,” he accused. “Or else determined not to see.”
Rutledge made no comment, driving on into the night.
“I DON’T KNOW your name,” Rutledge told the man beside him as the motorcar turned down the dark and rutted drive that led between the stone posts and up to the empty house, the dry grass thrashing against the coachwork.
“Hauser. Gunter Hauser,” the German said, rousing himself again. “If there is whisky in that house, I shall drain the bottle!”
He directed Rutledge around to the rear of the house, where a yard door had been pried open, then held closed again with a bit of wire.
For a manor house, this one was small—a country squire’s home rather than a grand estate—with gardens along the south front and outbuildings in a courtyard formed by the stables on the west. There was an air of solidity about the house, and at the same time a forlornness, as if the last owners had not foreseen the straits to which it had come: waiting for the lawyers to settle the family’s affairs and find a relative who had probably never seen nor ever wanted the responsibility for the family dwelling. The gardens, standing out in the headlamps as Rutledge turned the car, were overgrown with a summer’s weeds, their outline no longer sharp and clear. Nature had already begun her efforts to reshape the manicured paths between the beds, and grass lifted seed heads like small rockets in the darkness. The paint on the outbuildings had begun to flake and peel, giving a scabrous look to the walls where the headlamps spread them with light. A window high in the stable had blown in from a windstorm, and the air of decay all around the yard seemed to promise a dreary interior.
With some difficulty, Rutledge managed to get the German into the stone-flagged kitchen and, after the man had lit a lamp on the table, deposited him in the nearest chair. Hauser’s face was gray with pain and exhaustion. Rutledge himself felt like falling asleep where he stood. Instead, he walked along the passage toward the formal rooms of the house.
The stairs ran up into blackness