A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [15]
“I’ll talk to Mary and the rest of the staff later,” Rutledge said, and walked to the door. There he turned to look back at the drawing room and then at the staircase. Under ordinary circumstances, Wilton would have noticed Johnston and the maid as soon as he came out of the drawing-room door. But if he had been looking back at Charles Harris instead, he might not have been aware of either servant, silent and unobtrusive behind him.
With a nod, Rutledge opened the front door before Johnston could reach it to see him out, and with Sergeant Davies hurrying after him, walked down the broad, shallow stone steps and across the drive to the car.
Hamish, growling irritably, said, “I don’t like yon butler. I don’t hold with the rich anyway, or their toadies.”
“It’s a better job than you ever held,” Rutledge retorted, and then swore under his breath. But Davies had been getting into the car and heard only the sound of his voice, not his words. He looked up to say, “I beg pardon, sir?”
The heavy drapes of the sitting room upstairs parted a little, and Lettice Wood watched Rutledge climb into the car and start the engine. When it had passed out of sight around the first bend of the drive, she let the velvet fall back into place and wandered aimlessly to the table where the lamp still burned. She flicked it off and stood there in the darkness.
If only she could think clearly! He would be back, she was certain of that, prying into everything, wanting to know about Charles, asking about Mark. And he wasn’t like the elderly Forrest; there would be no deference or fatherly concern from him, not with those cold eyes. She must have her wits about her then! The problem was, what would Mark tell them? How was she to know?
She put her hands to her head, pressing cold fingers into her temples. He looked as if he’d been ill, this inspector from Scotland Yard. And such people were often difficult. Why had Forrest sent for him? Why had it been necessary to drag London into this business, awful enough already without strangers trampling about.
Why hadn’t they left it to Inspector Forrest?
“Will we speak to Mavers now, sir?”
“No, Captain Wilton next, I think.”
“He’s staying with his cousin, Mrs. Davenant. She’s a widow, has a house just on the outskirts of town, the other end of Upper Streetham from Mallows.”
He gave Rutledge directions and then began to scan his notebook as if checking to make certain he had put down the salient points of the conversations with Lettice Wood and Johnston.
“I thought,” Rutledge said, “that the servants claimed that the argument between the Colonel and the Captain concerned the wedding. Johnston said nothing about it.”
“It was the maid, Mary Satterthwaite, who mentioned that, sir.”
“Then why didn’t you say so while we were there? I’d have spoken to her straightaway.”
Davies flipped back through his notebook to a page near the beginning. “She said she went up to Miss Wood’s room to bring a cold cloth for her head, and Miss Wood was telling her that she had left the gentlemen to discuss the marriage. But the way Miss Wood said it led Mary to think it wasn’t going to be a friendly discussion.”
“And then, having seen the end of the quarrel, the maid merely jumped to the conclusion that that was what they were still talking about?”
“Apparently so, sir.”
Which was no evidence at all. “When is the wedding?”
Davies flipped several more pages. “On the twenty-second of September, sir. And Miss Wood and the Captain have been engaged for seven months.”
Rutledge considered that. In an hour’s time—from the moment that Lettice Wood left the pair together until Johnston had seen Wilton storming out of the house—the subject of conversation could have ranged far and wide. If there had been a discussion of the wedding at nine-fifteen, surely it would not have lasted an hour, and developed into a quarrel at this stage, the details having been ironed out seven months ago and the arrangements for September already well