Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [47]
“It’s easier to smash the back of a head—when there’s no face staring into yours,” Hamish pointed out. “With the bayonet, we didna’ look into the face.” And that was also true. Dead center, twist, withdraw. A belt buckle above the blade, not a pair of human eyes . . .
So why had the priest turned away? Toward the windows, rather than toward the intruder?
Only an exceptionally trusting man would have done that.
“Look, I’ll turn my back, and let you walk out of here. Return the money if and when you can; there are others who need it as much as you do. . . .”
Still, to say that, Father James must have had a very good idea who was threatening him. Yet how far could a frightened man trust in return? Had it been a calculated risk, then? To calm whoever stood there, rather than agitate him?
Or had his assailant said, “Turn your back, and let me go”—then lost his nerve?
Rutledge listened to his intuition, and heard no reply.
The room, then. He slowly turned to study it. Not only had the drawer been broken open, the room had been ransacked.
If the priest had caught the intruder with the tin box pried open and the money in his hand, and offered him safe passage out the door, when had the room been torn apart? It must have happened before Father James came up the stairs. But why, when the locked desk drawer was the most logical place to begin a search and would have yielded the small tin box straightaway?
If the room had been turned upside down after the priest was dead, why not take a few minutes more to search through the rest of the house? The small clock in the parlor—the gold medal around the priest’s neck— whatever other easily pocketed windfalls came to hand— these had been left behind.
Why had ten or fifteen pounds satisfied a killer? If Walsh needed that much to finish paying for his cart and would take nothing else—why kill the priest?
Hamish said, “When you came in, your first act was to open yon draperies.”
Rutledge looked again at the windows. “Yes. And if Father James had done the same, the killer would then have been presented with his back, before they had even spoken to each other.”
He examined the rest of the room. One closed doorway led to the priest’s bedroom, as he found by opening it. Simple furnishings—a hard single bed, a wooden crucifix above the headboard, and a much-used prie-dieu against the wall of the study. An armoire between the windows and a low, matching chest at the foot of the bed. A chair stood beside a small bookshelf, and Rutledge crossed to read the titles. Religious texts, for the most part, and a collection of biographies: Pitt the Younger. Disraeli. William Cecil—the great secretary to Elizabeth the First. And a selection of poetry. Tennyson. Browning. Matthew Arnold. O. A. Manning . . .
He turned away and opened the only other door. It led to a bath. Rutledge closed that and went back to the study. Here were the broken desk and a chair, to one side of the passage doorway. A horsehair settee with two straight-backed chairs at angles beside it faced the hearth. In the corner beside the bedroom door stood the private altar. The candlesticks were there, polished to shine like molten sunlight, but the police had taken away the crucifix used as a weapon. A darker spot on the wood marked its dimensions. It would have been heavy. And one blow would have sufficed. Two at most . . .
Hamish said, “A man could stand unseen between that altar and the wall. If the room wasna’ lit.”
Rutledge was already looking at the space. He wedged himself in it. A broad man could just fit himself in there. And a thin one . . . But could Walsh?
“Yon priest in Norwich?” Hamish had not liked Monsignor Holston. “Perhap he canna’ return to the scene of his crime.”
“If he’d stood in the bedroom, whoever he was,” Rutledge speculated, “until the priest had turned his back to attend to the drapes, it would have taken the murderer a half dozen steps to close the distance between them. Even accounting for Walsh’s longer strides. And wary, alert, Father James would have sensed he was coming.