A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [111]
Agnes, both hands over her heart as if to keep it from leaping out of her chest, was on her feet also, staring at Rutledge with consternation in her eyes.
Rutledge, as stunned as they were, stared back, uncertain what he’d done.
Behind his eyes, Hamish was saying over and over again, “She’s naught but a child—a child!”
19
The sunset was a thin red line on the western horizon as Rutledge drove back into Upper Streetham. His body was tired, his mind a tumult of images and probabilities. He made his way though the quiet Inn and upstairs to his room, shutting the door behind him and standing there, lost in thought.
If the child’s evidence was right—and he would have wagered his life that it was—Mavers couldn’t have shot Harris. Well, he’d been almost sure of that from the perspective of timing! An outside possibility, a dark horse, attractive as Mavers was as a suspect, but a close-run thing if he’d actually done the killing.
But what else had Lizzie changed?
The doll had been beside the hedge at the edge of the meadow, half hidden under the spill of branches and leaves. From that vantage point, then, Lizzie had seen a horse and rider.
The man she was most accustomed to seeing on a horse was her own father. Living in the little cottage over on the other side of the hill, at the end of a long and rutted road, the Pinter family was more or less out of the mainstream of village life. Yes, Lizzie had seen any number of horses, Lizzie had seen any number of men—and women—riding. But the man she was most accustomed to seeing…
And when she heard the horse coming toward her out there in the fields where she’d been searching for wildflowers, she had run toward the sound, expecting to find her father.
But it wasn’t Tom Pinter on that horse, it was Charles Harris thundering toward her, his horse already frightened and bolting.
Only she hadn’t known that, for she hadn’t been able to see the rider’s face.
Instead she’d seen only a bloody stump on a man’s body. And if her sudden screams had startled the horse, making it shy away from her, the gruesome burden on its back might finally have fallen out of the saddle.
Face—or rather chest—down on the grass?
But Lizzie, in terror, believing that the awful thing covered in blood was her own father, had fled, dropping the doll….
Or had she been in the meadow earlier, dropped the doll, remembered where she’d left it, and on her way to fetch it, encountered the specter of death?
He wasn’t sure it mattered. What did matter was that Lizzie had been in the meadow, had seen Charles Harris on horseback, already dead. But she hadn’t seen the gun, she hadn’t seen Wilton, she hadn’t been frightened by a loud noise at close range.
And the killer hadn’t seen her….
Which meant that Charles Harris might not have been killed in that meadow.
Sergeant Davies had said from the beginning that he wasn’t sure exactly where Harris had been shot, but assuming that the pellets driving into his head and body had thrown him violently out of the saddle, he would have dropped no more than a few feet either way from the scene of the killing.
I should have looked at the body—
And something else—the fact that Harris had been found on his chest, not his back. If he’d been shot out of the saddle, he’d have gone down on his back. If he fell out of the saddle after his horse had bolted, the dead man’s knees spasmodically gripping the animal’s sides in the muscle contractions of death…if he fell out, he might well have gone down on his face.
Hamish, whispering in the darkness that filled the room, said, “You remember Stevens,