Charles Todd - A test of wills

Lettice Wood was tall and slim, with heavy dark hair that was pinned loosely on the top of her head, smooth wings from a central parting cupping her ears before being drawn up again. She was wearing unrelieved black, her skirts rustling slightly as she turned to watch them come toward her.

"Inspector Rutledge?" she said, as if she couldn't distinguish between the Upper Streetham sergeant and the representative of Scotland Yard. She did not ask them to be seated, though she herself sat on a brocade couch that faced the fireplace and there were two upholstered chairs on either side of it. A seventeenth-century desk stood between two windows, and against one wall was a rosewood cabinet filled with a collection of old silver, reflecting the single lamp like watching eyes from the jungle's edge. Sergeant Davies, behind Rutledge, stayed by the door and began to fumble in his pocket for his notebook.

For a moment the man from London and the woman in mourning considered each other in silence, each gauging temperament from the slender evidence of appearance. The lamplight reached Rutledge's face while hers was shadowed, but her voice when she spoke had been husky and strained, that of someone who had spent many hours crying. Her grief was very real-and yet something about it disturbed him. Something lurked in the dimness that he didn't want to identify.

"I'm sorry we must intrude, Miss Wood," he found himself saying with stiff formality. "And I offer our profoundest sympathy. But I'm sure you understand the urgency of finding the person or persons responsible for your guardian's death."

"My guardian." She said it flatly, as if it had no meaning for her. Then she added with painful vehemence, "I can't imagine how anyone could have done such a terrible thing to him. Or why. It was a senseless, savage-" She stopped, and he could see that she had swallowed hard to hold back angry tears. "It served no purpose," she added finally in a defeated voice.

"What has served no purpose?" Rutledge asked quietly. "His death? Or the manner of it?"

That jolted her, as if she had been talking to herself and not to him, and was surprised to find he'd read her thoughts.

She leaned forward slightly and he could see her face then, blotched with crying and sleeplessness. But most unusual nevertheless, with a high-bridged nose and a sensitive mouth and heavy-lidded eyes. He couldn't tell their color, but they were not dark. Sculpted cheekbones, a determined chin, a long, slender throat. And yet somehow she managed to convey an odd impression of warm sensuality. He remembered how the Sergeant had hesitated over the word "attractive," as if uncertain how to classify her. She was not, in the ordinary sense, beautiful. At the same time, she was far, very far, from plain.

"I don't see how you can separate them," she answered after a moment, a black-edged handkerchief twisting in her long, slim fingers. "He wasn't simply killed, was he? He was destroyed, blotted out. It was deliberate, vengeful. Even Scotland Yard can't change that. But the man who did this will be hanged. That's the only comfort I've got." There was a deeper note in her voice as she spoke of hanging, as if she relished the image of it in her mind.

"Then perhaps we ought to begin with last Monday morning. Did you see your guardian before he left the house?"

She hesitated, then said, "I didn't go riding that morning."

Before he could take her up on that stark reply, she added, "Charles loved Mallows, loved the land. He said those rides made up, a little, for all the months he spent away. So he usually went out alone, and it was never a fixed route, you see, just wherever his list for that day took him-it might be inspecting a crop or a tenant's roof or the state of the hedges or livestock, anything. And he came back feeling-fulfilled, I suppose. It was a way of healing after all he'd been through."

"How many people knew what was on his list each day?"

"It wasn't written down, it was in his head. Laurence Royston might be aware that Charles was planning to look into a particular problem, if they'd discussed it. But for the most part it was Charles's own interests that guided him. I don't suppose you were a soldier, Inspector, but Charles once said that the greatest crime of the war was ruining the French countryside for a generation. Not the slaughter of armies, but the slaughter of the land." She leaned back, out of the light again, as if realizing that she was running on and had lost his attention.

I didn't go riding that morning Rutledge considered those words, ignoring the rest of what she had said. It was as if that one fact separated her entirely from what had happened. But in what way? He had heard soldiers offer the same excuse to avoid discussing what they had witnessed on the battlefield but had not been a part of: "I wasn't in that assault." I don't know and I don't want to know…

A denial, then. But was it a washing of hands, or a means of telling the absolute but not the whole truth?

Her face was still, but she was watching him, waiting in the security of the darkness for him to ask his next question. Her grief appeared to be genuine, and yet she was doing nothing whatsoever to help him. He could feel her resistance like a physical barrier, as if they were adversaries, not joined in a mutual hunt for a murderer.

She in her turn was silently counting her heartbeats, willing them to a steady rhythm so that her breathing didn't betray her. In feeling lay disaster. Not for this London stranger with his chill, impersonal eyes was she going to lay out her most private emotions, and watch them probed and prodded for meaning! Let him do the job he had been sent to do. And why was it taking so bloody long? Charles had been gone for three days!

The silence lengthened. Sergeant Davies cleared his throat, as if made uneasy by undercurrents he couldn't understand.

For they were there, strong undercurrents, emotions so intense they were like ominous shadows in the room. Even Hamish was silent.

Changing his tactics abruptly, Rutledge asked, "What did your fiance, Captain Wilton, and your guardian discuss after dinner on Sunday, the night before the Colonel's death?"

Her attention returned to him with a swift wariness. The heavy-lidded eyes opened wide for an instant, but she answered, "Surely you've spoken to Mark about that?"

"I'd prefer to hear what you have to say first. I understand that whatever it was led to a quarrel?"

"A quarrel?" Her voice was sharp now. "I went upstairs after dinner, I-didn't feel well. Charles and Mark were in the drawing room when I left them, talking about one of the guests invited to the wedding. Neither of them liked the man, but both felt they had to include him. An officer they'd served with, my guardian in the Boer War and Mark in France. I can't imagine them quarreling over that."

"Yet the servants told Inspector Forrest that there had been angry words between the two men, that, in fact, Captain Wilton had stormed out of the house in a rage, and that Colonel Harris flung his wineglass at the door the Captain had slammed behind him."

She was rigid, her attention fixed on him with fierce intensity. Even the handkerchief no longer unconsciously threaded itself through her fingers. He suddenly had the impression that this was news to her, that she had been unaware of what had happened in the hall. But she said only, "If they heard that much, they must have been able to tell you what it was all about."

"Unfortunately, they witnessed only the end of it."

"I see." As if distracted by some thought of her own, she said nothing for a time, and Rutledge waited, wishing he could know what was going on behind those long-lashed eyes. Then she roused herself and repeated, "Yes, that is unfortunate, isn't it? Still, you must know that neither Charles nor Mark is a hotheaded man."