A Test of Wills by Charles Todd Read Free Book Online Page B

years abroad—a tie with home, whether real or fancied.
    “Where does Captain Wilton usually walk?”
    She shrugged. “I can’t tell you that. Where the spirit takes him, I daresay. One day as I came home from the village, I saw a farm cart dropping him off at our gate, and he told me he had walked to Lower Streetham and halfway to Bampton beyond! Along the way he’d picked a small posy of wildflowers for Lettice, but it had wilted by then. A pity.”
    “I understand that he had a quarrel with Charles Harris on Sunday evening after dinner. Do you have any idea what that was about?”
    With a sigh of exasperation, she said, “Inspector Forrest asked me the same question, when he came about the shotguns. I can’t imagine Charles and Mark quarreling. Oh, good-naturedly, about a horse or military tactics or the like, but not a serious argument. They got along famously, the two of them, ever since they met in France, on leave in Paris.”
    “I understand that the Captain had spent some time here before 1914. He and Colonel Harris weren’t acquainted then?”
    “Charles was in Egypt, I think, the summer my husband died. And Lettice of course was away at school.”
    “The wedding arrangements, then. They appeared to be progressing smoothly?”
    “As far as I know. Lettice has ordered her gown, and next week she was to go to London for the first fitting. The invitations have been sent to the printer, flowers chosen for the wedding breakfast, plans for the wedding trip made—I doubt if Mark would have objected if Lettice had wished to go to the moon! And Charles doted on her, he wouldn’t have begrudged her anything her heart desired. She only needed to ask. What was there to quarrel about?”
    Mrs. Davenant made the marriage sound idyllic, such a piece of high romance that even death couldn’t stand in its way. And yet in the three days since Charles Harris had been found murdered, Lettice had apparently not asked to see Wilton. Nor, as far as he, Rutledge, knew, had Wilton gone to Mallows.
    He was about to pursue that line of thought when the sitting-room door opened and Captain Wilton walked across the threshold.
    He was wearing country tweeds, and they became him as well as his uniform must have done, fitting his muscular body with an air of easy elegance. The newspaper photographs of him standing before the King had not done him justice. He was as fair as his cousin, his eyes as dark a blue, and he fit the popular conception of “war hero” to perfection.
    “Wrap a bluidy bandage around his forehead, gie him a sword in one hand and a flag in the other, and he’d do for a recruitment poster,” Hamish remarked sourly. “Only they bombed poor sods in the trenches, those fine airmen, and shot other pilots down in flames. I wonder now, is burning to death worse than smothering in the mud?”
    Rutledge shivered involuntarily.
    Wilton greeted Rutledge with a nod, making the same comment that his cousin had made earlier. “You must be the man from London.”
    “Inspector Rutledge. I’d like to talk to you, if you don’t mind.” He glanced at Mrs. Davenant. “If you would excuse us?”
    She rose with smiling grace and said, “I’ll be in the garden if you want to see me again before you go.” She gave her cousin a comfortable glance, and left the room, shutting the door gently behind her.
    “I don’t know what questions you may have,” Wilton said at once, setting his walking stick in a stand by the door and taking the chair she had vacated. “But I can tell you that I wasn’t the person who shot Charles Harris.”
    “Why should I think you were?” Rutledge asked.
    “Because you aren’t a fool, and I know how Forrest danced around his suspicions, hemming and hawing over my abrupt departure from Mallows on Sunday evening and wanting to know what Charles and I were discussing that next morning when that damned fool Hickam claims to have seen us in the lane.”
    “As a point of interest, did you and