'I'll see us both dead first,' Rutledge said between clenched teeth, 'I swear-' And Davies, startled, looked at him in confusion.
4
You can see he's half out of his head,' Davies said again uneasily, as Rutledge sat there, rigidly staring at the disheveled figure in the middle of the sunlit, busy High Street. The Sergeant wasn't sure he'd understood the London man, and wondered if perhaps he had misquoted what the Captain had said to the Colonel: 'I'll see you in hell first.' Should he correct Rutledge then? Or pretend he hadn't noticed? He wasn't sure how to take this man-on the other hand, he hadn't seemed to be in haste to arrest Captain Wilton, and that counted for something.
'Out of his head? No, locked into it. Hickam must have been directing traffic when the shelling started, and stayed with it until one came too close. That's why he's behaving this way,' Rutledge said, half to himself. 'It's the last thing he remembers.'
'I don't know about that, sir-'
'I do,' Rutledge said curtly, recollecting where he was, and with whom.
'Yes, sir,' Davies answered doubtfully. 'But I can tell you there's no talking to him now. He won't hear you. He's in his own mad world. We'll have to come back later.'
'Then we'll see the meadow where the body was found. But first I want to find the doctor. Dr. Warren.'
'He's just down there, past the Inn. You can see his house from here.'
It was a narrow stone-faced building that had been turned into a small surgery, and Dr. Warren was just preparing to leave when Rutledge came to his door and introduced himself.
'I want to ask you a few questions, if you don't mind.'
'I do,' Warren said testily. He was elderly, stooped and graying, but his blue eyes were sharp beneath heavy black brows. 'I've got a very sick child on my hands and a woman in labor. It'll have to wait.'
'Except for one of the questions. Are you prescribing sedatives for Miss Wood?'
'Of course I am. The girl was beside herself with grief, and I was afraid she'd make herself ill into the bargain. So I left powders with Mary Satterthwaite to be given three times a day and again at night, until she's able to deal with this business herself. No visitors, and that includes you.'
'I've already seen her,' Rutledge answered. 'She seemed rather-abstracted. I wanted to know why.'
'You'd be abstracted yourself on what I've given her. She wanted to see the Colonel's body-she thought he'd been shot neatly through the heart or some such. Well, his head had been blown off at nearly point-blank range, leaving a ragged stump of his neck. And I had to tell her that before she'd listen to me. Oh, not that bluntly, don't be a fool! But enough to deter her. That's when she fainted, and by the time we got her to bed, she was just coming out of it. So I gave her a powder in some water, and she drank it without knowing what it was. And now there's a baby that's going to be born while I stand here discussing sedatives with you. A first baby, and the husband's worthless, he'll probably faint too at the first sign of blood. So get out of my way.'
He went brusquely past Rutledge and out toward the Inn, where he apparently left his car during surgery hours. Rut- ledge watched him go, then ran lightly down the steps to his own car, where Davies was still sitting.
Driving on down the High Street, Rutledge slowed as Da- vies pointed out the track that began behind the tree-shaded churchyard, the one that Wilton claimed he had taken. It climbed up through a neat quilt of plowed fields, mostly smallholdings according to the Sergeant, that ran to the crest of a low ridge, and then it made its way down the far side to a narrow stone bridge and the ruins of an old mill. A three- mile walk in all, give or take a little.
The church sat not on the High Street itself but just off it, at the end of a small close of magpie houses that faced one another on what Davies called Court Street. Rutledge thought these might be medieval almshouses, for they were of a similar size and design, all fourteen of them. He turned into the close and stopped at the far end, by the lych-gate in front of the church. Leaving the motor running, he walked to the rough wall that encircled the graveyard, hoping for a better look at the track. He wanted a feeling for how it went, and whether there might be places from which a plowman or a farm wife feeding chickens might overlook it. He needed witnesses, people who had seen Wilton out for his morning walk and climbing this hill with nothing in his hand except a walking stick. Or- had not seen him at all, which might be equally important…
The start of the track was empty except for a squabbling pair of ravens. The rest of it ran out of sight of the village for most of its length, for it followed the line of trees that bordered the cultivated fields, and their branches shaded it this time of year. He could see a cow tied out to graze, and that was all.
Returning to the car, he asked, 'Can you reach the meadow where the body was found, from this track?'
'Aye, you can't see it from here, unless you know where to look, but there's a smaller track that branches off from this one, about two fields away from us. If you follow that, you'll come to the hedgerow that runs along the boundary of the Colonel's land. It's there that the smaller track connects with another one running up from Smithy Lane-I'll show you that, because it's where I found Hickam, drunk as a lord. Think of it as a rough H, sir, this track by the church and the other by Smithy Lane forming the legs and climbing to the ridge, whilst the bar of the H is the smaller one cutting across.'
'Yes, I follow you. Once you've reached the hedgerow, what then?'
'Find a break in it and you'll be in the fields where the Colonel raises corn. Above them there's a patch of rough land that's put to hay, between the hedgerow and a copse of trees. On the far side of those trees lies the meadow. That's the scene of the murder.'
Rutledge reversed. Back on the High Street again, he saw Hickam weaving an uncertain path along the pavement. His head down, he was muttering to himself, once or twice flinging out an arm in a gesture of disgust. He looked half drunk now, a man without pride or grace or spirit. Neither Rutledge nor Davies made any comment, but both could see that there was no need to stop.
Still driving in the direction he had taken to Mallows earlier, Rutledge saw Smithy Lane some thirty feet ahead, just as Davies pointed it out to him. An unpaved street, it ran between the busy blacksmith's shop and a livery stable on the right and the ironmonger's on the left. Beyond these businesses were six or seven run-down houses straggling up the slope of the hill toward the fields beyond. Where the last house stood, the lane became a cart track and soon the cart track narrowed into a country path of ruts and mud puddles. Rutledge drove gingerly, his attention on tires and axles.
But then the cart track eventually lost its way in a tangle of hawthorns and wild cherry, and here they left the car. As Davies got out, he said, 'It's here I found Hickam-he'd fallen asleep in the leaves yonder. And there,' he said, pointing to the last open ground before the track faded into the path, 'is where he claims he saw the Colonel talking to Captain Wilton.'
'Did you look for signs of a horseman here? Or the prints of Wilton's boots in the dust?'
'Inspector Forrest came to look the next morning, and then said we'd best leave this business to Scotland Yard.'
'But were there signs of the two men?'
'Not that he could see.'
Which probably meant that he hadn't wanted to find anything. Rutledge nodded and they moved on, soon afterward passing the point where the rather overgrown track from the east met this one.
'And that's the bar of the H, sir, like I said.'
Skirting a field of marrows, they came at length to the hedgerows. Sergeant Davies quickly found his way through them, into the fields of young wheat beyond.
'We're on Mallows land now,' he said. The edges of the fields where they walked were still heavy with wet earth, clinging to their boots in great clots. The hayfield higher up was a wall of tall wet stalks rimmed with weeds. Burrs stuck to their trousers and wild roses caught at their coats. Davies swore once with fervent imagination as he was stung by nettles, and then they were in the copse, where walking was easier, almost silent on a cushion of damp leaves. They came out of the stand of trees into a small, sunny meadow, where the sound of bees filled the air.
The rain had washed away any signs of blood, but the grass was still bruised and trampled from the many
