Free A Test of Wills by Charles Todd

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. Rutledge 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 Davies 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