Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [138]
A second gray horse, awakened by a voice next to where she’d been dozing head down in her stall, swung it high and stretched forward to nuzzle him.
The mare.
She was home.
Once his breathing had settled back into the range of speech, Rutledge stepped into the stall, calling her name softly as he ran his hand down her neck and then along her flank, before moving toward her hindquarters. The mare quivered, her coat rippling with the movement of the nerves under it, but she stood still. He kept one hand on her back and bent to lift the heavy hoof on the near side. In the poor light of the barn, he couldn’t see well enough to examine it.
Turning her head to stare at him, she let him work with her without protest. He put down that hoof, and then moved to lift the other.
For an instant he thought she was going to kick out, and he could see himself caught in the head just as Walsh had been, his back too near the stall’s high side wall to let him escape the blow. But she simply moved a step forward, as if to give him more room.
The shoe was missing.
He put down the heavy hoof, keeping his hand gently on the mare’s rump. Her coat was rough with the lather of sweat, briars and leaves tangled in the thick hair. She had been ridden very hard, and she was tired. . . .
He lifted the hoof again. She turned her head, the great brown eyes watching him.
But she did not kick. She was safe in her own stall now, and not likely to object, in her present state. He let the hoof down, and moved around toward the big head.
“Clever girl, to find your own way home.” He slapped the neck just below the ears twitching with interest as if wondering what it was he wanted.
Hamish said, “Left to hersel’, it’s no’ a great surprise.”
Where was Randal?
Had he come back yet? There was no sign of the gelding. This time Rutledge moved on to the last stall to peer inside. It stood empty.
Randal was still searching for his lost mare.
Rutledge laid the hammer by the harrow, where he’d found it, and walked out of the barn. He could hear ravens calling in the woods, and somewhere the sharp whistle of a pheasant.
Priscilla Connaught was waiting. He had to go.
It was almost a surprise when he heard Hamish’s voice saying, “The woman willna’ go away. Stay until yon farmer comes back.”
Rutledge thought, “I’ll finish what I’ve begun.” But in Hurley, the doctor would be ready to examine Walsh’s body. Hamish was right. He ought to be there, too. No matter what he did, he was off track—last night, this morning—and there seemed to be nothing he could do about it.
Besides, it was Blevins’s case. The Inspector would have to be present.
He absently fondled the dog’s ears. Walsh was dead. Whatever Hamish thought, one had always to remember the living.
CHAPTER 23
THE FARMHOUSE WHERE PRISCILLA CONNAUGHT HAD been taken after wrecking her motorcar was set, like so many others, back from the road down a winding lane that led up a slight rise and then into the farmyard. It was muddy, the warm smell of manure coming from a cart by the far wall where the milking shed had been cleaned. The cows themselves, some dozen of them, were already plodding steadily out to pasture, following a routine so well established in their lives that they needed no human direction.
A walk of paving stones led across to the house, and one branch of it disappeared through a hedge around to the front. Rutledge left his car by a stack of bricks covered with a tarpaulin and picked his way across the yard to the walk. There was a door at this end of it, what he assumed to be the kitchen door into the yard. It opened before he got there.
An anxious woman peered out at him. She wore her graying hair in a bun at the back of her neck, and a heavy sweater over her dark dress. “Inspector Rutledge?” she asked, her voice rising.
“Mrs. Danning? I met your husband along the main road. He’s brought the team down to pull Miss Connaught’s motorcar out of the ditch.”
She said, disapprovingly,