A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [10]
Lettice Wood was tall and slim, with heavy dark hair that was pinned loosely on the top of her head, smooth wings from a central parting cupping her ears before being drawn up again. She was wearing unrelieved black, her skirts rustling slightly as she turned to watch them come toward her.
“Inspector Rutledge?” she said, as if she couldn’t distinguish between the Upper Streetham sergeant and the representative of Scotland Yard. She did not ask them to be seated, though she herself sat on a brocade couch that faced the fireplace and there were two upholstered chairs on either side of it. A seventeenth-century desk stood between two windows, and against one wall was a rosewood cabinet filled with a collection of old silver, reflecting the single lamp like watching eyes from the jungle’s edge. Sergeant Davies, behind Rutledge, stayed by the door and began to fumble in his pocket for his notebook.
For a moment the man from London and the woman in mourning considered each other in silence, each gauging temperament from the slender evidence of appearance. The lamplight reached Rutledge’s face while hers was shadowed, but her voice when she spoke had been husky and strained, that of someone who had spent many hours crying. Her grief was very real—and yet something about it disturbed him. Something lurked in the dimness that he didn’t want to identify.
“I’m sorry we must intrude, Miss Wood,” he found himself saying with stiff formality. “And I offer our profoundest sympathy. But I’m sure you understand the urgency of finding the person or persons responsible for your guardian’s death.”
“My guardian.” She said it flatly, as if it had no meaning for her. Then she added with painful vehemence, “I can’t imagine how anyone could have done such a terrible thing to him. Or why. It was a senseless, savage—” She stopped, and he could see that she had swallowed hard to hold back angry tears. “It served no purpose,” she added finally in a defeated voice.
“What has served no purpose?” Rutledge asked quietly. “His death? Or the manner of it?”
That jolted her, as if she had been talking to herself and not to him, and was surprised to find he’d read her thoughts.
She leaned forward slightly and he could see her face then, blotched with crying and sleeplessness. But most unusual nevertheless, with a high-bridged nose and a sensitive mouth and heavy-lidded eyes. He couldn’t tell their color, but they were not dark. Sculpted cheekbones, a determined chin, a long, slender throat. And yet somehow she managed to convey an odd impression of warm sensuality. He remembered how the Sergeant had hesitated over the word “attractive,” as if uncertain how to classify her. She was not, in the ordinary sense, beautiful. At the same time, she was far, very far, from plain.
“I don’t see how you can separate them,” she answered after a moment, a black-edged handkerchief twisting in her long, slim fingers. “He wasn’t simply killed, was he? He was destroyed, blotted out. It was deliberate, vengeful. Even Scotland Yard can’t change that. But the man who did this will be hanged. That’s the only comfort I’ve got.” There was a deeper note in her voice as she spoke of hanging, as if she relished the image of it in her mind.
“Then perhaps we ought to begin with last Monday morning. Did you see your guardian before he left the house?”
She hesitated, then said, “I didn’t go riding that morning.”
Before he could take her up on that stark reply, she added, “Charles loved Mallows, loved the land. He said those rides made up, a little, for all the months he spent away. So he usually went out alone, and it was never a fixed route, you see, just wherever his list for that day took him—it might be inspecting a crop or a tenant’s roof or the state of the hedges or