Search the Dark

by Charles Todd

  Mowbray frowned as if he couldn’t make out what it was, much less recognize it. But Rutledge was very patient. He could feel his feet and knees beginning to ache from the awkward position, but he kept himself steady and quiet, offering no distraction.

  After a time Mowbray reached out a work-hardened finger and touched the fabric of the dress as if testing to see if it was real. Lightly, not with interest so much as his inability to decide what it was. Then he saw that it had a shoulder, a sleeve—a collar—and knew.

  “I thought the bombs killed her. I wasn’t there when it happened. I was in France, Captain Banner was telling me I had to go to London. That something had happened. I think they took me by car to the port. It was raining and dark and I couldn’t feel anything—not even in the service in the chapel—”

  The dark bloodstains were visible now, black and stiff, a long soaked patch and the splatters, like black dots on the cloth with no attempt to place them becomingly, no sense of artistry, only marks of the intensity of the attack.

  “They wouldn’t open the casket and let me see her. They said I shouldn’t. Was this what she was wearing, then? Is—oh, God, it must be her blood!” He recoiled, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets as if to keep them away from the horror. “I wanted to hold her again and they wouldn’t let me—they didn’t tell me there was so much blood!”

  “Stop this,” Johnston cried, in nearly as much horror as Mowbray. “It’s inhumanly cruel, it’s—you’ve got to stop!”

  He came forward, pulling at Rutledge’s shoulders, forcing him backward. Hildebrand, swearing, was trying to tell the constable to get back into that room, damn it! Their voices echoed in the cramped space, loud and frightened.

  Rutledge threw off Johnston’s grip, kept his balance by a miracle of muscle and tendon, and protected the dress from the floor. Mowbray, looking in amazement from one to the other, as if startled into brief sanity, said quite clearly, “That’s not the pink she liked! Who gave that to her? Was it him? Was it the man with her?” He fingered it again, puzzled. “It’s the wrong color, I tell you—I knew when I saw her it was the wrong color!”

  For an instant Rutledge thought Mowbray was going to lunge at his throat and choke him, but it was the dress the hands were reaching for, groping, clutching, then holding it up, peering at it in the dimness, trying to see, and turning toward the door, toward Hildebrand, who’d arrested him.

  “It’s not hers, it’s a trick! She’s smaller than this, I know my own wife’s clothes! Why did the Hun want to kill her, she was never any harm to anybody, never an unkind word! I’ll make him pay, see if I don’t! I’ll kill every one of the bastards I can put hand to, I’ll grind him into the mud—pound until there’s no face left, and keep on pounding until you can’t tell brains from earth. I swear it to God, I do!”

  Hildebrand managed to get the dress out of his grip without ripping it, and Johnston tried to push him back to the cot, while Rutledge stood there and watched the spate of words he’d released.

  They hadn’t cleared Mowbray of murder. He may not have killed his wife, the dead woman might well be Margaret Tarlton, but he’d just described in passionate, intense detail the way the dead woman had died.

  It took time to settle him down again, but when the adrenaline finally subsided and he had some small grip again on his surroundings, he sank back into the same posture they’d found him in, rocking himself with the pain and the uncertainty, as if he had no recollection of the dress, the men around him, or tensions so taut that Hamish was warning Rutledge to go—go!

  But he stayed, walked back down the passage with Hildebrand and Johnston berating him in vicious terms, spilling out their own shock and horror in a tirade that left them both breathless and stumbling over each other’s words without noticing it.

  Rutledge stopped at the door to the front room, and turned.

  “It may have been unorthodox,” he said coldly. “It was most certainly necessary. There’s a possibility he saw Margaret Tarlton alive—and killed her thinking she was his wife.” You sacrifice the man for the woman—”Or even more likely, came across her dead body. Which may explain why he was so quick to believe the charges against him. Because Margaret Tarlton’s not in London, not in Gloucestershire, and not in Sherborne. You tell me where she is—and why we can’t find her. There’s a death certificate for Mrs. Mowbray, but it’s Miss Tarlton who’s missing! Can’t you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “You’re not going to turn my case into a circus, I’ll have you recalled first—”

  “How can I build any reasonable defense after what we just heard—”

  “That’s beside the point,” Rutledge said. “I’m not interested in solving your problems, I’m interested in what’s at the bottom of this murder. I’m interested in saving that poor devil if he’s innocent and convicting him if he’s guilty. I want to find answers to the riddle of who’s lying in that grave in your churchyard—and why she’s there. I believe I’m on the right track. If you won’t help me prove I’m right, then for God’s sake, show me where I’m wrong.”

  Johnston said, “You forced my client to all but convict himself out of his own mouth, before witnesses! I don’t see how that’s supposed to save him!”

  “Did you listen at all to what he was saying? That the dress in Hildebrand’s hands isn’t Mrs. Mowbray’s color or size! But Elizabeth Napier swears it’s Margaret Tarlton’s color and size. If we were wrong about his victim, can’t you see that we may also be wrong about his part in her death?’

  “Are you claiming that it’s my investigation that’s at fault? By God!”

  Rutledge could feel frustration battling his need for air and space. He said, “No. We’re all in this muddle together, Hildebrand. Only, if we’re wrong at the end of it, it will be Mowbray who pays for any blunders we’ve made, not you or I.”

  “And what do we do about those wretched children, then? Answer me that—pretend they never existed, and hope to hell we’re right?”

  The door behind Rutledge opened suddenly, bringing in a sweep of air because the outer door was also standing wide.

  A breathless sergeant, red-faced and muddy, said over Rutledge’s shoulder, “Inspector Hildebrand, sir? We’ve found a body, sir. I think—you’d best come and see it!”

  15

  Rutledge drove. Hildebrand sat in the seat beside him while Sergeant Wilkins occupied the space that Hamish considered his own.

  That made Rutledge edgy. If he turned around, would Hamish be there in the shadows beside the sergeant? Or had the sergeant unwittingly exorcized his fellow passenger?

  Hildebrand sensed his uneasiness and attacked. “Rather throws your theory into a cocked hat, doesn’t it?”

  “I won’t know until we get there.”

  Hildebrand laughed. “Yes, that’s it, slip off the hook. You’ve done bloody little else since you got here!” Then, remembering the presence of his sergeant, he added to the man, “Tell me again. Slowly this time!”

  The sergeant repeated the story he had spilled out in Hildebrand’s office, the words tumbling over each other in frantic haste. His voice was calmer now, as he ordered his thoughts and remembered details. “We’d broadened the search, like you’d said, and it was that young chap, Fenton, who saw the earth seemed different in the one place, sunken like, as if something had been buried and the soil had settled in around it. Well, he began to dig a bit, thinking it might be somebody’s old dog or the like, and instead he comes up with a muddy edge of cloth. Appeared to be part of a blanket at first, then we could see the corner, with a bit of lining. A coat, we thought. You could see the color, a dark blue. Then the white of bone. We stopped there and I came for you straightaway. Not wanting to disturb anything before you’d seen it like it was.”

  “Yes, well done! You’re sure it’s a coat, not a blanket? You’d wrap a dog in an old blanket!”

  “It’s not made the same as a blanket. And there’s no fur, sir. You’d find fur too, if it was a
n animal. That lasts.”

  “Yes, yes!” Hildebrand answered testily. “No sense of size—child, fully grown adult?” He was not a man who enjoyed suspense, he wanted his answers now, questions later. Sometimes in policework there were no answers at all. He’d been afraid this Mowbray investigation was heading in such a direction. But if they’d found either the children or that damned Tarlton woman, all to the good. He felt his spirits suddenly rising. If it was the Tarlton woman, it’d get Rutledge off his back, by God, and leave the Mowbray business out of it altogether!

  “No, sir, as I said, we didn’t want to disturb the ground more than needful.”

  A silence fell, and Rutledge found himself thinking, This is too far for Mowbray to have come. He’d have had to pass through two villages—someone would have seen him—and bone meant the body had been in the ground for some time. In the trenches, you learned how long it took a man to rot. …

  He was still tired from the session with Mowbray, feeling the intensity of emotion, the rawness of the man’s fears—his own reaction to them.

  “I hope to God the body has nothing to do with Mowbray!” he told himself.

  “Or with Charlbury …,” Hamish added softly, startling him.

  By the time they’d reached the makeshift grave, a small crowd had collected, standing just out of sight of the remains. They were mostly from Leigh Minster, according to the sergeant. The news hadn’t traveled to Stoke Newton or Charlbury yet.

  Rutledge pulled off the road, braked the car, and Hildebrand was out almost before it had stopped moving, wanting to be the first on the scene. The sergeant followed. Rutledge let them go. It was their jurisdiction, after all.

  The scrub ground had been pastureland at one time, allowed to go wild and overgrown now with weeds that reached to his knees, a few of them shrubby and tenacious, dragging at the fabric of his trousers like bony fingers. From where he was walking he could see a distant rooftop, a barn, he thought, very likely the last outpost of Leigh Minster. That was to his right, and on the left was a field, already cut. Ahead, a slight rise. He turned to look behind and saw that there was a burned-out chimney marking the ivy-grown foundations of a house across the road. A blackened stump, with rooks perched on the broken edges calling raucously.

  If you’d looked for a place to bury a body, this was ideal for the purpose, invisible unless someone came along the road. Which brought to mind the next question: Who had known such a place was here? Certainly not Mowbray, a stranger in Dorset!

  Rutledge walked through the knot of voyeurs who whispered behind their hands, trying to decide what was behind the sudden influx of policemen and what was attracting their attention just out of sight behind the weeds. The general opinion appeared to be the discovery of the missing children. He heard Mowbray’s name several times as he passed. Ahead, around the depression in the earth, stood six or seven men. He recognized the constable from Leigh Minster and nodded to him. Hildebrand and the sergeant were on their knees studying the cloth that emerged like a small sail from the rough hole that had been dug by the sergeant and his men. Blue, and wool, if he, Rutledge was any judge. But cheap wool, thin rather than thick.

  It wasn’t until he reached the others that he saw what appeared to be a knob, dirty white, with bits of flesh still attached, like a half-chewed bone, and the clinging mud from recent rain.

  It was human, not animal—

  That was the first question Hildebrand asked, looking up. “Human, then?’

  “Yes. I think it is.”

  Hildebrand nodded. “All right, lads, let’s see a bit more, shall we?”

  He straightened and moved aside while the sergeant handed the shovel to a thickset constable with sleeves already rolled above his elbows. He set to carefully, as if he’d done this sort of thing before. Scraping, wielding the shovel as a broom more often than the work it was designed to do, the man made slow progress. Hildebrand, tight-faced, impatience in every line, watched. But he didn’t hurry the constable, and after several glances at Hildebrand, the sergeant made no comment either. The clang of the shovel, the grunting of the constable, and the distant rooks broke the stillness. And then the rest of the bone came into view, A shred of stocking clung to the flesh, and at the end, an ankle in a black, heeled shoe.

  A woman. The grave was not deep; at a guess no more than a foot of soil covered her body. She appeared to have been wrapped in the coat rather than wearing it.

  It had been far too hot for a wool coat the day the woman in the farmer’s cornfield had died. This wasn’t Margaret Tarlton or Mrs. Mowbray. And it wasn’t the missing children.

  Hildebrand sighed. Another damned question…

  It took an hour or more to uncover the remains to the point where the men watching and waiting could look at her and form any opinion of age, class, or time in the ground.

  The constable from Leigh Minster squatted to peer into the makeshift grave, studying the body. After a time he said, “Don’t recognize her! We’ve no one missing, I’d know if there was. Who is she then? Can anyone say?” He got to his feet, looked around at the men on either side.

  It was difficult to judge what she had once looked like. The face was badly decomposed, with signs that it had been damaged before death. The dark hair was tangled and mixed with clots of damp earth. Hildebrand turned to the constable from Stoke Newton. “Anything?”

  “No, sir. There was a woman went missing some while back. A maid. But I wouldn’t—” He looked more closely and then shook his head, “I don’t think this one’s been in the ground long enough. It’s hard to say, but I’d guess from the coat and shoes she’s not a servant girl on her day off. Dressed more like a woman gone to market. Still—early days yet!”

  Listening, Rutledge thought, I was right. An able man, that one! Aloud he said, “The face. It hasn’t been beaten the way the Mowbray woman was?”

  Hildebrand said, “Hard to say.” He squatted on his heels as the constable had done. “There’s injury here. Nose damaged, and that right cheekbone. But the teeth aren’t broken, nor the forehead. We can’t be sure a beating’s what killed her. Could be there’s a stab wound in the body. Or a bullet. Doctor will tell us that.” He got to his feet. “All right, lads, send that crowd away, and let’s get her back to Singleton Magna.” He paused and looked at Rutledge. “Anything you want to add?”

  Rutledge shook his head.

  “Then it’s my business, Dorset business, not part of what brought you here.” It was a warning. Stand clear.

  Time enough to challenge that, Rutledge told himself, when and if there was a need to do it. Not now. Not in front of Hildebrand’s subordinates.

  “So far I’ve seen nothing to show me that this involves the Yard,” he answered neutrally. Because he hadn’t. Still, the words were carefully chosen, not signifying capitulation, while reserving the right at any point to change his mind.

  Hildebrand chose to regard them as a promise, not as a provisional agreement. More to the point, a promise before witnesses. He was pleased to be magnanimous and added, “Your suggestion that we search a wider area brought her to light. I’m grateful. Look, you’d better drive back to Singleton Magna. I’ll stay here until we’ve got her sorted out, and then I’ll send these men on about their search. Could be an hour or so before we bring her in.”

  Rutledge, politely dismissed, left. But Hamish was already considering the connection between this body and the last one. As Rutledge put up the crank and got into the driver’s seat, Hamish said, “It’s no’ to do with Charlbury. No’ the same manner of death. And this woman was put in the ground, not left in a field for anyone to find.”

  “Yes, that’s what interests me. Whoever killed her must have known that she wouldn’t be missed. It was safe to hide her body. No search—and there wasn’t one, was there?—and no notice taken of her absence from wherever she came from. But in the case of the body outside Singleton Magna, I’m beginning to think she wasn’t hidden because there was a scapegoat available—Mowbr
ay—and because Margaret Tarlton would be missed. By a number of people, one of them with the power to raise heaven and earth looking for her.” He drove sedately through Stoke Newton, where small knots of villagers stood on the street gossiping, as if the news had finally reached them and speculation was rife. Once on the high road again he added, “But I can’t believe that was the reason our body’s face was battered. I think there was passion behind it, not an attempt to hide her identity. It served that purpose of course—but it wasn’t the intention.”

  “Aye. Which means you’re one body short and yon Hildebrand is one body long! Better him than you!”

  Rutledge shook his head. “I’d have been happier if that corpse had solved the puzzle of ours. If it meant those children were safe. And that the killer, whoever he or she was, had nothing to do with that poor bedeviled soul in the cell.” He couldn’t seem to get Mowbray out of his mind.

  “You did na’ need yon second dead lassie to prove that. You know and I know where the answers are. And I do na’ think she’ll change what’s happened in Charlbury. You’ve got a murderer to find there, and the sooner the better! Unless, like Hildebrand, ye’re satisfied to put it on Mowbray’s head.”

  He couldn’t. Even Hamish knew that it was impossible.

  By the time Rutledge arrived at Charlbury—breakfastless and in a moody frame of mind—the news had flown before him. In the form of a man in the pub of the Wyatt Arms who had enjoyed regaling anyone who would listen with all the gruesome details.

  From the sound of them, Rutledge knew, the man had not seen the body.

  “Another killing,” he was telling a fresh recruit to his gathering audience, “just like the one in Singleton Magna. That man they’ve got in jail there—might not be the first time he’s gone looking for his missing wife. Left a trail of bodies over half of England if you want to know what I think. Sees a woman out on her own, walking along a road, like, or waiting for someone to come fetch her, and the first thing pops in his head is ‘There’s my wife, by God!’ And before Bob’s your uncle, he’s killed her!”