Search the Dark

by Charles Todd

  All right, then, where had she run from?

  To search for the children, he told himself, I’ll have to work out the direction she’d be likely to come from—and how Mowbray had followed her.

  Yet there was nothing in any direction to suggest a sanctuary where a frightened, weary family might have taken refuge.

  He tried to picture them, the children crying, spent and thirsty, the mother trying hard to shush them and soothe them at the same time. The man—her husband? her lover?—carrying the little girl, while she held the boy. Four miles—but still not far enough. They would want to get clear of Singleton Magna and the pursuing Furies as quickly as possible, which told him they wouldn’t have asked for a ride on a wagon. Nor would they stop at a farmhouse door to ask for a glass of water or an hour to let the children rest. Either way would leave traces of their passage.

  It had taken Mowbray two days to catch up with her….

  Consider a different point of view. Where had the family intended to leave the train? They could have been traveling to the Dorset coast or any town in between. Or beyond, to Devon, even to Cornwall. All right, given that their direction was south, or even southwest, they’d most likely keep to that. However indirectly. Which meant, in theory, that they’d have left Singleton Magna by the same road he’d just traveled. Where, then, had they spent that last night?

  Rutledge slung his coat over one shoulder and walked on to the signpost where the road divided.

  Two arms pointed southwest. The faded letters read STOKE NEWTON and LEIGH MINSTER. From there the road might well carry on to the coast. The third arm pointed northwest, to Charlbury.

  He went back to the field and climbed the shallow bank—his footsteps lost in a morass of many prints now—and walked toward the spot where the tidy rows of grain ended in a flattened fan. Just before he reached it, he saw the darker stains in the dark earth, barely visible now but clear enough if someone searched for them. Here she’d died, bleeding into the soil, and here she’d been abandoned.

  He knelt there in the trampled dust and stared at the earth, trying to reach out to the mind of the woman who had lain here. Hamish stirred restlessly, but Rutledge ignored him.

  A terrified woman. Coming face to face with a man bent on vengeance, knowing she was going to die—knowing her children were already dead—or soon would be—

  Did she beg? Make promises? Was there anything she had left that Mowbray wanted, besides her life? Or was death an end for her to terror and horror—the doorway into the silence where her children had gone before her?

  Had she hidden them and protected them with her own Wood? Knowing that once she was dead—and couldn’t be made to tell—they’d be safe? Buying time while they reached some kind of safety.

  Was that why he’d beaten her face so savagely? Trying to force the truth from her, trying to make her give him what he believed was his, his flesh and blood?

  But the ground here was silent. And Rutledge, listening for answers in his own mind, seeking something real and deeply felt that could show him the way, could hear nothing. Whatever had brought this woman to the edge of an abyss, whatever emotions had roiled the air and left grisly traces on the ground were still her secret.

  In the end he stood up and shook his head, unable to reach what had happened here. My fault? he wondered, and Hamish said it was.

  What about Mowbray’s point of view? Take the living man, instead of the dead woman, and delve into his feelings.

  He’d killed her here—and abandoned her here.

  Why? Why not pull the body into the rows of grain, where only the field mice and crows would spot it so soon? Why leave it close to the road, where the farmer, coming to look over his crops, might stumble across it and raise the alarm?

  “Because,” Hamish answered him, “the man was no’ thinking with cold logic. He was distracted and angry and vengeful.”

  “Yes,” Rutledge agreed aloud. “He wanted her dead, he didn’t care whether he’d be caught or not. They found him, after all, asleep under a tree.”

  He looked from this vantage point around the circle of corn and trees and distant church tower, the horizons of this place of death. But he saw nothing to draw his attention. No shed, no barn with its roof falling in, no farm house. The clump of trees, then? They were far enough off the road

  Rutledge spent a good quarter of an hour searching among the trees and came up emptyhanded. No sandwich wrappers, no scuffed earth, no suitcases—

  Suitcases.

  No one had mentioned the family’s suitcases. Had these been left on the train? Or had they tried to drag their luggage with them, down the hot and dusty road? It was a point to consider. Another point to consider …

  He went back to his motorcar, hot and dusty himself, to drive on down the left, southwestern, fork in the road.

  It led to two straggling villages, houses lining the road, water meadows at their backs on either side, and farms in the outlying fringes. In each one Rutledge sought the local constable and questioned him. The first one was still enjoying a belated dinner, and the other was in his shirtsleeves gossiping over the garden wall with his neighbor. But they answered him readily enough.

  Rutledge learned that Hildebrand, in his thoroughness, had preceded him here, and there appeared to be nothing left for him to discover in either Leigh Minster or Stoke Newton. No strangers have come through here in the past week—both constables assured him of that, and he believed them. They appeared to be steady, careful men who knew their patch well. Nor had an ownerless suitcase turned up in the middle of a field or under some hedge. Apparently neither village had been pulled—wittingly or unwittingly—into the tragedy at Singleton Magna.

  Back in his motorcar again, the cooling wind of twilight swirling about his shoulders, Rutledge listened to the voice in the rear seat. It seemed to breathe on him, though he knew very well it was only the soft Dorset air.

  “I do na’ think he’d have come so far. The man was certain his wife was still in Singleton Magna—he went raving about yon town for two days, searching. People saw him. And he was asleep there when the police came looking for him! But what’s no’ been answered is, what made him so certain they’d be found there? That the townsfolk must have hidden them from him?”

  “I don’t know,” Rutledge said. “In the end, he did find the woman close by. He caught up with her there in the cornfields. And he killed her there and left her there. Unless …”

  “Aye, unless. Unless the man with her got rid of her because she was the one Mowbray wanted. And he and the children got clean away.”

  Rutledge had been considering that possibility. “If he killed her here in the open and the children saw him do it, how could he persuade them to come away with him after that? It was a bloody crime, she’d have screamed the first time he struck her. They would have cried out in alarm, pulled at his coat, his arms—trying to stop him—then fought to stay by her, because they wouldn’t have understood that she was dead. And if she was a liability to him, why did he stop at killing her? Why not rid himself of both the children—they weren’t his, after all. No, that line of investigation is taking us nowhere.”

  “But it’s the children that’ll tell you the rest of the truth. Alive or dead.”

  “I know,” Rutledge said. “And where shall we find them?”

  It was nearly dark when he got back to Singleton Magna and left his car behind the inn. In his absence Hildebrand had come to find him and written a message on hotel stationery, its thick, crested paper incongruously scrawled over in heavy black ink.

  “London just replied to your request for more information on Mrs. Mowbray. She was from Hereford. No known connection with Dorset. That may mean that the man with her lived or worked or had relatives in this county. I’m looking into that now.”

  It was one of the telephone calls Rutledge had made that afternoon, asking a canny sergeant he knew in London to look into Mrs. Mowbray for him. Gibson always had his ear to the ground. If anyone co
uld uncover information on the dead woman, it was he. A pity there was no way Gibson could do the same for the man.

  And Rutledge didn’t hold out much hope that Hildebrand would fare any better, with so little to go on. It might take weeks to trace him—if he belonged in Dorset. Or years, if he came from another part of England.

  “If he got clear, they’d hide him, him and the children. Family. Friends. If he asked,” Hamish said as Rutledge took the stairs two at a time.

  “Very likely,” Rutledge answered aloud, before he could stop himself. “Unless they know that Mowbray is safely in jail.”

  “But the children are no’ his,” Hamish pointed out. “And the mother’s dead. If yon man wanted to keep them—”

  “—he’d stay out of sight. He’d have to turn them over to the police if he came forward. Yes, that’s an interesting thought, isn’t it?”

  The children, again …

  They were beginning to haunt him.

  4

  Rutledge spent a restless night, his room too warm for comfortable sleeping, and his mind too busy.

  The images flitted and dissolved in a kaleidoscope of anguish. Of Mowbray, broken and in despair in his cell—of the bloody body of his wife lying at the edge of a field in plain sight when the farmer went to see to his crop—of children crying for their mother and a man who wasn’t their father offering what comfort he could—of a gallows waiting for a prisoner who might not understand why he was being hanged.

  And as always, Hamish, attuned to the tumult in his mind, reminded him of his own fallibility, a policeman driven by his own pain attempting to get to the bottom of another man’s. A murderer’s. Both of them—murderers.

  “It’s love that’s at the bottom of this,” Rutledge said aloud in the darkness, trying to silence the voice in his head. And then swore because the word conjured up memories of Jean. Jean, in a fashionable blue gown with ecru lace and the flowers he’d given her pinned at her shoulder. Jean laughing as she swung and missed, and the tennis ball went smashing into the backstop. The sun on her face as they walked through Oxford early on a Sunday morning, drinking in the quiet and peace.

  But what kind of love? It had so many faces, so many names. Jealousy wove a thread around it, and envy, and fear. People died for love—and killed for it. And yet in itself it was indefinable, it wore whatever passions people brought to it, like a mountebank, with no reality of its own.

  Somewhere in the town outside his window he could hear laughter and music. Happy laughter, without restraint or burdens.

  Once Jean was married and off to Ottawa, he told himself, he could finally put her out of his mind. As he had nearly put her out of his heart. Olivia Marlowe had taught him more about the quality of love than Jean ever had.

  “What will teach me to forget my Fiona?” Hamish said softly. “Do ye never remember her? Do ye never hear her weeping by yon empty grave, while I lie in France with no way to call out to her or offer comfort? What peace can Ian Rutledge find, loving any woman, when there’s Hamish MacLeod on his conscience!”

  In the darkness Rutledge turned his head away from the insistent voice. It was true. What woman would be willing to share his life with such demons in his mind?

  In the morning Rutledge met Hildebrand for breakfast in the Swan’s dining room, the bright chintz curtains bellying like sails in the early breeze. The tablecloths were blindingly white. Hildebrand appeared to be suffering from a headache. Several times he massaged his eyes as if they burned, and he growled at the middle-aged woman who waited on their table. She gave him a withering look as she walked away and said, “I knew you as a lad, with your braces broken and your face dirty! Don’t come the grump with me!”

  Rutledge suppressed a smile.

  Hildebrand, ignoring her, said, “I had a hellish conference last night with my chief. He wants those children found. Yesterday wouldn’t be soon enough! Makes the entire county look bad, he informs me, bloody maniacs running about slaughtering their families. He says we’re to make haste and finish this business, or he’ll know the reason why! It might have taken some of the wind out of his sails if you’d been here to placate him.”

  “I went out to the scene of the murder. I don’t know where they could have hidden themselves—or been hidden, near that field. I keep coming back to Singleton Magna. And whether someone in the town is keeping silent—assuming the children and the man are still alive.”

  Hildebrand stared at him, then pulled one of the flyers out of his pocket and tossed it across to Rutledge’s plate, where it landed on the toast he had just spread with marmalade.

  Rutledge picked it up, wiped the back with his serviette, and then said, “What’s this in aid of?”

  “The fact that that flyer was given to every household in the town and all the outlying farms. Somebody—somebody!—would have come forward with information. Stands to reason! If not the family, a nosy neighbor, the old biddy across the road, some child wanting to be noticed. Do I have to spell it out for you?”

  “No,” Rutledge said, reining in his temper. He was looking at the flyer, at the faces. “This should have brought results. I agree. But it hasn’t. And I keep asking myself why no one has come forward.”

  “Which tells me,” the other man responded acerbically, “that they’re dead. The man and the children. Which is where we’ve been for some days now—looking for their bodies.”

  “There can’t be all that many hiding places within walking radius of the town. And if Mowbray caught up with his wife by that field along the high road, it narrows our search even more. The western side of Singleton Magna, not the east. Otherwise he’d have had to bring her—or chase her—through the town itself. And that’s not on.”

  “We’ve looked. There isn’t a stone as large as that plate in front of you that we haven’t lifted, not a tree we haven’t climbed, not a stream we haven’t walked through up to our knees. Not a wall, a plot of disturbed ground, a shed, an outhouse, bridges, or any other conceivable place we haven’t searched at least three times. And are searching yet again!”

  They’ve vanished, then, Rutledge thought. Like foxfire, the nearer you come, the farther away it appears to be.

  Hamish was saying something, but Rutledge ignored him.

  “I went on to Leigh Minister and Stoke Newton. You’ve searched there as well?”

  “Yes, on the premise that the train was going south.”

  “What about the other fork?”

  “The way to Charlbury? That’s another three miles distant. We spoke to the constable there, in the name of thoroughness, but I wasn’t surprised when we drew a blank. A long way for a man and a woman to walk, encumbered with children. And Stoke Newton’s closer than Charlbury. Stands to reason, if Mrs. Mowbray was looking for sanctuary, she’d have chosen Stoke Newton.”

  “What if she considered that herself—and chose Charlbury instead, to throw us off the track?”

  Hildebrand shrugged. “It’s possible. But likely? No. You’re hunting for straws, man!”

  “Then clear up another puzzle for me. Why was Mowbray so certain he’d find her here in Singleton Magna?”

  “I spent most of the night turning that over in my mind. I don’t think he was certain. Look, she wasn’t on the train when he saw her, she was already on the platform, kneeling to speak to the little girl. They’d gotten off the train before he saw her—and very likely before she saw him. Stands to reason, he’d tell himself, if they got off here, this was where they planned to be. So he hunted for her here—and in the end, he got it right.”

  Was that how it had happened? It might explain why the suitcases hadn’t been found. He mentioned them to Hildebrand, who shook his head.

  “I’ve thought about that too. Mowbray’s not the only poor sod out of work. If someone had come across the cases and had need of whatever was inside, what’s to prevent him from keeping the lot and his mouth shut at the same time?”

  Rutledge felt depression settling in, and Hildebrand didn�
��t seem to find the endless circle of supposition any more joyful. He rubbed his eyes again and turned the subject to title men who had arrived that morning, and where he had sent them to search.

  “Meanwhile, I’ve got my own men asking questions in town. They know what they’re after, we should have some answers by late afternoon.”

  When they’d finished their coffee, Rutledge stood up. “I’ve one or two matters needing my attention. I should be back by three o’clock.”

  Hildebrand felt relief wash over him. Out of sight was out from under foot. London’s task was diplomacy, where the investigation crossed parish boundaries and sensitive toes might feel trod upon. If that kept Rutledge occupied most of the day, he himself might accomplish a hell of a lot more.

  With a brief nod, Hildebrand strode out the door like a man with a heavy schedule ahead of him.

  Rutledge stared at the flyer again, deep in thought.

  The woman who’d waited on them looked down and saw it. “A sorry business!” she said pityingly. “I blame the war. Disrupting a family, putting ideas into her head. It’s the little ones I feel most for, truth to tell. Losing their father, and a mother no better than she ought to be!”

  “From all accounts she was a good mother.”

  “That’s as may be! But it’s a sorry business, and mark my words, it’s her that’s to blame!”

  “Small as they are, how much would these children remember about Mowbray?” he asked, curious. “He was in France most of their lives. Surely they’d come to accept any replacement as their real father?”

  The woman looked up at him, her face scornful. “What makes you think this was the first and only man she’d taken up with?”

  It was a very good question!

  As she piled dishes on her tray, she added, “My eldest daughter lost her children to the influenza. Too little to live, the doctor told her. I don’t think she’s slept a night since they died. And here’s someone puts her own fancies before her children. Doesn’t sound to me like a good mother!” She lifted the heavy tray and marched off toward the swinging door that led to the kitchens, her pain evident in her straight, unyielding back.