than I expected. And rather attractive in a quiet way. Widely read for a military man-we had a very interesting discussion over dinner about American poets, and he seemed to know Whitman quite well.' She brushed a strand of windblown hair out of her face. 'He seemed a likable man, on short acquaintance. A very gracious host. I can't tell you much more, because I talked mostly to Lettice Wood after dinner and then to Mrs. Davenant, and shortly after that, the party broke up.'
'How would you describe relations between Wilton and Colonel Harris?'
'Relations? I hardly know.' She thought back to that evening for a moment, then said, 'They seemed comfortable with each other, like men who have known each other over a long period of time. That's all I can remember.'
'Thank you, Miss Sommers. If you should think of anything else that might help us, please get in touch with Sergeant Davies or me.'
'Yes, of course.' She hesitated, then asked, 'I've gone on with my walks. I suppose that's all right? My cousin frets and begs me to stay home, but I hate being cooped up. There's no-well, danger-is there?'
'From the Colonel's killer?'
She nodded.
'I doubt that you have anything to fear, Miss Sommers. All the same, you might exercise reasonable caution. We still don't know why the Colonel was killed, or by whom.'
'Well, I wish you luck in finding him,' she said, and went striding off.
'A pleasant lady,' Davies said, watching her go. 'Her cousin, now, she's as timid as a mouse. Never shows her face in the village, but keeps the cottage as clean as a pin. Mrs. Haldane was saying that she thought the poor girl was a halfwit at first, but went over to the cottage one day to ask how they were settling in, and saw that she's just shy, as Miss Sommers said, and on the plain side.'
Rutledge was not interested in the shy Miss Sommers. He was tired and hungry, and Hamish had been mumbling under his breath for the last half hour, a certain sign of tumult in his own mind. It was time to turn back.
What bothered him most, he thought, striding along in silence, was the Colonel himself. He'd actually seen the man, heard him inspire troops who had no spirit and no strength left to fight. A tall persuasive figure in an officer's greatcoat, his voice pitched to carry in the darkness before dawn, his own physical force somehow filling the cold, frightened emptiness in the faces before him. Convincing them that they had one more charge left in them, that together they could carry the assault and take the gun emplacement and save a thousand lives the next morning-two thousand-when the main thrust came. And the remnants of a battered force did as he had asked, only to see the main attack fail, and the hill abandoned to the Hun again within twenty-four hours.
Yet here in Upper Streetham Charles Harris seemed to be no more than a faint shadow of that officer, a quiet and 'thoroughly nice' man, as Mrs. Davenant had put it. Surely not a man who was likely to be murdered.
How do you put your fingers on the pulse of a dead man and bring him to life? Rutledge had been able to do that at one time, had in the first several cases of his career shown an uncanny knack for seeing the victim from the viewpoint of the murderer and understanding why he or she had had to die. Because the solution to a murder was sometimes just that-finding out why the victim had to die. But here in Warwickshire the Colonel seemed to elude him…
Except to acknowledge the fact that once more he would be dealing with death, he, Rutledge, had never really thought through the problems of resuming his career at the Yard. At least not while he was still at the clinic, locked in despair and his own fears. To be honest about it, he'd seen his return mainly as the answer to his desperate need to stay busy, to shut out Hamish, to shut out Jean, to shut out, indeed, the shambles of his life.
Even back in London, he had never really considered whether or not he was good enough still at his work to return to it. He hadn't considered whether the skills and the intuitive grasp of often frail threads of information, which had been his greatest asset, had been damaged along with the balance of his mind by the horrors of the war. Whether he could be a good policeman again. He'd simply expected his ability to come back without effort, like remembering how to ride or how to swim, rusty skills that needed only a new honing…
Now, suddenly, he was worried about that. One more worry, one more point of stress, and it was stress that gave Hamish access to his conscious mind. The doctors had told him that.
He sighed, and Sergeant Davies, clumping along through the grass beside him, said, 'Aye, it's been a long morning, and we've gotten nowhere.'
'Haven't we?' Rutledge asked, forcing his attention back to the business in hand. 'Miss Sommers said she did see Wilton walking this track. But where was he coming from? The churchyard, as he claims? Or had he walked by way of the lane, as Hickam claims, met the Colonel, and then crossed over this way? Or-did he go after Harris, follow him to the meadow, with murder on his mind?'
'But this way leads to the ruins by the old bridge, just as he told us, and Miss Sommers saw him here around eight, she thought. So we're no nearer to the truth than we were before.'
'Yes, all right, but since Miss Sommers saw him here, he'd be bound to tell us that he was heading for the mill, wouldn't he? No matter where he'd actually been-or was actually going.'
'Do you think he's guilty, then?' Sergeant Davies couldn't keep the disappointment out of his voice.
'There isn't enough information at this point to make any decision at all. But it's possible, yes.' They had reached the car again, and Rutledge opened his door, then stopped to pick the worst of the burrs from his trousers. Davies was standing by the bonnet, fanning himself with his hat, his face red from the exertion.
Still following a train of thought, Rutledge said, 'If Miss Sommers is right and Wilton was up there in the high grass early on, say eight o'clock, he might well have been a good distance from the meadow by the time the Colonel was shot. Assuming, as we must, that the horse came straight home and the Colonel died somewhere between nine-thirty and ten o'clock, when Royston went down to the stables looking for him.'
'Aye, he would have reached the ruins and the bridge in that time, it's true. So you're saying then that it still hangs on Hickam's word that Captain Wilton was in the lane, and when that was.'
'It appears that way. Without Hickam, there's no evidence where the Captain had come from before he ran into Miss Sommers. No evidence of a further quarrel. And no real reason except for what Johnston and Mary overheard in the hall at Mallows for us to believe that the Captain had any cause to shoot Harris.'
Sergeant Davies brightened. 'And no jury in this county is going to take a Daniel Hickam's word over that of a man holding the Victoria Cross.'
'You're forgetting something, Sergeant,' Rutledge said, climbing into the car.
'What's that, sir?' Davies asked anxiously, coming around and peering into the car from the passenger side so that he could see Rutledge's face.
'If Wilton didn't shoot Harris, then who did? And who turned the corpse over?'
After lunch at the Shepherd's Crook, Rutledge took out the small leather notebook, made a number of entries, and then considered what he should do next. He had sent Davies home to his wife for lunch, while he lingered over his own coffee in the dining room, enjoying the brief solitude.
What was Harris like? That seemed to be the key. What lay buried somewhere in the man's life that was to bring him to a bloody death in a sunlit meadow?
Or to turn it another way, why did he have to die that morning? Why not last week-last year-ten years from now?
Something had triggered the chain of events that ended in that meadow. Something said-or left unsaid. Something done-or left undone. Something felt, something glimpsed, something misunderstood, something that had festered into an angry explosion of gunpowder and shot.
Royston, Wilton, Mrs. Davenant, Lettice Wood. Four different people with four vastly different relationships to the dead man. Royston an employee, Wilton a friend, Mrs. Dav- enant a neighbor, and Lettice Wood his ward. Surely he must have shown a different personality to each of them. It was human nature to color your moods and your conversations and your temperament to suit your company. Surely one of the four must have seen a side to his character that would lead the police to an answer.
It was hard to believe that Charles Harris had no sins heavy on his conscience, no faces haunting his dreams,
