A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [28]
“And you know the Captain well enough to be certain you did see him and not someone else?”
She smiled, the gray eyes lighting within. “A woman doesn’t forget Mark Wilton, once she’s seen him. He’s very handsome.”
“How would you describe the Colonel?”
She considered his question, as if she hadn’t given much thought to the Colonel before now. “He was younger than I expected. And rather attractive in a quiet way. Widely read for a military man—we had a very interesting discussion over dinner about American poets, and he seemed to know Whitman quite well.” She brushed a strand of windblown hair out of her face. “He seemed a likable man, on short acquaintance. A very gracious host. I can’t tell you much more, because I talked mostly to Lettice Wood after dinner and then to Mrs. Davenant, and shortly after that, the party broke up.”
“How would you describe relations between Wilton and Colonel Harris?”
“Relations? I hardly know.” She thought back to that evening for a moment, then said, “They seemed comfortable with each other, like men who have known each other over a long period of time. That’s all I can remember.”
“Thank you, Miss Sommers. If you should think of anything else that might help us, please get in touch with Sergeant Davies or me.”
“Yes, of course.” She hesitated, then asked, “I’ve gone on with my walks. I suppose that’s all right? My cousin frets and begs me to stay home, but I hate being cooped up. There’s no—well, danger—is there?”
“From the Colonel’s killer?”
She nodded.
“I doubt that you have anything to fear, Miss Sommers. All the same, you might exercise reasonable caution. We still don’t know why the Colonel was killed, or by whom.”
“Well, I wish you luck in finding him,” she said, and went striding off.
“A pleasant lady,” Davies said, watching her go. “Her cousin, now, she’s as timid as a mouse. Never shows her face in the village, but keeps the cottage as clean as a pin. Mrs. Haldane was saying that she thought the poor girl was a half-wit at first, but went over to the cottage one day to ask how they were settling in, and saw that she’s just shy, as Miss Sommers said, and on the plain side.”
Rutledge was not interested in the shy Miss Sommers. He was tired and hungry, and Hamish had been mumbling under his breath for the last half hour, a certain sign of tumult in his own mind. It was time to turn back.
What bothered him most, he thought, striding along in silence, was the Colonel himself. He’d actually seen the man, heard him inspire troops who had no spirit and no strength left to fight. A tall persuasive figure in an officer’s greatcoat, his voice pitched to carry in the darkness before dawn, his own physical force somehow filling the cold, frightened emptiness in the faces before him. Convincing them that they had one more charge left in them, that together they could carry the assault and take the gun emplacement and save a thousand lives the next morning—two thousand—when the main thrust came. And the remnants of a battered force did as he had asked, only to see the main attack fail, and the hill abandoned to the Hun again within twenty-four hours.
Yet here in Upper Streetham Charles Harris seemed to be no more than a faint shadow of that officer, a quiet and “thoroughly nice” man, as Mrs. Davenant had put it. Surely not a man who was likely to be murdered.
How do you put your fingers on the pulse of a dead man and bring him to life? Rutledge had been able to do that at one time, had in the first several cases of his career shown an uncanny knack for seeing the victim from the viewpoint of the murderer and understanding why he or she had had to die. Because the solution to a murder was sometimes just that—finding out why the victim had to die. But here in Warwickshire the Colonel seemed to elude him….
Except to acknowledge the fact that once more he would be dealing with death, he, Rutledge, had never really thought through the problems of resuming his career at the Yard. At least not while he was still at the