Search the Dark

by Charles Todd

  “The Wyatts always had a tenant and his family living here. I come over daily from Charlbury then. Mr. Oliphant, he went to New Zealand in 1913, and that was the end to that. The other dairymen went off to fight the Hun. Mrs. Wyatt says there’s no money to hire ’em back now, nor to fix the barn roof! I moved to the house after my wife died, just to keep an eye on the place. Mrs. Wyatt, she keeps some things in one of the upstairs rooms. Towels and coveralls.”

  Rutledge had run out of questions. And yet he had a strong feeling that because he’d been partly distracted, he had overlooked something. What?

  Jimson watched him, waiting.

  The man wasn’t lying, Rutledge was fairly certain of that. Jimson was telling the truth as he saw it. But police work had taught Rutledge that a witness could reply to questions exactly, even honestly—and still manage to avoid the whole truth.

  And suddenly the answer was there, in the man’s very watchfulness.

  Jimson hadn’t heard the sound of Rutledge’s engine—and he wouldn’t have heard the Wyatt car leave—or return. Speak to him directly, while he stared at your face, and he could follow a conversation well enough to give reasonable answers. It took concentration and to some extent a painfully learned ability to read lips. This most certainly explained the tension in him.

  The man wasn’t lying. He was going deaf. He had told Rutledge what his eyes had seen, but there was no way for him to know what sounds he might or might not have missed. Anyone could have come—or gone—from here. And at any time. Jimson could only say with any certainty when Aurore had come.

  As an alibi for Aurore Wyatt, he was useless.

  Yet she must have known… so why had she left her own safety to hang on such a fragile thread?

  Rutledge asked if he might look through the house or the barn, but Jimson shook his head. “Not without permission,” he said staunchly. “I don’t have authority to let you go poking about in Mr. Wyatt’s property. He might not like it, policeman or no.”

  The last thing Rutledge wanted to do was ask Aurore for permission.

  Neither Hildebrand nor Bowles would authorize a search warrant. Both of them would be far more likely to read him a lecture on the exact nature of his responsibility in this inquiry.

  If the suitcase was here—the hat—even the murder weapon—they would have to remain here until he had enough evidence to show cause to search.

  And yet as he stood in the drive, he had a feeling that this farm had played a role in Margaret Tarlton’s death. How or why, he wasn’t sure. Alibi—or evidence? For—or against Aurore Wyatt?

  Instinct, light as the breeze that ruffled the leaves of the trees and toyed with the grass at his feet, made him say to Jimson, “No matter. It was purely curiosity, not police business. This was quite a prosperous dairy in its day.”

  “Aye, it was,” Jimson said, sadness in his voice as he looked around him. “The best dairy in the county, to my way of thinking. Now we’ve not got thirty cows in milk, and I see to all of them, with Mrs. Wyatt’s help. I was that proud to work here, man and boy. That’s the trouble with living too long. In my time I’ve seen more change than I liked. Mrs. Wyatt, now, she says change is good, but I don’t know. I’ll be dead and in the ground before this place turns around. There’s no money, and no hope here. If I was her, I’d go back to France tomorrow and leave it to rot, instead of watching it fall slowly to pieces.”

  “She has a husband. She can’t leave.”

  “Simon Wyatt’s not the man his father was. I never saw such a difference in all my life as when he came home from the war. What’s he want that museum for? Dead, heathenish things!” He shook his head. “Mrs. Daulton, now, she says it might be better for him than standing for Parliament. Choices are a good thing, she says. There weren’t no choices when I was a lad, you did what your pa did, you counted yourself lucky to find a good woman to marry, and you raised your children to be decent, God-fearing Englishmen. And the dead didn’t wander about in the night, talking to fence posts and trees, looking for their soul!”

  Startled, Rutledge said, “Who wanders about in the night?” The first name that came to mind was Henry Daulton. He wasn’t sure why, except that Henry must find his mother’s steadfast belief in his full recovery overwhelming at times.

  “Ghosts!” Jimson said direly, gesturing around him, and turned to walk back to the barn. Rutledge called to him and then swore, remembering that the caretaker was deaf.

  But no amount of persuasion could pry another word out of the old man.

  18

  The police spent all day trying to find a connection between the corpse that had been discovered in the field near Leigh Minster and any of the communities ringing the location—Leigh Minster itself, Stoke Newton, Singleton Magna, or Charlbury.

  But just as the constables had reported, there were no missing women. And no newly hired domestics who had failed to appear at the time set for them to begin work. No cousins, daughters, wives, sisters-in-law, or other female relatives unaccounted for. She was clearly a stranger, then. Except that there were seldom any sound reasons for killing strangers.

  Hildebrand marked her down as an unsolved murder and went back to looking for the Mowbray children. He drove the teams of searchers with a determination that was both praiseworthy and single-minded.

  Dr. Fairfield, a small man of few words, established the time of death at approximately three to four months earlier.

  “She couldn’t have been in the ground longer,” he told Rutledge later, stripping off his white coat and hanging it on a hook behind the door of the bare room where he kept the dead. “And her clothing supports the timing. This is August. I daresay she died in late April, early May. Cool enough weather to have her coat with her. Cause of death? I’d say she was choked but not killed by strangulation. It was the beating about the head that finished the job. I found a fracture just above the temple, small but sufficient. I don’t think she was sexually molested. There’s no indication of it, from what I can see now, and her clothing is oddly tidy, as if whoever buried her had laid her out carefully on the coat.”

  “Was it the same person, do you think, who killed the Mowbray woman? Or Margaret Tarlton, as she may be?”

  The doctor frowned, rubbing his chin. “That’s harder to say. This one’s skin is gone, you don’t see the damage as readily. But yes, it might have been the same killer. Might, mind you! I’m not an authority on murder. Still, both women appear to have been attacked by someone who clearly intended to kill them but, in the end, didn’t know how to finish the job quickly or properly. When it’s anger that runs amok to the point of destructive force, there’s generally more damage—to the head, the throat, the shoulders. Then the blows land randomly, you see, driven by rage and intended to inflict as much hurt—and therefore as much satisfaction—as possible. Here the blows were confined to the head, mainly the face, as if to conceal identity as well as to kill.” He looked up at the taller man before him. “Does that seem odd to you? What I’m saying?”

  “Not to a policeman. No.”

  The doctor sighed. “Of course murder is seldom premeditated, is it? That is, with planning and preparation. And the fact is, the human being isn’t easy to murder, without the proper tools. A knife. A firearm. A garrote. Even a hammer will do. Whoever killed these two women—whether it was the same person or two different people—it was emotion that drove him or her in the beginning. And then necessity took over. He had to silence the victim, you see. And he had a quite nasty job there. If I were you, having to search for the right person, I’d find someone who”—he paused, seeking the right words—”who was determined to go on, however gruesome the task, until the woman’s pulse stopped.”

  “That can run either direction—a secret to be kept, or merely the realization that a live victim can point a finger at his attacker,” Rutledge responded, thinking about it.

  “Hmmm. Secrets take many forms, don’t they? From the sins of the flesh to the sins of the soul.” The docto
r smiled, but without humor or lightness. “This one is terrible enough that the killer was willing to suffer horror himself—herself—in order to keep it safe. Until you’ve battered someone to death, Inspector, you can’t conceive of how much blood and flesh and bone are spattered about. Only a madman can relish that, or someone so deranged by emotion that the flecks are not even registered, until it’s over. Or someone grimly carrying on to the bitter end.” He turned out the light in the hall and led the way to the side door of his surgery. “Does what I’ve told you help at all?”

  “Yes,” Rutledge said tiredly. “Unfortunately, I think it does.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it,” the doctor said, taking up his own coat and putting it on. “I’m late at a dinner party, and my wife won’t be happy about that. Hildebrand didn’t find my information useful. He’s a good man, Inspector, but he makes up his mind to suit the facts. If I took the same approach in medicine, I’d have filled the churchyard with my mistakes!”

  Rutledge walked back to the Swan, thinking about what the doctor had said. Hamish, in the back of his mind, was reminding him that blindness could be worse than deafness. Rutledge ignored him as long as he could and then said, “It isn’t blindness. Human nature enters into it. I can’t see Aurore Wyatt beating anyone to death. You said as much yourself once.”

  “Women,” Hamish said, “will kill to protect their bairns—and their man. Margaret Tarlton was Simon Wyatt’s past, returned to haunt him. She did na’ want that. And the woman wasn’t going away, she was staying.”

  “Jealousy? No, I don’t see Aurore Wyatt being jealous of Margaret or anyone else.” Yet she was afraid of Elizabeth Napier.

  “Who’s spoken of jealousy?” Hamish demanded.

  Rutledge stopped, watching a carriage coming up the hill toward the inn. The streets were deserted, it was just the dinner hour. He stood still and could hear laughter coming from the house on his left, and people’s voices. The carriage rattled past and disappeared among the trees at the top of the hill. A cat stepped out of the inn’s yard, ears twitching, catching the distant sound of a dog’s raucous bark. Something fluttered overhead—a bat, he thought.

  But deeper was another thought. Why had Simon Wyatt turned away from his future in Parliament? What was the real reason?

  A foreign wife might not be an asset—but with the proper backing, even that might be overcome. If Elizabeth Napier’s father had turned against Wyatt for rejecting his daughter and putting in her place a French nobody, he was—by all accounts—an astute enough politician to know that you didn’t have to like the men you backed, you only needed to be sure of their support in the future. The Wyatt name had been magic in this part of Dorset for more than one generation. A safe seat for this constituency.

  Simon and Aurore blamed his decision on the war. But what if there was something more than war weariness—or a devotion to his other grandfather—that made a very able and personable man choose seclusion over a brilliant career? A small museum without the resources to grow, hidden away in the Dorset countryside where visitors were few, where the exhibits would surely have a very narrow appeal, however interesting they were in their own right … It didn’t quite add up.

  “It’s no’ what I was saying—” Hamish began.

  But Rutledge cut him short. His eyes moved across to the police station where Mowbray still sat in his gloomy cell, watched day and night. “It’s a beginning, isn’t it?” he responded. “That’s all that matters!”

  The station door opened and Hildebrand came out, then paused as he saw Rutledge looking toward him. An instant’s hesitation, and he walked on, as if the man on the other side of the street didn’t exist.

  “You’ve spoiled his investigation,” Hamish pointed out. “He will na’ thank you for it.”

  “Mowbray might,” Rutledge said. “Nobody else seems to care about him.”

  After eating his dinner without being aware of what was on his plate or his fork, Rutledge went out to his car and turned it toward Charlbury.

  It was late in the evening to be calling on police business, but often the unexpected worked more successfully than the routine.

  The road was dark, nearly empty, except for a dog that trotted into the undergrowth as the car’s headlamps flicked over the crest of the rise. But Charlbury was brighter, and the Wyatt house looked as if it was expecting the King. There were lamps lit in most of the rooms, and in the museum wing. He left his car up by the church and walked back, making his way to the wing on foot. He thought: Curious … so much light and no sounds of voices, of people shouting or talking or laughing.

  The museum was empty. The masks leered at him in the brightness, mouths agape or dark slashes, eyes black with speculation or alarm, and the weapons, doubled with their own shadows, gave the rooms an air of tension. He walked through the three main areas, into the small, empty office, and then into the room across from it, hardly more than a large broom closet. He had never been there before. It held a bed with only a blanket, military in its folds, a chair, and a wooden table of indeterminate age, rescued from the attics or a jumble sale. A cupboard held a pair of shoes and some underwear, a clean shirt and a folded, freshly pressed pair of trousers.

  Rutledge stood there in silence, not needing Hamish’s comments to tell him that this was where Simon Wyatt spent most of his nights.

  A gasp from the doorway made him spin around.

  Aurore was there, grasping the frame with fingers that were white. “For a moment I thought—” She stopped. “Were you looking for Simon?” Her voice had steadied, sounded nearly normal. “Couldn’t you have come to the door and knocked, as everyone else does?”

  “—that I was Simon?” he asked, finishing her first, unguarded reaction. “I didn’t come to the door because I saw the lights here and thought he was in this wing. I preferred not to disturb the household, calling so late.”

  “Simon … is out,” she said.

  But her eyes were showing the strain of worry, and he said, “What’s wrong?” His words crossing hers.

  She let the door frame go, then shrugged, that French expression of I wash my hands. … “He doesn’t sleep well. At night. He hasn’t since the war. He rests here sometimes, when he doesn’t want to disturb me, moving about the house in the dark. Or if he’s very tired, sometimes in the afternoon. That’s why the bed is here. It doesn’t signify.”

  It was an apology for her husband. Perhaps for the state of her marriage. And an attempt to distract him. But the tension in her was palpable.

  He read her eyes, not her words. “What’s wrong?” he repeated.

  “You misunderstand, there is nothing to worry you.” She looked away.

  He stood there, watching her. In the end, she turned her face back to him and said, “It isn’t a police matter! Simon has gone somewhere. I was worried when he didn’t come to dinner. I waited, and finally I went to find him. But he isn’t in the house. Or in the grounds. I’ve looked. Elizabeth Napier took it upon herself to walk up to the church and to the Wyatt Arms. He won’t be there, but it gave her something to do.”

  And took her out of my way…. The thought if not the words hovered between them.

  “How long has he been gone? Did he take the car or one of the carriages?”

  “Since teatime. I think. The motorcar is still here, and the carriage.”

  “Then he must be in the village—at the Arms or at the rectory, perhaps.”

  After a moment she said, “It—this isn’t the first time he has gone without telling me. But not this long, before. That’s the only reason I worry.”

  She stared at him, her eyes begging but saying nothing. Refusing to betray her husband.

  The dead didn’t wander about in the night, talking to fence posts and trees, looking for their soul. Jimson’s words echoed darkly in his mind.

  “Can I help? Mrs. Wyatt?”

  Hamish was telling him that it was not his affair, it was not police business. But Rutledge had an intense feeli
ng that it might be. Men like Simon Wyatt didn’t walk out their door at teatime and disappear.

  “You can help by returning to Singleton Magna and calling again in the morning. Everything will be well in the morning, I promise you!”

  “Will it? Let me help you find him. Discreetly. People are used to a policeman prowling about. God knows, we’ve searched for days in every conceivable place for those children! Where shall I begin?”

  “He hasn’t—” She stopped, then after a moment said, “Before this, he was always in the house or the gardens.” Yet her voice seemed hollow, even to her own ears. “Always.”

  Again he read her eyes, ignoring her words. “But you aren’t sure of that, are you? If he often slept here, in this bed, or worked long hours in this wing, how could you be sure? Where he went—or when—or for how long! During the day or in the night.”

  Aurore bit her lip. “The house—with Elizabeth Napier here, moving between the house and the museum, he must feel—I don’t know. Caught”

  “But he was proposing to hire an assistant. She would have been in the house and the museum day after day.”

  She said angrily, “I don’t know! Explain it however you will!”

  “Do you want to come with me?”

  Aurore shook her head. “No. I’ll stay. In the event …” She let the sentence run into silence again. In the event he returns of his own accord… and needs me.

  He walked past her, near enough to smell the fragrance of her hair and perfume. Lily of the valley … But she didn’t turn, she didn’t say anything more.

  At first he quartered Charlbury, down toward the inn, up toward the church. He saw Elizabeth Napier speaking to someone by the church door and thought it might be Joanna Daulton. Nothing.

  He went on to the motorcar and began to drive toward the farm, thinking that it was a logical place for Wyatt to escape to if he wanted peace from the two women who drew him first this way and then that.

  Jimson had seen him in the night—it has happened before. Rutledge didn’t need Hamish to tell him. He had already gotten there on his own.