A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [29]
Even back in London, he had never really considered whether or not he was good enough still at his work to return to it. He hadn’t considered whether the skills and the intuitive grasp of often frail threads of information, which had been his greatest asset, had been damaged along with the balance of his mind by the horrors of the war. Whether he could be a good policeman again. He’d simply expected his ability to come back without effort, like remembering how to ride or how to swim, rusty skills that needed only a new honing….
Now, suddenly, he was worried about that. One more worry, one more point of stress, and it was stress that gave Hamish access to his conscious mind. The doctors had told him that.
He sighed, and Sergeant Davies, clumping along through the grass beside him, said, “Aye, it’s been a long morning, and we’ve gotten nowhere.”
“Haven’t we?” Rutledge asked, forcing his attention back to the business in hand. “Miss Sommers said she did see Wilton walking this track. But where was he coming from? The churchyard, as he claims? Or had he walked by way of the lane, as Hickam claims, met the Colonel, and then crossed over this way? Or—did he go after Harris, follow him to the meadow, with murder on his mind?”
“But this way leads to the ruins by the old bridge, just as he told us, and Miss Sommers saw him here around eight, she thought. So we’re no nearer to the truth than we were before.”
“Yes, all right, but since Miss Sommers saw him here, he’d be bound to tell us that he was heading for the mill, wouldn’t he? No matter where he’d actually been—or was actually going.”
“Do you think he’s guilty, then?” Sergeant Davies couldn’t keep the disappointment out of his voice.
“There isn’t enough information at this point to make any decision at all. But it’s possible, yes.” They had reached the car again, and Rutledge opened his door, then stopped to pick the worst of the burrs from his trousers. Davies was standing by the bonnet, fanning himself with his hat, his face red from the exertion.
Still following a train of thought, Rutledge said, “If Miss Sommers is right and Wilton was up there in the high grass early on, say eight o’clock, he might well have been a good distance from the meadow by the time the Colonel was shot. Assuming, as we must, that the horse came straight home and the Colonel died somewhere between nine-thirty and ten o’clock, when Royston went down to the stables looking for him.”
“Aye, he would have reached the ruins and the bridge in that time, it’s true. So you’re saying then that it still hangs on Hickam’s word that Captain Wilton was in the lane, and when that was.”
“It appears that way. Without Hickam, there’s no evidence where the Captain had come from before he ran into Miss Sommers. No evidence of a further quarrel. And no real reason except for what Johnston and Mary overheard in the hall at Mallows for us to believe that the Captain had any cause to shoot Harris.”
Sergeant Davies brightened. “And no jury in this county is going to take a Daniel Hickam’s word over that of a man holding the Victoria Cross.”
“You’re forgetting something, Sergeant,” Rutledge said, climbing into the car.
“What’s that, sir?” Davies asked anxiously, coming around and peering into the car from the passenger side so that he could see Rutledge’s face.
“If Wilton didn’t shoot Harris, then who did? And who turned the corpse over?”
After lunch at the Shepherd’s Crook, Rutledge took out the small leather notebook, made a number of entries, and then considered what he should do next. He had sent Davies home to his wife for lunch, while he lingered over his own coffee in the dining room, enjoying the brief solitude.
What was Harris like? That seemed to be the key. What lay buried somewhere in the man’s life that was to bring him to a bloody death in a sunlit meadow?
Or to