A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [112]
It was true, he’d seen it happen.
Moving toward the bed, he turned up the lamp and then walked across to the windows, rested his hands on the low sill, and looked out into the silent street. A cool breeze touched the trees, then brushed his face in the open window, but he didn’t notice.
Where had Harris been killed?
Not that it mattered—if the Colonel hadn’t been shot in the meadow, it simply gave Wilton more time to reach Mavers’s cottage, pick up the gun, and track him down.
But closer to the house, someone might have seen him pull the trigger or heard the shot. Yet no one had come forward.
Mark Wilton had the best possible motive. Still, Rutledge had been involved with other cases where the best motive wasn’t necessarily the one that counted. Mark Wilton was, by his own admission, near the scene. He’d quarreled with the Colonel because the wedding was going to be called off…which made the timing of the death right: to kill Harris before he’d made public what he’d decided to do.
All the same, Rutledge knew he’d feel better when he’d answered the final two questions: One, why had Harris called off the wedding? And two, where precisely had Harris been shot?
Rutledge straightened, pulled off his tie, and took off his coat. There wasn’t very much he could do tonight. In the dark. When everyone else was sound asleep…
But he found himself retying his tie, picking up the coat again. Almost driven to action, when it wasn’t possible to take any action at all. Buffeted by the strongest feeling that time was running out.
Wilton had said he wouldn’t shoot himself, he wouldn’t take the gentleman’s way out before he was arrested, convicted, and hanged. But that was assuming he was innocent, and could see that there was truly a chance for a very bright barrister to prove that there wasn’t enough evidence to bring in a conviction. If he was guilty, however—
Rutledge was almost sure that Wilton wouldn’t do anything rash before the funeral. For Lettice’s sake, rather than his own. But afterward…
Bowles and the Yard—and the King—would probably rejoice if Wilton never came to trial. But Rutledge, far from wanting his pound of flesh, was determined to have that trial. To prove or disprove his evidence, to finish what he’d begun. With a carefully constructed suicide note left behind, Wilton could appear to be the victim, not the villain. He could leave behind enough doubt to overshadow anything Hickam and that child and Mrs. Grayson might say. The case couldn’t be closed in such uncertain circumstances.
Without turning down the lamp, Rutledge walked out of the room, down the stairs, and out the garden door to his car. It made a racket starting up in the stillness, but there was nothing he could do about it. The first of the funeral guests to arrive were probably sleeping and wouldn’t hear it anyway.
He turned toward Mallows, driving fast, his headlamps scouring the road with brightness. But at the estate gates, he changed his mind and stopped just inside them, turning off his headlamps and pulling off into the rhododendrons that grew high and thick under the trees. Getting out of the car, he stood still for a time, listening.
A dog barking off in the far distance. A lonely bark, not an alarm. An owl calling from the trees behind the house. The light breeze sighing overhead. He started to walk then, giving the house as wide a berth as he could, and soon found himself in the fields above it, lying between Mallows proper and the Haldane lands.
Moving through the darkness, minding where he put his feet, he kept the house to his right. It was dark, and the windows of Lettice’s rooms shone like black silver in the night. In the back there was a single light in one of the upper rooms,