A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [99]
“Not yet. I’m taking you to the doctor in Marling first.”
“Over my dead body. Sit down, it hurts my shoulder to look up at you.”
Rutledge pulled out a chair from the table and sat. After a moment he chose his opening gambit. “You’re the best suspect I have. I’d earn a commendation for solving these murders so quickly, you must see that. You’re here in England under false pretenses, and that’s only the first strike against you. What’s more, there’s business in London that needs my attention.” He kept his voice level and his eyes hard.
“It would not be to your glory to find out in a courtroom that you were very wrong. As a matter of interest, have you ever hanged an innocent man?”
It was too close to the mark. Rutledge looked away before he could stop himself.
“So.” There was a pause, and then Gunter Hauser asked, “It was a shocking experience for Mrs. Mayhew, finding me bleeding all over her steps. Has she recovered?”
“I expect she’s out searching for you. With a first stop at the hotel in Rochester, where she’s certain you are staying.”
It was Hauser’s turn to look away. “So. She will quickly be disillusioned.”
“Lies have a way of coming home to roost.”
“Like the crows on the roof, which should have awakened me, and didn’t. Is there any more of that whisky? I’d prefer schnapps, but beggars aren’t choosers.”
“It won’t settle well on an empty stomach.” Rutledge got up, taking out the bread and the sausage, cutting off a chunk, adding a slice of cheese to make a sandwich for Hauser. Then he went out to the motorcar and brought in the Thermos of hot tea he’d asked the hotel to put up for him.
Hauser eyed it with interest, but laughed when Rutledge poured it and he saw it was tea. “How the English can drink tea is beyond a European’s imagination. But it is hot, and just now, I am grateful.”
Rutledge laced the tea with a little whisky and passed it to Hauser. “Tea-drinking Englishmen defeated your armies, if you remember.”
“No, it was the Americans did that. We couldn’t fight all of you. What do they drink, the Yanks?”
“Bourbon, I expect,” Rutledge answered, and was silent while Hauser got down the food and most of the tea.
Seeming to be a little stronger after that, the German said, “You don’t know what to do with me. I’m a problem, like a dead horse.”
“The truth is,” Rutledge told him, “I have you just where I want you. For the moment. We can’t seem to lay hands on the man who stabbed you. Is he up the stairs under one of the sheet-shrouded beds?”
Hauser laughed. “See for yourself. No one will stop you.”
“The outbuildings, then?”
The laughter faded. “I have killed no one. I was the one who was assaulted, if you remember.”
“Describe him, then. This man.”
Hauser frowned. “He was perhaps my height. And there was something wrong with the way he walked—I overtook him easily. Or perhaps he was intoxicated.”
Rutledge considered the drunk he himself had brought in. Had Holcomb armed himself with a knife, since then?
Hauser was saying, “At any rate, I was soon catching him up. He crossed the road then, and I expected to pass by on my side with no more than a nod.”
“Did he speak to you?”
“No. When I was even with him, he came at me with the knife. I didn’t see it in his hand at first. He was on me and the knife was already cutting my chest. I’ve told you this already—” The frown deepened.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. I would have said he was not a common laborer on his way home. He—There was something in the way he moved. I don’t know—”
“Where did he go after he stabbed you?”
“I have no idea. He was there—and he was gone.”
“On foot?”
“I was too busy just then to care.” Hauser finished the tea and then, setting the cup aside, he said, “I’ve been wounded before. I know the drill.”
“Yes.”
Hamish was stirring in the back of Rutledge’s mind.
Hauser said, “What is it that haunts you? I ask, because whatever it was,