Search the Dark

by Charles Todd

“This Mrs. Mowbray was killed—murdered, you mean?” she asked, swiftly moving to the heart of the problem. “How dreadful! And they have caught this man? Her husband?”

  “We have her husband in custody. It’s the children we’re still trying to locate. Any help Miss Tarlton might give us will be greatly appreciated.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean—trying to locate?”

  “We—aren’t sure what’s become of them.”

  Elizabeth Napier shivered. After a moment she said, “I’ve worked in London with the poor. I’ve seen men who have lost all hope, who have killed their families rather than watch them starve. But this is different, isn’t it? He wasn’t trying to spare them.”

  “We have no reason to believe that’s the case,” he answered. “But Miss Tarlton might be able to throw some light on the matter.”

  “Margaret isn’t here,” she said reluctantly. “I was expecting her a week ago, but apparently she went back to London instead.”

  “You’ve spoken with her on the telephone?”

  “No, she hasn’t called or written. But she was expecting to take up a new position; she may not have had the time. Let me give you her London address—”

  “She’s not there,” he said. “We’ve spoken with her maid. She says Miss Napier was to come directly here from Charlbury.”

  “But she hasn’t—”

  Elizabeth Napier stopped, looking at him in alarm, the serviette drawn through her fingers like a handkerchief, over and over again. He couldn’t quite read her fear, but it was there. “I don’t understand!” she said finally. “Please!”

  He took the folded sheet of paper from his notebook and handed it to her. She looked down at the photograph on it, her brows puckered as if she had trouble seeing it. “What’s this?” she asked, perplexed by the shift in direction.

  “A photograph of Mrs. Mowbray and her children. Does Miss Tarlton bear any resemblance at all to the woman you see there?” Hamish, mindful of the effort Rutledge was making to keep his voice free of any inflections that might lead an answer, began to stir.

  “To this woman? No, certainly not!”

  Then she hesitated, staring intently at the face. “Well, they’re both tall and fair—I suppose that’s a similarity—but it isn’t strong. It’s more in something—I don’t know, something about their form, I think. The long bones, the fine hair, the—the delicacy, perhaps?”

  “Do you have a photograph of Miss Tarlton?”

  “A photograph? Why should—no, of course, there’s one in the study. When my father had a house party last spring, she helped me entertain. It was a political weekend, and they’re always the worst, the wives are bored to tears or scratching each other’s eyes out in the politest way whenever the men aren’t around. Someone had a camera. If you’ll excuse me—”

  He could feel the tension in his body now. That odd sixth sense had already leapt ahead, his thoughts tangled with the possibilities opening before him. The warning to let sleeping dogs lie passed through his mind as well.

  “Then what about the children?” Hamish was saying, voice low, urgent.

  “If it wasn’t his wife that Mowbray killed, there won’t be any children.”

  “But there were children at the railway station. You have na’ forgotten.”

  “No. But if the Tarlton woman was visiting the Wyatts in Charlbury, she might have been in the right place at the wrong time. Mowbray might have believed he’d found his missing wife.” It was the conviction that had brought Rutledge to Sherborne. The need to settle the matter of Margaret Tarlton’s whereabouts. Such thin evidence …

  Miss Napier returned, a silver-framed photograph in her hand. Instead of giving it to Rutledge she walked to the door and opened it, stepping out into the last of the daylight to compare the photograph and the printed flyer Hildebrand had had made up.

  After a moment she shook her head, and Rutledge came to take the frame from her, trying to read her expression. He saw only confusion.

  He too stood in the light, looking down at several women shown standing by the elegant hearth in the hall, as if posed by someone oblivious to the interplay of relationships among them. There was a stiffness that betrayed their antagonism even while their expressions portrayed polite enjoyment. But second from the left was a young woman with long bones and fair hair, who looked at the camera in much the same way—and yet not the same way—as Mary Sandra Mowbray had done in 1916. An oddly ephemeral thing …

  Hamish saw the truth as quickly as Rutledge did.

  Rutledge told himself, It isn’t real. This resemblance between the two women. You see it only when you look for it—there’s nothing to trigger it unless you’re consciously expecting to find it. Or hoping to see it?

  “It isn’t a likeness. Is it?” Elizabeth Napier asked. “I can’t tell—”

  “It isn’t a likeness,” he answered finally, “but there’s something very—uncanny—about the similarity.” He had unwittingly used the same word Hamish was repeating in his mind. “At a guess, I’d say that if the two women stood side by side, you wouldn’t notice it. There’s the voice, of course, and how each carries herself. Her expression—her nature. They’re not from the same social background. They’ve lived quite different lives. These qualities would strike you first”

  “I don’t follow you—”

  He said carefully, looking for flaws himself, “If you saw either woman walking down Bond Street some distance ahead, you might say to yourself, ‘I think that’s Margaret Tarlton.’ If you saw either woman in the slums or along a country road, you might pass her by without a glance, because you wouldn’t expect to encounter Miss Tarlton there.”

  “Except for their clothing. How they were dressed.”

  “But Mowbray, expecting to find his wife in Singleton Magna, might not know her wardrobe now, in this new life he’d already accused her in his own mind of living. He wouldn’t look for differences, he’d look for similarities.” Like the color pink … if that was a woman’s favorite color.

  “I begin to see. But go on.” Her face had lost some of its color.

  “This man survived the war to come back to an empty life. Out of work, no home, no family to support him, nothing safe or familiar. He desperately wants this woman to be his wife, and by the time he does find her, he can’t feel anything but anger when she denies everything. He tries to make her stop lying to him—and, in the end, kills her.” There were any number of holes in this piece of speculation. He found himself trying not to think about them.

  Hamish was asking vehemently how he had overlooked the one salient fact that would negate all his fine theories.

  But Rutledge made himself concentrate on Elizabeth Napier’s reaction.

  “It’s still guesswork,” he said, forced to honesty. “I can’t prove any of it.”

  She was looking up at his face, dawning horror on hers as she assimilated the images in her mind. “You aren’t—you aren’t trying to say—that the dead woman in Singleton Magna might possibly be Margaret Tarlton! That it explains why she isn’t here—or in London. No, I refuse to believe it!”

  Yet he could tell that the conviction was growing stronger with every moment. She was an intelligent woman—

  Still, she fought against it. Elizabeth stood by Rutledge’s side, her hand on his arm, her eyes scanning the two faces, one in an ornate frame, the other a grainy reproduction on cheap paper. Whatever her inner struggle, whatever the deeper emotion that lay behind her fear of the truth, she couldn’t ignore the evidence before her.

  Then she spoke, with a heaviness that made him ashamed of the necessity of bringing her into this murder. There were tears standing in her eyes, and her fragility touched him deeply. “If it’s true—if that poor woman is Margaret—then it’s all my fault. I sent her there—I thought I was being quite clever. I thought it was incredibly simple and that no one would ever suspect—how very stupid of me!” She fiercely blotted her eyes with her serviette, then looked down at it in surpr
ise, as if she’d forgotten her dinner—as if it belonged to a far distant and far different past.

  Bracing her shoulders, she said, “It won’t do to cry. I’m always the first to say that! ‘Don’t cry!’ I’ve told those pathetic women in the slums. ‘It doesn’t solve anything!’ But it relieves the pain somehow, doesn’t it?”

  Carefully folding the flyer, she handed it back to Rutledge along with the photograph in its silver frame. “You’ll need that, I think. And you’d better come in,” she said. “Have you dined? No? That’s good, I have need of company just now. We’ll eat what we can of dinner. Then I’ll change and go with you to Singleton Magna. I want to see this woman—or has she been buried?”

  “No, she hasn’t been buried. But she isn’t—her face was badly beaten. I don’t know that you could, er, hope to recognize her.”

  Her own face went white, and he thought for a moment she might faint. But she said resolutely, “Don’t tell me before I’ve eaten something! Come with me!”

  Rutledge followed her back into the hall and down the passage to a room with an arched ceiling and a table down the middle that would comfortably seat twenty or more. At the far end, in isolated splendor, a place had been set for one. She walked to it, picked up the small silver bell by her plate, and rang it sharply. When the maid came to answer her summons, she said, “Another place for the inspector, please. Tell Cook I’ll have a fresh bowl of soup as well.” She waited until the maid had taken the first course back through the heavy door to the kitchens and then indicated the chair on her right. Rutledge accepted it.

  Elizabeth Napier took a deep shuddering breath, closed her eyes for an instant, shutting out what she had, soon, to face, then sipped her wine as if it offered the strength she didn’t possess.

  “Are you quite sure this—this woman—whoever she may turn out to be—was killed by this man, Mowbray? Is that proved beyond a doubt?”

  “No. Not beyond any doubt. But he publicly threatened his wife. And then we found the … her. There’s no one else we have any reason to suspect. At any rate, he’s presently under arrest.”

  “Then,” she said, “that relieves my mind—and my conscience.”

  “In what way?” he asked, looking directly at her. But she was unfolding her serviette and laying it neatly across her lap. He couldn’t see—or read—her eyes.

  She shook her head.

  He said, “If there’s information you might have—if the woman in Singleton Magna is Margaret Tarlton, not Mary Mowbray—”

  “No,” she replied vehemently. “I won’t make accusations and turn your policemen loose on an innocent person. That would be morally wrong!”

  “Then why did the thought even cross your mind?”

  The maid returned with a tray and two plates of a palegreen soup on it, the smell of lamb and white beans wafting to Rutledge, awakening his stomach if not his mind to enthusiasm. The sandwiches had been finished some time ago. She served her mistress and then the guest before filling his glass with wine. With a rustle of those starched skirts, she disappeared again into the kitchen.

  “I—Margaret wasn’t the kind of woman to have enemies. She worked for her living and knew the importance of being pleasant to everyone. If I had to stand before God in the next five minutes and answer to Him, I’d be hard-pressed to think of anyone who would deliberately want to harm her!” She picked up her spoon and made a pretense of using it.

  But Rutledge was good at the same game. “Perhaps not. But what if someone saw a way of getting to you—through Margaret? I offer this, you understand, as an hypothesis.”

  She lifted her eyes, startled and wary, to his. There was something moving in the blue depths, and he suddenly knew what it was: jealousy.

  “This was your suggestion, Inspector, not mine.”

  And it was the last he could get out of her on the subject.

  But he knew whom it was she accused. The name hung between them through the rest of the meal, like a miasma in the air, heavy and fraught with a mixture of strong emotions: Aurore Wyatt.

  For the first time since she’d come to greet him in the hall on his arrival, Rutledge couldn’t have sworn, with any certainty, whether this woman was telling the truth—or lying.

  9

  They drove in silence through the night toward Singleton Magna, with Rutledge at the wheel and Elizabeth Napier by his side, wrapped in a light woolen cloak against the chill that had come with darkness. Her small leather case lay in the boot. A wind blew out of the west, and his headlamps picked up scatterings of leaves and dust as they swirled across the road. Shadows loomed black and indeterminate along the way, like watchers in mourning.

  From time to time Hamish kept up a steady commentary on the issues in the case and the probability of Rutledge’s skills coping with them. But he ignored the voice in his ear and kept his attention on the wheel and the two shafts of brightness that marked his way.

  Once a fox’s eyes gleamed in the light, and another time they passed a man shuffling drunkenly along the verge, who stopped to stare openmouthed at the motorcar, as if it had arrived from the moon. Villages came and went, the windows of their houses casting golden squares of brightness across the road.

  Elizabeth Napier was neither good company nor bad. He could feel the intensity of her concentration, her mind moving from thought to thought as if her own problems outweighed any sense of courtesy or any need for human companionship before she faced the horror that lay ahead of her. He himself hadn’t seen the victim. In place her body might have told him a great deal. The coroner had already done what he could, found whatever there was to find. The children had been Rutledge’s priority, not the dead woman. Until now.

  Then, as the first houses of Singleton Magna came into view, Elizabeth Napier stirred and said, “What was she wearing? This woman?”

  He thought for a minute. “Pink. A floral print dress.”

  She turned to look at him. “Pink? Are you sure? It isn’t a color Margaret wears—wore—very often. She likes shades of blue or green.”

  “Will you mind waiting at the police station while I send for Inspector Hildebrand? It’s best if he makes the necessary arrangements.” He smiled at her. “The sooner this is finished, the easier it will be for you.”

  She turned to him in surprise. “I thought you were in charge of this murder investigation?”

  “I’m here to keep the peace between jurisdictions,” he said without irony, and added, “My priority has been the search for the children. So far I’ve had other questions on my mind.”

  “Didn’t you care about them?” she asked, curious.

  “Yes, of course,” he said testily, “but the problem has been where to look. Hildebrand has done everything humanly possible, with no results. I’ve tried to go in different directions. I’ve tried to ask myself, if they aren’t dead, why haven’t we found them? Did someone else see them at the railway station, or are they only part of Mowbray’s wretched delusions?”

  “Surely not? If he was so very angry, something set him off!”

  “Precisely. That’s an avenue I’ll pursue next.”

  “And has it been successful?” She was interested, listening. “This rather different approach to police work?”

  “I’ll know when you tell me who the victim is—or isn’t.”

  * * *

  It took a constable half an hour to locate Hildebrand and ask him to come down to the police station. Once there he stared at Elizabeth Napier as if she had no business in his office at this hour of the night, and he said as much to Rutledge, his eyes wary and cold.

  “Couldn’t this wait until the morning? It’s been a long day, and I’m tired.”

  “Miss Napier is Thomas Napier’s daughter,” Rutledge responded dryly. “I brought her here from Sherborne. It’s late, yes, but I felt you should speak with her as soon as possible. Miss Napier, this is Inspector Hildebrand.”

  Hildebrand looked sharply at her. “Speak to her about what? Get to the point, man
! Are you telling me she knows something about those children?”

  Rutledge said, “It seems she may be able to identify our victim.” He explained, and watched Hildebrand’s face change as the man listened.

  He didn’t answer Rutledge directly but was consideration itself as he turned to Elizabeth Napier. Even in the dark cloak that hung to her knees, she seemed very small and utterly feminine. Lost in this masculine world of violence and dark emotions, where the dusty file cabinets and stacks of papers concealed the secrets and deeds of humanity’s least fortunate. Outside the long windows, the shrubs dipped and swayed in the wind, like beggars imploring mercy.

  “I’m truly sorry you’ve been brought into this sordid affair, Miss Napier. And for no reason. Inspector Rutledge hadn’t seen fit to confide his intentions to me—or I might have informed him of a decision taken this same afternoon. Mrs. Mowbray was laid to rest shortly before six o’clock. There’s no body to show you. The matter is closed.”

  His eyes slid to Rutledge’s face, triumph in them. “In our minds, there was no question of identity—I discussed that issue thoroughly with my superiors and the rector at St. Paul’s Church. And Mrs. Mowbray had no family other than her children. There was no reason to postpone the—er—decent interment.”

  There was a wild fury rising in Rutledge’s throat, choking him. He wanted to take Hildebrand by the neck and throttle him.

  It had been a deliberate and cold-blooded decision on Hildebrand’s part, to make sure that his investigation wouldn’t be undermined by what he’d clearly seen as Rutledge’s interference.

  Satisfied to see the sudden stiffness in Rutledge’s face and the anger that surged, barely contained, just behind it, Hildebrand smiled tightly. “I took the liberty as well of consulting your superior in London. He was in full agreement.”

  Bowles. Of course the bloody man would agree!

  And the one person who might have verified the identity of the dead woman was standing here, puzzled by an interaction she couldn’t quite follow.

  Elizabeth looked from one to the other. “She’s been buried? But why? I must see her, I’ve come all this way!” She turned to Rutledge. “You’ve got to do something, Inspector!”