Search the Dark
Page 8
“No, I don’t suppose they do,” he answered, reminding himself that she was no different from any other witness he might question. And yet he’d met her first with no knowledge of her role—if there was any—in his investigation. It seemed to give her, somehow, an edge. As if she judged him, even as he judged her, because they had begun as equals.
She waited for him to go on. There was a stillness about her that struck him as she stood there, composed and quiet Even her eyes were still, absorbing him somehow. As if time were not an issue of concern to her. Or possibly to him either. It was a very strong impression and he found it distracting.
Most of the Frenchwomen he’d met spoke with self-possession and a natural sense of self-worth. Vivacity was to them a tool of conversation, half flirtatious, half a mannerism that reflected their view of life. This woman was different It was something deep inside, a well of stillness that seemed without end. But not, he thought, a well of serenity.…
Hamish said, apparently out of context, “She’s no’ a killer.”
She drew off her gardening gloves and pulled the smock over her head. “I’ve missed my tea, waiting for Simon. Will you have a coffee—or some wine—with me? There’s a table under the trees there. I’ll just find Edith.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve not quite learned to like tea. But I’m trying.”
He walked back to the french doors with her. The fragrance of lily of the valley came to him suddenly, and he realized that it was her perfume. It surprised him; the sweetness wasn’t what he’d have thought she might have chosen for herself. Something headier—or at least more provocative. And yet today in her plain gray dress with its buttoned belt and square white collar, she was anything but provocative. Quakerish, perhaps.
She called to Edith as she walked through the french doors, leaving him in the garden.
Hamish, unsettled in the back of his mind, reminded him he was a policeman on duty. And to keep his wits about him.
It was a timely reminder. Rutledge walked over to the small table and shook a butterfly off the nearest chair. He wondered what it would think of its gaudy brethren on display in a glass case inside this house. Served them right, for drawing attention to themselves?
Aurore Wyatt came back and took the chair opposite the one he’d moved. “Edith tells me you’ve already been to the museum. What do you think of it?”
“Unusual,” he replied dryly, after some thought.
Her laughter, husky and rich, was unexpected. “How very English of you,” she said. “The English are masters of understatement, are they not?” Then she added as if it mattered to her, “It’s become Simon’s life. I hope it is what he wants to do and not what he feels he ought to do.”
“In what sense?”
“The Wyatts have always gone into politics. For generations. It was expected—before the war, you understand—that he would stand for Parliament as well. From childhood he was prepared for nothing else. And by nature it suited him. Handsome, able, a genuinely charming man who commanded respect. He never speaks of it now. Only of this museum, about which he knows so little.” There was a wryness in her eyes. “But we are none of us the same after four years of war. And he married me, which was not very wise in a politician. An English wife would have been safer. More—comme il faut?”
He said nothing, but had a sudden mental picture of Aurore Wyatt among the male and female voters of a quiet Dorset constituency. The cat among the pigeons … “I understand his other grandfather was an explorer of sorts.”
“Yes, in the Pacific and Indian oceans. He left Simon his collections—I think, in the hope that he might display them and make his grandfather as famous as Darwin or Cook. Simon had said nothing of this to me in France. It wasn’t until I arrived in England that he seemed to remember anything at all about his grandfather’s boxes. They were stored in London, had been for ages. And suddenly he would not hear of anything but this museum.” She shrugged in that way that only Frenchwomen have, lifting her shoulders with her head to one side, as if denying any understanding of the matter. “That is why I wonder, sometimes, if he feels an obligation to satisfy one ancestor if not the other. If not Westminster, then this museum. It would be very sad, would it not?”
“What does Simon Wyatt himself want in life?”
“Ah!” Aurore answered ruefully. “If I knew that, I would be a very fortunate woman.”
Edith came out with a tray of glasses and a bottle of wine. “The coffee’s not done,” she said apologetically.
“Wine will do very well, for me,” Aurore said, and offered a glass to Rutledge before pouring her own. He accepted, and found the wine very good indeed, dry and perfect for a warm afternoon. She watched him savor it, her eyes observing without judging. “You were in the war, I think?”
“How do you know?”
She tilted her head and thought for a moment before answering him. “You speak French very well. And you know a good wine when you taste it.” But he knew that it wasn’t what she might have said, if she’d been honest.
“The war was neither wine nor language,” he said, more harshly than he intended. “It was a very hard four years. They are finally over.”
Somewhere Hamish echoed softly, “Over?”
“But not yet forgotten,” she said astutely, looking at the man’s face and eyes, and reading more there than he was comfortable having her see. “No, I understand. I also have seen too much pain and death. And my husband as well. I thought—there was a time when I thought he might not survive the war. I watched him, and I knew he was expecting to die. Which sometimes means that it will happen. Like so many of the young men marching off to war, he didn’t understand that he was mortal. He came to the fighting as if it were a game, there on the steps at Eton. And when he discovered it was not like this, it was too late. There was nothing to be done but fight and wait for death to come. And even death failed him. Sometimes I think the survivors feel guilty for having lived, when so many died.”
Thinking of Hamish, Rutledge looked away. It was too near for comfort.
She said, putting down her glass, “Is there anything that can be done?”
“No.” He wanted to offer her hope, and couldn’t. He had none to give. After a moment he realized that Hamish was trying to draw his attention to something—that her digression had led Rutledge away from what had brought him here. Out of purpose? Or because he had listened with some sense, some knowledge of the suffering she was talking about?
“Why do I tell you these things?” she asked, frowning. “I have not spoken of them to anyone, not even the nuns!”
“She’s no’ a woman to do anything by chance,” Hamish reminded him.
He brought the topic of conversation abruptly back to Miss Tarlton’s visit. “I’m under the impression that Mr. Wyatt offered Miss Tarlton a position. As assistant. Is that true?”
Aurore Wyatt looked away. Even in profile, the stillness about her was striking, as if her body were attuned to it in blood and bone. Yet there was a strength too, which seemed to mask a great, unspeakable pain. Part of that she had told him about—but not all. Not nearly all. He was sure of it.
“If you are asking if I approved, no. But not because of Miss Tarlton. She seems to be both respectable and capable, with a surprising knowledge of Asia. Her family had served in India for generations, as I understand it. As an assistant she would have been very useful to Simon. It was—my opinion—that Simon himself should have advertised. Instead he left the task to someone else.”
“I’m afraid I don’t see the problem. If she’s competent.”
Aurore turned to look at him, her fingers on the rim of her glass, her eyes a darker gray that he remembered. “My husband’s assistant will live here, in this house. Take meals with us. Share our lives. That will not be comfortable when I am strongly aware that this person does not approve of me.
He was surprised. “Why? Surely not because you’re French? She can’t know anything else about you in such a short time.”
After a moment he said, “They think you took advantage of Mr. Wyatt’s loneliness?”
She lifted her glass and drank, then set it down. “You didn’t know my husband before he left for France. Nor did I. But I’m told—very often I’m told!—that he was destined to be a famous cabinet member—a great prime minister—or God Himself, for all I know! They believe—his father’s friends and associates—that the change in him now is the result of his marriage. And so my doing. They blame me, because it is much easier than understanding why he prefers this ridiculous museum to what he was bred to do!”
“As long as Wyatt doesn’t blame you, what difference does it matter what other people think? Or say?”
“How like a man,” she said in gentle derision. “You do not live in a woman’s world, you don’t know the savagery there. It can be worse than the jungle—”
At that moment Simon Wyatt came storming through the french doors and out into the garden. “It’s my fault, he says! Idiot! I’d like very much to nail him to that wall with one of his own damned bolts!” Coming to the table, he pulled up the third chair. “What’s that? Wine! Good God, I hope you offered him gin or a scotch first!”
“Edith will bring you one, if you prefer it,” she told her husband. “But I think the inspector was leaving. I’ll see him to the door.”
Surprised, Rutledge finished his wine and set the glass on the table. “Thank you, Mrs. Wyatt.” He stood, offering his hand to Simon. “I hope the museum is a success,” he said.
Simon said, moodiness settling in on him like a cloak, “I don’t know that it will be. But the important thing is to try. It’s all I can do.” He shook Rutledge’s hand, and then Rutledge was following Aurore into the house.
At the front door she said, “I hope we’ve answered your questions.”
“There’s one other,” he told her reluctantly. “I’d like Miss Tarlton’s full name, and her direction if you have it.”
“Her first name is Margaret. And she lives somewhere in Chelsea. You’ll have to ask Simon for the street and number.”
“Thank you,” he replied. “Good-bye, Mrs. Wyatt.”
She nodded and watched him walk away.
The watching bothered him. It hadn’t been simple curiosity, nor the look of a woman intrigued by a new man in her sphere, only uneasiness.
But whether it was uneasiness for herself—or for Simon Wyatt—he couldn’t tell.
Margaret Tarlton. Of Chelsea, London.
He had a strong feeling that she wasn’t the woman he was searching for.
Rutledge placed a call to London as soon as he reached Singleton Magna. The reply came before he went down to his dinner.
Bowles said peremptorily, “What’s this Tarlton woman got to do with the Mowbrays?”
“She was on the same train. She got off at Singleton Magna that day. We want to know what she saw—if anything.”
“See to it you’re not stepping on any toes, man!”
“I’m care itself.”
Satisfied or not, Bowles became crisp and to the point. He said, “We sent a man around to find Miss Tarlton. Her maid says she went down to Singleton Magna last week and afterward was to go on to Sherborne. To the country house of a Thomas Napier. One of the political Napiers, Rutledge! He’s in London, but his daughter, Elizabeth Napier, is staying in the house presently. We haven’t been able to reach her”
“Never mind,” Rutledge said. “I’ll drive over there myself.” He jotted the names in his notebook and closed it. “Any information available on Miss Tarlton or this Miss Napier?”
“Nothing about Miss Tarlton, except that she comes from an Anglo-Indian family that settled in London around the turn of the century, after her father died. Mother’s dead as well now. Several aunts and cousins, I’m told. They live in Gloucestershire.” There was a pause. And then Bowles went on, “You might be interested in one discovery we’ve made about Miss Napier. She was engaged to be married to Simon Wyatt, who lives in Charlbury, not far from Singleton Magna. Her father’s his godfather, I’m told. In fact, it was Wyatt Miss Tarlton was going to visit, to apply for a position. She used to be Miss Napier’s secretary, from 1910 to last year. Lived in the Napiers’ London house.” The voice stopped again, then added with relish, “Small world, isn’t it?”
8
As Bowles hung up, Rutledge took out his watch and considered time and distance. It was still light. He could make it to Sherborne by a reasonable hour. If Margaret Tarlton was there, it would save time to interview her tonight. If he telephoned, she might put him off. Or … he refused to consider the alternative, that he might not find her at the Napiers’.
He found he didn’t want to go back to the Wyatts’ house. If Margaret Tarlton was in Sherborne, he had no other business in Charlbury.
Finding Peg in the kitchen, he persuaded her to put up some sandwiches—“But the meat’s left from luncheon, sir!” she’d exclaimed. “And the dinner roast won’t be finished for another half hour. Can’t you wait for that?’—and set out in a westerly direction for the town of Sherborne.
It was famous for its abbey church, built of golden stone like soft butter, and for the school for boys that had had a reputation for their athletes when he’d been at Oxford. Three former Sherborne scholars had stood between him and a chance at a Blue.
The Napier house was harder to find than he’d expected, set well back from the main road on an unmarked lane that wended its way first this direction and then that, before making up its mind to connect with the gates and the drive up to the house. He could see it ahead, after he’d made the turn.
It was built of the same lovely stone as the abbey and looked to be nearly as old, with oriel windows and pointed arches. The porch was a handsome affair of niches, statues, and a stone balustrade on two sides. He thought this might once have been a small manor belonging to the abbey. Someone had added a wing in the same style, probably a hundred years ago. He could just see the roof of it on the south front. As a gentleman’s country house, it was still rather small, but more than made up for that in its architectural quality. Thomas Napier’s forebears had possessed both the taste and good sense not to meddle with the fabric. And possibly a thin purse? Often that determined how many changes were made as the family’s fortunes rose.
A dark-haired maid in stiff black with an apron so starched it gave the impression it would break before it bent opened the door to him and said, “Yes, sir?” as if he’d taken a wrong turn and had come to ask his way.
“Inspector Rutledge, from Scotland Yard,” he said. “I understand a Miss Tarlton is staying here, as a guest of Miss Napier’s. Is she in?”
“Miss Tarlton, sir? No, she’s not. But I’ll ask if Miss Napier’s receiving visitors. She’s just sat down to her dinner.” Her voice was doubtful.
“This won’t take long,” he said. “There are one or two questions she might be able to answer.”
“I’ll ask, sir. If you’d care to wait?” She opened the door for him to step into the hall, and he was pleased to see that it was as handsome as the porch, with an elegantly carved fireplace and a high, medieval ceiling. The fine portraits on the walls, placed to catch the eye, were of a succession of men impressively magisterial in bearing, who bore a strong family likeness. Four generations, staring down at him in formidable array.
Rutledge smiled, studying them. He recognized Thomas Napier himself—painted at the age of thirty, at a guess, when he took his seat in Parliament. “A bonny man” was Hamish’s verdict. Tall, distinguished, with a short Edwardian beard and dark hair brushed back from a high forehead. The hair had grayed at the temples now, but the firmness of the features hadn’t changed at all. Napier was still a striking man. Father, grandfather, and great-grandfather possessed the same strength.
The
re were no women here. And no sons of Thomas’s?
He heard the tap of heels on the stone passageway down which the maid had disappeared, and a slender dark-haired woman came through the door to greet him, her resemblance to the men on the walls very clearly marked. Except that in her the same strong, distinguished features had been softened by femininity. For she was very feminine, in appearance and manner.
“Inspector Rutledge?” she said with a graciousness she must have been far from feeling, for her serviette was still in her left hand and her dinner would be growing cold. “I understand you’re seeking Miss Tarlton. May I ask why?” Her voice had a girlish lightness, but she was all of thirty, if he was any judge.
“Miss Tarlton, I’m told, took a train on thirteen August from London to Singleton Magna, where she was met and taken to Charlbury by Mrs. Simon Wyatt. That was the same day, sadly, that a Mrs. Mowbray and her children traveled on the same train. As you may know, we believe Mrs. Mowbray was killed soon after that. We’re trying to locate anyone who might remember her or her children or the man believed to be traveling with her. We very much hope that Miss Tarlton can give us information we badly need.”
“No, I had heard nothing of this!” she said with a ring of surprise and truth in her voice. “You had better tell me more, I think.”
He did, starting from the beginning, when Mowbray had stood in the window of the train, looking out at the woman on the platform. But he stopped with the finding of the body in the field.
She listened intently, without comment, as if he had come to make a report to her father. Her blue eyes were on his, steady and intelligent, reflecting her concern. He was careful in his choice of words, cushioning the purpose of his visit as well as he could, but he quickly realized that Elizabeth Napier’s softness covered a very strong mind.