Search the Dark

by Charles Todd

  “She’s afraid,” he said softly, “because there is something she knows and canna’ tell. Hildebrand would no’ stand for this nonsense—”

  Was it that, Rutledge wondered, or the fact that she was sure she could reach him—and so was using him to protect herself by putting on him the onus of betraying her? Using him as Elizabeth Napier was using Simon Wyatt?

  “Aye. A woman does na’ think the way a man does,” Hamish told him.

  But Rutledge had made up his mind.

  He took the hand she held out and shook it briefly. “Agreed,” he said.

  And watched the play of expressions across her face. Surprise. A certain wariness. Relief. At the last, a flare of fear.

  As if she realized, suddenly and far too late, that perhaps she had misjudged him.…

  Rutledge walked back to the gate with Aurore Wyatt without speaking. She had slipped into a silence all her own, as if she had forgotten the man beside her. Her face was withdrawn, her eyes shuttered behind the long lashes.

  They could hear Elizabeth Napier’s voice, and Simon’s. Not the words so much as the comfortable rise and fall of a conversation between two people who had much in common. Long years of understanding, respect—love …

  Aurore said, tilting her head to listen, “I knew when Margaret Tarlton came here to apply for the position of assistant that, one way or another, she would bring that woman back into our lives. I was right. Only I didn’t see the way of it. Just that it would happen.”

  “He married you. That’s what matters.” As Jean would never marry him. It was finished. But then, as Hamish was busy reminding him, Rutledge himself had been the last to let go in that relationship. Why should Elizabeth Napier be any different? If the war years had changed him so much, taking Jean from him, they had also cost Elizabeth Napier Simon Wyatt. Simon too had changed.…

  “Yes, he married me. But I ask myself sometimes, was it the war? Was he sorry for me and what had happened to me? Was it loneliness, or a man’s need for a woman? Or was it truly love? I thought I knew. Then. Now I am not as certain as I once was.” She put her hand on the gate, ready to open it and go inside. “Please. Find that woman. Find her soon. For Simon’s sake!”

  And she left him standing there, watching her graceful stride as she went up the walk, ignoring the voices that seemed to ignore her so completely.

  13

  There was one other stop Rutledge wished to make in Charlbury. The inn. It was the pulse of village life, oftentimes the place where gossip and conjecture made their first rounds. The question was, would Denton tell him what was being said, or as the outsider would he be shut out of knowledge any villager might be given for the asking?

  Nodding to Benson, who was still polishing the boot as if he had nothing better to fill his time, Rutledge stepped into the Wyatt Arms. He saw that Denton’s nephew, Shaw, was sitting at a table alone, an empty pint glass in front of him, idly tracing one finger through the rings left by other pints. He looked up, recognized Rutledge, and said, “Why in God’s name couldn’t you have told me that Margaret Tarlton was missing! Damn it, I had to hear it from that Prescott bitch!” The words were slurred, but behind them was deep anger.

  “I didn’t know, when I was here yesterday, that she was missing.”

  “Then you’re a damned poor policeman! God, it’s been over a week!”

  “How did you come to know her?” Rutledge pulled out the empty chair across from him and looked around. There was no one else in the shadows of the small room, but he could hear voices from the bar, down the passage.

  “Not from Charlbury, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Then where? London?”

  “That’s right,” he answered grudgingly, as if the alcohol in him wanted to talk and the reticence of the man tried to hold on to silence. “I was on a troop train, on my way to the coast. She was one of those women offering hot tea and sandwiches as we came through. I didn’t even know her name! Just that she had the loveliest face I’d ever seen.” He frowned. “I took it to Egypt with me. I thought, if I die, at least I’ve seen her—touched her hand. And if I live, I’ll find her. Call it a promise to myself.…” A bargain with fate.

  Rutledge looked away. How well he knew what bargains might be made with fate. To keep a man alive one day longer, one battle longer …

  “Or come between a man and wanting to die,” Hamish reminded him.

  “Two years later I was back in London. Sooner than I’d expected. Shipped like a sausage, strapped to a stretcher, out of my head most of the time. A fever. No one, least of all the doctors, could decide what it was or how best to treat it. They sent me home to die. But I was one of the lucky ones, it burned itself out. The first day they let me stand on my feet, all I could think of was getting back to that railway station, finding her somehow. A fool’s dream, that!”

  “She must have spoken to a hundred men on each train. It’s not very likely she’d remember one of them in particular.”

  “No, you’ve got it wrong! There was a benefit performance at one of the theaters, and I didn’t want to go, but a friend wouldn’t take no for an answer—and there she was, sitting in one of the boxes across from me! I couldn’t tell you, if my life was on the line, what the program was about. There was a woman singing, Italian arias or something. I thought she’d never finish! At the interval I managed to speak to Margaret. It took some doing to separate her from her party, but I wasn’t about to lose her a second time!” There was an echo of triumph in his voice and a lift to his shoulders, as if the memory were still alive in his mind.

  Rutledge waited. Silence was sometimes more effective than a question.

  “I’d talked to her that day about Canada—how it was out there. I don’t know why—it seemed to catch her imagination, and I was afraid she’d move on to the next window if I stopped. I told her about the place where a group of us were planting apple orchards on the slopes facing south and how we’d built the long irrigation lines, wooden troughs, but they worked. How the high peaks were heavy with snow, even into May. Whatever came into my head, to keep that look on her face! The first thing she said to me at the theater was ‘Hallo, you’re the man who lives with grizzly bears and elk!’ “

  He stopped, frowned at his empty glass. “I’ve lost count,” he said. “I’ve muddled the rings too. Can’t depend on ’em anymore.” Looking up, he said, “You aren’t drinking. Why not?”

  “I’m on duty,” Rutledge reminded him. “What happened after the theater?”

  “I escorted her everywhere she’d let me. Riding one day, tennis another, dinner—any excuse to be with her. I was falling in love with her. What I didn’t know, couldn’t judge, was whether she cared for me. Or if I was just an available man when she needed a presentable escort, someone with both legs and two arms, who could dance with her. The doctors raised hell, they said the pace I was setting was getting in the way of my recovery. I didn’t care. The longer I was in England, the happier I was!”

  Denton came in. “I heard voices,” he said, looking from Shaw’s strained face to Rutledge’s. “Thought it might be custom.”

  “No, it’s all right, Uncle Jack.”

  Denton nodded and left. After a moment, Shaw said, “I’d have married her. But she wasn’t interested in living in a wilderness, no matter how beautiful or exotic it might be. She’d grown up in India. ‘I don’t want to be exiled again,’ she said. “Not if I can help it!’ ” He managed, somehow, to capture the light tones of a woman’s voice. And a subtle hint of selfishness, as if Margaret Tarlton didn’t mind how she might have hurt him.

  It was the first real glimpse Rutledge had had of the missing woman.

  “I asked her—begged her—to tell me if there was another man, and she shook her head and kissed me and said I was being silly. But there was. I could see his eyes following her. I could see the look on his face when he came into a room and she was there. God, he was a mirror of what I was feeling! And I was stupid enough to confront
her with it. The day before I was to sail. She wouldn’t see me afterward, wouldn’t answer my calls or my letters. It was—that was the last time. When I was sent home again, half my guts cut away, I knew it was finished. How could I go back to her—how could I even tell her I was alive?”

  Hamish had stirred, already sure of the answer.

  More sure than Rutledge was. “Who was the other man?”

  Shaw grimaced, as if the tension of the last ten minutes had brought back the pain in his body. His arms were lightly clasped around his middle, to hold it in. He seemed completely sober now, eyes dark circled and heavy with memory, a man with only a past and no future.

  “Thomas Napier. If he hadn’t had a daughter a year older than she was, I think he’d have married her himself. He wanted her badly enough! It was there, raw and hot, sometimes, when I’d bring her home and we were laughing, clinging to each other as we made our way up the steps, more tipsy with excitement than wine, but how could he know? When I saw her getting out of the Wyatts’ motorcar last week, I thought for one horrible instant she’d come looking for me! Out of misplaced pity or duty. But Mrs. Prescott soon put an end to that rash hope. She mentioned to Denton that it was the museum that had brought Margaret. Something about coming here as Simon’s assistant. Besides, there was no way she could have known I was here. Very few people do!”

  “Did you speak to her, before she left Charlbury?”

  “God, no! When I can barely stand straight, even now, without all the fires of hell lit in my belly? I’ve got some pride left, damn it! She wouldn’t have me before. What could I say that might have changed her mind now?”

  “She wasn’t married to Napier, for one thing.”

  “No.” Shaw looked at the dark ceiling, where the beams wore a collection of polished horse buttons. Studying them as if they were more important than anything he was thinking or feeling. A bitter concentration.

  “There’s the other side of it as well—she was considering moving here, leaving the Napier household for another position.”

  Shaw laughed, a rough, hollow sound. “She’d have to, wouldn’t she, if she was planning to marry him? Margaret has been Elizabeth’s secretary for years. Not Napier’s social equal, that. But if she were here, under Simon’s wing, she’d be safe enough from gossip. People wouldn’t be so fast to jump to ugly conclusions. That’s the sort of thing Margaret would think of. She must have known very well how to handle him. It was Elizabeth who stood in the way.”

  His mind occupied on his way out of Charlbury, Rutledge almost missed the woman standing by the road clearly hoping to catch his eye.

  She was wearing a faded housedress, the blues nearly gray now, and her hair was pinned back stringendy, as if it were being punished for trying to curl in the dampness. Was she one of the women he’d passed on the street? He couldn’t be sure. She’d have dressed differendy, going to market.

  Rutledge pulled over and said, “Were you looking for me?”

  “Aye! You’re the policeman from London, they say!”

  “Inspector Rutledge. Yes.” Behind her, in the doorway, he could see three small children peering out with large, sober eyes. Whatever it was their mother wanted, they’d been told to stay out of the way and make no noise. Or the policeman would get them? It was a threat used often enough in some quarters of London, to keep children quiet. “Be’ave now, or I’ll fetch the copper on yer!”

  The woman nodded, then hesitated, as if reluctant to give her name. But they were just outside her house, with paint peeling around the windows and a look of shabbiness about the roof where it needed rethatching. He could find her again, easily. She said, “Hazel Dixon. I heard tell you was looking for information about that woman guest at the Wyatts’. How she left Charlbury on the fifteenth.”

  Hamish stirred, and Rutledge tried to keep his own expression bland. “That’s right.” Let her tell it in her own way, or she might change her mind.…

  Suddenly there was a hot intensity in the pale blue eyes watching him. “It was her. Mrs. Wyatt. I saw the car. Going on toward noon, it was, two days after that Miss Tarlton came here. I heard the motor and looked out my window, and I saw it passing, in the direction of the crossroads and Singleton Magna.”

  “Could you see the driver?” he asked. She would have been on the far side of the car, as he was now.

  “Well, it was her, wasn’t it? She’s the one drives the car! Mr. Wyatt, he don’t care to drive himself, he’s used to having people at his beck and call. I’ve seen her, with a scarf blowing out like some banner announcing her! And the men too, turning to look, wanting in their eyes. It’s indecent, lustful! Most of ’em, including my Bill, know what she’s like. They was in France and those women had no men of their own, I know what went on! My Bill didn’t learn to—”

  She stopped, this time with a rising flush. She hadn’t meant to say such things, she’d allowed herself to be led on by his way of listening.

  There were shadows, moving a little, behind the children, and Rutledge realized that other women—at least two? he thought, possibly three—were in the dimly lit front room, moral support for her confession but not intended to hear whatever it was that Bill had—or had not—been taught by any Frenchwomen he’d encountered abroad.

  It was a common enough anxiety of wives in wartime. That men far from home, fighting a war against loneliness and fear as well as the enemy, might have found comfort of a sort in the local women. And picked up disease or new tastes. The music halls were filled with jokes and songs about the French.

  “It was her!” she repeated fiercely. “I’d swear to it!”

  “Was there anyone in the motorcar with her?”

  Mrs. Dixon bit her lip. “I saw something rosy—with lavender in it! Must have been that Miss Tarlton. Well, it stands to reason! Who else would have been in that car with Mrs. Wyatt!”

  But he thought she might be lying now. Had she seen Margaret Tarlton at the Wyatt gate and known what she was wearing? Or was she so determined to indict Aurore Wyatt that she was piecing together bits of information garnered from the other women listening and invisible inside her house? “What kind of hat was Miss Tarlton wearing?”

  Mrs. Dixon stared at him. Then she said, too quickly, “The way that Mrs. Wyatt drives her husband’s motorcar, you’d be a fool to wear a hat! It’d be blown off your head before you was out of Charlbury!”

  And it was true, as Hamish was busy pointing out, that Aurore herself hadn’t been wearing a hat the first time Rutledge had seen her. But he couldn’t recall if there had been one in the seat beside her.…

  “They say that that Miss Tarlton’s missing. What do they think’s become of her?” Mrs. Dixon asked, unable to stop herself. Curiosity was driving her now. “That man in Singleton Magna, he’s already killed his wife—”

  “We want to locate Miss Tarlton because she arrived on the same train with Mowbray. She might have seen him, or his family.”

  “They say he killed his children!” She shuddered, caught up in her own fears, glancing over her shoulder uneasily. “I’ve kept mine close, I can tell you, since I heard of that.”

  “I don’t believe you have anything to fear from him now. He’s in custody.”

  She turned to go. “I saw that Miss Tarlton the day she came. I was along to my sister’s house. If I’d stolen another woman’s husband, like some I know, I’d not want such a pretty face at my breakfast table! Tempting fate all over again, that’s what it is. And Mr. Simon already regretting his choice!”

  “Regretting? What do you mean?” It was sharper than he’d intended.

  But Hazel Dixon wouldn’t be drawn into that topic. “I’ve said enough. I saw the car, and Mrs. Wyatt in it! And that other woman. If that’s any good to you, I’m glad!”

  Rutledge thought as he let off the brake that Elizabeth Napier’s presence in Charlbury was bearing its bitter fruit. In a village already rife with speculation about Simon’s wife, rumor had spread from house to house, and Hazel Dix
on, encouraged and supported by her friends, was now casting the second stone at Aurore Wyatt. She wouldn’t have spoken out if the village had maintained its wall of silence, an undivided front. Elizabeth Napier, breaking the seal by openly showing her anxiety over Margaret Tarlton’s disappearance and allowing the bloody events of the Mowbray murder to find their way—even if topsy-turvy—into the story, had already shadowed Simon’s mind with doubt. And as if by osmosis, the Hazel Dixons of Charlbury had picked up the strong scent of distrust and were emboldened to strike out.

  He was never sure how such things actually worked in a village. But work they did.

  Aurore had been absolutely right. Seeing her in his company, even for so brief a time, had fed the hungry maws of gossip.

  Hamish, from his accustomed place deep in Rutledge’s mind, asked, “Are you sae certain, then, it’s gossip and no’ the truth?”

  Constable Truit still hadn’t returned from the search party he’d been summoned to join. Tired of waiting for him, Rutledge left Charlbury and halfway back to Singleton Magna made up his mind.

  It began to rain long before he reached London, and the streets were shining with wet, the trees drooping heavily, when he found the house in Chelsea that he was looking for.

  It was small, with a narrow porch, silk drapes crossing the windows, and on the steps pots of geraniums in a shade that complemented the brick. Even in the dull light it possessed a decided charm. At the same time it wasn’t a house that a young woman on her own could afford. Unless there was money in the family to draw on.

  The maid who answered the door was small and dark, with Welsh ancestry in her round face. But her voice was pure London. Rutledge told her who he was. She led him into a small parlor attractively decorated with rosewood furnishings, a French carpet, and pre-Raphaelite prints on the walls. He recognized several of them. Either Margaret Tarlton liked the romantic aura they represented, or she knew its value as a setting. And yet, oddly, he hadn’t imagined her as a romantic. Was Thomas Napier? Sometimes men of power and prestige had buried in them a streak of the quixotic when it came to their preferences in women.