She was saying anxiously, “Should I offer you tea or—or coffee? I don’t know when Helena’s coming back, truly I don’t, it would be useless to wait, and there’s the cleaning still to be done….”
Taking pity on her, he left, dodging the goose again, but he was sorely tempted to sideswipe it after one last onslaught as he cranked the car. The heavy wings had caught the side of his head a nasty clip as he bent over.
“At least it wasn’t a goat,” Davies said, enjoying himself. “You’d have sailed over yon wall like one of the Captain’s aeroplanes.”
When they reached Upper Streetham again, they found a message from Dr. Warren saying that he must see them urgently.
He was in his surgery when they arrived and he took them upstairs to a small room with an iron bedstead, a table, a single chair, and a very still form under starched sheets.
“Hickam,” Warren said shortly.
“What the devil’s happened to him?” Rutledge demanded, drawing up the only chair and sitting down to stare at the closed, gray face. “He looks half dead!”
“He is. Alcoholic poisoning—he drank enough to kill himself. A miracle he didn’t. I’ve never seen a man so full of gin in all my years of practice. Hickam must have the constitution of an ox.”
Rutledge felt a surge of guilt. “Where did you find him? How?”
“I was coming home last night from the Pinters’ farm—just over the ridge, one of Haldane’s tenants, little girl’s in rough shape, and I’d stayed until the sedative finally started to work. This was about two in the morning. Hickam was lying in the middle of the road. He’d crawled that far, though God knows from where, and then passed out. I damned near ran over him, to tell you the truth of it, didn’t see him until the last minute because he was in the darker shadows cast by the trees along the High Street there, and I didn’t have my headlamps on—there’s something wrong with the fool things. I was so tired that I thought it was a sleeping dog and swerved to miss it, and damned near rammed the horse trough outside Miss Millard’s dress shop. Then I realized it was Hickam, and for a brass farthing would have just left him there in the road to sleep it off. But I got the car started again, managed to haul him into it, and brought him here. And a good thing too, or we’d have lost him for a fact.”
Rutledge could see the man’s unsteady breathing, the sheet over his chest rising and falling with soft but ragged irregularity, and said, “Are you sure he’ll live?” He found himself torn between wishing Hickam dead and keeping him alive. But if he died, and it was Rutledge’s doing—he cursed himself savagely.
Warren shrugged. “Nothing is sure in medicine. But at least the odds are on his side now. God knows, there must have been a pint of gin still in his belly when I pumped him out. And that would have killed him for certain before morning.”
“Where did he find enough money to drink that much?” Davies demanded, leaning over Rutledge’s shoulder for a closer examination of the sunken eyes, the scraggle of beard, the slack mouth.
Without answering him, Rutledge glanced up at Warren. “Did you know I’ve been looking for him? Most of this morning?”
“Forrest said something about it when I spoke to him about Hickam. That’s when I left the message for you. But if you’re thinking of questioning him now, you’re mad. He’s too weak to know what he’s saying—even if he could manage to speak.”
Rutledge nodded. He could see that much for himself. But he said, “Then I want you to keep him here until I can question him. Use any pretext you can think of, tie him to the bed if you have to, but keep him here, out of harm’s way. And no visitors, absolutely none.”
“You don’t seriously believe he can tell you anything useful!” Warren scoffed. “A man like Hickam? Nonsense!”
Rutledge’s eyes were dark with anger as he said, “Why? Because he’s a drunk? A coward? Out of his head? You might be the same in his shoes. I’ve seen more shell shock cases than you’ll ever attend, Doctor, and they’re tormented people with no way out of the prisons of their minds. You weren’t in France or Gallipoli or Palestine, and there’s nothing in your medical practice to tell you what it was like.”
“And I suppose you know?” Warren snapped.
Rutledge caught himself on the brink, realized in time where his outburst was carrying him, and said only, “I was there.”
Still angry when he reached the car, Rutledge said to Davies, “Tell Forrest I’m holding Dr. Warren responsible for Hickam, and if for any reason whatsoever he leaves the doctor’s care, he’s to be arrested on sight. Is that clear?”
“Where’ll you be, then?” Davies asked warily.
“I’m going back to Mallows.” To see what Lettice Wood might tell him, alone and with no notes being taken.
Glad not to be included in that visit, Davies hurried off to find Forrest. And Rutledge was left with Hamish’s company on the drive out to the Colonel’s home.
This time he was shown directly to Miss Wood’s sitting room, and Rutledge found it empty. She came in through a connecting door after a few minutes, still wearing black, but with her face no longer invisible to him. The drapes were drawn back, and the sun’s warm reflection filled the room with a softness that was kind to her grief-shadowed eyes.
And this time she offered him a chair facing the couch where she chose to sit, in the opposite corner, with her back to the light from the windows. More, he thought, for her own comfort than from any desire to make the interview difficult for him. But she was braced for something—he could see the tenseness in her body, the clenched line of her jaw.
“Have you brought me any news?” she asked, her voice still husky. As she looked directly at him he noticed that her eyes were not the same color. One was a smoky hazel, a green flecked with brown and gray, the other a warm green touched with gold. Startlingly odd, yet very beautiful.
“Not yet. We’re still exploring several avenues. I’m trying to build a picture in my mind of Colonel Harris. The sort of man he was, the sort of life he led.”
She brushed that aside with angry impatience. “I’ve told you. He had no enemies.”
“Someone killed him,” he reminded her. “Someone wanted him dead. He must have done something, if only that one single act, to rouse such terrible hate.”
She flinched as if he’d struck her. “But surely you’ve made progress?” she asked again after a moment. “You must have talked to other people. Laurence Royston? Mark? Inspector Forrest?”
Lettice Wood was fishing, he realized suddenly. She wanted to know what had been happening, what had been said….
“They’ve told me very little, actually. Everyone says that your guardian was a very fine man. Everyone, that is, except Mavers.” He said nothing about Carfield.
She smiled a little, more in irony than amusement. “I’d have been more surprised if he hadn’t. But Charles was a very nice man. He needn’t have been my guardian, you know. He was barely grown himself at the time, and it must have seemed a dreary job, taking on the responsibility of a parentless child—a little girl at that!—just when there was a war to go to. To me he seemed as old as my father. I was even a little frightened of him, clinging to my nanny’s skirts and wishing he’d go away. Then he dropped to one knee and held out his arms to me, and the next thing I knew I’d cried myself dry and he was ordering a tea with all my favorite things and afterward we went riding. Which scandalized the household, I can tell you, because I was supposed to be in deepest mourning, shut away in darkness and in silence. Instead I was out in the fields laughing and racing him on my pony and—” Her voice cracked, and she looked away hastily.