A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [95]
Dust sheets covered the furniture like shadowy ghosts, looming out of the darkness without sufficient definition to betray what was beneath them. Here, he thought, in the drawing room, must be a piano, and over there, a square table. And a cabinet or a chair here . . .
He lifted that sheet to look under it, and found a drinks cabinet with cut-glass decanters still half full. Taking up a pair of them, he walked back to the kitchen.
He found Hauser leaning on his good arm, lips tight against the pain.
“Here.” Rutledge set the decanters on the table beside him and crossed to the cabinets to find something to put the whisky in. “In for a penny, in for a pound. I don’t suppose anyone will care, anyway, if we drink all of it.”
The dishes had been packed away. Settling for two clean jam jars, he came back and poured a stiff drink in one of them, a smaller amount in the other. Adding water from a metal pitcher, he pushed the full glass toward the German.
The man drank, shuddering. “Thank you. I should have seen that doctor, after all. But there would have been too many questions.”
Rutledge was silent.
“So.” After a moment, the man said, “What is it you want with me? There’s something. Or you would have handed me over to the local police.” The blue eyes, narrowed with effort, studied Rutledge intently.
Unwilling to be led too far too soon, Rutledge said thoughtfully, “There’s enough evidence to hang you. You know that. We haven’t found any other explanation for these murders. Witnesses. Motive. Opportunity. Only what points to you.”
“I haven’t come here to kill Englishmen. I was sick of that long before the war ended.”
“There may be good wine left in the cellars of this house. Did you use it to trick your victims? There’s your weapon.” He watched the face before him with interest. “A good K.C. could bring a conviction.” Suddenly he could see an image of Raleigh Masters in a courtroom, using his voice and his dry wit to shape the thinking of a jury. . . .
“You can’t kill men with wine.” The German’s voice was bitter.
“No. But you can with laudanum.”
“I have no laudanum.”
“You’re resourceful. You’d find it if you wanted it. A few drops in the glass, to start with, and then more in the second glass. The victim would be drowsy by then, and not realize how dangerously close to disaster he was. Especially if he’s already taking the medication for pain. Did you bring them here, and kill them?” Rutledge looked around the kitchen, with the bedclothes heaped in one corner, nearest the stove. “You could drag them out and find some means of carrying them off. A bicycle. A horse borrowed in the night. A handcart. Leaving them beside the road, where someone would discover them sooner or later . . .”
The German said appreciatively, “It’s a clever picture you’ve drawn. A jury would no doubt believe it. As a matter of interest—having left me for dead once—would it sit well with your conscience if I was hanged?”
Rutledge flinched. “No.” And then as if the words were drawn out of him against his will, he said, “Where did you find me? When the war had ended?”
He tried to keep his voice steady. He failed.
Hauser looked at him. “You really don’t know? No. If I had a map, I could probably show you. One of my men asked you if you had any English cigarettes. We had none, and no beer either. But you merely stood there. Damnedest thing I’d ever seen! And you don’t remember?”
“Very little.”
“What was it? A head injury? We couldn’t see a wound. And nobody wanted to touch you, to try to take your cap off.”
“Something like that,” Rutledge agreed. The tension in his body almost choked off his breath.
Hauser nodded. “That’s the conclusion we came to. Someone said, ‘You’d better get him back to his own lines,’ but no one volunteered. We didn’t care, in a way. The war was over for us, and we didn’t care about much, to be honest.”
“And yet you took me back?”
“I took you as far as I could. Too far, as it happened.