Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [146]
Both Sims and May Trent were silent, absorbing what he’d said. She was the first to recover. “Then let that someone drive to Norwich with you.”
But something made her look away from him.
“Walsh is dead,” Sims put in. “I can’t believe that Walsh would have tried to escape, if he was innocent! If the facts, once they’re collected, would exonerate him, why not wait to be cleared?”
“Because he was a poor man and terrified that justice wouldn’t care if he went to the hangman. Which reminds me—if you’re convinced of his guilt, tell me why the two of you spent the night in this empty barn of a house, and wouldn’t leave it or go for help?”
May Trent stared down at her cup. “I’m a silly woman. The Vicar asked me again and again if I’d walk with him as far as the hotel. But I couldn’t go back outside and feel safe. You said yourself—a murderer was on the loose.”
“I think he was,” Rutledge replied slowly. “But perhaps it wasn’t Walsh.”
She spilled tea into the saucer and clicked her tongue in annoyance. “I wish you would tell us what’s wrong! What it is you want from us.”
Sims took the saucer from her, poured out the spilled tea, and wiped it with a serviette. He said, “I have work to do here. I can’t abandon my parish on a whim. Miss Trent is justified in asking what it is you want.”
Rutledge said quietly, “I’m a policeman. Have you forgotten? I don’t have to ask. I can require you to accompany me. Now, if you’ve finished your tea, we’ll be on our way.”
Listening to Hamish battering at the back of his mind, Rutledge made one detour on his way to the road south.
He pulled once more into the rutted drive by Randal’s farm.
But the gelding and the farmer had not come home.
Rutledge was beginning to feel uneasy.
The motorcar was silent as they drove south. Rutledge, uncomfortable because the Vicar was sitting in Hamish’s usual place, was not the best of companions, and May Trent kept her face turned away from him, looking out the window.
Hamish, on the other hand, was conducting a long and skeptical conversation with Rutledge.
“It isna’ the best way! Go to London, and speak to yon Chief Superintendent, tell him what it is you suspect! Let him reopen the inquiry.”
“Bowles won’t be any more receptive than Blevins was. And the case will be closed. I have at best twenty-four hours to solve he mystery that surrounded Father James’s last days. But it was there.” Rutledge paused. “And there’s a secret binding these people together. Each seems to know only a part of it. What I don’t understand—yet—is whether the mystery and the secret are one and the same. I’m willing to bet my career that they are!”
“Aye, it could be so. But the days of the rack are over— you canna’ force them to tell you. Or be certain in the end you’ve got the truth.”
Rutledge concentrated on the road for a time and then picked up the thread of his silent conversation with Hamish. If nothing else, it kept him awake. But it failed to satisfy either one of the participants.
Hamish’s last salvo was telling.
“They willna’ like it in London.”
“No. But we’re a long way from London.” Rutledge shut out the voice in his aching head and tried to concentrate on the busy road south.
It was close to teatime when Rutledge pulled the motorcar into a small space between a cart full of cabbages and the deep hole that still reeked like a cesspool.
He got out, stretched aching shoulders, and went around the boot to open the door for May Trent. But the Vicar was already there before him, saying, “Why didn’t you tell us that it was Monsignor Holston you were