Search the Dark ir-3

by Charles Todd

  “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 suck his thumb. The man, looking up, was dark haired, of medium height and weight, his pleasant face wearing a distinctly uncert
ain 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…”

  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 his knees before it, his face contorted with tears. “Bertie?” he cried, his hands raking the glass. “Bertie? Is it you, lad?”