A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [74]
Why couldn’t he get a grip on the emotions of this case?
Because there was something he hadn’t learned? Questions he should have asked and hadn’t? Relationships he hadn’t found?
Or because his own ragged emotions kept getting in his way?
Why had he lost that strong vein of intuition that once had made him particularly good at understanding why the victim had to die? At understanding why one human being had been driven to kill another. Was it lost innocence, the knowledge that he himself was now no better than the killers he hunted? No longer siding with the angels, cut off from what he once had been?
He laughed sourly. Maybe it had only been a trick, a game he was good at when he could stand back dispassionately from the searing flame of emotions. A trick he’d used so often he’d come to believe in it himself. He could hardly bring back an image of the man he’d been in 1914. A realist, he’d told himself then, accustomed to the darkest corners of human experience. Well, he’d discovered in the trenches of France that hell itself was not half so frightening as the darkest corners of the human mind.
Not that it mattered. All they expected of him now was that he do his job. No frills, no flamboyance, no magician’s artifice, just answers.
If he couldn’t do his job, what would he do with his life?
He began to walk, making his way from the meadow down to Mallows, trying to think which way the horse might have come, what path had led Harris here.
But that didn’t work, did it? If Harris had been in the lane speaking to Wilton, he must have been returning to Mallows, not starting out on his ride! And why hadn’t Lettice chosen to go riding with her guardian that morning? Why had she said, with such pain, “I didn’t go riding with him,” as if in her mind this time had been somehow different?
He walked on, following the contour of the land, using his sense of direction to lead him toward the house. In the distance he could see the chimneys of the cottage the two Sommers women had rented for the summer, and from one particular spot, the church steeple rising among the treetops, marking the village. Could you also see this part of Mallows’ land from the church tower? It was an interesting thought….
And farther along, the distant rooftops of Mallows itself, and the stables. What could be seen of the hillside from that vantage point?
Could you follow Colonel Harris’s progress and be certain of meeting him at one particular place? Or had the encounter been happenstance? No, because the killer had come armed, ready to kill….
Skirting the plowed fields where new growth was dark green and strong, he found the orchards, and the stile, and a shrub-bordered path. At a fork that divided into one path of hard-packed earth pointing in the direction of the stables and sheds, the other paved now and passing through a hedge to the landscaped grounds, he came first to the kitchen gardens, the herbs, the flowers for cutting, and then the formal beds that marked the lawns.
Sure of his way now, Rutledge strode around a hedge, badly startling a gardener on his knees in a patch of vegetables. The man scrambled to his feet, pulled off his cap, and stared. Rutledge smiled. “I’ve come to see Mr. Royston.”
“I—he’s not at home, sir, Mr. Royston isn’t, he hasn’t come back from the Inquest that I know.”
“Then I’ll go along to the house and wait. Thank you.” He nodded, and the gardener stood staring after him, perspiration unheeded running into the frown lines on his sun-red forehead.
Rutledge crossed the lawns to the drive and rang the bell, finding himself asking to see Lettice, not Laurence Royston.
12
To Rutledge’s surprise, Lettice Wood asked him to come up to the small sitting room and was waiting for him there in the sunlight from the windows.
“The Inquest is over, Miss Wood,” he said formally. “I haven’t any information to give