It was after eight when Rutledge woke up the next morning, head heavy with sleeplessness that had pursued him most of the night. He'd heard the church clock chime the hours until it was six o'clock and light enough to see the birds in the trees outside his window before he'd drifted into a drowsing sleep that left him as tired as he'd been when he went to bed.
He'd stayed with Lettice an hour or more, sitting with her until she felt able to sleep. He thought it had been a relief to talk, that she'd feel better afterward. But her last words to him, as he began to close the heavy front door behind him, were, "If I had it to do over, I'd have loved him just the same. I only wish I hadn't lost my courage now, and said more than I meant to say." "I know."
She'd cocked her head to one side, looking at him, her eyes sad. "Yes. I think you do. Don't humiliate Mark. If he's guilty, hang him if you must, but don't break him."
"I give you my word," he'd said, and Hamish had quarreled with him all the way back to Upper Streetham.
Rutledge had a hasty breakfast and went directly to the Dav- enant house. But Grace, the maid, informed him that the Captain had already left for Mallows, and Mrs. Davenant had gone with him as far as the church, to see to the flowers. He came back to town and found that there was already a gathering of people in the lane near the church, though it was only a little after nine. Cars and carriages were lined up, having brought guests from Warwick and elsewhere, and small groups were standing about talking quietly.
The church bell began to toll soon after nine-thirty, deep, sonorous, welling out over the countryside. The hearse had already drawn up, and the casket, oak and bronze, had been carried inside by men from Charles's Regiment acting as pallbearers, their uniforms red as blood in the sunlight.
Rutledge walked about, looking to see if Sally was indeed in the church, and found her giving instructions about the placement of wreaths in front of the coffin. Carfield, magnificent in flowing robes, was already greeting the mourners, moving among them like a white dove in flocks of crows. He went back outside.
Catherine Tarrant arrived, saw him, nodded, and walked quickly to the church, not looking to the right or left. The women from Upper Streetham made a point of cutting her dead as she passed, but several people from London spoke to her as if they knew her.
Rutledge stopped Sergeant Davies when he arrived and asked, "Have you seen Royston? I need to speak to him." He wanted an invitation to the reception, to keep an eye on Wilton. And he wanted to ask Royston about the place where Charles might have been killed.
Davies shook his head. "He was supposed to be here and greet these people. Mr. Haldane is over there, speaking to some of them. Beyond Carfield. The one with the fair hair."
Rutledge could see the tall, slim figure moving quietly from group to group. Sally Davenant came out to join Hal- dane just as the car arrived with Lettice Wood and Mark Wilton. She got out, swathed in veils of black silk, moving gracefully toward a half dozen officers who had turned to meet her. She spoke to them, nodding, her head high, back straight, Wilton just behind her with a quiet, thoughtful expression. Someone from the War Department came over- Rutledge recognized him from London-and then she moved on, impressively calm and leaving behind her looks of admiration and warmth.
"It's a bloody show," Hamish was saying. "We stacked our dead like lumber, or buried them to keep them from smelling. And here's a right spectacle that'd shame an honest soldier."
Rutledge ignored him, scanning the gathering crowd as they moved through the lych-gate and up the walk toward the open doors of the church. Overhead the bell began to count the years of the dead man's life, and he saw Lettice stumble. Wilton took her arm to steady her, and then she was herself again.
He let them go inside and walked down to where the Mallows car had been parked near the lych-gate, ready to take Lettice back in time for the reception.
"Where's Royston?" Rutledge asked the neatly uniformed groom sitting in the driver's seat. "Has he already arrived?"
"I don't know, sir. I haven't seen him at all," the man said, touching his cap. "Mr. Johnston was looking for him just before we left."
Inspector Forrest came hurrying by on his way to the service. The tolling had stopped, and from inside the church the organ rose in solemn majesty, the lower notes carrying the sense of loss and sorrow that marked the beginning of a funeral's salute to the dead.
Rutledge called to him, "Keep an eye on Wilton. Don't let him out of your sight. It's important."
"I'll do that, sir," he promised over his shoulder, not stopping.
Uncertainty, that same sense of time passing, of tension and of waiting, swept him. He wasn't sure why. Looking up, he saw Mavers hurrying past the end of the Court, head down and shoulders humped.
Dr. Warren's car, turning in to the Court, moved quickly to a space in front of one of the houses across from the lych- gate. Warren got out, saying to Rutledge as he passed, "Hick- am's the same-neither better nor worse, but holding on and eating a little. Why aren't you in the church?"
"I don't know," Rutledge answered, but Warren had gone on, not hearing.
On impulse, Rutledge walked around the church, trying to see if Mavers had taken the path up to his house in the fields. But the man had vanished. He kept on walking, climbed over the churchyard wall, and struck out into the fields. But by the time he'd reached the crossbar of the H that led to the other path-the one that skirted Charles Harris's fields and Mallows land-he turned that way instead, his back to Mavers's house. Soon he came to the hedge, and the meadow and the copse of trees where the body had been found. It had seemed very different last night in the dark. Somehow thicker, more sinister, full of ominous shadows. Now-it was a copse, open and sunlit, shafts of light like spears lancing down through the trees. Butterflies danced in the meadow.
Rutledge moved on. Dozens of feet and two rainstorms had swept the land clean of any signs that might have led him to the answer he needed. Where had Charles Harris died? Where was the blood, the small fragments of bone?
The sun was warm, the air quiet and still. Some quirk of the land brought the sound of singing to him from the church, a hymn he remembered from childhood. "A Mighty Fortress." Appropriate to a soldier's death.
Hamish, who had been quiet, tense, and watchful in his mind, like something waiting to pounce in the vast, secretive recesses of emotion, said suddenly, "I don't like it. I've been on patrol on nights when the Huns were filtering like smoke out of the trenches, and my skin crawled with fear."
"It isn't night," Rutledge said aloud. The sound of his voice was no comfort, only intensifying his sense of something wrong.
He moved from field to field. It hadn't taken long, not more than twenty minutes since he'd left the churchyard. Unconsciously he'd lengthened his stride early on, and now he was sweating with the effort. But he couldn't slow down, it was almost as if something drove him. The saplings were not far now.
But what was it? What was behind this dreadful sense of urgency?
From the start he'd been afraid he'd lost any skills he'd once had. He'd tried to listen-too hard perhaps-for any signs that they'd survived. And found only emptiness. And yet-last night he'd come close to feeling the intuition that had once been his gift. He'd followed his instincts, not the dictates of others. They'd been certain Harris had died where he'd fallen. They'd been certain that no one in the village could have killed the Colonel. They'd been certain there was no case against Wilton, and he'd found one.
He had his murderer. Didn't he? Then why didn't he feel the satisfaction that ordinarily came with the solution of a vicious crime? Because his evidence was circumstantial, not solid? Or because there was still something he'd overlooked, something that he'd have seen, five years ago. Something that-but for his own emotional tensions-he'd have thought of long before this?
He went through the stand of saplings without being aware of them, his feet guiding him without conscious volition.
Something was missing. Or someone? Yes, that was it! He'd spoken to everyone of consequence in his interviews- except one.
He'd never asked Maggie Sommers what she'd seen or heard that last morning of Charles Harris's life. He'd assumed she knew nothing. And yet she lived across a stone wall from Mallows land, and Colonel Harris sometimes rode that way- she'd learned to return his wave, shy as she was.
Had Harris passed the cottage that last morning? Had Maggie seen anyone else!
Rutledge swore. Impatient with her timidity, he'd treated her-as everyone else did!-as all but witless.
He was in the fields now, heavy with the scent of raw earth and sunlight.
What did she know that no one had thought to ask? She would be the last person to come forward voluntarily. That would have been unbearable agony for her. And yet-now that he was sure the murder had happened somewhere other than the meadow-her evidence could easily be critical. It could damn Wilton to the hangman-or free him, for that matter.
Maggie, he realized, could very well hold the key to this murder, and he'd overlooked it. He glanced toward the distant stone wall, seeing it with new eyes. Maggie, hanging clothes on the line on Monday mornings. Maggie working in her overgrown garden. Maggie, always at home and close enough to Mallows here to hear a horseman in the fields. Or a shotgun going off nearby. Maggie seeing the murderer, for all he knew, waiting among the trees or in the dell or coming over the rise. Maggie, anxious and afraid of strangers, watchful and wary, so that she could hide herself inside the cottage before she herself was seen. And a lurking killer, unaware of a witness he'd never even glimpsed.
And this was the time to speak to her, while Helena was at the funeral. He doubled his pace, as if afraid, now that he'd remembered her, that she might be gone before he got there. Cursing himself for his blindness, for seeing with his eyes and not with that intuitive grasp of people he'd always had.
Ahead he could hear something, unidentifiable at first, a loud, insistent, repetitive It was the goose at the Sommers cottage. Something had upset the bird, he could tell from the wild sound, rising and falling without so much as a breath in between.
Rutledge broke into a run, ignoring the neat rows of young crops under his feet, stumbling in the soft earth, keeping his balance with an effort of will, his eyes on the rose-draped wall that separated Mallows from Haldane land and the Sommers cottage.
Helena was coming into town for the services. Maggie was alone He could hear screams now, high and wordless, and a man's bellow of pain. He was no longer running, he was covering the ground with great leaps, risking his neck he knew, but unable to think of that as the screams reached a crescendo of something beyond pain.
Reaching the wall, he rested his palms on the edge of it, swung his body over in one movement, paying no heed to the long thorn-laced roses that pulled at his clothes. His feet landed among Maggie's pathetic little flowers on the far side of the wall, trampling them heedlessly.
There was a motorcar in the drive, down by the gate. It was empty, and he ignored it, springing for the cottage.
Seeing him coming, the goose wheeled from her stand near the cottage door and sailed toward him, wings out, neck low, prepared for the attack.
He brushed her roughly aside, and was ten yards from the door when it burst open and a man came reeling out, his face a mask of blood, his shirt torn and soaked to crimson, his trousers slashed and smeared.
It was Royston. Something had laid open his shoulder- Rutledge could see the blue-white sheen of bone there-and he plunged heavily off the steps and into the grass, hardly aware of Rutledge sliding to a halt almost in his path.
Regardless of the pain he was inflicting, Rutledge caught him by his good shoulder and swung him around, anger twisting his face into a grimace as he shouted, "Damn you! What have you-"
Inside, the screaming went on.
"Watch her!" Royston cried. "She's got-got an ax-" His knees buckled. "The child-the child-"
Rutledge managed to break his fall, but Royston was losing blood rapidly, his words weaker with every breath. "The child-I killed-"
Without waiting for any more, Rutledge was through the door, eyes seeing nothing after the glare of the sun, but ahead of him was something, a figure barely glimpsed. A woman in black, huddled on the floor at the end of the brown sofa, two darknesses blending into one like some distorted parody of humanity, humped and ugly. A primeval dread lifted the hairs along his arms.
Reaching her, he grasped her shoulders, saying, "Are you all right? Has he hurt you? What has he done to you?" She stared up at him, face chalk white, eyes large and wild. In one bloody hand was an ax. His own eyes were adjusting rapidly now. The room was empty except for Maggie and the assorted furnishings of a rented house. He got her up on the sofa, and she leaned back, eyes closed. "Is he dead?" she asked breathlessly, in the voice of a terrified child.
"No-I don't think so."
She tried to get up, but he pressed her back against the sofa, holding her there, trying to determine how much of the blood was hers, how much Royston's.
"I'll have to get help-I'll find Helena and bring her to you-she's at the church-"
But Maggie was shaking her head, dazed but at least able to understand him. Her eyes turned toward the closed door at the far end of the room. "She's in there," Maggie whispered.
Rutledge felt his blood run cold.
"I'll go-"
"No-leave her! I hope she's dead!"
He mistook her meaning, thinking that she was saying that death was preferable to the cataclysm of rape.
"I saw her kill him," she went on, not taking her eyes from the bedroom door. "I saw her! She shot Colonel Harris. And it was for nothing, it wasn't the right man-she'd thought it was, but Mavers said-and then that man out there admitted it was true, that he'd killed the child."
"What child?" he asked, thinking only of Lizzie.
"Why, little Helena, of course. Mr. Royston ran over her in his car-in Colonel Harris's car. And the check he sent was in the Colonel's name. So we thought-all these years we thought-but it wasn't the Colonel. Helena got it all wrong." There was a sudden spark of triumph in her eyes, as if it gave her some obscure pleasure to think that Helena had been wrong. "Aunt Mary and Uncle Martin always said she was better than I was, so pretty, so smart, so fearless-they said they wished the car had killed me, not Helena. I was only adopted, you see, I wasn't theirs-" There was a lifetime of suffering in her words, a lifelong misery because the wrong child had died in an accident and she had been blamed for living. "They asked for all that money, and it wasn't enough to satisfy them, they wanted her back again. But she was dead. And I was alive."
He wasn't interested in Maggie's childhood; he had a man bleeding to death on his hands, and God knew what behind that closed, silent bedroom door.
"So when Helena discovered that the Colonel lived here, just across the wall-that he was our neighbor-"
Getting up from his knees, his breathing still erratic and harsh, he ignored Maggie and started across the room to the bedroom, forcing himself to face what had to be faced. Hamish had been babbling for the last five minutes, a counterpoint to Maggie's slow, painful confession, but Rutledge shut him out, shut out everything but the long, bright streak of blood down the door panel, on the handle of the knob Somehow Maggie was there before him. "No! Leave her alone, I tell you! I won't let you go near her-let her die!" And with such swiftness that he couldn't have stopped her if his own life had depended upon it, she was through the door and into the room, turning the key in the lock behind her.
"Maggie!" he shouted, pounding on the door, but he could hear only her sobbing. She'd taken the ax with her. There was nothing to do but try to break the door down with his shoulder or kick it down.
It took him three tries. When it finally swung wide on broken hinges, he was into the room before he could regain his balance.
There was only one bed, narrow, neatly made, now covered in blood. And only Maggie, collapsed across the pretty lemon-colored counterpane like a heap of rags, stained and worn. The ax was on the floor at her feet. He turned wildly, surveying the small room, finding no one else, the window closed, the closet empty. Then he was beside the woman on the bed, leaning over her, lifting her gently. Black lifeblood welled beneath her, thick and pungent. The heavy, ivory- handled knife had plunged too deep. There was nothing he could do.
Her eyes were not able to see him. But she was still alive. Just.
"I had to do it," she said. "I couldn't stand it anymore. She knew that. She always knew things before I ever did. But for once she was wrong-about the Colonel. She'll go to hell, won't she, for killing him? And I'll go to heaven with the angels, won't I? We couldn't share anymore. Not with that on her conscience."
"Where did she kill him?" Rutledge asked.
"By the wall. When he came to speak to Maggie. She had the shotgun hidden there, among the roses, where he couldn't see it. And she tried to ask him if he'd been the one driving the car that killed Helena. But he wouldn't listen, he told her not to be a fool, that she was upset and not thinking clearly. So she shot him-she lifted the gun and shot him and his head flew everywhere, and the horse bolted before he'd stopped bleeding, and it was the most awful…"
Her voice faded. He could see the blood trickling out of her mouth. The way the body lay, graceless and heavy. It would only be a matter of minutes. There was nothing he could do to stop the bleeding, nothing anyone could do to put the torn flesh back together. But he sat there beside her until her eyes told him she was dead. Then he got to his feet and began to search the cottage.
He found the shotgun in a closet. And signs of one breakfast on the table. And only one bedroom occupied, the other with the mattress still rolled up and wrapped in a sheet. Two trunks holding clothes. He went through each cupboard and closet, looked under anything that might hide a body. But there was no one.
He wasn't surprised. Taking a sheet with him, he hurried out to bind up Royston's bloody shoulder. The goose, smelling the blood, had backed off behind the car in the drive. Royston's car. He'd come to take Helena to church… Royston was very weak, but alive. Rutledge, with some experience in war wounds, did what he could to stop the bleeding, and then called his name, trying to rouse him. Royston opened his eyes, stared at Rutledge with a frown, then groaned with the mounting pain. "In there," he managed hoarsely. "It's over," Rutledge said curtly. "I got here a little early. I was talking to Maggie, and she began to ask me about the-accident. All those years ago. Mavers had said something, Helena had told her about it, she said. Then she went into the bedroom to fetch Helena. And Helena came out with the ax. I didn't-there was nothing I could do. If you hadn't come-" "Stop talking." "You can't leave Maggie here! Not with that madwoman!" "Maggie's dead." "Gentle God!" "And Helena died with her." "What? She killed her cousin?" "You killed Helena. In Colonel Harris's car. When you were twenty. You told me so yourself." "I don't understand-" "There never was a Helena. Only-Maggie, and years of being told that Helena was better and brighter and stronger than she was-until she believed it. And tried to be Helena herself. And couldn't. But somehow she created Helena inside herself." He shivered, thinking of Hamish, wondering if one day in the future, he'd create the man's image in his own flesh and be a divided soul, like Maggie Sommers. "And it was-Helena-who shot Charles Harris."
He got Royston to his feet and somehow to the car. Then he was driving as fast as he could toward Upper Streetham, watching the man's face, watching the rough breathing. Someone fetched the doctor from the church, and then Warren threw them all out of his surgery as he worked over Laurence Royston. All except Rutledge, who stood in the doorway watching the gentle, swift hands moving across the savage wounds of the ax. "I don't know how this happened," Warren said over his shoulder. "It will be touch and go, if he lives. But he's got a strong constitution. I think we can save him. I won't give up without a fight-"
The front door opened and Rutledge could hear Wilton's voice, and then Forrest's.
He went out to speak to them, leaving Warren to his work.
Later, he called London. Bowles growled at him, wanting to know what he'd done about Wilton.
"Nothing. He's in the clear. I've found the murderer. She's dead-"
"What do you mean? She? What she?"
So Rutledge told him. Bowles listened, grunting from time to time. At the end of it, he said, "I don't understand any of this business-"
"I know. But the poor woman lived in such wretchedness that I can't blame her for trying to bring Helena back to life. You'll have to check with the police in Dorset, see what's known about Maggie. It's going to be routine, I think. I don't expect any surprises."
"How can two women live in one body?"
Rutledge was silent. How could he explain? Without betraying himself? And oddly enough, he'd liked Helena… Someday, would other people like Hamish better than Ian Rutledge? It was a frightening thought. The doctor had told him he wasn't mad to hear Hamish-because he, Rutledge, knew that Hamish didn't exist. But Maggie was different. She'd wanted Helena to exist. Not out of madness but out of a bleak and lonely need to satisfy two vicious, selfish adults, trying to become the daughter they'd lost and mourned, a desperate bid for love by a shy, bewildered child… until she'd made Helena live again. And one day, coming across Charles Harris in a town far from home, suddenly Helena wanted vengeance. Maggie lost control-was in danger of losing herself-and when Helena attacked Laurence Royston, Maggie had somehow found the strength to stop it. Once and for all.
Bowles was saying, "-and I don't really care. What matters is that I've got the Palace off my back now. We can close the case, sweep it all under the rug, clear the Captain's good name-and we're all back where we started from."
Except for Colonel Harris, Rutledge thought.
And Maggie Sommers…
… and Lettice. He felt waves of black depression settling over him, swamping him.
No! he told himself fiercely.
No, I won't give into it. I'll fight. And by God, somehow I'll survive! I solved this murder. The skills are there, I've touched them-and I will use them again! Whatever else I've lost, this one triumph is mine.
"Ye'll no' triumph over me!" Hamish said. "I'm a scar on your bluidy soul."
"That may be," Rutledge told him harshly. "But I'll find out before it's finished what we're both made of!" Afterward, staring at the telephone, Bowles swore savagely. Somehow, against all expectation, Rutledge had pulled it off.
Scotland Yard would be overjoyed with the results, they'd bring the man home as a hero, and he, Bowles, would be left to bask in reflected glory once more. That nonsense about the dead woman-she'd probably committed suicide and Rutledge had been smart enough to see his chance. To put the blame on her, not Wilton. And no one in the Yard would dare to question it. Not when so many reputations had been saved…
Well. There's always a next time. Beginner's luck, that's what it was. And next time, no convenient scapegoat would spoil the game…