by Charles Todd
“Makes a habit of being wherever Mrs. Darley’s daughter is. In my view, she’s leading him a merry dance before choosing Danny Marker. Danny works over to Leigh Minster and comes to Charlbury only at the week’s end.”
A born gossip …
“I wanted to ask Truit about the day that man in Singleton Magna killed his wife. I’d like to know if there were any strangers in Charlbury at that time.”
She cocked her head and looked him over. “You aren’t from the London papers?”
Rutledge said apologetically, “No.”
She sighed. “I thought not. You must be the London policeman, then, the one they was expecting over to Singleton Magna.” She waited, pointedly, until he gave her his name. “There was a guest at the Wyatts’, that came by car. But no one on foot, no woman with small children, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s a long walk, anyway, for little ’uns. D’ye know what I think?” She didn’t give him a chance to answer. He’d have her opinion, wanting it or not. “They’re buried in a churchyard. What’s a better grave than a fresh one, to hide bodies in!”
“Anyone dead of late in Charlbury?” he asked, amused by the ghoulish relish with which she offered her suggestion.
“No.” There was disappointment in the admission. “We’ve got a maid missing, but no one’s likely to want to kill her. She was uppity, and good riddance, Mrs. Bagley says.”
“How long has she been missing?”
“Getting on for five, six months,” the constable’s neighbor admitted reluctantly. “I’ve got a sheet with the picture of that family on it. Constable Truit, he was handing ’em out. Betty’s hair was darker, nothing like the woman they was looking for. Besides, she weren’t married, nor had any children. At least, not that we knew of! But pretty enough to want more from life than scrubbing another woman’s floors. Gone to London, more than likely. Looking for trouble.”
Rutledge thanked her and turned to go.
“If you’d come in another month, you’d’ve seen the museum open,” she said to his back, eager to keep his attention. “There’s to be a party then. They’re hoping for grand guests down from London, but they won’t come. Not now that Mr. Wyatt is dead. What’s the point? Unless it’s curiosity brings them. But who’s likely to want to see pagan statues and dead birds? I ask you!”
He glanced toward the churchyard farther along the road. Someone was standing there, watching, from the shadows of the tall trees. “You never know.”
She laughed, a hoarse croak. “No. Not with people, you never do.”
And with a final whisk of her broom she walked back inside her door. Having had the last word? And garnered enough information from him to regale her neighbor on the other side?
Constable Truit would hear about Rutledge’s visit before he turned the knob of his front door.
Hamish said out of a long silence, “If yon constable has his mind on courting, he’ll no’ see all that happens.”
“But that woman will, be sure of it.” Rutledge walked slowly along the street, getting a feeling for Charlbury. As in most villages, people went about their own business and left others to mind theirs. Dorset had not held a very large place in English affairs, over most of the country’s history, and seemed content to leave it that way.
Beside the church was the tidy rectory, the gardens by its front windows heavy with August bloom, and the path to the door was neatly raked. He stopped, as if admiring the effect.
Yes, the figure he’d seen in the trees was still there. He continued on his way. The church was strikingly Norman, with a truncated tower just roof high that seemed to be wanting the rest of itself, as though the builders had stopped working one day and never returned to finish the job. The apse was firmly rounded and the walls appeared to be thick, for the windows were deeply set. They caught the sunlight with darkness rather than light, as if they hadn’t been intended to shed a glory of color across the nave. There was no grace or symmetry here, only a statement of power and might. He thought the builders might have anticipated using it as a fortress one day, for want of a castle nearby.
Peripherally he could observe the man in among the heavy, low-branched trees. Reasonably tall, straight—young. A shadow across his face. And something in his cupped hands—
Rutledge froze. The man held a bird in his fingers.
Turning to him, Rutledge called, “What’s the date of the church, do you know?”
“Yes,” he replied, coming toward Rutledge and into the light. “Early Norman with some later additions. It was never worth anyone’s time to rebuild it in a later style. So it hasn’t changed much in six hundred years.” The words sounded as they’d been spoken by rote—or the man was so accustomed to the question he needn’t give the answer any thought. Then he held up the bird. It was just beginning to struggle in the light clasp. “Flew into one of the church windows and knocked himself silly. Cat would have had him if I hadn’t found him first!” He opened his fingers very carefully, and after a moment, the freed bird shook itself and took off toward the nearest tree. He grinned at Rutledge. The very blue eyes were wide and guileless.
Looking into the man’s face, Rutledge saw that the odd blankness was explained by the terrible, deep scar that started over the bridge of his nose and ran above one eyebrow around the side of the head. The fair hair had grown back stiffly over the healed wound and stuck out at odd angles.
“In the war, were you?” he asked conversationally.
The man nodded. “Everybody asks that. Do I look like a soldier?” The question was serious, considered.
“Yes,” Rutledge answered after a moment. “You stand quite straight.”
He smiled, sudden pride in the damaged face. “Yes, I do, don’t I?”
Rutledge said, “I must go now. Thank you for the information on the church.”
“My father was rector here all my life,” the man said as Rutledge turned. “He died of the influenza. I know every nook and cranny of the church. Even some he didn’t find!”
Rutledge studied the open face, his thoughts going suddenly to the missing children. But there appeared to be no intentional double meaning in the remark, only simply a statement of fact and unassuming self-satisfaction. In this one thing, if nowhere else, he had exceeded his father.
The man’s eyes followed him as Rutledge turned back down the street toward the inn. Hamish, as aware of it as he was, muttered uneasily. “He’s no’ a simpleton,” he said. “There’s the mind of a child, all the same. I canna’ trust it.”
“He let the bird go,” Rutledge silently reminded Hamish. “No, I don’t think he’d harm children. Although he might be persuaded to hide them.…”
As he passed the largest house, the one with the wing set back beside it, he heard a woman calling a man’s name from somewhere out of sight. And then, more clearly, the response.
“No, don’t bother me with that. Not now!”
The owner of the voice came around the corner of the house, carrying one end of a ladder and in his rough clothes looking more like a laborer than the man lugging the other end did. But his fair hair and fairer skin, flushed with heat and exertion, weren’t a working man’s. He shifted the ladder with dexterity and said as he lifted it to the gutters, “No, let me go first! It will save time!” and went smoothly up to the roof with the apparent ease of long practice.
The Wyatt home? Rutledge asked himself. It was the only one he’d seen so far with room enough to house a museum, even a tiny one.
Outside the milliner’s shop, a woman came hurrying through the door to hand a small box to a younger woman pushing a pram. The two of them looked up at Rutledge as he passed, then began speaking again in lowered voices. The news of his arrival was already moving quickly along the village grapevine. As interesting gossip always did, it seemed to fly on the very wind.
Then why, in God’s name, had there been no gossip about the Mowbray children?
Even Hamish had no answer to give to that.
He retrieve
d his car from the inn and was halfway out of Charlbury when he saw the constable coming toward him on foot, a sturdy, youngish man with red hair, the stiff collar of his uniform unbuttoned in the heat.
Pulling over to the side of the road, Rutledge waited for him, and the man came up to the motorcar with an arrogance to match his stride.,
“Something you’re wanting, sir?” he asked, his eyes sweeping over Rutledge in what was close to incivility. Hamish growled under his breath, describing the man and his ancestry in Highland terms.
“Inspector Rutledge, from London. I’ve been looking for you, Truit,” he replied, and the constable’s eyes narrowed, but there was no other change in his manner. “I’ve been scouting the ground between here and Singleton Magna, looking for any information that’s still to be found.”
“It’s not very much,” Truit answered. “As far as I can find out, the Mowbray woman never got this far. Nor did we see any sign of the accused, Mr. Mowbray. He wouldn’t have come this far either, would he? A long hot walk, not for the likes of small children, and he’d know that. Besides, we haven’t had many strangers in Charlbury, not this summer. And I haven’t found any connection between Mowbray and any of our local people. I asked at every house, to be certain, though I knew from the start it wasn’t very likely.”
A policeman seldom finds what he’s already convinced can’t be found, Rutledge thought.
It was one of the faults of the profession, an ease of making up the mind when the most obvious facts seemed to point in one direction. And sometimes in the general run of crimes, where the facts pointed turned out to be right. But where there was murder, there was often a complexity of personalities and secrets that could take an investigation in any direction—or ten directions at once. If he wasn’t prepared to follow the most unlikely possibilities as well as the most likely, a policeman ran the risk of committing an injustice.
“The family might have been offered a ride. On a dray or a cart. In a car.”
“As to that, if they were taken up by a vehicle, it won’t have been a local one,” the constable said pedantically, as if explaining matters to a man of limited intelligence, “which tells me they’d be far beyond Charlbury by now. What would persuade them to stop here, when they could be miles away with a farmer who came from anywhere ’twixt here and the Somerset border?”
“Even so, he didn’t have wings! How did he reach Somerset without passing through Charlbury? Or Stoke Newton? This farmer of yours? He couldn’t drive his wagon through one of these villages without being seen by someone.”
“A number of carts and a wagon came through Charlbury,” Truit admitted. “None of them with any passengers! I asked around about that. And no one in my town offered a lift to someone coming from Singleton Magna.”
“Then why haven’t we found the other bodies?” Rutledge asked, not intending any reflection on the constable’s efforts, his mind instead on what the carts and wagon might have carried, and whether three people, two of them children, might have hidden themselves behind or under the cargo. But Truit chose to take the remark as a distinct challenge.
A deep flush spread up the man’s face. “That’s a matter you’ll have to take up with Inspector Hildebrand, sir. It’s not my place to answer for him!”
Washing your own hands, are you? Rutledge thought, but said only, “You’re right, of course,” and left it at that
But as he drove on, he and Hamish entered into a lengthy discussion of Constable Truit’s abilities and how he did his job. Hamish had taken a strong dislike to the constable and made no bones about it.
A chain was no better than its weakest link. And in the chain of villages that blocked the most likely direction the Mowbrays had taken from the railway station at Singleton Magna, the other two constables had been brisk, business-like, and courteous, men who knew their worth and took pride in exhibiting it.
Rutledge, thinking about it, decided he was coming back to Charlbury. Something at the back of his mind, unformed and more intuitive than rational, was aroused. Even Hamish was aware of it, though he said only, “It’s trouble you’re stirring up, but you’ll no’ be satisfied until you’ve sorted that one out!”
“He’s not dependable,” Rutledge pointed out. “He tells you whatever he thinks will make less work for him. He’s certain there’s no connection in Charlbury with the Mow-brays, and he may be right. But what if he’s wrong?”
“You no’ can walk away from it,” Hamish agreed. “Until somebody’s found the bairns!”
6
Hildebrand was out to lunch when Rutledge walked down to the police station, and rather than wait in the dark smothering confines of the place, he asked if he could speak to Mowbray instead.
The constable on duty, mindful of the tightrope he walked between this man from London and Inspector Hildebrand, dithered for two whole seconds, thinking it through. But Rutledge knew his man, and with the commanding presence of a former army officer standing in front of him and brooking no nonsense, the constable came down on the side of prudence and offered to take Rutledge back personally.
They found another constable in the cell with Mowbray, a cadaverously thin policeman who looked to be in the last stages of tuberculosis, but his voice was strong and deep as he stood up, speaking politely to Rutledge.
“He doesn’t have much to say, sir,” the watcher told him. “Just sits and stares. Or cries. That’s the worst, just tears rolling down his face and no sound.…”
“Go have yourself a smoke,” the first constable told him, and he left with a swift stride that spoke volumes. “We can only keep a man here two hours,” he went on to Rutledge in an undertone. “I’d have a riot on my hands, else. Not the best of assignments.”
“No.” Rutledge turned to Mowbray, and said in a firm, quiet voice, “Mr. Mowbray? It’s Inspector Rutledge, from London.”
The bowed head came up with a jerk, the face tight with fear. “You’ve found them, then?” he asked, voice a thread of sound. “Are—are they—dead?”
“No. But I’d like to ask you—it’s hard searching for someone you’ve never seen. I’d like you to describe the children for me. As you saw them on the railway platform.”
Mowbray shook his head. “No, please—I can’t—I can’t!
“It would help,” Rutledge told him gently, “if we knew. If they seemed healthy—lively—or were quiet, shy—”
Mowbray clapped his hands over his ears, swaying with pain and grief. “No—don’t! Oh, God, don’t!”
He was relentless, it had to be done. “They grow fast, children do. Would you say Mary was a good mother? That she’d cared for them properly? Were they well filled out? Or had she neglected them, let them grow thin and pale—”
The bowed head came up again, eyes suddenly fierce behind the tears. “She’s a good mother, always was, I’ll not hear anything against my Mary!”
“You must have found it easy to recognize her—but much harder to be sure of them. The little girl must have gone up like a weed—they do, sometimes—”
But perseverance got Rutledge nowhere. With a gasp Mowbray threw up his hands, as if warding off blows. “I tell you I couldn’t harm them—they were alive!—I loved them—I wanted to hold them—for God’s sake, I loved them!”
Rutledge reached out and touched the stooped shoulder, avoiding the eyes that looked into hell.
Like Hamish’s eyes, if he ever turned and found them watching him—
Rutledge spun on his heel and went out of the room, his breathing disordered, his mind in turmoil. The constable came after him, then stopped. “You got him to speak—it’s more than I’ve been able to do!”
“Not that it did any good! Are you coming?”
“I’ll have to wait for Hindley to return,” he said. “If you don’t mind—”
“No, I’ll find my own way!” Rutledge walked down the passage, his breath coming roughly in his throat. Outside on the steps of the building, he ran into Hildebrand.
“Y
ou look like you’ve seen your own ghost,” he said, staring at Rutledge. “What’s happened?”
I’ll not go back into that building! Not yet! Rutledge told himself and said aloud, “Nothing has happened. But I want to speak to you where we can’t be overheard. Shall we walk down to the railway station?”
Grumbling about the heat, Hildebrand followed him as he strode off. “I’ve been out in the sun most of the morning,” he was saying. “I’ll be dead of sunstroke before we find those bodies. And half my men with me!”
“That’s what I want to speak to you about. I don’t think Mowbray saw either his wife or his children at the railway station—”
“Don’t be daft, man!” Hildebrand said harshly, stopping to stare at Rutledge. “Of course he did! That’s what started the poor sod’s rampage!”
“Listen to me, damn it! I think he believed he saw his wife—or someone who strongly resembled her. And children of the ages he remembered. They reminded him so forcibly of his family that he was thrown into emotional confusion. Just then the train pulled out, which meant he couldn’t confront the woman and sort it all out. By the time he’d made his way back to Singleton Magna again, he was convinced he had to be right, that she and the children had somehow survived. But when he couldn’t find any trace of them here, the longer he searched the more certain he was that there must be a conspiracy afoot to conceal them. And the angrier and the more determined he became—”
Hildebrand watched him with disbelief. He was in no mood for folly—
“The sun’s turned your wits, man! He knew his wife, he came after her, he killed her, and that’s why we’re searching high and low for those children—”
“Mowbray may well have killed the woman,” Rutledge agreed, holding on to his own temper. “But every time we ask anyone about the missing woman or the missing children, we begin by telling them that we’re searching for the Mowbrays. And no one has seen them! If we had another name to put to the woman—the children—even the man—we might hear a different answer.”
“The man’s name? You’re saying that if he believed he married her, and we knew what name she’d taken, we could set things straight by saying ‘Here, we’re looking for the Duchess of Marlborough, this is her photograph, and these are her children,’ and some bored footman might say, ‘She’s gone to visit her cousin over in Lyme Regis, we don’t expect her back for days!’ And we find ourselves telling him that she’s not in Lyme Regis, she’s dead.”
