Thunder rolled again, much nearer this time, and she flinched, startled. The sunlight was fading, an early darkness creeping in. Outside the windows the birds were silent, and somewhere Rutledge could hear a rustle of leaves as if the wind had stirred, but the heat was oppressive now.
Taking a deep, shaking breath, Lettice went on. “Charles was a very strong man, Inspector. He had a fiercely defined sense of duty. What he did on Sunday evening wasn’t easy for him. He liked Mark—he respected him. It was for my sake—not because of any weakness in Mark!—that he changed his mind about the wedding.”
“Charles doted on you—he’d have given you anything you wanted. Then why not this one thing—the man you planned to marry?”
“Because,” she said softly. “Because he did put my happiness above everything else. And he finally came to believe that Mark Wilton wasn’t the right man.”
“And Wilton, who believed as strongly that he was the right man, turned on his friend, shot him out there in the meadow, and with that one act, lost any hope he might have had of marrying you! I don’t see how he gained anything by killing Charles that he couldn’t have gained by waiting. Unless there was something else—some reason powerful enough that silencing Charles Harris was worth the risk of losing you forever. Something that might have destroyed Captain Wilton personally or professionally.”
She looked up at him, eyes defensive but resolute. It was a strange test of wills, and he wasn’t sure exactly where it was leading. Or even if she knew the answer he wanted to hear.
“All right, I did think it was Mark at first—not because I saw him as a murderer, but because of my own sense of responsibility over what had happened, the feeling that he’d done it to obliterate Charles, to get even. I was half drugged, ill with grief, not knowing where to turn or what to do. Charles was dead, they’d quarreled over the marriage—one thing on the heels of the other—what else could I think? But I’m not as sure now. When Mark finally came here, I couldn’t sense guilt, I couldn’t find any response in him—or in me—that ought to have been there if he’d killed. Only—a terrible emptiness.”
“What did you expect? Shivers of premonition?”
“No, don’t offer me sarcasm! Give me credit for a little sense, a little knowledge of the man I was planning to marry!” A flush of anger in her cheeks made her eyes glitter, the unshed tears brightening them.
“But still you called off the wedding! In my presence.”
“You don’t marry while you’re in mourning!”
“Then you’ll go ahead and marry him after you’ve mourned a decent length of time? If he isn’t hanged for murder?”
Shocked, she stared at him. “I—I don’t—”
“Lettice. You aren’t telling me all of the truth.” He gave her time to answer him, but she said nothing, her eyes holding his, unreadable, once more defiant. “Who are you protecting? Mark? Yourself? Or Charles?”
The wind had picked up, lashing at the house, sending a skirl of leaves rattling across the windows. She got up quickly and went to close them. From there, she turned to face him again. “If you want to hang Mark Wilton, you’ll have to prove he’s a murderer. In a court of law. With evidence and witnesses. If you can do that, if you can show that he was the one who shot Charles Harris, I will come to the hanging. I’ve lost Charles, and if I truly thought Mark had killed him, and no one could actually prove it, even though that was the way it had happened, I’d go through with the wedding and spend the rest of our lives making him pay for it! I care that much! But I won’t betray him. If he’s innocent, I’ll fight for him. Not because I love him—or don’t love him—but because Charles would have expected me to fight.”
“If Mark didn’t shoot Harris—who did?”
“Ah!” she said, smiling sadly. “We’re back to where we were, aren’t we? Well, I suppose it comes down to one thing, Inspector. What mattered most to Mark? Keeping me? Or killing Charles? Because he knew—he knew!—he couldn’t do both. So what did he have to gain?”
The storm broke then, rain coming down with the force of wind behind it, rattling shutters and windows and roaring down the chimney, almost shutting out the flash of the lightning and a clap of thunder that for an instant sounded as if it had broken just overhead.
17
The rain was so intense that he stopped at the end of the drive, in the shelter of overhanging trees. Rutledge’s face was wet, his hair was matted to his head, and the shoulders of his coat were dark with water. But he felt better out of that house, away from the strange eyes that told him the truth—but only part of the truth. He didn’t need Hamish whispering “She’s lying!” to tell him that whatever Lettice Wood was holding back, he’d find no way of forcing it out of her.
As the storm passed, the rain dwindled to a light drizzle, the ground steaming, the air still humid and unbreathable. He got out and started the car again, then turned away from Upper Streetham toward the Warwick road. He drove aimlessly, no goal in mind except to put as much distance between himself and the problems of Charles Harris’s murder as he could for the moment.
“You’re drawn to her, the witch,” Hamish said. “And what will Jean have to say about that?”
“No, not drawn,” Rutledge answered aloud. “It’s something else. I don’t know what it is.”
“Do you suppose, then, that she bewitched the Captain and the Colonel as well? That somewhere she had a hand in this murder?”
“I can’t see her as a murderess—”
Hamish laughed. “You ought to know, better than anyone, that people kill for the best of reasons as well as the worst.”
Rutledge shivered. What was it about Lettice Wood that reached out to him in spite of his better judgment?
Reluctantly, bit by bit, she had confirmed Hickam’s rambling words. And Wilton’s own behavior, his unwillingness to come to Mallows after the quarrel or explain what it had been about, reinforced the picture all too clearly. And it was slowly, inevitably developing. The child’s part in it still—
Rounding the bend, he saw the bicycle almost too late, coming up on it with a suddenness that left decision to reflexes rather than conscious action. He got the brake in time to skid to a stop in the mud, wheels squealing as they locked, sending him almost sideways.
Hamish swore feelingly, as if he’d been thrown across the rear seat.
Standing on the road was Catherine Tarrant, bending over her bicycle. She looked up in startled horror as he came roaring down on her, driving far faster than he’d realized, faster than the conditions of the road dictated. His bumper was not five feet from where she stood as the car came to a jarring halt, killing the engine.
Recovering from her shock, she demanded angrily, “What do you think you’re doing, you damned fool! Driving like that? You could have killed me!”
But he was getting out of the car, and she recognized him then. “Oh—Inspector Rutledge.”
“What the hell are you doing in the middle of the road? You deserve to be run down!” he responded with a matching anger, marching toward her, fists clenched against his rising temper. The unpleasant drizzle wasn’t helping.
“The chain’s broken—I don’t know if something came loose or if I jammed it when I skidded. Oh, for pity’s sake, don’t just stand there, put my bicycle in the back of your car before we’re both wet to the skin, and take me home!” She was in a foul temper as well, but dry, he noticed, as if she’d found shelter somewhere from the worst of the rain.