He went over his notes after dinner, sitting in his room until the walls seemed to close in on him. No illumination came, no connections. Faces. Voices. Yes. But so far leading nowhere. Except, possibly, to Wilton? He remembered his father saying once, after a tiring day in court, “It isn’t actually a question of guilt or innocence, is it? It’s a matter of what the jury believes, once we’ve told them what evidence there is on either side. Given the proper evidence, we could probably convict God. Without it, Lucifer himself would walk free!”
It was late when he got up to walk off a restlessness that prodded him into activity, useful or not.
Before the war it had been the case that drove him night and day—partly from a gritty determination that murderers must be found and punished. He had believed deeply in that, with the single-minded idealism of youth and a strong sense of moral duty toward the victims, who could no longer speak for themselves. But the war had altered his viewpoint, had shown him that the best of men could kill, given the right circumstances, as he himself had done over and over again. Not only the enemy, but his own men, sending them out to be slaughtered even when he had known beyond any doubt that they would die and that the order to advance was madness.
And partly from his fascination with a bizarre game of wits. Like the Colonel, who was far too good at strategy, he’d had a knack for understanding the minds of some of the killers he had hunted, and he had found the excitement of the hunt itself addictive. Man, he’d read somewhere, was the ultimate prey. And the police officer had the reinforcement of Society to indulge in that chase.
Rutledge had tried to explain his reasons to Jean once, when she had begged him to leave the Yard and take up law instead, like his father before him. But she’d stared at him as if he had spoken to her in Russian or Chinese, then laughed and said, “Oh, Ian, do stop teasing me and be serious!”
Now it was his own uncertainties that left him with no peace, his illusions as shattered as his mind. Why could he feel nothing about this murderer? Why?
He heard something in the shadowy alley to his left, between the baker’s shop and a small bootery, a muffled cough. And then Hickam stumbled out, singing to himself. Drunk again. If anything, worse than before, Rutledge thought with exasperation. But at least he wasn’t back in an imaginary France, and there might still be a chance of getting a little sense out of him.
Overtaking him in five strides, Rutledge put a hand on the man’s shoulder to stop him, speaking his name. Hickam shrugged it off irritably. “I want to talk to you. About Colonel Harris,” Rutledge said firmly, prepared to block his retreat down the alley or a dash across the street. “I’ve come from London—”
“London, is it?” Hickam asked, slurring the words, but Rutledge suddenly had the feeling that he wasn’t as drunk—yet—as he wished he was. “And what does London want now? A pox on sodding London! A pox on sodding everybody!”
“The morning that the Colonel died, you were in the lane, drunk. That’s where Sergeant Davies found you. Do you remember?” He forced the man to face him, could smell the alcohol on his breath, the unwashed body. The fear.
Hickam nodded. His face was ghastly in the moonlight, tired and strained and hopeless. Rutledge looked into eyes like black plums in a pudding, and flinched at what he read there, a torment much like his own. “Did you see the Colonel? Charles Harris. Or anyone else?”
“I didn’t shoot him. I had nothing to do with it!”
“No one claims you did. I’m asking if you saw him. Or saw anyone else that Monday morning.”
“I saw them—the two of them.” He frowned. “I saw them,” he added, with less certainty. “I told Forrest—”
“I know what you told Forrest. Now tell me.”
“He was angry. The Captain. Pleading. They were sending us across to take the guns, and he didn’t like it. You could hear the shells—the bombardment had started.” He was beginning to shake. “‘I won’t give up that easily,’ he said. ‘I’ll fight. Whatever you’ve done, I’ll fight you every step of the way!’ The guns were ours at first, but then the Hun answered, and they were close, I could hear the screaming and I couldn’t find my helmet. And the Colonel said, ‘Don’t be a fool. Whether you like it or not, you’ll have to learn to live with it.’ And I saw the Captain’s face, and knew we were going to die—”
He was crying, tears running down his face like the shiny trails left by garden slugs, his mouth turned down in an agony of terror. “They sent me down the sunken road, to see that the flankers found their way, and the Colonel rode off, leaving the Captain behind, and I knew he’d kill me if he caught me hiding there from the guns—I didn’t want to die—God help me—”
Arms wrapped protectively around his body, he bowed his head and wept with a bottomless grief that silently racked him, his shoulders shaking, all dignity and identity gone.
Rutledge couldn’t take any more. He fished in his pocket for coins and gave them to the man, forcing them into the hand nearest him. Hickam lifted his head, staring at him, bewildered by this interjection of reality into his desolation, feeling the coins with his fingers like a blind man. “Here. Buy yourself something else to drink, and go home. Do you hear me? Go home!”
Hickam continued to stare at him, at a loss. “They’re moving up, I can’t leave—”
“You’re out of it,” Rutledge said. “Go find the aid station and tell them you need something to drink. Tell them I said you could have it. Tell them—for God’s sake, tell them to send you home!”
And without a backward glance, Rutledge wheeled and strode angrily down the walk to the Inn, Hamish hammering at his senses like all the Furies.
Rutledge lay awake for hours, listening to the murmurs of a pair of doves nesting under the eaves. They were restless, as if a prowling cat or an owl worried them. The village was quiet, the public bar had closed, and only the big church clock, striking the quarters, disturbed the stillness of the night. He had himself under control again, and only Redfern had seen him return, taking the stairs three at a time. He’d nearly stopped to tell the man to bring him a bottle of whiskey, but had enough sense left to remember where—and who—he was.
Staring at the ceiling, he decided he would call for an immediate Inquest and have it adjourned.
Hickam had been too befuddled to know what he was saying, and God alone could imagine what sort of witness he would make in court. Yet Rutledge was sure now that there was something locked in his mind, tangled with the war, tangled with his confusion and the fumes of alcohol, and if Dr. Warren could get the man sober—and sane—long enough to question, they might get to the bottom of this business.
For all they knew, it might clear Wilton as easily as it might damn him, in spite of Forrest’s dithering.
The trouble was, there was too much circumstantial evidence and not enough hard fact. The quarrel with Harris at Mallows, the possible—probable—encounter with Harris again in the lane the next morning, the shotgun sitting in Mavers’s unlocked house, the direction Wilton had chosen for his walk, all appeared to point to the Captain. And the time sequence itself fit, all quite neatly.
But this hadn’t been a neat killing. It had been angry, vengeful, passionate, bloody.
Where, except for Mavers’s tired rhetoric, had there been such passion on a quiet June morning?
And where had it disappeared, once Charles Harris had been cut down with such savage fury? That was the mystery he was going to have to solve before he could find the killer. So much passion…it had to be there still, banked like a fire…and aroused, it might kill again….