by Charles Todd
He looked at Rutledge, not sure how to go on.
“Why didn’t you come forward sooner?” Rutledge asked. “We’ve had sheets printed, police asking questions, going from house to house.” He tried to keep the anger and the shock out of his voice, for the children’s sake and his own, “It was in the papers repeatedly, both a photograph and a request for help.”
“Well, I went straight back to London, didn’t I? And a damned—and a good thing I did, because Susan suddenly went into labor that same night, and everything else went out the window, didn’t it? It wasn’t until I went back to fetch the children that my mother-in-law told me about the—er—what happened to the woman and said I was lucky it wasn’t my wife and my two that was missing. She said she’d had nightmares for days about the poor little dears. Mind you, I’d have never gone to the police if she hadn’t talked on and on about the horror of it all. Which set me to thinking.” He shook his head. “She has a morbid taste for tragedies, that woman does!”
“What happened?”
“The police saw fit to arrest me on the spot, that’s what happened, and if the rector in the church who’d married us and christened these two hadn’t come forward, I’d probably still be there!” He frowned indignantly, still unsettled by the injustice of it all. “That was last night.”
“I’m sorry,” Rutledge said soothingly. “They were trying to do their job.”
“I fail to see how arresting an innocent man is part of any policeman’s job,” Andrews replied, with the first show of spirit.
“Do you remember what the woman was wearing? The one who helped the children?”
“God, no, I don’t know anything about women’s clothes—” he began.
“Was it pink? Or perhaps yellow?” Rutledge waited. All this time, Hildebrand had been standing at his back, across the desk, silent and watchful and hoping—believing!—that Rutledge might still fail.
Andrews shrugged. “I tell you, I don’t know.”
Rutledge turned to the little girl, squatting on his heels before her. “Can you remember the woman who helped you at the train, when you fell?” he asked gently, smiling at her. “Was she pretty? As pretty as your mother?”
Rosie looked down, playing with the sash of her own dress. “Yes,” she said so softly it was just a whisper.
“Tell me.”
“She was pretty,” Rosie repeated.
Over her head Rutledge asked, “Do you still have the handkerchief?” Andrews silently mouthed no.
“I liked her hat,” Rosie said into the exchange. “I want one.”
“Do you? What color was it?”
He waited, patient, silent. After a moment she pointed to a carafe of water on the desk, a crystal jug with an upturned glass for its lid. A band of silver at the neck caught the reflected light of the courtyard, shining and clear. “Like that,” she said, and smiled shyly.
“Like light on water, silvery,” the Wyatt maid Edith had said.
Rutledge slowly straightened and turned to Hildebrand.
The inspector said abruptly, “If you’d excuse us for a moment, Mr. Andrews?” Without waiting for an answer, he went around the desk and looked at Rutledge.
The two men went out into the dark, cramped passage, carefully closing the door behind them and moving away, out of earshot. At the far end of the passage, the other door that locked Mowbray away was deep in shadow. Rutledge found himself thinking about the man inside.
“He didn’t kill them,” he said, more to himself than to Hildebrand.
“We don’t know that,” Hildebrand said.
“That child just identified the color of the hat Miss Tarlton was wearing. If it was Miss Tarlton at the station, if it was Miss Tarlton that Mowbray saw and came looking for, it means his wife must surely have died in 1916, with the two children. And it was only his imagination—” He stopped. Knowing—who better?—how imagination tricked the mind. How what you believed was shadowed and shaped by what you had done. Mowbray hadn’t been in London to save his wife or his children, he’d been away in France. He’d come home to bury them. He’d missed them every day since. To the point that in a desperate time of his life, he had seen what he wanted most in the world to see … a return to what had been.
“We don’t know that!” Hildebrand repeated stubbornly. “A child that age in a courtroom? It would be a farce, the questioning could tangle her into knots. Are you willing to put that family through such a nightmare?”
“What are you going to do instead? Will you continue this search, widen it, go on looking until there’s nowhere else to try?”
“I fail to see that it’s any of your business! If we have found those children, you may return to London and leave the rest to the local police.”
“Then allow me one final test. Let Mowbray see them—”
“Have you run stark mad—”
“No, listen to me!” As their voices clashed, the constable on duty at the desk opened the door at the head of the passage and stared down it. He quickly shut it again at a gesture from Hildebrand. “What I want to do is this.”
An hour later it was arranged. Not without complaints from Robert Andrews and from Hildebrand and from Marcus Johnston, Mowbray’s attorney.
A call put in to Bowles in London by an irate Hildebrand caught the man in a fierce mood, not a receptive one. Even when the receiver was turned over to Rutledge, Bowles’s voice rang down the line in deafening vowels.
“I’ve had Thomas Napier calling in from his office to see what progress we’ve made toward finding Miss Tarlton,” he said shortly. “I don’t like to have politicians breathing down my neck. It’s your fault, Rutledge, for dragging the Napiers into the issue in the first place!”
“If the dead woman is Miss Tarlton, Mr. Napier will do more than breathe down our necks,” Rutledge said. “He’ll be camping in your office! From all reports he was as fond of her as he was of his own daughter.” Fonder, very likely.…
“Then find out, once and for all, if these children are Mowbray’s or not. Do you hear me? Put Hildebrand on again, I’ll set him straight.”
And so it was arranged.
When they went to fetch Mowbray, sunk in the darkness of his terrors, he came shuffling and blinking into the light in Hildebrand’s room, his face gaunt, unshaven, his hair lank and dull. He said nothing as Johnston, his own face stiff, greeted his client. A silence fell.
Mowbray seemed not to know or care who they were, what they wanted. He had been brought here. He suffered that with the same awful patience he gave to everything he did now, from eating his food to lying on his cot through the night. Nothing touched him. In the courtyard outside Hildebrand’s windows, a ball came bouncing across the debris of leaves and dust.
Johnston was talking when the first child appeared. It was the same age as Robert Andrews, and nearly the same coloring, a little boy chasing exuberantly after the red ball.
Mowbray started up, crying, “No—don’t torment me—”
Rutledge said quietly, “Is that your Bertie, Mr. Mowbray?”
“No, God, no. I killed my Bertie, you told me so yourself!”
Another small boy came running into the yard, fiercely demanding his turn with the ball, and the first turned away with it, leading to a screaming match between the two. A third boy appeared, a little older now, closer to the age the Mowbray boy would have reached if he’d lived.
Watching Mowbray carefully, Rutledge said, “You must look at them, Mr. Mowbray. You must help us know if one of these boys is your son.”
Mowbray, his eyes wet with frantic tears, turned toward Johnston for help. Johnston, shaking, said, “Inspector!” in warning.
The fourth child came reluctantly into the courtyard. Mowbray suddenly started, half rising from his chair. Johnston reached out to stop him, and Rutledge reminded him softly, “Remember! There is no way he can reach them!”
Before Johnston or Hildebrand could move, Mowbray had come across the room to the window, sinking to hi
s knees before it, his face contorted with tears. “Bertie?” he cried, his hands raking the glass. “Bertie? Is it you, lad?”
Robert Andrews the younger turned toward the man at the window, looking at him in alarm. Then he turned back to the ball players and scooped up the ball they had dropped in their struggle. Racing away up the walk toward the street shouting, “Mine! Mine!” he vanished.
Mowbray cried, “No—no—come back! Bertie!”
And at the same time he caught sight of Rosie, being led by the hand into the courtyard by a slightly older child. On such short notice, they’d had difficulty finding girls of the right age…. He stared at her, drinking in the sight of her, a strange look of wonder on his face. Rosie, her hand confidingly in that of the other girl, looked straight at the window and then away again. That same shy smile lit her face.
“Tricia, love?” Mowbray asked, his body trembling as if he had a fever. “They said I’d killed you and left you in the dark for the foxes—”
He broke down then, his eyes turning to Rutledge for one brief moment, in their depths something shining. It was the brief, terrible spark of hope.
Johnston was openly moved, his face wet with tears. Hildebrand swore under his breath, the same words over and over and over again.
Rutledge, ignoring the savagery of Hamish’s anger, looked at Mowbray and told himself that it had had to be done—for Margaret’s sake—for Mowbray’s sake, above all else. He went to the prisoner and touched his shoulder. “They are the children you saw,” he said gently. “The children at the train station. Is that what you’re telling me? The little boy who picked up the ball, and that smaller girl. Are you quite sure?”
“Yes, yes, they’re my children, they’re alive—” His shoulders moved with the sobs racking his lungs, his words tumbling out incoherently. He pressed his face against the glass as the two girls turned and went back the way they’d come, eyes straining for a last glimpse of them. He repeated the words, more clearly this time, as if finding them easier to believe with each breath.
“No,” Rutledge said. “No, I’m afraid they aren’t Bertie and Patricia. Their name is Andrews. Think, Mowbray! Your Bertie would be four now, nearly five. Like the older boy you saw. And the little girl, Patricia, would be seven by now. These two children—the ones who remind you so much of your own two—are younger, the ages Bertie and Patricia were when they died in London.”
“Their mother?” Mowbray asked huskily, suddenly remembering. “Is she out there too?” Raw need gleamed like fire in his eyes.
“No.” His voice was very low, with infinite compassion in its timbre. “The mother of these two children who remind you so much of your own is in London, recovering from the birth of her third child. She’s auburn haired, and—er—plump.” He pulled from his pocket the photograph that Robert Andrews had let him borrow. “Do you see that?”
After a moment the words seemed to register. Mowbray looked at it, frowning with the effort. The woman captured by the camera had dark hair, far darker than that in the photograph Mowbray himself had carried, and she weighed at least two stone more. “That’s not Mary!” he said in surprise. “She doesn’t look anything like Mary!” His eyes swiveled to Johnston and Hildebrand. “Where’s Mary?” he demanded accusingly, as if she might still be conjured up with the children.
Hildebrand opened his mouth but Rutledge got there before him. “Look at this photograph,” he said, passing the one he’d borrowed from Elizabeth Napier. “Do you see your wife among these women, Mr. Mowbray? Look carefully at all of them, and tell me.”
He studied it, distraught and weeping. “She’s not there,” he said, hope dying again. “She’s not there.” He looked up at Rutledge and said with such pathos that it brought silence to the three watchers, “Did I kill my Mary, then?” Rutledge stood there, looking down at the frightened, ravaged face. Against the judgment of the policeman he’d trained to become, he said quietly, “No. You didn’t kill her. The German bombs did, a long time ago. She can’t suffer anymore. And she can’t come back to you. Neither can the children.”
But he made no mention of Margaret Tarlton.
After the angry doctor had taken Mowbray back to his cell and given him a sedative to swallow, Johnston walked out of the police station saying only, “I don’t know what you’ve accomplished. I just don’t know what to believe!”
The constable was busily sorting out the children by the front door, thanking the parents from whom he’d borrowed them, and watching Andrews crossing to the hotel with a very sleepy little boy on his shoulder and a little girl dragging her feet in the dust, head down and yawning.
“What happened?” the constable asked Hildebrand, and then quickly went back into the station, minding his own business with industry.
Hildebrand said, “Johnston is right. What’ve you accomplished? If those are the children we’ve been searching for—and for the sake of argument, I’ll accept it for now—there’s still the dead woman. If she happens to be this Miss Tarlton, Mowbray killed her mistaking her for his wife! That’s the long and short of it. Stands to reason. We’ve still got one victim, and we’ve got her killer.”
“Have we? He didn’t recognize Margaret Tarlton, did he? How did he meet her? And where is her suitcase? Where is her hat? We’re back to the same quandary we’ve faced all along. If Mowbray killed that woman and then went to sleep under a tree, ripe picking for the police when the body was found, why did he bother to clean the blood off himself, get rid of the weapon, and hide her suitcase? To what end? Why not leave them there, beside her?”
“Who knows what goes on in the mind of a madman!”
“Even the mad have their own logic!”
“No, don’t come the Londoner with me, Rutledge! Madness means there’s no logic left in the mind.”
“I submit, then, that whoever killed Margaret Tarlton took away the suitcase, the hat she was wearing, and the weapon.”
“Oh, yes? Walking down the road with them in his hand, was he?”
“No. He—the killer—was taking Margaret Tarlton by car to the station in Singleton Magna. And it was into the car that he shoved the hat and the weapon and the missing suitcase, until he could dispose of them later!”
“Oh, yes?” Hildebrand repeated. “But came through his front door spattered with blood and said, ‘Don’t mind this lot, I’ll just have a quick bath before tea!’ ”
“Yes, it’s the blood that’s the problem,” Rutledge admitted. “We don’t know where either Mowbray or anyone else might have washed off the blood.”
But there was only one place, and he’d already felt the words burning in the back of his mind like red-hot brands.
At the farmhouse, Aurore Wyatt could easily have walked inside after tending a sick heifer and bathed her face and hands and thrown away a stained shirtwaist, or burned it in the kitchen fire. Except for the deaf old man who worked there, who would have seen or paid any heed to what she did? By the time she got back to her own house,
she’d have been clean.…
Rutledge, standing there in the late-afternoon sunlight while a saw droned on and on somewhere in the distance, suddenly knew how Judas had felt. A traitor—a betrayer of someone who trusted him …
Or who trusted in her spell over him?
22
When it was finished, when Hildebrand had walked back into his office and the waiting knot of people—starved of news—had wandered away, Rutledge drew a long shuddering breath and went back to the Swan. He felt dazed with weariness, the emotional trial in Hildebrand’s office still searing his conscience.
What choice had he been given?
At what price had Mowbray won some respite from his own horrors? Or had they only been scored more deeply into the man’s tormented mind? And was he a killer at all, but only the victim as much as the dead woman in the pauper’s grave by the church?
Hamish, who disapproved of much that Rutledge did, holding him to the high standards of a man who was Calvinist in heart
and soul, said, “When ye’re done feeling sorry for yoursel’, there’s the ither woman with nae name and nae face. What aboot her, then?”
“What about her?” Rutledge said. “Mowbray couldn’t have killed her, he couldn’t have made a practice of riding trains and murdering any woman with a passing resemblance to his dead wife! And she was dark-haired, not fair!” He suddenly lost patience with Hamish. “What has she to do with Margaret Tarlton, for God’s sake?”
“Aye, that’s the question. But look, if she has a part in this matter, she deserves justice even if there’s nae MP calling for answers!”
Tired to the bone, Rutledge said, “If we’ve cleared Mowbray of killing his children, and if we’ve shown that the dead woman is very likely Margaret Tarlton—if Miss Napier has told the truth about recognizing that dress—then we’re back to the people who knew her best. The Napiers. Shaw. The Wyatts.”
“Aye. Find that hat, forebye, and you’ll ha’ the answer.”
“You said that about the children,” Rutledge said wearily. “And it wasn’t enough.”
He had reached his room, but without any memory of walking into the inn or up the stairs or down the passage. Closing the door behind him, he took off his coat and threw himself face down across the bed.
Two minutes later, Hamish’s complaints notwithstanding, Rutledge was deeply asleep, where not even dreams could reach him. The dark head on the pillow stirred once as the church bell struck the hour, one arm moving to crook protectively around it and the other hand uncurling from the tight fist of tension.
You don’t, Rutledge told himself over a late dinner, lose your objectivity if you want to be a good policeman. You learn to shut out the pain of others, you learn to ask the questions that can break up a marriage, set brother against brother, or turn father against son. Willy-nilly, to get at the truth.
But what was truth? It had as many sides as there were people involved and was as changeable as human nature.
