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“There are those who might wish Mark dead, if you believe the gossips. But Charles? He was never here long enough to make enemies. He was a soldier, and leave was a rare thing, a time of respite, not for stirring up trouble.”
    “No land disputes, no boundary quarrels, no toes stepped on in the county?”
    “I’ve not heard of them. But ask Laurence Royston, his agent. He can tell you about running the estate and whether there were disputes that might have festered. I can’t help you there. I only came here to live near the end of the war, when I’d finished school. Before that, I was allowed to visit on school holidays when Charles had leave. Otherwise, I went home with one of my classmates.”
    Questioning her was like fencing with a will-o’-the-wisp. I don’t know, I can’t help you there, I didn’t go riding that morning —And yet he had believed her when she said that hanging the murderer would bring her comfort. In his experience, the shock of sudden, violent death often aroused anger and a thirst for vengeance. But it seemed to be the only natural, anticipated reaction he’d gotten from her. Why did she keep drifting away from him?
    He was reminded by a shifting of feet that Sergeant Davies was in the room, a witness to everything she said. A man who lived in Upper Streetham, who presumably had a wife and friends…was that the problem? He, Rutledge, was a private person himself; he understood the fierce needfor privacy in others. And if that was the case, he was wasting his time now.
    “How did you spend the morning? Before the news was brought to you?”
    She was frowning, trying to remember as if that had been years ago, not a matter of days. “I bathed and dressed, came down to breakfast, the usual. Then I had a number of letters to write, and was just coming out of the library to see if Mr. Royston might take them into Warwick for me, when—” She stopped abruptly, then continued in a harsh voice. “I really don’t recall what happened after that.”
    “You didn’t leave the house, go to the stables?”
    “Of course not, why on earth should I tell you I did one thing when I’d done another?”
     
    Rutledge took his leave soon afterward. Davies seemed relieved to be on his way downstairs at the butler’s heels, showing an almost indecent haste to be gone.
    But Rutledge felt unsatisfied, as if somehow he had been neatly outmaneuvered in that darkened room. Thinking back over what the girl had said, he couldn’t pinpoint any particular reason for disbelieving anything she’d told him, but doubt nagged at him. She couldn’t be more than twenty-one or twenty-two, and yet she had shown a self-possession that was uncommon at that age—or any other. And he hadn’t been able to break through to the person underneath. To the emotions that must be there. To the unspoken words he’d wanted to hear but that she had managed to hold back.
    Her detachment, then. That was what disturbed him. As if she didn’t connect the reality of violent death with the questions that the police were asking her. No passionate defense of her fiancé, no rush to push Mavers forward in his place, no speculation about the nature of the killer at all.
    It was almost, he thought with one of those leaps of intuition that had served him so well in the past, as if she already knew who the killer was—and was planning her own private retribution…. “I can’t imagine how anyone could have done such a terrible thing to him,” she’d said. Not who —how.
    Then as he reached the foot of the stairs he remembered something else. Both Sergeant Davies and the butler had mentioned a doctor. Had the girl been given sedatives that left her in this sleepwalker’s state, detached from grief and from reality too? He’d seen men in hospital talk quietly of unspeakable horrors when they’d been given drugs: stumbling to describe terrors they couldn’t endure to think about until they were so heavily sedated that the pain and