A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [43]
“I didn’t shoot him. I had nothing to do with it!”
“No one claims you did. I’m asking if you saw him. Or saw anyone else that Monday morning.”
“I saw them—the two of them.” He frowned. “I saw them,” he added, with less certainty. “I told Forrest—”
“I know what you told Forrest. Now tell me.”
“He was angry. The Captain. Pleading. They were sending us across to take the guns, and he didn’t like it. You could hear the shells—the bombardment had started.” He was beginning to shake. “‘I won’t give up that easily,’ he said. ‘I’ll fight. Whatever you’ve done, I’ll fight you every step of the way!’ The guns were ours at first, but then the Hun answered, and they were close, I could hear the screaming and I couldn’t find my helmet. And the Colonel said, ‘Don’t be a fool. Whether you like it or not, you’ll have to learn to live with it.’ And I saw the Captain’s face, and knew we were going to die—”
He was crying, tears running down his face like the shiny trails left by garden slugs, his mouth turned down in an agony of terror. “They sent me down the sunken road, to see that the flankers found their way, and the Colonel rode off, leaving the Captain behind, and I knew he’d kill me if he caught me hiding there from the guns—I didn’t want to die—God help me—”
Arms wrapped protectively around his body, he bowed his head and wept with a bottomless grief that silently racked him, his shoulders shaking, all dignity and identity gone.
Rutledge couldn’t take any more. He fished in his pocket for coins and gave them to the man, forcing them into the hand nearest him. Hickam lifted his head, staring at him, bewildered by this interjection of reality into his desolation, feeling the coins with his fingers like a blind man. “Here. Buy yourself something else to drink, and go home. Do you hear me? Go home!”
Hickam continued to stare at him, at a loss. “They’re moving up, I can’t leave—”
“You’re out of it,” Rutledge said. “Go find the aid station and tell them you need something to drink. Tell them I said you could have it. Tell them—for God’s sake, tell them to send you home!”
And without a backward glance, Rutledge wheeled and strode angrily down the walk to the Inn, Hamish hammering at his senses like all the Furies.
Rutledge lay awake for hours, listening to the murmurs of a pair of doves nesting under the eaves. They were restless, as if a prowling cat or an owl worried them. The village was quiet, the public bar had closed, and only the big church clock, striking the quarters, disturbed the stillness of the night. He had himself under control again, and only Redfern had seen him return, taking the stairs three at a time. He’d nearly stopped to tell the man to bring him a bottle of whiskey, but had enough sense left to remember where—and who—he was.
Staring at the ceiling, he decided he would call for an immediate Inquest and have it adjourned.
Hickam had been too befuddled to know what he was saying, and God alone could imagine what sort of witness he would make in court. Yet Rutledge was sure now that there was something locked in his mind, tangled with the war, tangled with his confusion and the fumes of alcohol, and if Dr. Warren could get the man sober—and sane—long enough to question, they might get to the bottom of this business.
For all they knew, it might clear Wilton as easily as it might damn him, in spite of Forrest’s dithering.
The trouble was, there was too much circumstantial evidence and not enough hard fact. The quarrel with Harris at Mallows, the possible—probable—encounter with Harris again in the lane the next morning, the shotgun sitting in Mavers’s unlocked house, the direction Wilton had chosen for his walk, all appeared to point to the Captain. And the time sequence itself fit, all quite neatly.
But this hadn’t been a neat killing. It had been angry, vengeful, passionate, bloody.
Where, except for