Search the Dark

by Charles Todd

  “No,” Shaw said, wincing as he moved too suddenly in his chair. “Except that Margaret’s death doesn’t seem to have left even the briefest mark on anybody’s life except mine. And possibly Thomas Napier’s, who knows?” He sighed heavily, shaking his head. “I don’t know whether I loved her or hated her, in the end. I might have killed her myself, if she’d hurt me again. Someone else did, and now I want to find him—or her.”

  “For vengeance? It doesn’t work out the way you think it might.”

  “Doesn’t it?” Shaw said wryly. “If I discovered her killer tonight, I don’t know what I’d do about it. Turn him over to you. Or batter the life out of him myself. It doesn’t matter, I’m dead anyway. Still—it frightens me, not knowing how I’ll feel. When I loved her so much. That’s why I’m sober, Rutledge. I’m suddenly afraid to drink….”

  20

  It was the next morning when Rutledge finally ran Simon Wyatt to earth in the museum, shut the doors to the room he was working in, and said curtly, “Sit down.”

  “I’ve got too much to do—”

  Rutledge cut him short “The museum can wait. The opening can wait. I want to talk to you.”

  Something in Rutledge’s voice broke through his wall of isolation. Simon reached for a chair that was filled with boxes, shoved them off the seat, pulled it to him, and sat down. “All right. Five minutes.”

  “There’s a very good chance that the murder of Margaret Tarlton can be laid at your wife’s door.”

  “Aurore? Don’t be stupid, man, she’s no more guilty of murder than I am! If this is what you want to say to me, I’ve got more important things to attend to!”

  Rutledge reached out and pressed Simon back into his chair. “You’ll listen to me until I’ve finished, damn it. And I’ll decide when that is!”

  He had spent a long sleepless night going over many things in his mind, but there was no one except Hamish he could have said them to.

  “The plan was, as I understand it, for Mrs. Wyatt to drive Margaret Tarlton to the train station at Singleton Magna. She tells me that she didn’t, that she was at the farm working with a sick heifer. All right, that means that Margaret Tarlton is still in this house, looking for a way to the station. Mrs. Daulton sees her at your front gate, waiting—wearing the clothes she had changed into. The dress, in fact, she was wearing when the body was found. Elizabeth Napier has told me that she’s quite sure the dress belonged to Margaret. I’m sure Edith could identify it as well. Or Mrs. Daulton.”

  “I haven’t heard about this—” Simon began, incensed. “Why hasn’t anyone told me?”

  “Because you’ve got your head buried in this museum and don’t hear what’s being said to you,” Rutledge told him in exasperation. “To go on. Your maid Edith, concerned that Miss Tarlton might miss her train, hurries down to the inn to ask Denton if his nephew Shaw can drive Miss Tarlton. But while she’s gone Miss Tarlton, for reasons of her own, walks down to the rectory and asks Henry Daulton if he or his mother can take her to Singleton Magna. He leaves Miss Tarlton on the steps while he goes to the garden to speak to his mother, but as he turns away she says, ‘There’s Mrs. Wyatt,’ and leaves, angry that she’s already running late. A woman who lives on the other side of the inn tells me that she saw the car leaving town soon afterward, that your wife was driving, and that she believes Margaret Tarlton was a passenger.”

  Simon started to speak but Rutledge cut him short. “Whether her evidence is reliable or not doesn’t matter; this places your wife in the car with Margaret Tarlton, heading toward Singleton Magna in time to make the train. Miss Tarlton’s on her way to Sherborne, where she’s to spend several days with Miss Napier.”

  There was a look of surprise on Simon’s face, but he said nothing.

  “According to the stationmaster, she isn’t one of the passengers on the train going north and certainly not on the train going south. She doesn’t arrive in Sherborne on fifteen August, nor on the following day, because Miss Napier and her chauffeur Benson have gone to meet her, Miss Napier herself on the fifteenth and Benson on the sixteenth. Meanwhile in London, her maid Dorcas Williams hasn’t seen or heard from her, nor have her cousins in Gloucestershire. Miss Tarlton, it appears, has vanished from the face of the earth. But we do have a body in Singleton Magna who is wearing what appear to be her garments. It would seem, then, that Miss Tarlton died on the road outside Singleton Magna sometime in the afternoon. And if your wife took her out of Charlbury in your motorcar, then your wife was most likely the last person to see Miss Tarlton alive. Do you follow me?”

  Simon Wyatt, frowning, said, “Yes, of course I do! I just don’t accept your reasoning. My wife is not a murderess, she’d never met Margaret Tarlton before the thirteenth, when she went to collect her at the station, and I can’t imagine any possible reason why Aurore would want to kill a comparative stranger!”

  “Miss Tarlton was very likely going to accept your offer of a position here.”

  “And what’s that got to do with murder! No, your theory is full of holes, man! Aurore may have taken Margaret as far as Singleton Magna, but it doesn’t tell me what Margaret Tarlton did once she got there! If Aurore set her down in the town, someone else could have as easily met her there. Have you thought of that? Have you made any effort to find out?”

  He hadn’t, as Hamish was busily pointing out.

  Shaw. Elizabeth Napier. Thomas Napier. Who else?

  “Does Miss Tarlton know anyone in Singleton Magna—or for that matter in Charlbury?”

  “God, no! She’s been here once or twice with the Napiers, but she’s not the kind of woman who likes the country very much. London is her métier, she’s at home in parlors and salons and theaters.”

  “All the same, she was willing to work here. To leave London.”

  Simon made a deprecating gesture. “She came to help me make a success of the opening, and then I hoped to attract a student of the East to come in and see to preservation of specimens, the proper cases, some sort of cataloging, all the trimmings of a proper museum. I don’t have the money for that, not at the moment, but the quality of exhibits is quite high. I’ve already shown some of the better examples to Dr. Anderson in Oxford.” Simon grinned. “I expect he hoped I might contribute them to his own private collection. My grandfather was a skilled draftsman and has drawn birds in New Guinea and Sulawesi that created quite a fuss when Anderson showed them to specialists. Many of them hadn’t been described before.” As he spoke, his eyes flashed with more life and enthusiasm than Rutledge had ever seen him show.

  “And you told her this was short-term employment?”

  “Margaret herself said she wouldn’t stay—six months, a year at best. She spoke of other plans after that. I thought it might be marriage. The way she tilted her head when she said it, with a sort of pride.”

  “Any idea who the man might have been?”

  “No. But then I’ve been away for four years. Someone she met in the war, at a guess. I don’t see Margaret Tarlton winding up a spinster.”

  “Someone she met in the war? Not Thomas Napier?”

  Simon stared at Rutledge. “Elizabeth’s father? Good God, what put that idea into your head! I thought I was the only one who knew about that!”

  “Someone had helped Miss Tarlton purchase a small house in Chelsea. I thought it might have been her employer.”

  A cold look turned Simon’s face hard. “No. It wasn’t Thomas Napier. It was my father. She bought it through a trust fund he set up for her.”

  Surprised in his turn, Rutledge said, “Why? That’s an expensive gift.”

  “He didn’t see fit to tell me. And they weren’t lovers, if that’s the conclusion you’re jumping to! He said it was a business arrangement, that he’d done it because he’d known her father. Poppycock! Tarlton never came here, and my father was never in India. I’d wager Thomas Napier’s behind it!”

  “Are you saying Napier was in love with Miss Tarlton? If he’d wanted her to have a ho
use of her own, why didn’t he buy it for her?” It was the first independent corroboration of that he’d had.

  “Politics, mainly. And because he wouldn’t want Elizabeth to know. She’d be angry and hurt, if he’d conducted an affair under his own roof. I expect that’s why he hasn’t come down to Singleton Magna and given Hildebrand hell for dragging his feet in this business. He’s being discreet. For his sake, and for Elizabeth’s. And for Margaret’s, if it turns out all of you are wrong.”

  “If there had been another man in her life, what would Napier have done?”

  “For a man of his clever, controlled nature, he was besotted with Margaret Tarlton. If you’re asking me if he would have killed her, no, but I’d hate like hell to be in the shoes of the other man!”

  “And your father wasn’t in love with her—or receiving favors from her?”

  “If it was blackmail, it wasn’t sexual. He may have owed Napier a political favor, or some debt. My father left a letter explaining about the house. I worked out the rest of it myself. Mainly because my godfather had been so cooperative when I asked him to speak to Elizabeth for me. I’d expected him to turn on me.”

  “What happens to the house now, if Margaret Tarlton is dead?”

  Simon’s fair brows twitched together. “I’m not sure. It was some sort of trust, arranged through lawyers. I was told there’s a clause protecting my father’s claim to the house, based on the fact he’d had some connection with Margaret’s family. If she married or died without children, the trust reverted to him.”

  “Your father is dead. Does this mean the house comes to you now?”

  Simon answered slowly, “I expect it does. But it’s early days yet to cross that bridge. No one knows for certain, if you’re telling me the truth, whether Margaret is dead—or has simply disappeared for reasons of her own. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about women, Inspector, it’s that they have a logic all their own! She might well turn up alive and surprise all of us.”

  Before turning to go, Rutledge asked, “Will you go back to politics, if the museum is a success and you’ve satisfied your duty to your grandfather?”

  “Why does that matter so much to everyone?” Sudden anger sent a flush into Simon’s face and he looked directly at Rutledge. “What was your excuse for leaving Scotland Yard to fight in France? Or are you the only one who’s allowed to dig into another man’s soul?”

  Rutledge owed Wyatt honesty for honesty. He said slowly, “I believed it was a sense of duty. Of responsibility to King and Country. Not patriotism, you understand, it wasn’t the parades and speeches and flag waving. I remember thinking I have an obligation here. If these men can walk away from their families and their careers, and serve, so must I.”

  And Jean had said only, “You know, you look very handsome in uniform!” As if he were dressed for a masquerade… dear God.

  “Why did you go back to the Yard? Afterward?”

  “Because it was what I did best.”

  “Duty, again. I’m no longer sure I know what that means. Even the women in my family were politically astute and politically ambitious. It never occurred to any of them that I might not be cut out of the same bolt of cloth. It never occurred to me. I went away to war to be a hero. I came home a failure in the eyes of most people. No medals, no appetite for politics, no fashionable marriage.”

  “Is that why you have taken the trouble to build this museum?” Rutledge gestured to the shelves around them, the mysteries of another world, another culture. So foreign in this English house in an English county. And with a French wife … but that was something he couldn’t say aloud.

  It was as if Simon hadn’t heard him. “I wasn’t a bad soldier, I fought hard, I served as well as any man. I don’t know why I survived. I don’t see how any of us did. It was a bloody lottery. I win, you lose.”

  Rutledge felt the coldness of memory. The times he’d been terrified that he might die—and the long months when he was terrified that he wouldn’t.

  “It wasn’t a pretty war,” Simon finished. “And I discovered that I was no Churchill. In the shambles of the trenches I couldn’t make a pretense of being dashing and flamboyant. It would have been obscene.”

  Rutledge, feeling a flatness that pervaded his spirit and gave him a sense of loss, walked slowly back to the inn, where he’d left his car. Had he finally reached the bedrock of Simon Wyatt? In those last words, he thought perhaps he had. “I discovered that I was no Churchill.” Was that the torment that sent him out into the night alone, reliving something that was past?

  “Nae mair than you do!” Hamish said with savage honesty.

  All right then. Why did he himself persist in this business of policing? Why had he ever taken it up after the war?

  “Because it was all you are fit for,” Hamish reminded him.

  It was, after all, what he had told Wyatt.

  “Then why do I sometimes get it so bloody wrong!”

  He started the car and climbed in, shutting the door and letting in the clutch with half his attention on his thoughts. All at once he realized that Shaw was coming out of the inn and hailing him, bent almost double with the effort it took to hurry and shout at the same time.

  Rutledge stopped the car so suddenly he killed the engine. A sense of cold foreboding swept through him.

  Shaw reached the passenger side and said breathlessly, “Bloody hell, Rutledge, didn’t you hear me?”

  “I’m sorry—” Rutledge began, but Shaw shook his head.

  “You’re needed in Singleton Magna straightaway. As soon as you can get there. Hildebrand had someone telephone to the Wyatt house, but you’d already left. Aurore passed the message on to my uncle.”

  Rutledge thought, They’ve found the children…. But all he said was, “Very well, I’m on my way.”

  His mind was in turmoil. He swore silently as he cranked the car again and, with a wave to the still-flushed man in front of the inn, drove down the road at speed, startling a horse being taken to the smithy for shoeing. It reared and shook its head, wild-eyed, while the farmer holding the reins shouted at Rutledge to mind what he was about.

  Driving hard and fast, he kept his mind on the road, not allowing his thoughts to break through his concentration. He reached Singleton Magna, left the car in the yard behind the Swan, and with his heart thundering against his ribs walked back toward the police station. If they’d found the children, it meant he’d been wrong from the start.

  There was a small knot of people standing outside the inn—he hadn’t seen them as he came up the street, but he noticed them now. It confirmed his fears. A ripple of excitement swept them as he passed by, but no one called to him or tried to approach. Crossing the busy road between two young girls on horseback and a dray carrying milk cans, he ran lightly up to the door of the station and opened it.

  There was nothing else he could do.

  Inside the air was thick with ominous tension. Constable Jeffries saw him over the heads of the men jamming the small room and spoke. “We’ve found the children,” he said grimly. “Inspector Hildebrand is waiting for you. In his office.”

  Rutledge felt the coldness settle into his very bones. He’d seen dead children before. Somehow he wasn’t prepared to see these. He nodded to the constable and went down the dark passage to Hildebrand’s door, knocking before turning the knob to enter.

  “You sent for—” Rutledge began on the threshold, and stopped as if he’d been shot.

  In the small room, Hildebrand, stiff with strain, stood behind his desk. He glared at Rutledge.

  “You took your time getting here,” he said. “Never mind. It seems that I’ve done your job for you.”

  21

  The other chair in the room, across the desk from Hildebrand, was occupied by a man holding a small boy on his knees, one arm protectively around the little girl some two years older, who was leaning anxiously against the side of the chair. Both children stared at Rutledge, eyes round and frightened. The boy began to s
uck his thumb. The man, looking up, was dark haired, of medium height and weight, his pleasant face wearing a distinctly uncertain expression.

  Rutledge, with Hamish hammering at the back of his mind, took a deep breath, like a drowning man coming up out of the sea into life-giving air.

  “The Mowbray children?” he asked into the lengthening silence.

  Hildebrand, rocking on his toes, anger apparent in every line of his body, held Rutledge’s glance as it swung back to his grim face. “No. But close enough. At least it seems that way. You’re the expert from Scotland Yard. That’s why you were sent here. You make the decision.”

  Anger of his own surged through Rutledge, but he turned to the man in the chair, holding out his hand. “My name’s Rutledge,” he said, “Inspector Rutledge.”

  “Robert Andrews,” the man said, taking it awkwardly over the boy’s head.

  “And these are Albert Mowbray’s children?” He paused. “Tricia and Bertie?” He smiled at them, first the girl and then the boy.

  The children stared back at him, unmoved by familiar names.

  Andrews looked quickly at Hildebrand. “Well, no, they’re mine, actually. This is Rosie and young Robert.” The little girl shyly smiled as her father spoke her name, her head pressed against his shoulder. They were pretty children, both of them—and of the ages Bert Mowbray’s son and daughter had been on the day they died in London.

  “Then how are you connected with this—er—investigation?”

  “Hasn’t he told you?” Andrews asked, looking again at Hildebrand. “I thought—Well, never mind what I thought!” He cleared his throat. “I was on the train that passed through Singleton Magna on thirteen August. My wife was expecting our third child in two weeks, and I’d promised to take Rosie and her brother to Susan’s mother—she has a house down along the coast—close to the time. And I did. Rosie was tired and wishing the long trip over, weren’t you, love?” He touched her hair briefly with his free hand. “And she tried to leave the train, only she fell on the platform and scraped her knee. That was when the woman came over and bound a handkerchief around the cut, telling her what a brave little girl she was.…”