A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [100]
As the storm passed, the rain dwindled to a light drizzle, the ground steaming, the air still humid and unbreathable. He got out and started the car again, then turned away from Upper Streetham toward the Warwick road. He drove aimlessly, no goal in mind except to put as much distance between himself and the problems of Charles Harris’s murder as he could for the moment.
“You’re drawn to her, the witch,” Hamish said. “And what will Jean have to say about that?”
“No, not drawn,” Rutledge answered aloud. “It’s something else. I don’t know what it is.”
“Do you suppose, then, that she bewitched the Captain and the Colonel as well? That somewhere she had a hand in this murder?”
“I can’t see her as a murderess—”
Hamish laughed. “You ought to know, better than anyone, that people kill for the best of reasons as well as the worst.”
Rutledge shivered. What was it about Lettice Wood that reached out to him in spite of his better judgment?
Reluctantly, bit by bit, she had confirmed Hickam’s rambling words. And Wilton’s own behavior, his unwillingness to come to Mallows after the quarrel or explain what it had been about, reinforced the picture all too clearly. And it was slowly, inevitably developing. The child’s part in it still—
Rounding the bend, he saw the bicycle almost too late, coming up on it with a suddenness that left decision to reflexes rather than conscious action. He got the brake in time to skid to a stop in the mud, wheels squealing as they locked, sending him almost sideways.
Hamish swore feelingly, as if he’d been thrown across the rear seat.
Standing on the road was Catherine Tarrant, bending over her bicycle. She looked up in startled horror as he came roaring down on her, driving far faster than he’d realized, faster than the conditions of the road dictated. His bumper was not five feet from where she stood as the car came to a jarring halt, killing the engine.
Recovering from her shock, she demanded angrily, “What do you think you’re doing, you damned fool! Driving like that? You could have killed me!”
But he was getting out of the car, and she recognized him then. “Oh—Inspector Rutledge.”
“What the hell are you doing in the middle of the road? You deserve to be run down!” he responded with a matching anger, marching toward her, fists clenched against his rising temper. The unpleasant drizzle wasn’t helping.
“The chain’s broken—I don’t know if something came loose or if I jammed it when I skidded. Oh, for pity’s sake, don’t just stand there, put my bicycle in the back of your car before we’re both wet to the skin, and take me home!” She was in a foul temper as well, but dry, he noticed, as if she’d found shelter somewhere from the worst of the rain.
They stared at each other, faces tight with self-absorbed emotions; then she managed a wry smile. “Look, we’d better both get out of the way, or someone else will fly around that bend and finish us off! Take me home and I’ll offer you some tea. You look as if you could use it. I know I could.”
He walked past her, lifted the bicycle, and carried it to his car. She helped him put it in the back—he had an instant’s sharp sense of the ridiculous, thinking that it would crowd Hamish out—and then came around to the passenger side, not waiting for him to open her door.
He cranked the car, got in, and said, “Did you miss the rain?”
“I was at the Haldanes’ house. They’re away, I just went by to pick up a book Simon promised to lend me.” She lifted a large, heavily wrapped parcel out of the basket behind her and set it in her lap. “He brought it back from Paris and thought I might want to see it. Something on the Impressionists. Do you know them?”
They talked about art as he backed the car and drove to her house, and she left a servant to deal with the bicycle, striding past the handsome staircase and down the hallway toward her studio without looking over her shoulder to see if he followed. Setting the borrowed book on a stool, she took off her