A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [119]
Had Harris passed the cottage that last morning? Had Maggie seen anyone else!
Rutledge swore. Impatient with her timidity, he’d treated her—as everyone else did!—as all but witless.
He was in the fields now, heavy with the scent of raw earth and sunlight.
What did she know that no one had thought to ask? She would be the last person to come forward voluntarily. That would have been unbearable agony for her. And yet—now that he was sure the murder had happened somewhere other than the meadow—her evidence could easily be critical. It could damn Wilton to the hangman—or free him, for that matter.
Maggie, he realized, could very well hold the key to this murder, and he’d overlooked it. He glanced toward the distant stone wall, seeing it with new eyes. Maggie, hanging clothes on the line on Monday mornings. Maggie working in her overgrown garden. Maggie, always at home and close enough to Mallows here to hear a horseman in the fields. Or a shotgun going off nearby. Maggie seeing the murderer, for all he knew, waiting among the trees or in the dell or coming over the rise. Maggie, anxious and afraid of strangers, watchful and wary, so that she could hide herself inside the cottage before she herself was seen. And a lurking killer, unaware of a witness he’d never even glimpsed.
And this was the time to speak to her, while Helena was at the funeral. He doubled his pace, as if afraid, now that he’d remembered her, that she might be gone before he got there. Cursing himself for his blindness, for seeing with his eyes and not with that intuitive grasp of people he’d always had.
Ahead he could hear something, unidentifiable at first, a loud, insistent, repetitive—
It was the goose at the Sommers cottage. Something had upset the bird, he could tell from the wild sound, rising and falling without so much as a breath in between.
Rutledge broke into a run, ignoring the neat rows of young crops under his feet, stumbling in the soft earth, keeping his balance with an effort of will, his eyes on the rose-draped wall that separated Mallows from Haldane land and the Sommers cottage.
Helena was coming into town for the services. Maggie was alone—
He could hear screams now, high and wordless, and a man’s bellow of pain. He was no longer running, he was covering the ground with great leaps, risking his neck he knew, but unable to think of that as the screams reached a crescendo of something beyond pain.
Reaching the wall, he rested his palms on the edge of it, swung his body over in one movement, paying no heed to the long thorn-laced roses that pulled at his clothes. His feet landed among Maggie’s pathetic little flowers on the far side of the wall, trampling them heedlessly.
There was a motorcar in the drive, down by the gate. It was empty, and he ignored it, springing for the cottage.
Seeing him coming, the goose wheeled from her stand near the cottage door and sailed toward him, wings out, neck low, prepared for the attack.
He brushed her roughly aside, and was ten yards from the door when it burst open and a man came reeling out, his face a mask of blood, his shirt torn and soaked to crimson, his trousers slashed and smeared.
It was Royston. Something had laid open his shoulder—Rutledge could see the blue-white sheen of bone there—and he plunged heavily off the steps and into the grass, hardly aware of Rutledge sliding to a halt almost in his path.
Regardless of the pain he was inflicting, Rutledge caught him by his good shoulder and swung him around, anger twisting his face into a grimace as he shouted, “Damn you! What have you—”
Inside, the screaming went on.
“Watch her!” Royston cried. “She’s got—got an ax—” His knees buckled. “The child—the child—”
Rutledge managed to break his fall, but Royston was losing blood rapidly, his words weaker with every breath. “The child