Search the Dark ir-3

by Charles Todd

  This was Hardy country. But it was the difference in light that impressed Rutledge more than the author’s dark and murky characters. There was a golden-brown tint to the light here that seemed to come from the soil and the leaves of the trees. Not washed pastel like Norfolk, nor rich green like Kent. Nor gray damp like Lancaster. Dorset had been wool trade and stone, cottage industry and small farming towns strung along old roads that the Saxons had laid out long before the Norman conquest. Outlying meadows where cattle quietly grazed.

  Rutledge found himself wishing he could ask a painter like Catherine Tarrant if she saw light in the same way, or if it was only his undependable imagination.

  He came into the town of Singleton Magna almost before he knew it was there, the abrupt shift from fields to houses almost as sharp as a line drawn in the earth. The railroad’s tracks parted company with him and ran on to the station.

  Slowing as he motored down the main street, with its shops still doing a brisk business and farm carts pulled up at the curbs, he searched for the local police station.

  It was no more than a cubbyhole next to the town’s one bank, a small offshoot of the main building that must at one time have been a shop. The front window had been painted white with the letters POLICE in black, and the heavy green door was nicked by time and hard use, its iron handle worn with age. The bank it adjoined was more majestic, with a handsome porch above its door, as if it too had begun life as something else, a merchant’s house or a church office.

  After finding a place to leave his car and stepping out into the warmth of the afternoon, he saw a tall, stooped man of middle age just coming out of the green door. The man looked at him, frowned, and came over to speak. “Are you Inspector Rutledge, by any chance?”

  “Yes, I’m Rutledge.”

  The man held out a long-fingered hand. “Marcus Johnston. I’m representing that poor devil Mowbray. Nasty business. Nasty. And he’s not saying a word, not even to me. God knows what kind of case I can build for him. My advice at the moment is to throw himself on the mercy of the courts.”

  Rutledge, whose father had followed the law, said only, “I don’t know a great deal about the man or his crime, except for the scant information the local people sent up to the Yard. He was searching the town for his wife, I understand? And her body has been found, but not the others he was after.”

  “That’s right. The police have done their best, they’ve covered the ground hereabouts for miles in every direction. No bodies. No graves. More important, no one inquiring about her. No distraught husband and sobbing children, I mean.” He sighed. “Which leads to the conclusion that they’re dead. And all Mowbray will say to me is that they were his children, why should he want to kill them?” A woman passed and Johnston tipped his hat to her. She nodded and then eyed Rutledge with curiosity as she walked on.

  “I did some checking before I left London. I’m told Mowbray was in France in 1916 when the bombing occurred. He was sent home on compassionate leave to bury his wife and children. They were identified by the constable when they were pulled from the rubble of the building. Mother and two children, dead. Mowbray himself never saw the bodies; he was told it was better to remember them as they were.”

  “Inspector Hildebrand believes there must have been a mistake of some sort-the constable felt fairly certain the bodies were Mowbray’s wife and children, but they could have been another family altogether. The bombing demolished one building, as I understand it, and that brought down those on either side. Fifty or more dead. Easy mistake for the constable to have made-especially at night, fires, injured people everywhere. Absolute horror and chaos.” Johnston grimaced. “Bombs and tons of masonry don’t leave much to look at, I don’t suppose.”

  “If it had been another family who died in the raid, why hasn’t someone come looking for them? Parents? Sisters? Husband home on leave? Seems odd no one did, and discovered the mix-up.”

  “God knows,” Johnston answered tiredly. “My guess is, there was nobody to care about the dead woman-and Mowbray’s wife probably took advantage of that to start a new life. Makes sense, especially if she’d grown tired of waiting. Take happiness while you can. No fuss. Easier than a divorce.”

  In France half a dozen men under Rutledge’s command had applied for compassionate leave at one time or another, most of them men whose wives wanted to leave them and had told them so in a letter. One had been furiously angry…

  “Private Wilson,” Hamish reminded him. “He said he’d have her back or know the reason why. He was brought up on assault charges in Slough and given six months.”

  Johnston seemed to know what Rutledge was thinking, adding, “Hard on the poor sod who’s told his family’s dead, but I daresay she never thought about that. Only that he wouldn’t come tearing home in a rage.” He squared his shoulders with an effort, as if the weight of the world lay on them.

  Rutledge studied the long, thin face, lined with something more than age or exhaustion. That was a look he, Rutledge, had seen often enough since he came home from France. And recognized. This man had lost a son in the war and was still grieving hard. The murder of a young woman, someone he didn’t know and didn’t love, had less reality to him than the death in a foreign country of the only flesh and blood that had mattered to him. Johnston was going through the motions for his client. That was all he could do.

  “Thank you for being so frank,” Rutledge said, preparing to walk on into the police station.

  Johnston seemed to realize how hopeless he himself thought the evidence was. He summoned a smile and added, “Early days yet, of course! Early days!” But there was a hollowness in the words and the smile.

  Rutledge watched him move on down the street, then opened the door of the station, finding himself in a scene of turmoil. There were some half a dozen people crammed into a room meant to hold two at best, and the sudden sense of claustrophobia that swept over him was so fierce he drew in his breath with the shock of it.

  Someone looked up, a constable, and said sharply, “What is it you want?”

  “Rutledge, from London,” he managed to say, but it came out harshly. Everyone in the room turned to stare at him, making the sense of suffocation worse. He could feel the knob on the door behind him jammed into his back.

  “Ah!” the constable replied noncommittally. “Come this way, sir, if you please.” He led Rutledge through the anarchy and into a dark, stuffy hall that smelled of cabbage and dust. “That’s the leaders of the next search parties,” he said over his shoulder. “We’ve not found the others-the man or the children.”

  Rutledge didn’t answer. They reached a door painted brown, and the constable knocked, then turned the knob.

  The room beyond was bright with late sun, and a long pair of windows stood wide, looking out into a small courtyard overgrown with weeds. Although the windows provided little air movement, they gave the sense of openness he badly needed-an escape into light and freedom. Hamish, in the back of his mind, sighed with a relief as great as his own.

  “Inspector Rutledge, Inspector Hildebrand. If you’ll excuse me, sir…?” The constable left the end of his request dangling in the silence as he retreated, closing the door softly behind him.

  Hildebrand looked Rutledge up and down. “They said they were sending an experienced man.”

  “I was with the Yard before the war,” Rutledge replied.

  “But away through the better part of it,” Hildebrand finished for him. He himself was white-haired, with a youngish face. Rutledge put his age at not more than forty-five. “Ah, well. Sit down, man! Here’s what we have. Murder victim presumed to be Mrs. Mary Sandra Mowbray, of London. Matches the general description of the late Mrs. Mowbray, or I should say, presumed late. Even Londoners can’t die twice, can they? In his wallet Mr. Mowbray had a photograph of her with the children, taken in 1915, just before he was shipped over to France. We’ve had copies made to circulate. So far nothing’s come of it.” He tossed a file across the cluttered desk, and
Rutledge found himself looking down at a faded photograph of a woman facing the camera and the sun at the same time, squinting a little. She was wearing a floral print dress and a single strand of pearls. Her hair seemed dark blond or a light brown, the way the sun caught it. Her face was oval and pretty, with fine bones and a distinct look of breeding handed down from some remote ancestor. The children by her side were a little clearer. The boy was no more than two, wearing a sailor suit and a hat that had fallen to a rakish angle over one eye. He grinned, squinting, while his hands clutched a ball nearly as large as he was. The little girl, not as childishly plump, had the same fairness as the mother. She could have been a large four or a small five, judging from the shy smile that showed all of her front baby teeth quite clearly. Her hand clutched her mother’s skirts, and her head was tilted in a way that promised a sweet nature rather than a rowdy one as she peered up through her lashes with no hint of roguishness.

  When Rutledge had scanned the faces, he saw that the file also included official copies from London of a marriage license in the name of Mary Sandra Marsh and Albert Arthur Mowbray, a pair of birth certificates for the children, and the death certificates for all three. Signed in a scrawl by a London doctor. “Severe injuries from falling debris” they all read, and the autopsy had gone on to catalog them.

  “Sad business,” Hildebrand said after a moment. “Young woman with a husband over in France. Lonely. Probably told the poor devil she took up with that he was dead. Well, it wasn’t altogether a lie, was it? So many of them did die. Only not her husband. He lived to come home, didn’t he? Must have been one of her worst nightmares, the chance of running into him some day! And as luck would have it, he goes from London to the coast in search of work, and there she is, standing in the station at Singleton Magna. Plain as day!”

  “You think she saw him? Leaning out the train window?” Rutledge asked, reading down the statements of a conductor and several witnesses, one of them a farmer’s wife and her sister, the other two stokers returning to their ship.

  “Stands to reason, I’d say. Explains why the four of ’em left town in such haste. Not a glimpse of them anywhere! One or two possible sightings of her at the station, probably before Mowbray spied her. After that, she was covering her tracks for dear life. I asked around myself, didn’t leave that to my men.”

  “Very proper,” Rutledge said absently, rereading one of the statements. “Still, we have only Mowbray’s word that this was his wife and family.”

  “As to that, I checked with London,” Hildebrand said with satisfaction. “There were quite a few casualties the night Mrs. Mowbray’s street was bombed. Constable Tedley identified her and the children. They were in the stairwell of the block of flats where she lived. And she didn’t show up later to prove him wrong, did she? And no one came round looking for someone who should have been alive, did they? Straightforward, as far as London was concerned.”

  Rutledge nodded and handed the statements back to Hildebrand. Then he asked, “How did Mowbray catch up to her later? Has he told you?”

  “Man’s in no case to talk. Deep depression, according to the doctor. Just sits there, staring at the floor, face drained of emotion. Stands to reason,” he said again, as if he used the expression often. “Wife died twice, didn’t she? Once when he was told she’d been killed by the Zeppelins and now by his own hand. Shock. That’s what it is. I daresay any of us would feel much the same. Not that it explains or excuses, of course. But you can see how it would happen.”

  Shock. It was something Rutledge understood very well In a different voice he asked, “What weapon did he use?”

  “Now that’s an interesting question. Blunt force to batter her face in, which means anything from a heavy stone to a tool of some sort. We examined the tools Mowbray had with him. Hammers, screwdrivers, a pair of saws, a level, that sort of thing. No blood or hair on any of them. Which says to me he got rid of whatever it was. I’d guess it’s where he left the other corpses.”

  “And the wounds? Where were they?”

  “In the face, mostly. Repeated blows, eight or ten, the doctor says. But there’re marks on her neck too. As if he’d caught up with her, running, and grabbed her by the throat, pulled her down, and then went for the face. That’s often what you find where jealousy is the motive-make her so hideous even in death that the rival can’t bear to look at her anymore. Doctor says the force used was savage, as if driven by terrible anger or fear.”

  “And no blood on Mowbray or his clothing?”

  “No. But then he could have cleaned himself up, couldn’t he? Changed shirts even. There’s no way of telling how many he’d brought with him. We found one other work shirt in his satchel, and a white one for Sunday. He might have had more.”

  Rutledge closed the file. “I’d like to see Mowbray, if f may.”

  Hildebrand got to his feet. “Much good it’ll do you!” he said willingly enough. “Let me fetch the key on the way.”

  They went along the same dark hallway to the end, where the key was kept in a small cupboard. Then Hildebrand turned to another door just to his left and unlocked it. The iron key made a scraping sound that jangled the nerves. As the door swung open, Hildebrand said, “Someone to see you, Mowbray. Scotland Yard. On your feet, man!”

  The man on the cot, lying on top of the gray blanket, slowly swung his feet to the floor and stared up at his visitors. His face was empty, and he made no effort to do more than sit, as if doing even so much had drained him of life and hope.

  Rutledge picked up the chair on the far side of the narrow cell and brought it over nearer the cot. The room was wider than it was long, and there was no window. The air was stale, seeming to hover in visible layers around them as he sat down. In the back of his mind Hamish was pointing that out, over and over again. After a moment Rutledge said, “Mr. Mowbray?”

  The man shifted his feet a little and nodded.

  “Did you kill the woman who was found in the field? The woman dressed in pink?” Rutledge kept his voice low, quiet, no hint of accusation in it, only curiosity.

  “She was my wife, I’d never harm her,” he said gruffly after a time.

  “The cabby has said you threatened to kill her-” Hildebrand began from the doorway, but Rutledge waved him into silence.

  “You were angry with her, weren’t you? For deceiving you, for putting you through such anguish. When you believed you’d come home and buried her with the children? And then-suddenly-she was alive, and so were they, and the first emotion you felt was anger. A great, fierce anger.”

  “It was the shock-and the train wouldn’t stop-I was beside myself-I said things I didn’t mean. I’d never harm her.”

  “Not even for taking your children and going to live with another man?”

  Mowbray sat with his head held by the palms of his hands on either side of his temples. “I’d want to kill him ” he said huskily, “for getting around her. Making her do it. I’d blame him, not her.”

  “His solicitor’s just left,” Hildebrand put in again. “told him what to say. You’ve heard more from him already than I have! It’s-”

  But Rutledge ignored him, cutting across the flow of words as if they hadn’t been spoken. “Where did you leave the children? Can you take us to them? Let us help them?” He waited for an answer, then added gently, “You’d not want the foxes or dogs to find them first.”

  Mowbray raised his head, and the pain-filled eyes made Rutledge swear under his breath as he met them. “I don’t know,” the man said wretchedly. “I don’t know where they are. Tricia was always afraid of the dark. I’d not leave her alone out in the dark! But I can’t remember-they tell me I killed her, and my Bertie, but I can’t remember! Night and day-that’s all I can see in my mind. The children. It’s driving me mad!”

  Rutledge got up from his chair. He’d seen men break, God knew he of all people could recognize the signs! There were no answers to be had now from Mowbray. The haunting images he’d seen-or been told he’d
seen-had been seared deep into his brain, and separating them from reality would be nearly impossible.

  Hamish, in the back of his own mind, was dredging up memories that were also safer concealed in the shadows, and he fought them grimly.

  Mowbray was watching him like a beaten dog, and Rutledge turned to go, not trusting his voice, unable to offer any comfort. Mowbray’s eyes followed him. Then the two men were out the door, leaving their prisoner to the silence and his conscience. Rutledge said nothing as the key rasped again in the lock and Hildebrand turned to put it back in its cupboard, but he could still feel the sense of suffocation, of hopelessness and horror and fear they’d left behind them.

  “You could pity the poor sod-if you hadn’t seen what he’d done.” Hildebrand was waiting with polite impatience for Rutledge to precede him down the passage to his office.

  “Put a suicide watch on him,” Rutledge said finally. “I want a constable with him, night and day. Never out of sight for an instant.”

  “I’m short of men-we’re seaching for the others-”

  “Do it! If he kills himself before you find those bodies, they may never turn up.” Rutledge walked away, leaving Hildebrand fuming behind him, wanting to argue. He didn’t care. He’d stayed as long as he could stand it in this dark and grim place.

  “I can’t work miracles, I tell you!” Hildebrand was saying.

  Rutledge, still struggling against the strong presence in his mind as Hamish harshly pointed out that Mowbray didn’t have such luxury of choice-could never again hope to walk out into the air and sun-silently reminded the bitter voice that Mowbray was very likely the murderer of children and had chosen his destruction himself. “I’ll hold you personally responsible if that man dies,” he went on as the inspector caught up to him.

  Hildebrand answered through clenched teeth, “that one’s not likely to miss the hangman, if I can help it. Right, then! You’ll have your watch.”