by Charles Todd
“You’re sure?”
“Oh, yes. Of course it’s the doctor has to decide, but from what I’d been told, it isn’t likely. And she was found over Leigh Minster way-not very likely to be ours, is she? Long way to carry a body, and where she was found isn’t a spot strangers would be likely to know was there. Stands to reason.”
There was an echo of Hildebrand’s voice in the last words.
“Always keep an open mind, Constable!”
“Aye, that I do. Sir.”
Rutledge nodded and walked off, unsatisfied. But Hildebrand was right: The second body was none of his business, and he was just as glad to leave it.
He went instead to the Wyatt house, walking into the museum unannounced. Elizabeth Napier turned from the shells she was arranging, a smock over her deep-blue dress and a small feather duster on the floor beside her. “Hello, Inspector!” she said in surprise. “What brings you here?”
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Wyatt. Is he in the museum or at home?”
“Through that door and to your right,” she answered, speculation in her eyes. “Has there-has there been any word of Margaret? You aren’t asking Simon to break something gently-”
“Nothing, I’m afraid.” He kept walking, making his way through the clutter of empty boxes that someone had begun to flatten and set in a pile, preparatory to putting them away. He went through the far door, found a short passage and a small, cluttered room serving as an office, at the end on the right.
Simon was busy with a ledger and what appeared to be a pile of bills. Every surface in the room seemed to be occupied by some half-finished task, waiting to be remembered. He sighed as Rutledge came in, as if the interruption had spoiled his train of thought. Seeing who it was, he leaned back in his chair and began to rub the back of his neck as if it ached. “What is it? Any news?”
“No. I wanted to speak to you. Privately.” Rutledge closed the door behind him and pulled out a chair that had been shoved into one corner. After removing the stack of books it held to the floor, he sat down.
“Look, can’t this wait?” Simon asked. “I’ve got to finish this lot, and it’s going to take most of the day! I’m not good at this sort of thing, and Aurore knows it. I can’t think why she isn’t here lending a hand. Thank God Elizabeth can make some sense of those displays. I need every bit of help I can find!”
“No, it can’t wait,” Rutledge said uncompromisingly. “Take your mind out of that ledger and listen to me!”
Simon reluctantly pushed it to one side, though whether he’d shut the figures out of his mind was another matter. “Very well. What’s the problem?”
“I’ve got a corpse on my hands, I think it must be the woman you were expecting to hire as an assistant, and I have witnesses who tell me that your wife drove Margaret Tarlton back to the railway station. If they’re speaking the truth, it means that Aurore Wyatt was probably the last person to see her alive.”
He frowned. “I don’t see what the problem is. Aurore isn’t a murderess!”
Simon Wyatt had also said his wife wasn’t a liar. Rutledge found himself wondering if Simon was shallow-or under the stress of his work wasn’t able to absorb anything that wasn’t connected directly to his museum. “What do you know about your wife-her background, her family?”
“Good God, what do they have to do with it!”
“Her parents,” Rutledge said patiently, ignoring Hamish’s irritated remarks about the constable and now this man.
“They’re both dead-mother died some years before the war,” he said in some exasperation. “Father killed when the Germans came through-shot, trying to stop the looting of his house and farm. Aurore herself barely escaped-she reached a nunnery just over the Belgian border and was taken in. She was ill for weeks, exhaustion and a fever. Then she tried to make her way south, hoping to stay with a cousin in Provence. I found her, ill again and terrified, in a group of refugees that had come into our sector during the night, and got shot at for their pains. Mercifully nobody was killed, but it was a near thing, scared the very devil out of my men, I can tell you! Word had already been passed that there was movement along the German lines, and then out of the dark!… I wouldn’t put it past the Hun to think this was a great joke!”
Rutledge understood. You shot at anything that came at you out of the dark without password or provenance.
“What did you do with them?”
“Sent them to the rear, told somebody to take a look at them. That was that. It wasn’t until later that I saw Aurore again and hardly recognized her, she’d been so thin, half starved and half out of her mind when she reached us. She had some medical skills, and the doctors must have put her to work.”
It was a very superficial account, without emotion, without any sign that the woman he was speaking about was his wife.
“Tell me about your political career,” Rutledge asked, trying to find the measure of the man. “I’m told it was very promising.”
And Simon changed. There was suddenly a haggardness in his face, a tenseness in the shoulders hunched over the desk. “Why?” Abrupt. Rough. As if Rutledge had turned over a stone and found something unspeakable beneath. Clearly it wasn’t a topic he cared to pursue. “It isn’t pertinent to murder, is it?”
“Margaret Tarlton was your houseguest for two days. You spoke to her, worked with her. That makes you a suspect, as far as I’m concerned.”
For a time Rutledge was sure the man wasn’t going to answer at all. Finally Simon said, “Did you know, my father and I sat down and planned my war? Churchill has gotten a good deal of mileage out of his ! Prisoner of the Boers. Grand escape across a river. People who’ve been out to South Africa tell me his ‘river’ was hardly more than a swale, but that’s neither here nor there. Good opportunity for a politically minded young man-going to war. I was supposed to write letters home that my father could circulate among his friends and colleagues. Take photographs, keep a journal. Something I could publish privately as soon as the war was finished. We’d even given it a name, that book: Journey into Oblivion. And do you know, it turned out to be very apt, that title. I went into oblivion, and I didn’t come back!”
The pain in the eyes of the man across the desk from Rutledge told him much. It was the same unbearable pain he’d read in Mowbray’s. Something so deep, so infinitely dark that it would destroy.
Rutledge had seen that look in his own face, bearded and strained, thin and half mad, in a mirror in hospital. A stranger, he’d thought, bewildered, has come back in my place!
Simon stared at Rutledge, not seeing him, not seeing the reflection of emotion that was there, naked and unguarded, if he’d had the wit to look. He was too busy trying to hold himself together, trying to force the devils back inside the small, crowded box where they’d been locked.
Slamming his fist on the desk, Simon said, “Damn you! Damn you!”
His eyes closed, and there was a white grimness about his mouth, as if he felt sick and was fighting hard against the tide of nausea that threatened to overwhelm an iron control.
The silence in the room was so deep that Rutledge could hear a clock striking somewhere in the house, a slow, deep tolling of the hour.
And then, without warning, the door opened and Elizabeth Napier said, “Dear God!”
She went protectively to Simon, her hands on his shoulders, the fingers kneading with her anger.
“Leave him alone! Do you hear me!” she cried, lashing out at Rutledge. “I won’t have it!”
As if-he thought, his own iron will struggling desperately to reassert control, Hamish pounding in his mind like hammer on anvil-as if, small as she was, she could stand in the way of the majesty of the law. “We were discussing the war-” he began in his own defense.
“The war’s over,” she told him. “It’s finished It killed, it maimed, and it destroyed-and yet none of you will let it go! You carry it around with you like sackcloth and ashes, you live with it in your very bones by day and your dreams by
night, and treat it like some Holy Grail you brought back with you! Well, it isn’t; it’s a legacy of despair and hate and grievous hurt, and I won’t let it touch me anymore, do you hear me! I won’t let it!”
Rutledge looked at Simon. His eyes were still closed, his breathing ragged and harsh.
But Simon said, “It’s all right, Elizabeth. He didn’t know-he didn’t mean to stir it up. I’m sorry-”
But you did! Elizabeth’s eyes accused Rutledge. And it was just as terrible for you as it was for Simon, wasn’t it? ”Go away!” she said aloud. “Go away. Before you both find yourselves on the other side of your nightmares!”
And Rutledge got to his feet, knowing he had to leave, that Simon was past questioning and his own frail peace was shattered as well.
“Simon, I’m back-” It was Aurore who had come in, blocking his escape. She looked at her husband, at Elizabeth fiercely protecting him, her hands dug into the white fabric of his shirt, his eyes closed, their bodies touching, her side against his arm, his head resting on her wrist, an intimacy between them that spoke of comfort offered and comfort accepted on a level beyond friendship. She turned to Rutledge, his face grim and his eyes haunted, staring at her as if he too saw her as an outsider.
Without a word she whirled and went out again, with such a deep grief in her movements that Rutledge could feel her pain and his own inability to assuage it
She was gone, and he still stood where he was, rooted. Until Elizabeth’s voice reached him.
“Go to her,” she said urgently. “Make her understand! I’ll see to Simon.”
“No. It’s better if you go,” Rutledge said. “She won’t trust me.”
But he found himself walking the three paces between himself and the door, and heard Elizabeth saying, “She needs comfort, and she won’t take it from a woman! She’s too strong to let me see her cry!”
And he thought that was true.
He found Aurore up by the churchyard, deep into the dark, shadowed clearing under the trees, her hand lifted to one drooping branch, her head against her upper arm.
Not wanting to startle her, he said quietly, “Is there anything I can do?”
She said huskily, “Go away. No.”
He moved closer, still some six yards from her, but near enough that his voice wouldn’t carry to anyone else.
“I brought back the war, that’s all it was. Simon had built a very high wall, but not high enough. It was-Elizabeth came to see what was wrong, she must have heard us-and she thought I’d badgered him. Blame me for what happened.”
Aurore turned to face him. There were streaks of tears on her face. He felt a surge of self-disgust, as if he himself had been the one to make her cry. “You brought back the war. Yes, I think that was true. But it was Elizabeth who used it for her own ends. He won’t turn to me for comfort anymore. Did you know? He shuts me out, as if he doesn’t want me to see what he believes is weakness in him! He thinks-if this museum is a success, I’ll admire him, look at him with love and pride for what he’s accomplished. He thinks-he thinks that it will wipe out the past. I saw him break, you see. A man can forgive a woman anything but that. If I’d slept with half the British army, he could forgive me. If I had betrayed his soldiers and got them killed, he’d find a way to forgive me. But not this! ”
He understood her better than she realized. He found himself wondering if perhaps Jean had been clever enough to know that he might come to hate her in the end, if she’d married him after seeing him in hospital, broken and in despair. Then he knew it wasn’t an excuse he could make for her-Jean had been half embarrassed, half horrified by what she couldn’t understand. She’d been so tightly wrapped in her own dread she hadn’t seen the urgent need to reach out and comfort him.
He said, “There were men who came home damaged. Physically, most of them. Emotionally, a good many of them.”
Aurore replied with a heaviness that spoke of long sleepless nights waiting for a man to show he cared. “I don’t think most of the English soldiers who went to France were prepared for what this war was going to do to them. Battles, yes, they expected battles. Great glorious charges, like Waterloo, where there’s no time to think or feel, just the intensity of trying to survive. Instead they sat in filthy trenches. How do they explain this at home? Simon’s father wrote over and over, ‘Where are the letters you promised? Why are they not coming through? Is it a problem with the censors? And the photographs, where are they? Is the camera working? Do you have film? For God’s sake, why are you letting this opportunity slip through your fingers? Where is the next Churchill?’ And Simon couldn’t tell him what was wrong. That he was faced with mortality, and what he’d been born and bred to do no longer seemed to matter. I think he realized for the first time that he hadn’t chosen his political future, it had been thrust at him. But in its place, what did he want? What else was he fit for? How do you decide such things on a battlefield? He was the walking dead. Waiting for death to remember he was still there and come for him. There was no future. And yet he desperately wanted one.”
For an instant she put her hands to her eyes, as if pressing them might stop the aching in her head. Or the aching in her heart. She took a deep shuddering breath, to steady herself.
“Do you even know what I’m saying? I gave him hope. I gave him something to hold in his heart until death came. My body and my love brought him a little peace before the end. Only-he lived. And he wasn’t prepared for that Or for a marriage that might last after all. Or for his father dead and Thomas Napier furious with him for jilting Elizabeth, who was desperately trying to be brave and noble about it. He came home to change-and an accounting. And I was the living symbol of how far he’d fallen from grace in the eyes of those whose good opinion was important to him.”
She turned to look up at the church tower, truncated and heavy. Like a wasted promise… When she went on, there was no self-pity in her words.
“It was very difficult for both of us. But divorce is hard to come by, you know, it leaves a stigma. And I am Catholic, there is nothing for me afterward. I believed I’d be happier trying to make my marriage work than standing at the quayside and waving good-bye, admitting that I’d failed Simon. And myself as well. I was braced to fight. But I can’t fight them all. I don’t know how. It would be much better for me to be hanged, guilty or not, sparing Simon the embarrassment of publicly acknowledging that his marriage was a mistake.”
She stopped, her body suddenly rigid. “No, I didn’t mean that! He would never harm me. He still cares…”
But she had just given Rutledge a motive for her husband to kill.
He said carefully, after a time, “I told you before that I didn’t believe Elizabeth would stay. After this is finished. There’s nothing to keep her here, except blatant self-interest. And somehow I don’t see her confessing to that.”
“If I am convicted of murder, she will have Simon without the messy aftermath of divorce. And if I am not, she will have shown him that she still cares. It is something from the past, you see. Something he had thought he’d given up. I don’t know-”
He could see the tears glistening in her lashes. “He’d be a fool to choose Elizabeth Napier over you!”
She gave him a watery smile and said for the second time that day, “You are very kind. But you know and I know that this murder has brought to the fore more than just one woman’s death. It is something I must face. I don’t know how I shall do that. I don’t know where it will end, but I shall find the strength I need.”
He stood there, helpless, unable to touch her, unable to offer any comfort that didn’t sound like kindness.
“Mrs. Wyatt-Aurore-”
She shook her head. “No. You must not say anything. Tell me again about the giraffe in the kitchen of the Swan. Forget you’re a policeman and I am a suspect, and tell me instead how the giraffe came to wander so very far from home.” She gasped as she realized that what she’d said was a reflection of her own dilemma.
Hamish w
as vigorously protesting that Aurore was trying to distract him.
Rutledge ignored him. He said, “It wasn’t so very far from home. Or lost. Only misplaced for a little while. I shouldn’t worry for its sake.”
“Animals have no complexity in their lives, do they?” she agreed. “How very fortunate they are!”
She walked away, leaving him there in the trees, her back straight, her head held high. Not toward the house but to the church. She was telling him that she wanted privacy and a little time alone.
But he thought perhaps she hadn’t stopped crying.
When Rutledge came back for his car, which was parked by the inn, he saw Mrs. Prescott, Constable Trait’s neighbor, with a market basket over her arm and a sense of mission in her stride.
She saw him and crossed the street hastily to waylay him.
“What’s to do with Mrs. Wyatt? She seemed that upset when she came hurrying out of her gate! Walked right past me without so much as a how-do-you-do, Mrs. Prescott! And you on her heels, like the wrath of God!”
“She’s well enough,” Rutledge answered. “There was something about a giraffe, I think, worrying her.”
Mystified for a moment, Mrs. Prescott then gave him a lopsided smile. “Which is another way of saying I ought to mind my own business. Well, you wouldn’t be the first to tell me that. But gossip’s like making a quilt. Sorting where the patches belong and where they don’t. Weighing size and color and shape. That takes skill, of a kind. I like to gossip, anybody in Charlbury will tell you that!”
“What’s Charlbury saying about this body found outside Leigh Minster?”
“I could tell you how many teeth she had in her head, and whether her stockings was cotton or silk!”
“Can you put a name to the teeth?”
“Not yet. She’s too long in the ground, they say, to be Miss Tarlton, and too fresh to be that Betty Cooper. Another stranger, d’you think? We’re getting fair swamped with strange corpses! I’m told it’s none of your business, anyhow. Except that it keeps Inspector Hildebrand busy on two fronts and out of your way.” She paused, then said tentatively, “If you don’t mind my asking, do you think a man or a woman’s behind Miss Tarlton’s killing?”
