Search the Dark

by Charles Todd

  And yet he was accustomed to answering the voice in his head out of old habit. The Somme. A bloodbath for months, the toll climbing astronomically, and men so tired that their minds simply shut down. Assault after futile assault, and the German line still held.

  Set against such appalling losses, one more casualty was insignificant. Yet in the midst of such horror, the death of a young Scottish corporal had incised itself on Rutledge’s soul.

  The man hadn’t been killed by enemy fire. He had been shot by a firing squad for refusing a direct order in battle, and it was Rutledge’s pistol, in the shell-riven darkness before dawn, that had delivered the coup de grâce.

  The act had been military necessity. Not cowardice, but exhaustion—and the sheer bloody senselessness of throwing lives away—had broken him. Hamish MacLeod had refused to lead his men into certain death.

  Military necessity. For the sake of every soldier watching, an example had to be made. For the sake of thousands of men readying for the next assault an example had to be made. You had to know, facing death, that you could depend on the man next to you, as he depended on you.

  Rutledge could still feel the late summer heat. Hear the din of artillery, the rattle of machine-gun fire, the cries of wounded men. Smell the fear and the rotting corpses. He could still see the defeated look in his corporal’s eyes, the acceptance that it was a relief to die rather than lead his men back into the black hail of German fire.

  And all for nothing!

  The artillery shell found its mark an instant later, buried living and dead, officers and men, in heavy, stinking mud. Killing most of them outright and leaving the wounded to suffocate before the search dogs could find them many hours later. And ironically, the next shell sprayed shrapnel into the machine-gun position they had failed to take all that long night.

  Rutledge had barely survived. Deaf and blind, badly stunned, he lay under the corpse of one of his men in a tiny pocket of air. It had sufficed. He hadn’t known until someone told him at the aid station that it was Hamish’s blood soaking his coat, Hamish’s flesh clotting his face and hair, the smell of Hamish’s torn body haunting him all the rest of that day as he lay dazed. Severely claustrophobic from a living grave, severely shell-shocked, bruised and disoriented, he was allowed a few hours’ rest and was then sent back to the front. And Hamish went with him. A living reality in his mind. A voice with its soft Scottish burr. A personality as strong in death as it had been in life.

  Rutledge never spoke of it. He fought it alone, silently, as certain as the breath in his body that it was only a matter of time before death—or madness—put an end to it. That expectation kept him sane.

  And so he had brought Hamish home again, not as a ghost to be exorcised but as a deep-seated presence in the shocked and numbed recesses of his brain where only sleep could shut it out.

  He’d shared his thoughts with a dead man for so long it was easier to respond than risk the tap of a ghostly hand on his shoulder to attract his attention or see a white, empty face at the edge of his vision, demanding to be heard. That hadn’t happened—yet—but Hamish was so real to him that Rutledge lived in mortal dread of turning too quickly one day or glancing over his shoulder at the wrong instant and catching a glimpse of the shadowy figure that must surely be there, just behind him. Within touching distance. Close enough for its breath to ruffle his hair or brush his cheek.

  “There was a picnic, that August,” Rutledge said, desperate to change the drift of thought. “Up the Thames, beneath a stand of beeches so heavy the sun came through the leaves in purple shadows—”

  And that particular memory led to Jean … she was as dead to him as Hamish. This very week he’d seen her engagement announced in the Times. To a man who’d served in a diplomatic posting in South America through most of the war. Away from guns and carnage and nightmares.

  “He’s in line for a position in Ottawa,” Frances had said when she called round to offer what comfort there was to give. His sister knew everyone there was to know—few bits of gossip failed to find their way to her. “Away from all this.” She waved a languid hand in the air, and he’d known what she meant.

  Away from a Britain still wearing the scars of death and pain and the poverty of peace. Away from Rutledge’s torment, which had frightened Jean.

  “Jean has a knack for ignoring unpleasantness,” Frances had added wryly. “You won’t let it bother you, will you? That she found someone else so quickly? It simply means, my dear, that you’re well out of it, whether you’re aware of it yet or not. Shallow women make damnably dull and demanding wives. Although I must say, even I thought there was more to her. Or was that wishful thinking on my part too? Well, never mind, you’ll soon meet someone you can truly care about.”

  Why was it that the mind was so adept at finding its own punishment? Jean—or Hamish—to fill his thoughts.

  A bitter choice, Rutledge acknowledged with a sigh. The woman who had promised to marry him or the man whose life he’d taken. There was no surgery to mend a broken heart nor any to mend a broken mind.

  The doctors had shrugged and told Rutledge, “Shell shock makes its own rules. When you’re able to sleep better—when the stress of the Great War—of your work—of your memories—fades a little, so will the reality of Hamish MacLeod.”

  But stress was the nature of war. Stress was the very heart of his work at the Yard. He lived with death and blood and horror every day. It was what he did best, investigating murders. Hardly the most suitable work, perhaps, for a man back from the trenches, but he was trained for no other and didn’t have the spare energy to look for any other. And a prospective employer might well dig more deeply into his medical file than the Yard had done, taking him back after the war. Opening a Pandora’s box of things best left locked away.

  Superintendent Bowles knew more of Rutledge’s war years—Rutledge was convinced of it—than anyone else at the Yard. It was there in his eyes, watchful and wary. In the sneer that sometimes passed for a smile. But there had been no overt attack on Rutledge’s character. Only the assignments that no one else wanted, for one reason or another. Like the summons taking him now to Dorset.

  “Inspector Barton’s wife’s in the middle of a difficult pregnancy, and Dorset might as well be on the moon, she’s that upset about him leaving her. And Trask’s no countryman, they’ll be sending out search parties for him! As for Jack Bingham, he’s due for leave in two days.” Or so Bowles had claimed.

  Not that it mattered; Rutledge was glad to be out of London. Loneliness had its own compensations, even when it brought Hamish in its wake.

  Rutledge found his turning from the trunk road at the next signpost and was soon moving more southwesterly into the heart of Dorset. And with it the scent of hay faded. His mind found its way back from the past and slowly focused on the present.

  This was Hardy country. But it was the difference in light that impressed Rutledge more than the author’s dark and murky characters. There was a golden-brown tint to the light here that seemed to come from the soil and the leaves of the trees. Not washed pastel like Norfolk, nor rich green like Kent. Nor gray damp like Lancaster. Dorset had been wool trade and stone, cottage industry and small farming towns strung along old roads that the Saxons had laid out long before the Norman conquest. Outlying meadows where cattle quietly grazed.

  Rutledge found himself wishing he could ask a painter like Catherine Tarrant if she saw light in the same way, or if it was only his undependable imagination.

  He came into the town of Singleton Magna almost before he knew it was there, the abrupt shift from fields to houses almost as sharp as a line drawn in the earth. The railroad’s tracks parted company with him and ran on to the station.

  Slowing as he motored down the main street, with its shops still doing a brisk business and farm carts pulled up at the curbs, he searched for the local police station.

  It was no more than a cubbyhole next to the town’s one bank, a small offshoot of the main building that
must at one time have been a shop. The front window had been painted white with the letters POLICE in black, and the heavy green door was nicked by time and hard use, its iron handle worn with age. The bank it adjoined was more majestic, with a handsome porch above its door, as if it too had begun life as something else, a merchant’s house or a church office.

  After finding a place to leave his car and stepping out into the warmth of the afternoon, he saw a tall, stooped man of middle age just coming out of the green door. The man looked at him, frowned, and came over to speak. “Are you Inspector Rutledge, by any chance?”

  “Yes, I’m Rutledge.”

  The man held out a long-fingered hand. “Marcus Johnston. I’m representing that poor devil Mowbray. Nasty business. Nasty. And he’s not saying a word, not even to me. God knows what kind of case I can build for him. My advice at the moment is to throw himself on the mercy of the courts.”

  Rutledge, whose father had followed the law, said only, “I don’t know a great deal about the man or his crime, except for the scant information the local people sent up to the Yard. He was searching the town for his wife, I understand? And her body has been found, but not the others he was after.”

  “That’s right. The police have done their best, they’ve covered the ground hereabouts for miles in every direction. No bodies. No graves. More important, no one inquiring about her. No distraught husband and sobbing children, I mean.” He sighed. “Which leads to the conclusion that they’re dead. And all Mowbray will say to me is that they were his children, why should he want to kill them?” A woman passed and Johnston tipped his hat to her. She nodded and then eyed Rutledge with curiosity as she walked on.

  “I did some checking before I left London. I’m told Mowbray was in France in 1916 when the bombing occurred. He was sent home on compassionate leave to bury his wife and children. They were identified by the constable when they were pulled from the rubble of the building. Mother and two children, dead. Mowbray himself never saw the bodies; he was told it was better to remember them as they were.”

  “Inspector Hildebrand believes there must have been a mistake of some sort—the constable felt fairly certain the bodies were Mowbray’s wife and children, but they could have been another family altogether. The bombing demolished one building, as I understand it, and that brought down those on either side. Fifty or more dead. Easy mistake for the constable to have made—especially at night, fires, injured people everywhere. Absolute horror and chaos.” Johnston grimaced. “Bombs and tons of masonry don’t leave much to look at, I don’t suppose.”

  “If it had been another family who died in the raid, why hasn’t someone come looking for them? Parents? Sisters? Husband home on leave? Seems odd no one did, and discovered the mix-up.”

  “God knows,” Johnston answered tiredly. “My guess is, there was nobody to care about the dead woman—and Mowbray’s wife probably took advantage of that to start a new life. Makes sense, especially if she’d grown tired of waiting. Take happiness while you can. No fuss. Easier than a divorce.”

  In France half a dozen men under Rutledge’s command had applied for compassionate leave at one time or another, most of them men whose wives wanted to leave them and had told them so in a letter. One had been furiously angry….

  “Private Wilson,” Hamish reminded him. “He said he’d have her back or know the reason why. He was brought up on assault charges in Slough and given six months.”

  Johnston seemed to know what Rutledge was thinking, adding, “Hard on the poor sod who’s told his family’s dead, but I daresay she never thought about that. Only that he wouldn’t come tearing home in a rage.” He squared his shoulders with an effort, as if the weight of the world lay on them.

  Rutledge studied the long, thin face, lined with something more than age or exhaustion. That was a look he, Rutledge, had seen often enough since he came home from France. And recognized. This man had lost a son in the war and was still grieving hard. The murder of a young woman, someone he didn’t know and didn’t love, had less reality to him than the death in a foreign country of the only flesh and blood that had mattered to him. Johnston was going through the motions for his client. That was all he could do.

  “Thank you for being so frank,” Rutledge said, preparing to walk on into the police station.

  Johnston seemed to realize how hopeless he himself thought the evidence was. He summoned a smile and added, “Early days yet, of course! Early days!” But there was a hollowness in the words and the smile.

  Rutledge watched him move on down the street, then opened the door of the station, finding himself in a scene of turmoil. There were some half a dozen people crammed into a room meant to hold two at best, and the sudden sense of claustrophobia that swept over him was so fierce he drew in his breath with the shock of it.

  Someone looked up, a constable, and said sharply, “What is it you want?”

  “Rutledge, from London,” he managed to say, but it came out harshly. Everyone in the room turned to stare at him, making the sense of suffocation worse. He could feel the knob on the door behind him jammed into his back.

  “Ah!” the constable replied noncommittally. “Come this way, sir, if you please.” He led Rutledge through the anarchy and into a dark, stuffy hall that smelled of cabbage and dust. “That’s the leaders of the next search parties,” he said over his shoulder. “We’ve not found the others—the man or the children.”

  Rutledge didn’t answer. They reached a door painted brown, and the constable knocked, then turned the knob.

  The room beyond was bright with late sun, and a long pair of windows stood wide, looking out into a small courtyard overgrown with weeds. Although the windows provided little air movement, they gave the sense of openness he badly needed—an escape into light and freedom. Hamish, in the back of his mind, sighed with a relief as great as his own.

  “Inspector Rutledge, Inspector Hildebrand. If you’ll excuse me, sir …?” The constable left the end of his request dangling in the silence as he retreated, closing the door softly behind him.

  Hildebrand looked Rutledge up and down. “They said they were sending an experienced man.”

  “I was with the Yard before the war,” Rutledge replied.

  “But away through the better part of it,” Hildebrand finished for him. He himself was white-haired, with a youngish face. Rutledge put his age at not more than forty-five. “Ah, well. Sit down, man! Here’s what we have. Murder victim presumed to be Mrs. Mary Sandra Mowbray, of London. Matches the general description of the late Mrs. Mowbray, or I should say, presumed late. Even Londoners can’t die twice, can they? In his wallet Mr. Mowbray had a photograph of her with the children, taken in 1915, just before he was shipped over to France. We’ve had copies made to circulate. So far nothing’s come of it.” He tossed a file across the cluttered desk, and Rutledge found himself looking down at a faded photograph of a woman facing the camera and the sun at the same time, squinting a little. She was wearing a floral print dress and a single strand of pearls. Her hair seemed dark blond or a light brown, the way the sun caught it. Her face was oval and pretty, with fine bones and a distinct look of breeding handed down from some remote ancestor. The children by her side were a little clearer. The boy was no more than two, wearing a sailor suit and a hat that had fallen to a rakish angle over one eye. He grinned, squinting, while his hands clutched a ball nearly as large as he was. The little girl, not as childishly plump, had the same fairness as the mother. She could have been a large four or a small five, judging from the shy smile that showed all of her front baby teeth quite clearly. Her hand clutched her mother’s skirts, and her head was tilted in a way that promised a sweet nature rather than a rowdy one as she peered up through her lashes with no hint of roguishness.

  When Rutledge had scanned the faces, he saw that the file also included official copies from London of a marriage license in the name of Mary Sandra Marsh and Albert Arthur Mowbray, a pair of birth certificates for the children, and the deat
h certificates for all three. Signed in a scrawl by a London doctor. “Severe injuries from falling debris” they all read, and the autopsy had gone on to catalog them.

  “Sad business,” Hildebrand said after a moment. “Young woman with a husband over in France. Lonely. Probably told the poor devil she took up with that he was dead. Well, it wasn’t altogether a lie, was it? So many of them did die. Only not her husband. He lived to come home, didn’t he? Must have been one of her worst nightmares, the chance of running into him some day! And as luck would have it, he goes from London to the coast in search of work, and there she is, standing in the station at Singleton Magna. Plain as day!”

  “You think she saw him? Leaning out the train window?” Rutledge asked, reading down the statements of a conductor and several witnesses, one of them a farmer’s wife and her sister, the other two stokers returning to their ship.

  “Stands to reason, I’d say. Explains why the four of ’em left town in such haste. Not a glimpse of them anywhere! One or two possible sightings of her at the station, probably before Mowbray spied her. After that, she was covering her tracks for dear life. I asked around myself, didn’t leave that to my men.”

  “Very proper,” Rutledge said absently, rereading one of the statements. “Still, we have only Mowbray’s word that this was his wife and family.”

  “As to that, I checked with London,” Hildebrand said with satisfaction. “There were quite a few casualties the night Mrs. Mowbray’s street was bombed. Constable Tedley identified her and the children. They were in the stairwell of the block of flats where she lived. And she didn’t show up later to prove him wrong, did she? And no one came round looking for someone who should have been alive, did they? Straightforward, as far as London was concerned.”

  Rutledge nodded and handed the statements back to Hildebrand. Then he asked, “How did Mowbray catch up to her later? Has he told you?”