Watchers of Time (43 page)

He realized what Hamish had just said to him. “. . . a needle in a haystack . . .”

Rutledge turned and walked toward the stalls that had held three Norfolk Grays only last night, thinking that the hammer had been in the barrow with its brothers only last night. He’d seen them there when he’d gone through the barn with the farmer Hadley and Tom Randal.

But he hadn’t been searching for hammers, only for Walsh—

The luminous brown eyes of the remaining horse met his and as Rutledge neared the stall, the animal blew softly, interested in the mixed smell of dog and motorcar that he carried with him. The yellow dog walked patiently at his heels, panting and grinning, a willing conspirator if Rutledge took it into his head to steal this last mount.

Rutledge approached the horse with care, concentrating on speaking quietly, reassuringly, before reaching out to the nose stretched toward him. “Where are your stable-mates? Hmmm? And what’s keeping your master—”

Hamish said something, fast and unintelligible.

There was heaving movement in the shadows at his shoulder, hardly visible, more a sudden blend of sounds and shapes so startlingly close that there was no defense against it. Rutledge ducked, prepared for a wild attack.

A second gray horse, awakened by a voice next to where she’d been dozing head down in her stall, swung it high and stretched forward to nuzzle him.

The mare.

She was home.

Once his breathing had settled back into the range of speech, Rutledge stepped into the stall, calling her name softly as he ran his hand down her neck and then along her flank, before moving toward her hindquarters. The mare quivered, her coat rippling with the movement of the nerves under it, but she stood still. He kept one hand on her back and bent to lift the heavy hoof on the near side. In the poor light of the barn, he couldn’t see well enough to examine it.

Turning her head to stare at him, she let him work with her without protest. He put down that hoof, and then moved to lift the other.

For an instant he thought she was going to kick out, and he could see himself caught in the head just as Walsh had been, his back too near the stall’s high side wall to let him escape the blow. But she simply moved a step forward, as if to give him more room.

The shoe was missing.

He put down the heavy hoof, keeping his hand gently on the mare’s rump. Her coat was rough with the lather of sweat, briars and leaves tangled in the thick hair. She had been ridden very hard, and she was tired. . . .

He lifted the hoof again. She turned her head, the great brown eyes watching him.

But she did not kick. She was safe in her own stall now, and not likely to object, in her present state. He let the hoof down, and moved around toward the big head.

“Clever girl, to find your own way home.” He slapped the neck just below the ears twitching with interest as if wondering what it was he wanted.

Hamish said, “Left to hersel’, it’s no’ a great surprise.”

Where was Randal?

Had he come back yet? There was no sign of the gelding. This time Rutledge moved on to the last stall to peer inside. It stood empty.

Randal was still searching for his lost mare.

Rutledge laid the hammer by the harrow, where he’d found it, and walked out of the barn. He could hear ravens calling in the woods, and somewhere the sharp whistle of a pheasant.

Priscilla Connaught was waiting. He had to go.

It was almost a surprise when he heard Hamish’s voice saying, “The woman willna’ go away. Stay until yon farmer comes back.”

Rutledge thought, “I’ll finish what I’ve begun.” But in Hurley, the doctor would be ready to examine Walsh’s body. Hamish was right. He ought to be there, too. No matter what he did, he was off track—last night, this morning—and there seemed to be nothing he could do about it.

Besides, it was Blevins’s case. The Inspector would have to be present.

He absently fondled the dog’s ears. Walsh was dead. Whatever Hamish thought, one had always to remember the living.

CHAPTER 23

THE FARMHOUSE WHERE PRISCILLA CONNAUGHT HAD been taken after wrecking her motorcar was set, like so many others, back from the road down a winding lane that led up a slight rise and then into the farmyard. It was muddy, the warm smell of manure coming from a cart by the far wall where the milking shed had been cleaned. The cows themselves, some dozen of them, were already plodding steadily out to pasture, following a routine so well established in their lives that they needed no human direction.

A walk of paving stones led across to the house, and one branch of it disappeared through a hedge around to the front. Rutledge left his car by a stack of bricks covered with a tarpaulin and picked his way across the yard to the walk. There was a door at this end of it, what he assumed to be the kitchen door into the yard. It opened before he got there.

An anxious woman peered out at him. She wore her graying hair in a bun at the back of her neck, and a heavy sweater over her dark dress. “Inspector Rutledge?” she asked, her voice rising.

“Mrs. Danning? I met your husband along the main road. He’s brought the team down to pull Miss Connaught’s motorcar out of the ditch.”

She said, disapprovingly, “I shouldn’t wonder he’ll have his hands full. She shouldn’t have been driving so fast just there. It’s a miracle she didn’t do serious harm to herself!”

It was, he thought from her expression, more a condemnation of a woman at the wheel of a motorcar than it was of speed. Priscilla Connaught would have little in common with Mrs. Danning. They were brought up in very different worlds. The farmer’s wife had work-reddened hands and dressed much as her own mother must have done a generation ago. Youth had deserted her, her life given over to chores and cooking and raising children. To her, Priscilla Connaught was a city-bred peacock suddenly and inexplicably set down in a farmyard.

Holding the door for him, she walked ahead down a flagged passage, past the dairy room and a larder, then opened another door into the warm, lamplit kitchen. “She’s just in here,” Mrs. Danning added over her shoulder, and he stepped into the large room, his hat in his hand. Although sparsely furnished, there was a good round table, handsome chairs, the work sink, and two oak dressers. One of them held jugs and plates, cups and bowls, the glaze shining in the lamp’s glow.

Priscilla Connaught, her hair pinned up haphazardly, her coat dirty and torn, a long scrape across her cheek from her ear to her nose, was sitting hunched in a chair by the coal stove, though the room was warm. Someone had given her a shawl to wrap around her shoulders. It was handmade, thick, and appeared to have been knitted of whatever oddments of wool had been in the basket. There was almost a frivolous air about it, as if the juxtaposition of blues and grays and a very pretty rose had not been thought out as a pattern. A child’s first efforts, perhaps, for the stitches were sometimes too tight.

He said, “Miss Connaught?”

She looked up, her face streaked with tears and blood from the scrape. The misery in her eyes shocked him.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I didn’t know who else to ask. These people have been very kind—but I’d like very much to go home, now.”

He crossed the room to pull out a chair from the table, to set it next to hers. “Are you hurt?”

“Hurt?” She stared at him, as if the word was foreign to her. “I don’t
think
I am.”

He’d seen the car in the ditch. She’d have taken some punishment.

Rutledge reached out and gently lifted the hair from her face. His intent had been to make her more comfortable, but she flinched as he touched it, and he saw that there was a bloody cut at the very edge of her forehead.

Turning to Mrs. Danning, Rutledge said, “Could you bring me a wet cloth, please?”

She went to the sink and pumped up water into a small bowl. “It’ll be cold. Shall I set it on the stove for a spell?”

“No, that will do.” She brought him the bowl and a clean towel from a drawer. Rutledge got to his feet, dipped the towel into the bowl, and moving the hair aside, began to clean blood from the wound.

Priscilla Connaught’s breath caught at the coldness of the water, her eyes fluttering, but she held her head still like a good child, and let him work. Mrs. Danning, standing just behind him, was saying, “My dear lord, I never saw that! And she didn’t say anything—”

It was deep, and the blood welled up, in spite of his efforts to stem the flow. Rutledge said, “I don’t mean to hurt you—” And then he added, to distract her, “How did you come by this?”

“I don’t know,” she said faintly. “I don’t remember anything, except wanting to die . . . lying there in the ditch, wanting to die.”

She began to cry, silently at first, moving her face away from his fingers, and then the sobs shook her body, and she hunched away from his ministrations, into herself.

Mrs. Danning took the bowl from his hands. Her voice was troubled as she said, “She was this way when Michael brought her in. He’s the dairyman. He’d gone out with the milk cans, and the dogs found her first—dark as it still was, the motorcar was that hard to see in the ditch. He discovered she was alive, and ran back for my husband, to help get her out of the vehicle—her door was jammed, they said, and she couldn’t walk. They thought she’d broke her ankle or worse.”

Rutledge looked down. One ankle appeared to be swollen, the stocking sagging around it torn and filthy. A strap on the shoe was torn as well.

“Could you make us some tea?” Rutledge asked, to keep Mrs. Danning occupied. “I think it might help. I could use a cup myself.”

“It won’t take a minute. The kettle’s still hot.”

As she busied herself with the tea preparations, Rutledge sat down again and reached out to put his hand on Priscilla Connaught’s shoulder. “You’re safe,” he told her. “It’s all right now. Come, look at me.” He took out his handkerchief and pressed it into her hands, but she just clenched her fingers around it, like a lifeline, and couldn’t seem to stop the wrenching sobs that enveloped her.

If she’d been a man, if she hadn’t had the head wound, he would have slapped her lightly, to snap her out of the hysteria. Instead he said harshly, “That’s enough!”

She took two or three gulping breaths, startled into obeying, her eyes lifting in surprise to his face. Rutledge took the handkerchief from her fingers, and began to press it against her wet cheeks.

As if the words bottled inside had finally been unstopped, she said shakily, “I tried to kill him. I saw him there in the dark, bent over in his saddle, and I
wanted
to kill him. I drove into the hedge instead—because I couldn’t bear to hit the horse—”

He waited, letting her talk. “I
shrieked
at him, blowing the horn, screaming, heading straight at him, and the horse threw him then, and I drove directly over him. I wanted him dead, and then I wanted to kill myself. I tried to point the bonnet at a tree, but the wheels slipped in the grass, and I missed it and went into the ditch instead, and was terrified that I wouldn’t die—and it went black, and I—” She started to cry again.
“I’m still alive!”
Her eyes were on his, begging. “I wanted it to be swift, painless, over within an instant . . .”

Beyond the table, he saw Mrs. Danning standing with the teapot in one hand, the lid in another, staring at her unexpected guest, horror on her face.

She clearly hadn’t heard this part of the story, she knew only that there had been an accident. “Is there someone dead? Michael didn’t say anything about that!”

Rutledge, his mind working swiftly through what Priscilla Connaught had said, heard Hamish ask, “It couldna’ be Walsh she ran down—”

“How do you know he’s dead, Miss Connaught? Did you see him after you hit him?”

Hamish said, “There’ll have to be a search.”

Priscilla Connaught frowned. “I drove straight over him. He must be dead!” She brushed her hair back again, and looked at the blood on her fingers. “Is that his blood?” she asked, confused. She took the handkerchief from him and scrubbed the spot. “I don’t know. I can’t—I can’t remember any more. Except that it’s finished. That’s all. Finished.” She made a faint gesture and after a moment added, as if bewildered, “It’s easier said than done, trying to kill yourself—” She stared at him, as if this was a new discovery, something she hadn’t foreseen.

She began to weep again. Mrs. Danning set down the pot, lifted the teakettle from the black stove, and poured in steaming water. “It’ll only take a bit to steep,” she said.

“How do you kill yourself?” Priscilla Connaught asked weakly through her tears. “I thought of slashing my wrists, but I didn’t have anything sharp—only the tools in the boot, and they wouldn’t do the job.
I wish I was
dead!
”

Hamish said, “She needs a doctor’s care. She canna’ be trusted.”

It was true. Rutledge took a deep breath and said, “This isn’t the place to talk of dying. Or the time. You mustn’t upset Mrs. Danning!”

Priscilla Connaught looked up at the sturdy farmer’s wife. “I’m sorry,” she said, and then repeated it. But he thought the apology was more a response to his tone of voice than to his words.

Rutledge coaxed a cup of sugared tea into Priscilla Connaught, which warmed her, but failed to make any headway in bringing her out of her depression and exhaustion. Instead she lapsed into a silence that seemed almost a blankness. Setting aside his own tea, he said, “Let me drive you back to Osterley. My car’s just outside. We’ll fetch yours when you’ve rested. The Dannings will see to it, meanwhile. It will be safe enough here.”