A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [13]
He was reminded by a shifting of feet that Sergeant Davies was in the room, a witness to everything she said. A man who lived in Upper Streetham, who presumably had a wife and friends…was that the problem? He, Rutledge, was a private person himself; he understood the fierce need for privacy in others. And if that was the case, he was wasting his time now.
“How did you spend the morning? Before the news was brought to you?”
She was frowning, trying to remember as if that had been years ago, not a matter of days. “I bathed and dressed, came down to breakfast, the usual. Then I had a number of letters to write, and was just coming out of the library to see if Mr. Royston might take them into Warwick for me, when—” She stopped abruptly, then continued in a harsh voice. “I really don’t recall what happened after that.”
“You didn’t leave the house, go to the stables?”
“Of course not, why on earth should I tell you I did one thing when I’d done another?”
Rutledge took his leave soon afterward. Davies seemed relieved to be on his way downstairs at the butler’s heels, showing an almost indecent haste to be gone.
But Rutledge felt unsatisfied, as if somehow he had been neatly outmaneuvered in that darkened room. Thinking back over what the girl had said, he couldn’t pinpoint any particular reason for disbelieving anything she’d told him, but doubt nagged at him. She couldn’t be more than twenty-one or twenty-two, and yet she had shown a self-possession that was uncommon at that age—or any other. And he hadn’t been able to break through to the person underneath. To the emotions that must be there. To the unspoken words he’d wanted to hear but that she had managed to hold back.
Her detachment, then. That was what disturbed him. As if she didn’t connect the reality of violent death with the questions that the police were asking her. No passionate defense of her fiancé, no rush to push Mavers forward in his place, no speculation about the nature of the killer at all.
It was almost, he thought with one of those leaps of intuition that had served him so well in the past, as if she already knew who the killer was—and was planning her own private retribution…. “I can’t imagine how anyone could have done such a terrible thing to him,” she’d said. Not who—how.
Then as he reached the foot of the stairs he remembered something else. Both Sergeant Davies and the butler had mentioned a doctor. Had the girl been given sedatives that left her in this sleepwalker’s state, detached from grief and from reality too? He’d seen men in hospital talk quietly of unspeakable horrors when they’d been given drugs: stumbling to describe terrors they couldn’t endure to think about until they were so heavily sedated that the pain and the frantic anxiety were finally dulled.
He himself had confessed to Hamish’s presence only under the influence of such drugs. Nothing else would have dragged that out of him, and afterward he had tried to kill the doctor for tricking him. They’d had to pull him off the man, and he’d fought every inch of the way back to his room.
It might be a good idea, then, to speak to the family’s doctor before deciding what to do about Lettice Wood.
Before the butler could see them safely out the door, Rutledge turned to him and asked, “What was your name again? Johnston?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you show me the drawing room, please. Where the quarrel between the Captain and the Colonel took place?”
Johnston turned and walked silently across the polished marble to a door on his left. He opened it, showing them into a room of cool greens and gold, reflecting the morning light without absorbing it. “Miss Wood had coffee brought in here after dinner, and when the gentlemen joined her, she dismissed me. Soon afterward she went upstairs, sending for one of the maids and saying that she had a headache and would like a cool cloth for her head. That was around nine o’clock, perhaps a quarter past. At ten-fifteen I came here to take away the coffee tray and to see if anything else was needed before I