A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [37]
He stopped, but Rutledge said nothing, and after a time, Mavers went on more quietly. “My mother never got over that—he was her favorite. A big strapping lad like her own father. And my sister drowned herself in the pond one day because Harris stopped fancying her. I went to Mallows to horsewhip him and got thrashed by the grooms instead. Ma called me a worthless whelp for daring to blame Harris for Annie’s weakness. So I ran off to join the Army myself, and somehow he found out about it, and he had me sent home for lying about my age. But he wouldn’t give me my job back in the stables at Mallows—he told that bootlicking fool Royston that they didn’t want me there anymore because I was a troublemaker. So that’s just what I became, trouble. A thorn in his flesh! And if you believe that one fine morning I’d shoot him down, depriving myself of that lifelong pleasure, you’re a greater fool than you look!”
Rutledge heard two things in Mavers’s diatribe—the ring of truth, and the echo of envy. “You’re talking about a boy. Twenty, perhaps? Not much older than that. And you were what? Fourteen? Fifteen?” he said carefully.
The red flush returned to Mavers’s face. “What does age have to do with it? Is there some special dispensation for cruelty if you’re rich and under twenty?”
“You know there isn’t. But a man generally isn’t judged by what he did as a boy, he’s judged by what he did as a man.”
Mavers shrugged. “Boy or man, he’s the same. Besides, the damage is done, isn’t it? And the man at forty may be a saint, but the rest of us are still bleeding from what he did when he was twenty. Who’s to put that right? Who’s to bring Annie back, or Jeff? Or Ma. Tell me!”
Rutledge looked around the room, at the worn, plain furniture and the threadbare carpet on the floor, half hidden by the papers, at the damp-stained walls and the windows streaked with dust, all of it dappled by the tree leaves outside as a passing wind stirred them and let in a little light. He’d met men like Mavers before. Hungry for something they didn’t have, and ignorant of how to go about getting it, hating those who had had life given to them easily. Lost men, angry men, dangerous men…because they had no pride of their own to bolster their self-esteem.
“Hating doesn’t put it right either, does it?”
The goat’s eyes were hard. “It does give life a purpose, all the same.”
Preparing to go, Rutledge said, “As long as it doesn’t lead to murder. There’s never an excuse for murder.”
He was nearly out the door into the hall when Hamish said under his breath, “But who’s a murderer, then? The man who carried that shotgun yonder, or the officer who shoots his own men?”
Startled, Rutledge half turned as if Mavers had spoken, not the voice in his own head. And as he looked back, he saw what had been concealed behind Mavers’s chair and by Mavers’s body and by the books piled on the table—a shotgun, leaning against the wall where it met the jutting corner of the hearth, almost lost in the deep shadow there.
6
Satisfied after her conversation with Inspector Forrest, Catherine Tarrant rode slowly back down the High Street, threading her way through the late-afternoon shoppers and the workmen going about their business. Her eyes quickly scanned their faces, but no one spoke to her and she didn’t stop to ask the whereabouts of the one person she sought. Turning her head to glance down Smithy Lane, she almost ran down a small boy dragging his dog behind him on a rope. The dog was too interested in the smells along their route to pay much heed to its master,