A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [42]
For “people,” substitute Lettice Wood, Rutledge thought to himself. But discounting the jealousy, Carfield had offered a better evaluation of Harris and Wilton than anyone else.
Sometimes hatred saw more clearly than love.
And it might be a very good idea to add Carfield’s name to the very short list of possible suspects, though what purpose Harris’s death might have served in the Vicar’s eyes was yet to be seen.
He went over his notes after dinner, sitting in his room until the walls seemed to close in on him. No illumination came, no connections. Faces. Voices. Yes. But so far leading nowhere. Except, possibly, to Wilton? He remembered his father saying once, after a tiring day in court, “It isn’t actually a question of guilt or innocence, is it? It’s a matter of what the jury believes, once we’ve told them what evidence there is on either side. Given the proper evidence, we could probably convict God. Without it, Lucifer himself would walk free!”
It was late when he got up to walk off a restlessness that prodded him into activity, useful or not.
Before the war it had been the case that drove him night and day—partly from a gritty determination that murderers must be found and punished. He had believed deeply in that, with the single-minded idealism of youth and a strong sense of moral duty toward the victims, who could no longer speak for themselves. But the war had altered his viewpoint, had shown him that the best of men could kill, given the right circumstances, as he himself had done over and over again. Not only the enemy, but his own men, sending them out to be slaughtered even when he had known beyond any doubt that they would die and that the order to advance was madness.
And partly from his fascination with a bizarre game of wits. Like the Colonel, who was far too good at strategy, he’d had a knack for understanding the minds of some of the killers he had hunted, and he had found the excitement of the hunt itself addictive. Man, he’d read somewhere, was the ultimate prey. And the police officer had the reinforcement of Society to indulge in that chase.
Rutledge had tried to explain his reasons to Jean once, when she had begged him to leave the Yard and take up law instead, like his father before him. But she’d stared at him as if he had spoken to her in Russian or Chinese, then laughed and said, “Oh, Ian, do stop teasing me and be serious!”
Now it was his own uncertainties that left him with no peace, his illusions as shattered as his mind. Why could he feel nothing about this murderer? Why?
He heard something in the shadowy alley to his left, between the baker’s shop and a small bootery, a muffled cough. And then Hickam stumbled out, singing to himself. Drunk again. If anything, worse than before, Rutledge thought with exasperation. But at least he wasn’t back in an imaginary France, and there might still be a chance of getting a little sense out of him.
Overtaking him in five strides, Rutledge put a hand on the man’s shoulder to stop him, speaking his name. Hickam shrugged it off irritably. “I want to talk to you. About Colonel Harris,” Rutledge said firmly, prepared to block his retreat down the alley or a dash across the street. “I’ve come from London—”
“London, is it?” Hickam asked, slurring the words, but Rutledge suddenly had the feeling that he wasn’t as drunk—yet—as he wished he was. “And what does London want now? A pox on sodding London! A pox on sodding everybody!”
“The morning that the Colonel died, you were in the lane, drunk. That’s where Sergeant Davies found you. Do you remember?” He forced the man to face him, could smell the alcohol on his breath, the unwashed body. The fear.
Hickam nodded. His face was ghastly in the moonlight, tired and