'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 parent- less 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. He gave her time to regain her composure, then asked, 'What sort of mood had the Colonel been in, the last few days before his death?' 'Mood?' she repeated quickly. 'What do you mean?' 'Was he happy? Tired? Worried? Irritable? Distracted?' 'He was happy,' she said, her thoughts fading where he couldn't follow her. 'Very, very happy…' 'Why?' Disconcerted, she said, 'What do you mean, why?' 'Just that. What had made him so happy?' Lettice shook her head. 'He just was.' 'Then why did he quarrel with Mark Wilton?' She got to her feet and walked across the room. For a moment he thought she was leaving, that she would disappear into her bedroom and shut the door on him. But she went to the windows instead, looking out at the drive and seeing, he thought, very little. 'How could I know the answer to that?' she countered. 'You harp on it as if it was important.' 'It might be. It might decide whether we must arrest Captain Wilton or not.' Turning back to him, a dark silhouette against the light, she said after a moment, 'Because of one quarrel? When you claim you don't even know what it was about?' Was it a statement? Or a question? He couldn't be sure. 'We have a witness who says they quarreled again. The next morning. Not far from where your guardian was killed.'
Even with her back to the window he could see how shaken she was, her shoulders hunched suddenly, her body tense. Her hands were still. He waited, but she said nothing, as if she'd run out of words.
And still no defense offered on behalf of the man she loved.
'If Captain Wilton is guilty, you'd wish to see him hang for it, wouldn't you?' Rutledge asked harshly. 'You told me before that you wanted to see the killer hanged.'
'Then why haven't you arrested him?' she demanded huskily. 'Why have you come here instead, and told me these things, why are you adding to my grief-' She stopped, somewhere finding the will to go on, to make her voice obey her brain. 'What is it you want of me, Inspector? Why are you here? Surely not to ask my opinion of quarrels I didn't witness, or to speculate on Mark's hanging as if he were someone I'd never met. There has to be more reason than that!' She was insistent, almost compellingly so.
'Then tell me what it is.' He was angry with her, and wasn't sure why.
'Because,' Hamish whispered, 'she's got courage, hasn't she? And your Jean never did…'
She crossed to the hearth, restless with pent up emotions, fingers mechanically rearranging the flowers there as if their relative positions mattered, but he knew that she wasn't aware of what she was doing. 'You're the man from London, the one they sent to find my guardian's murderer. What have you been doing since you got to Upper Streetham? Searching for scapegoats?'
'That's odd,' he said quietly. 'Catherine Tarrant said nearly the same thing. About making the Captain a scapegoat for someone else's crime.'
In the mirror above the hearth he saw her face flame, the warm blood flooding under the pale skin until she seemed to be flushed with a fever, and her eyes sparkled as they met his in the glass. 'Catherine? What has she to do with this?'
'She came to me to tell me straightaway that she was certain Captain Wilton was innocent.' He was intrigued with the way her eyes darkened with emotion, until you couldn't see the difference in them. 'Though why she might have done that, before anyone had actually accused him of murder, is still something of a mystery.'
Lettice Wood bit her lip. 'It was to spite me,' she said, looking away from him. 'I'm sorry.'
'Why should Catherine Tarrant wish to spite you? At Wilton's expense?'
'Because she thinks I let the man she loved die. Or at least was in a sense responsible for his death. And I suppose this is her way of striking back at me. Through Mark.' She shook her head, unable to speak. Then she managed to say, 'It's rather appalling, isn't it, considering-' She stopped again.
'Tell me about it.' When she hesitated, he said, 'I've only to ask someone else. Miss Tarrant herself, Captain Wilton-'
'I doubt if Mark even knows the story.'
'Then tell me about her relationship with Wilton.'
'She met him before the war-when he came to Upper Streetham after Hugh Davenant's death. And I suppose there was a mutual attraction. But nothing came of it, neither of them was ready for marriage. He could think of nothing but flying and she's quite a fine artist, did you know? She hadn't sold anything at that point, I don't think she'd even tried, but soon afterward one of her paintings received a great deal of attention in a London show, and she moved up to Town.'
The name suddenly clicked. He'd seen C. Tarrant's work, powerful, memorable studies of light and shadow, of faces with strength and suffering written in each line, or scenes where color richly defined the landscape with a boldness that brought Turner to mind. His sister Frances admired her enormously, but somehow he'd thought of the artist as older, a woman of experience and style, not the earnest girl he'd talked to in the Inn parlor.
Lettice Wood was saying, 'When her father died early in 1915, she came back to run their estate on her own.'
'That must have been a heavy responsibility.'
'It was. But there was no one else to take over. And the only men left to work the land were either very old or very young. Or like Laurence Royston, were trying to keep the large estates afloat, food and meat quotas filled.' She looked down at her hands, slim and white in her lap. 'I admired her-I was only a schoolgirl, and I thought she was something of a heroine. A part of the war effort, doing a man's work when she'd rather be in London, painting, going to parties and exhibitions.'
'Was her lover someone she'd left behind in London?'
She shook her head. 'You must ask Catherine, I tell you.'
He was watching her closely. She had stopped taking the sedatives, he was sure of it now. But she was still dazed, a little unsteady, as if the first shock of her guardian's death hadn't really worn off. Or as if something was tearing her apart inside, crowding out all other emotions except grief, and she was struggling to find a way to cope. 'You brought up the subject in the first place. Why, if you won't tell me the rest of it?'
'I was trying to explain, that's all-that she was turning the other cheek, if you like, showing magnanimity. She was doing for me what I failed to do for her.' Lettice swallowed hard. 'Or rubbing salt into the wound, for all I know.'
He continued to look at her, his face cold with speculation. Lettice lifted her chin, her eyes changing again as she refused to be intimidated. 'It has nothing to do with Charles. And certainly not with Captain Wilton,' she said firmly. 'It's between Catherine and me. A debt… of a sort.'
'Nothing seems to have anything to do with Charles Harris, does it?' Rutledge stood up. 'Why didn't you go riding with your guardian that last morning?'
Her mouth opened and she gulped air, as if he had struck her in the stomach with his fist. But no words
