A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [75]
“No, I can see that,” she told him quietly, gesturing for him to be seated. There was a large crystal bowl of flowers on the table. From Sally Davenant’s gardens? Or from Mallows’? Next to the severe black of her mourning the colors were richly bright, making her face all the paler. “Is it so hard a thing, to find a murderer?”
“Sometimes. When he—or she—doesn’t want to be found, and the trail is cold, as it were.” He sat down in the chair facing her, back to the window.
Her eyes were dark with pain. “Have you seen my—the Colonel’s body?”
Caught off guard, he said, “No. I haven’t.”
“Neither have I.” She stopped. “I read a story once, when I was a child. It was about medieval Norway or perhaps Scotland—an outlandish place, it sounded to me, where people didn’t behave as Englishmen did. There was a death in the village, and the chief couldn’t discover who’d killed the person. And so he ordered everyone who came to the funeral to walk past the bier where the body lay, and put their hand on the wound. Everyone did, and nothing happened. But the chief wasn’t satisfied, and then he found a man hiding under an overturned boat. He didn’t want to see or touch the dead, he was afraid of what might happen if he did. Afraid the wound would cry out and accuse him of a sin that had nothing to do with murder. And so he’d run away. I was too young to understand when I read the story. I thought the frightened man was wiser than the rest—not to want to touch the dead.” She had been toying with a small silver box she had taken up from the table beside her. Now she looked up at him. “But I wanted to go to Charles. Hold him—tell him again that I loved him—tell him good-bye. That’s when the doctor explained what had been done to him. And now I can’t bear the thought of it—I can’t bear to think of Charles at all, because when I do, I see a—a monster. You can’t imagine how guilty it makes me feel—how bereft of comfort of any kind.”
Rutledge remembered the first corpses he’d seen in France, obscene, smelling things, inhuman grotesques that haunted his dreams. Stiff, awkward, ugly—you couldn’t feel compassion for them, only disgust, and the dreadful fear that you’d turn out like them, carted off in the back of a truck, like boards.
“Death is seldom tidy,” he said after a moment. “Sometimes for the very old, perhaps. Nothing is finished by a murder, whatever the killer may expect.”
She shook her head. “Laurence Royston told me that he had killed a child once. Quite accidentally. She’d run in front of his motorcar, there was nothing he could do, it was over in an instant. But he still remembers it quite vividly, the faces of the parents, the grief, the small crumpled body. Two children, playing a game, and suddenly, death.” She smiled wryly at Rutledge. “It was meant to help me see that none of us is spared pain. Meant kindly. He’s a very kind man. But it was small comfort.” A bird began to sing in the trees beyond an open window. The sound was sweet, liquid, but oddly out of place as a background to a quiet discussion of death.
“Do you still wish to see Charles’s murderer hang?” He watched her face.
Lettice sighed and asked instead, “Do you truly believe Catherine Tarrant could have killed him?”
“I don’t know. The field is still wide. Catherine Tarrant? Mark Wilton? Or Mrs. Davenant. Royston. Hickam. Mavers.”
She made a dismissive gesture. “Then you’ve made no progress at all. You’re whistling in the dark.”
“You, then.” He couldn’t decide if the scent that wafted to him on the slight breeze coming in the window was her perfume or from the flowers.
“Me?”
Rutledge said only, “I must keep an open mind, Miss Wood.”
“If I were planning to kill anyone—for any reason—I would not have used a shotgun! Not in the face!”
“There are many ways to kill,” he said, thinking suddenly of Jean. “Cruelty will do very well.”
Her face flamed, as if he’d struck her. On her feet in an instant, she stood there poised to leave. “What are you talking about? No, I don’t want to hear it! Please—just leave, I’ve nothing more to say to you.” Her odd eyes