A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [33]
She had had the kind of face that men often fall in love with in their youth, fresh and sweet and softly feminine. Rutledge was suddenly reminded of girls in white gowns with blue sashes around trim waists, broad-brimmed hats pinned to high-piled curls, who had played tennis and strolled on cropped green lawns and laughed lightheartedly in the summer of 1914, then disappeared forever. Catherine Tarrant had changed with them. There was a firmness to her jaw and her mouth now, signs of suffering and emerging character that in the end would make her more attractive if less pretty. Her dark eyes were level, with intelligence clearly visible in their swift appraisal of him.
“I have nothing to tell you that will help your enquiries,” she said at once. “I don’t know anything about Colonel Harris’s death except what I’ve heard. But my housekeeper is Mary Satterthwaite’s sister, and Mary has told her about the quarrel between the Colonel and Captain Wilton. I know,” she added quickly, “Mary shouldn’t have. But she did, and Vivian told me. I just want to say to you that I’ve known Mark—Captain Wilton—for some years, and I can’t imagine him killing anyone, least of all Lettice Wood’s guardian! Lettice adored Charles, he was her knight in shining armor, a father and brother all in one. And Mark adores Lettice. He’d never let himself be provoked into doing anything so foolish!”
“You think, then, that the quarrel was serious enough to make us believe that the Captain is under suspicion?”
That shook her quiet intensity. She had come in defense of Wilton and found herself apparently on the brink of damning him. Then she collected her wits and with a lift of her chin, she said, “I’m not a policeman, Inspector. I don’t know what is important in a murder enquiry and what isn’t. But I should think that a quarrel between two men the night before one of them is killed will be given your thorough consideration. And you don’t know those two as well as I do—did.”
“Then perhaps you should tell me about them.”
“Tell you what? That neither of them had a vile temper, that neither of them would hurt Lettice, that neither of them was the sort of man to resort to murder?”
“Yet they quarreled. And one of them is dead.”
“Then we’ve come full circle again, haven’t we? And I’m trying to make you understand that however angry Charles might have made him at the moment, Mark wouldn’t have harmed him—least of all, killed him so savagely!”
“How do you know what might drive a man to murder?” he asked.
She studied him for a moment with those dark, clear eyes, and said, “How do you? Have you ever killed a man? Deliberately and intentionally? Not counting the war, I mean.”
Rutledge smiled grimly. “Point taken.” After a moment he added, “If we scratch Wilton from our list of suspects, have you got a name to put in his place?”
“Mavers,” she said instantly. “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could see him!”
“But he was in the village on Monday morning. In plain view of half a hundred people.”
She shrugged. “That’s your problem, not mine. You asked me who might have shot Charles, not how he did it.”
“It appears that Wilton was seen by several witnesses in the vicinity of the meadow where Harris died.”
“I don’t care where he was seen. I tell you he wouldn’t have touched Charles Harris. He’s madly in love with Lettice. Can’t I make you understand that? Why would he risk losing her?”
“Are you still in love with him?”
Color rose in her face, a mottled red under the soft, fair skin. The earnestness changed to a clipped tension. “I was infatuated with Mark Wilton five years ago. He came to Upper Streetham one summer, and I fell in love with him the first time I saw him—any girl with eyes in her head must have done the same! Mrs. Davenant’s husband had just died, and Mark stayed with her for a while,