by Charles Todd
Too little to live…
His war had been broken bodies and the sucking black mud. Unbearable noise—and unbearable silence. Artillery barrages, machine guns, strafing aeroplanes. Horses and men dying, their screams splitting the mind, the sound going on and on long after it had stopped. A war of attrition—meant to kill to the last man. Where one’s own survival seemed beyond any prayer.
In England it had been different. For the exhausted people at home, carrying the burden of deprivation, stunned by the long lists of dead and wounded, worn down by helpless waiting and uncertainty, influenza had come as the silent, stealthy scythe of God, striking without warning, killing with the same certainty as wounds in the flesh gone septic but not confining itself to the trenches. It killed young and old, without rhyme or reason, striking down the healthy, sparing the ailing, leaving children without mothers and mothers without—
He stopped halfway to the hall and spun on his heel to look back at the still swinging door to the kitchen.
Too little to live…
He stared down at the flyer in his hand. The pale faces of the children stared back at him.
Why hadn’t the children changed since 1916? Mowbray had described them as he’d seen them on the train platform as if they’d not altered from this faded photograph. Children who should have aged three years—in size and appearance. Did that mean he hadn’t seen them, except in grieving imagination?
No wonder the flyers hadn’t brought any results!
“But the woman’s dead—she was real enough,” he told himself.
Missing suitcases. A woman who’d vanished for over twenty-four hours, between hastily leaving the train and her murder. The ages of the missing children. Questions that niggled at the edges of his mind, with no answers.
Unless the poor devil living with his own madness in that jail cell had killed a woman and children he’d never seen before!
Gentle God!
Rutledge took the stairs to his room two at a time, as if trying to outrace the horror he’d evoked. There he picked up his hat, stood thoughtfully in the middle of the floor as he debated the best course of action, then ran lightly down the steps again and out to his car.
On the road west, he could see small groups of men in the distance, searching, covering again ground they’d already tramped over three and four times. Heads bent, sticks poking into undergrowth and among the thick boughs of trees, they moved steadily and carefully across the terrain assigned to them. In the field where the body had been found the grain was alive with them, and there was a fuming, red-faced man sitting his horse at the edge of the corn. The farmer, most likely. Rutledge considered stopping to speak to him and then decided it could wait until the man’s temper had subsided. This was his best crop of the season, trampled through no fault of his own. A policeman from London would be no different in his book than one from Singleton Magna.
At the signpost, Rutledge took the northwest road this time, toward Charlbury. He drove slowly, scouting for a likely outbuilding that might offer shelter. But the two dilapidated sheds he did investigate were empty of anything except pigeons, mice, and a swarm of insects rising into the stuffy air from the dust beneath his feet.
Tramping back to his car, he heard the sound of another automobile coming fast along the lane. He stopped to watch it, his coat over one shoulder, his shirtsleeves rolled up on his forearms, wishing he’d thought to bring a Thermos of tea or water with him. His throat felt parched.
The motorcar slowed as it came nearer and then braked as it drew abreast of him. A woman was driving it, and he knew the instant he saw her face that she wasn’t English. There was something about the way her dark hair was swept up into a bun, the blue dress she wore with a scarf around the throat. Style. His sister Frances would have recognized it instantly.
She was French—
“Are you in trouble?” she asked, her English lightly and fascinatingly accented. He found himself suddenly at a loss for words.
It wasn’t beauty. Not that she wasn’t damned attractive. But it was more subtle. Good bones, his sister Frances could have told him. A sensuality that came from within, a curve of the lips, a lift to the eyebrows. The way her clothes set off her coloring, the shades of blue in the scarf like stained glass, vivid and rich, bringing light to the gray eyes that shifted as he watched from clear, still water to dark, unfathomable pools of speculation.
He spoke quickly, and in French. “No, I’m a policeman. Inspector Rutledge from London. I’m taking part in the search for the missing Mowbray children.”
She smiled a little, hearing his French, unexpected in a deserted lane in the middle of Dorset, then she caught what he was saying. “Ah. The children. It is very sad, is it not? I hope they will be found alive. But one wonders, as the time goes by. I have no children—” She stopped, then went on wryly, “—it is something one feels, I think, about children, whether one is a parent or not.”
The smile, even as brief as it was, had been like sunlight over the sea. What in God’s name had brought such a creature as this to England? Rutledge glanced at her hands on the wheel and saw a wedding band. That explained it then. A man …
“Yes.” He moved slightly, away from her car.
She took that as a signal that the conversation was finished, although he’d meant it in another sense. “Then I shall leave you to your search. I wish you success with it—and living children at the end of it.”
The motorcar moved off, and as he watched her drive on, he cursed himself for being a tongue-tied fool. He hadn’t even asked her name, or where she lived. And what had brought her here, to this stretch of road connected with a murder investigation. If she knew of any place the police had not thought to search—
“She’s a stranger here hersel’,” Hamish reminded him. “She’d no’ be likely to ken what the police have na’ thought of.”
Which was true. He couldn’t hear her engine in the distance now. She was gone.
Rutledge started his car again and got in.
“And a woman like yon is naught but trouble!” Hamish added for good measure. “Leave her out o’ this business.”
Rutledge laughed. But he could still see the softness of her skin, warm with the sunny day, and the dark tendril of hair that swept across her cheek like a caress. Why was it that French women had a knack for disturbing a man, whether they were beautiful or not? Whatever it was, most of them were born with it, and he didn’t need to understand it to recognize it.
In a ramshackle barn, swaybacked with age and a roof half fallen in, he was startled by a small hawk he’d disturbed. She came sailing down toward him, defending her fledglings, and swooped near enough for him to hear the soft whish of her wing feathers on the still air. And then she was back in the beams again, well hidden. He could feel her eyes watching him. Nothing here, only prints of the heavy nailed boots of searchers.
He hadn’t expected to find anything. The effort had been made in the name of thoroughness. A policeman needed patience. And hope?
At the outskirts of Charlbury, which straggled in Saxon style along the road like beads on a string, he paused long enough to get his bearings.
It was no more than a village, houses facing each other across the high road and, at the far end, a stone church. There was a long narrow green, with its pond and white geese sailing above their reflections like frigates in the sun, an inn, some half-dozen shops, and on a slope behind an outlying farm, a round building with a thatched roof, gleaming whitely. It looked as if it had been stranded there, with no connection to Charlbury except perhaps fate.
Most of the houses were small, but between the common and the church they were larger and better kept. He thought it likely that the well-to-do farmers lived there. The grandest of the lot, with a slate roof and a sizable wing on its westerly side, was set well back from the street and boasted a fine garden behind a low, gated stone wall. There was little activity in Charlbury, as if people were working in their back gardens or on the farms
that spread out around the outskirts. One shopkeeper was washing his windows, and farther along a small boy squatted by a bench, teasing a cat with a string. It played with the end desultorily as if preferring to doze peacefully in the sun. The boy gave up as Rutledge watched, and turned to run toward the pond. As he did, he cannoned into a man coming out of the small bakery, who bent double from the force of impact and swore feelingly at the child. The words carried in the warm air.
They didn’t appear to have much effect. The boy was soon throwing sticks at the geese on the pond. A woman coming out of another shop, a basket over her arm, called to him, and he came reluctantly to walk beside her, his shrill voice bouncing off the water as he wanted to know why. The town brat, Rutledge thought, amused.
Then he noticed that the man the boy had run into was still leaning against the baker’s wall, as if in pain. Finally the man straightened gingerly and moved on. From the blacksmith’s shop came a sudden gust of black smoke as the bellows were worked. Somewhere Rutledge could hear cattle lowing.
His first stop was at the small, thatched stone house, marked by a sign, where the Charlbury constable lived. But there was no answer to his knock. Rutledge took out his watch and looked at the time. The man must be making rounds, then.
He drove back to the inn and got out, leaving the motorcar in the yard beside it. The inn was old, stone built, with a tidy thatched roof that overhung the dormers like a thick rug. It was comfortably situated where the street began a gentle curve to the common, and there was a small garden in front, in the middle of which rose a wooden post, covered for half its length by a profusely flowering vine. Hanging above that, incongruously, the sign portrayed a distinguished, graying man in frock coat and Edwardian whiskers, one arm raised as if giving a speech, THE WYATT ARMS was scrolled in gold above his head.
Wyatt? The name was familiar, but Rutledge couldn’t place it immediately.
Two farmers were coming out of the bar and held the door for him, nodding in countryman’s fashion as he passed. Inside the room was dark paneled oak, and Rutledge nearly stumbled over a chair before his eyes adjusted to the stygian atmosphere. Then he saw another doorway and went down a narrow passage into a room that looked out over a neatly kept garden with several tables set up beneath a striped awning. They were presently filled with women listening to a thin, elderly speaker reading from a sheet of paper.
He stopped.
“The ladies find it more to their liking than the parlor, on fair days,” a voice said out of the dimness, and a strong man in a white apron came in after him, gesturing to the garden. “That’s the Women’s Institute meeting. The ladies take their tea out there often, on a fine afternoon. What can I do for you, sir?”
A graceful but heavyset woman with dark hair and an unusual white streak that ran from her temple to the bun at the nape of her neck interrupted the speaker with a question. The speaker deferred to her, then went on.
Rutledge said, turning away from the windows, “Time for a pint, I think. Will you join me?”
The bar and the snug were empty, and the landlord said affably, “Don’t mind if I do. Thank you, sir.”
Rutledge sat at the heavy wooden bar—as black as the walls and the beams that supported them—on a stool worn shiny by generations of trousers sliding across the wood. The landlord lighted a lamp to one side of the mirror, and it gave a sense of reclamation to the room. The brass appointments gleamed like gold.
“Passing through?” the innkeeper asked as he pulled a pint and set it on the bar in front of Rutledge.
“I’m staying at Singleton Magna,” Rutledge said, sidestepping the question. “Yesterday and this morning I’ve been taking in the countryside.”
“Any word on the murders over there?” As if Singleton Magna were across the Channel, somewhere in the neighborhood of Paris, and news was hard to come by. “Sorry business,” he added, echoing the words of the woman at the Swan. He pulled a second pint and drank deeply, appreciatively, as if he enjoyed his own wares.
“They’ve got the man in custody. You probably know that. But no signs of the children still. They—that family, I mean—never came as far as Charlbury?”
“No, we don’t run to many visitors here. Not like in the old days. Not since the war, at any rate. I see strangers once or twice a month at best.”
“What brought visitors before the war?”
“Some came because of the Wyatts. Old Mr. Wyatt was MP for nearly forty years, and that drew the curious. He cut quite a dashing figure in his youth and was as popular in London as he was here. Mr. Simon was cut from the same cloth. Mr. Wyatt served this constituency his life long, and we all looked up to him in Charlbury, aye, and so did most of Dorset.”
The memory clicked. The sign—and the family that had made a name for itself in Parliament for three generations. Like the Churchills and the Pitts, a long tradition of public service and golden oratory.
“He’s dead, I think?”
“Aye, in the last year of the war, that was. He wanted to see his son take his seat, and he lived three years longer than anybody thought he might. But to no purpose.” A veil came down over the man’s eyes, as if the subject was ended.
Rutledge paid it no heed. “His son died in the war?” It was no more than an attempt to keep the innkeeper talking, but something flared behind the veil.
“No, Simon Wyatt came through it with hardly a scratch. But somewhere along the way he lost his taste for politics.”
It was a warning not to ignore the message a second time. Rutledge changed the subject. “And once the Westminster connection was gone, Charlbury settled back into tranquility again?”
The innkeeper made a wry face. “Not so’s you’d notice,” he said reluctantly. He put down his beer and looked out at the garden. “People are queer, you know that? Simon Wyatt’s grandfather, now, the one on his mother’s side of the family, he lost his wife early on. Nothing seemed to count with him after that, he couldn’t settle to farming or anything else. Then one fine day he went off to see the world. Sent home boxes of whatever struck his fancy—dead birds and strange-looking statues and other knick-knacks he picked up along the way. He was set on making a museum, though who’d come to look at such oddities, I ask you?”
“Not every man’s taste,” Rutledge agreed. “In London? That might make a difference.”
“No, here in Charlbury,” the innkeeper said. In the back toward the kitchen a man’s voice called, “Mr. Denton?”
He answered over his shoulder. “Aye, I’m coming, man!”
“Shall I carry down the next keg, then?”
“Put it with the others, Sam. I’ll sort it out later.” He smiled ruefully at Rutledge. “Anything else, sir? The dray brought my beer this morning. If I don’t watch, Sam’ll be drunk as a lord on whatever he can find that’s open. Old fool! But help’s hard to find. If there’s no work on the farms, the younger ones are off for London or wherever they can find a job. If he wasn’t so good with the horses, I’d have been shut of him years ago.”
Rutledge drained his glass and thanked Denton, then made his way out into the sunlight again. Sitting on a bench outside the door was the man he’d seen earlier. He was pale, his face beaded with sweat.
“Are you all right?” Rutledge asked. “I saw what happened.”
“Bloody brat! His mother can’t do anything with him. Needs a man’s firm hand. Preferably applied to the seat of his pants!” He cleared his throat and said, “I’m all right. As right as I’ll ever be.”
Something in the timbre of his voice made Rutledge turn to look at him. “Canadian, by any chance?”
“I lived there for a time. Alberta. Damned beautiful part of the country! Ever been there?”
“Never had the chance,” Rutledge answered. “I met a number of Canadians in the war.”
The man held out his hand and Rutledge took it. “My name’s Shaw. You aren’t a Dorset man.”
“Rutledge. I’m from London.”
“I ha
te the bloody place. Too crowded, too dirty, too old. A man can’t breathe there.”
“No,” Rutledge said, knowing what Shaw meant. “Do you have family here?” It was the opening he’d waited for, to bring up the subject of the Mowbrays.
“I’m Denton’s nephew. He’s kept an eye on me since I left hospital. The doctors won’t let me go back to Alberta, and I’ve not made up my mind what to do with myself.” Shaw grimaced. He wasn’t used to telling strangers his life story. It was a bad habit to get into.… “Sorry! I’m not usually this garrulous. It’s the fault of that bloody child!”
“I don’t mind, if it helps. Anything is better than what they give out in hospital for the pain.”
“God, yes!” Shaw got to his feet and took a deep breath. “It never lasts long,” he said, although the tension around his eyes hadn’t gone away. “Thanks for not making a fuss.”
As Rutledge nodded, Shaw opened the door and went inside. As if afraid that staying would lead him into other confessions he didn’t want to make.
5
Rutledge turned toward his parked car and then changed his mind, walking back up the street instead. He knocked several times at the constable’s door, without an answer.
A woman busily sweeping her walk shaded her eyes and said, “If you’re needing Constable Truit, he’s out.”
“Know where I might find him?”
“Business or trouble?”
Rutledge laughed. “I wanted to ask him how to grow fine marrows.”
She grinned, not a bit affronted. “Well, he’s not likely to be back before the day’s out. There’s no Mrs. Truit, you see, and he’s got courting on his mind.”
Rutledge said with interest, “Makes a habit of not being at home, does he?”
