A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [118]
Rutledge called to him, “Keep an eye on Wilton. Don’t let him out of your sight. It’s important.”
“I’ll do that, sir,” he promised over his shoulder, not stopping.
Uncertainty, that same sense of time passing, of tension and of waiting, swept him. He wasn’t sure why. Looking up, he saw Mavers hurrying past the end of the Court, head down and shoulders humped.
Dr. Warren’s car, turning in to the Court, moved quickly to a space in front of one of the houses across from the lych-gate. Warren got out, saying to Rutledge as he passed, “Hickam’s the same—neither better nor worse, but holding on and eating a little. Why aren’t you in the church?”
“I don’t know,” Rutledge answered, but Warren had gone on, not hearing.
On impulse, Rutledge walked around the church, trying to see if Mavers had taken the path up to his house in the fields. But the man had vanished. He kept on walking, climbed over the churchyard wall, and struck out into the fields. But by the time he’d reached the crossbar of the H that led to the other path—the one that skirted Charles Harris’s fields and Mallows land—he turned that way instead, his back to Mavers’s house. Soon he came to the hedge, and the meadow and the copse of trees where the body had been found. It had seemed very different last night in the dark. Somehow thicker, more sinister, full of ominous shadows. Now—it was a copse, open and sunlit, shafts of light like spears lancing down through the trees. Butterflies danced in the meadow.
Rutledge moved on. Dozens of feet and two rainstorms had swept the land clean of any signs that might have led him to the answer he needed. Where had Charles Harris died? Where was the blood, the small fragments of bone?
The sun was warm, the air quiet and still. Some quirk of the land brought the sound of singing to him from the church, a hymn he remembered from childhood. “A Mighty Fortress.” Appropriate to a soldier’s death.
Hamish, who had been quiet, tense, and watchful in his mind, like something waiting to pounce in the vast, secretive recesses of emotion, said suddenly, “I don’t like it. I’ve been on patrol on nights when the Huns were filtering like smoke out of the trenches, and my skin crawled with fear.”
“It isn’t night,” Rutledge said aloud. The sound of his voice was no comfort, only intensifying his sense of something wrong.
He moved from field to field. It hadn’t taken long, not more than twenty minutes since he’d left the churchyard. Unconsciously he’d lengthened his stride early on, and now he was sweating with the effort. But he couldn’t slow down, it was almost as if something drove him. The saplings were not far now.
But what was it? What was behind this dreadful sense of urgency?
From the start he’d been afraid he’d lost any skills he’d once had. He’d tried to listen—too hard perhaps—for any signs that they’d survived. And found only emptiness. And yet—last night he’d come close to feeling the intuition that had once been his gift. He’d followed his instincts, not the dictates of others. They’d been certain Harris had died where he’d fallen. They’d been certain that no one in the village could have killed the Colonel. They’d been certain there was no case against Wilton, and he’d found one.
He had his murderer. Didn’t he? Then why didn’t he feel the satisfaction that ordinarily came with the solution of a vicious crime? Because his evidence was circumstantial, not solid? Or because there was still something he’d overlooked, something that he’d have seen, five years ago. Something that—but for his own emotional tensions—he’d have thought of long before this?
He went through the stand of saplings without being aware of them, his feet guiding him without conscious volition.
Something was missing. Or someone? Yes, that was it! He’d spoken to everyone of consequence in his interviews—except one.
He’d never asked Maggie