by Charles Todd
She took a deep breath and stood up. “I’ll do it. Just give me a moment to change into something cleaner.”
“You must think about it carefully,” he warned her. “It won’t be a very-pleasant-experience for you either. She was bea-”
“No!” she said sharply, cutting across his words. “Don’t tell me. I can stand it better if I don’t know how she suffered.” She turned to look at him. “Are you reaching for straws, Inspector? I have heard-various accounts, I assure you, and none of them kind-about what was done yesterday. I’m very glad those children were found alive. But I think the methods used to be certain were rather cruel.”
“It would have been far more cruel to have hanged an innocent man.”
She said, “It is no excuse, all the same.”
They arrived at the doctor’s surgery half an hour later. Rutledge had telephoned the police in Singleton Magna, asking Hildebrand to make the necessary arrangements. There was a message waiting for him at the surgery. “I’m pursuing my own line of inquiry. Handle this yourself.”
Dr. Fairfield was distinctly cool, but did as he was asked.
Henry Daulton had insisted that he come as well. “My mother will need me afterward,” he said simply. “I saw dead people in the war. She won’t like it.”
All the same, they made him wait outside.
In the spare, scrubbed room, Mrs. Daulton was shown the articles of clothing first. She looked at them, then shook her head. She was very white, her lips drawn tightly together. After a moment she said with some constraint in her voice, “No. I don’t recollect Betty wearing anything like this while she worked for the Darleys. But then I wouldn’t know her personal wardrobe. Or what she may have bought later. I’m sorry. That’s not much help, is it?”
The musty smell of earth and death filled the air as the clothes were refolded and put away.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” the doctor asked solicitously. “Before we go on? My wife will be glad to have you step across to the house, Mrs. Daulton.”
Her eyes strayed to the white screen in one comer of the room. “I’d rather-” She cleared her throat with an effort. “I’d rather finish as quickly as possible,” she said. “If you don’t mind?”
As he led her forward and withdrew the screen, she looked at Rutledge with anxious eyes. “I tell myself this is no worse than comforting the dying. Or helping to lay out the dead.”
The body had been made as presentable as possible, which wasn’t saying much. Even the sheet covering it seemed stark and horribly suggestive.
When it was drawn back, Joanna Daulton gasped and seemed for an instant to cringe into herself. Then she recovered, from what inner wells of strength, Rutledge couldn’t tell, but he felt only admiration. She looked down at the battered face, tatters of rotting flesh and yellowed bone, the broken nose. Her eyes were wide, observing. Careful.
Then she shut her eyes, reached out a hand, and turned away. Rutledge took the trembling fingers and held them in his. They were icy cold.
“I-that might be Betty,” she said shakily. “There’s-a resemblance-of a kind. Still-Could I have some air, please?”
Rutledge transferred his grip to her arm and led her out into the main surgery, while the doctor quietly drew the sheet back over the dead woman’s face. Mrs. Daulton took the chair Rutledge drew away from the desk for her and sat down with a suddenness that told him she was close to fainting.
He thrust a waiting glass of cold water into her hand and said bracingly, as he would have done to a raw recruit shaking with reaction after his first battle. “That was well done. You were very brave, and it’s over now.”
“No, I wasn’t,” Mrs. Daulton said quietly after she had drank the water and rested for a moment. “I shall see that face in my nightmares for a very long time to come. The sad thing is, I appear to have been no help at all to you. I’m sorry.”
And to his astonishment, she buried her face in her hands and began to cry.
Rutledge delivered a subdued Mrs. Daulton and her son to the rectory in Charlbury and then, after two other stops, went back to Singleton Magna for his lunch. He was sick of death and bodies and questions.
But there was no respite. Halfway through his meal, there was a telephone call from London.
He expected it to be Bowles, complaining and demanding. Instead it was Sergeant Gibson.
“Inspector Rutledge, sir? I’ve been doing some digging in Gloucestershire, looking for that Tarlton woman. No luck, I’m afraid, but I’ve come across a small bit of information that you might want to hear. The cousins who live there are middle-aged, I’d say closer to forty than thirty. They’ve got a little boy of three or thereabouts. Proud as punch of him, they are. But one old gossip down the street tells me Mrs. Tarlton-that’s the cousin-couldn’t have children, it was the sorrow of her life, and this is a miracle baby.”
Rutledge felt a ripple of excitement. “Have you spoken to Mrs. Tarlton’s physician?”
“Aye, I did that, and he said-mind you, he didn’t like it one bit!-that Mrs. Tarlton had seen fit to go to Yorkshire to have the lad. He hadn’t even known she was pregnant. Returned with her baby, looking like the cat that ate the cream, very pleased with herself indeed. He didn’t have the direction of the doctor who’d delivered the boy, didn’t know, if you ask me! So I took it upon myself to look up the boy’s birth certificate. Very interesting reading, that. Sarah Ralston Tarlton, mother, father listed as Frederick C. Tarlton. Which is as it should be, if the boy’s truly theirs. I went next to the attending physician in York, and he says Mrs. Tarlton stayed in a rented house with her sister-in-law, an older woman. Her husband came several times to visit.”
He waited.
Rutledge said, “Any description of him?”
“Vague. Fits Freddy, right enough. The doctor said they were there only a few months, until Mrs. Tarlton and of course the baby were fit to travel. They were emigrating to Canada, he thought. But I’ll be willing to wager that it was all a farce, and our Miss Tarlton had a baby which she handed over to the cousins. She wouldn’t be the first young woman in London to slip up with some soldier.”
But was it “some soldier”? Or was the child Thomas Napier’s? If the arrangements had been so carefully made from the start, that link would be buried deepest. Napier had enemies; they would like nothing better than to catch even the faintest whiff of scandal.
“Well done, Sergeant! You’re vastly underrated. Has anyone told you that? I owe you a drink when I get back to London.”
“As to that, sir, rumor here says you’ve taken root in Dorset.” There was a deep chuckle at the end of the line as Gibson hung up.
“Interesting information or no’,” Hamish was saying, “what’s it got tae do wi’ this business?”
“Everything-or nothing,” Rutledge said, replacing the receiver. “It could give Elizabeth Napier a damned fine motive for murder.”
“Or yon Daniel Shaw. If he was to learn what happened.”
Or even Thomas Napier, if he was tired of moral blackmail…
None of which accounted for the second body.
Rutledge found himself restless, unable to settle to any one thought or direction. Every time he’d made any progress in this investigation, he seemed to slip back into a morass of questions without answers. He walked as far as the church yard, then turned down a shaded lane that led past the back gardens of half a dozen houses before winding its way to the main road again.
The source of his restlessness was easy to identify. The problem of Betty Cooper. He’d stopped at the Darley farm on the way back to Singleton Magna, to question Mrs. Darley. She had been bitter, as Joanna Daulton had foretold.
“I did my best by that girl! I gave her a home, I taught her to be a good maid, and I would have helped her find a place when she was ready. Instead, she walked away in the night, without a thank-you or a good-bye. Whatever trouble she got into afterward is none of my concern.” She was a woman with thinning white hair and a har
assed expression, worn by years of hard work. “I’m sorry if she’s got herself killed, I wouldn’t have wished that on her. But a green girl goes to a place like London and she’s likely to find trouble, isn’t she?”
“Would she have been likely to come back to you for help? If she’d needed it?” he’d asked. “If she’d found herself in trouble?”
The room was full of sunlight, but there was a darkness in Mrs. Darley’s face. “She’d have been sent away with a flea in her ear, if she had! I have no patience with these modern girls who don’t know their place or their duty.”
“Was there anyone she was close to in the neighborhood? A man or a woman? A maid at someone else’s home?”
“Women didn’t much care for her, she put on airs. Above herself, she was. As for men, they’d come around, as men will, but she wouldn’t give them the time of day either. Saving herself for better things, she was. Well, that’s all right in its way, but she had notions she shouldn’t of. When Henry Daulton came back from the war, she said if he hadn’t been wounded so bad, she’d have had a fancy for him. Then she met Simon Wyatt, and she was all for finding herself a gentleman. Mr. Wyatt had interviewed her only as a favor to Mrs. Daulton, but she couldn’t see that, could she? Took it personal, just because he’d seen her himself, rather than leaving her to his French wife.”
“She told you this?” Rutledge asked, surprised.
“Lord save us, no! I overheard her talking to one of the cowmen. He was teasing her, like, and she said a gentleman didn’t have dirt under his nails nor smell of sweat, nor drink himself into a stupor of a Saturday night, and knew how to treat a lady. Much taken with Mr. Wyatt she was. She said he’d gone and got himself a French wife, but it wouldn’t last. He was home now, and not in France. That’s when I came around the corner from looking at the cream pans and told her I’d not have talk like that under my roof. My late husband didn’t stand for that kind of sauciness, and neither do I! It wasn’t more than ten days later, if that long, before she was gone. And I haven’t seen her, nor wanted to, since. I don’t wish her harm, no, but some learn the hard way, don’t they?”
Rutledge also tracked down Constable Truit, who had-according to Joanna Daulton-tried to court the dead woman.
He shook his head when Rutledge began his questions. “Inspector Hildebrand asked me to have a look at the body when it was first brought in. I couldn’t see any likeness to Betty. Miss Cooper. Sleek as a cat, she was, sunning itself in the window. Not like this one, thin, cheap clothes and shoes. Not Betty’s style.” His confidence was solid, convincing.
Rutledge wondered if Truit saw what he wanted to see or if this was a considered opinion. All the same, the answer contradicted Mrs. Daulton’s tentative identification.
A dead end. And yet… if the dead woman was Betty Cooper, she’d come back to Dorset. Someone had killed her, when she did, to silence her.
Just as someone had killed Margaret Tarlton, when she came back to Charlbury for the first time since 1914.
“That’s wild supposition,” Hamish said.
But was it?
What did these two women have in common? Or-to put it another way, what threat had these two women posed, that cost them their lives?
The common thread, if there was one, seemed to be Simon Wyatt. And a savage beating that was the cause of death in both cases. But it was as tenuous as gossamer, that thread. One tug, to see where it might lead, would snap it…
If Elizabeth Napier had killed her secretary because Margaret had borne an illegitimate child to Thomas Napier, it made no sense for her to have killed a serving girl months before.
If Daniel Shaw had killed Margaret out of jealousy, he had no motive to kill anyone else.
If the connection was Simon Wyatt, then he, Rutledge, was back to Aurore.
“Or Simon himsel’,” Hamish pointed out. “For yon bonny house and the money it will bring in.”
Thanking Truit, he found himself thinking with cold clarity that there was one way that Simon Wyatt might win on two fronts: retrieve the money he needed so badly from Margaret’s Chelsea house and rid himself of his French wife. Leave her to hang for murder…
Coming out of Truit’s house, he was waylaid by Mrs. Prescott.
“I don’t see why you haven’t moved into the Arms,” she told him. “You’re in Charlbury more often than the doctor or the priest.”
“By accident,” he said, smiling.
She looked up at him. “Pshaw! It’s a pretty face bringing you back.”
He could feel a flush rising. “Margaret Tarlton’s face wasn’t pretty when her killer had finished. That’s what brings me back here. Did you have something to tell me?”
Mrs. Prescott nodded. “My brother, now, he’s a good listener. Says his voice dried up the day after his wedding and hasn’t been heard since. But he’s a great one for the gossip over a pint at the Arms. You’d think he knew more about wood than any man alive.”
“Wood?” His mind was only partly on what she was saying.
“He’s a carpenter. Like the Lord, only not liable to wind up on some of his own handiwork! Makes chests and bed frames over to Stoke Newton. And he’s the one told me about the body they’d found by Leigh Minster.”
“And you’re here to tell me the identity of it?”
“No, it’s not anyone I know. Not that Miss Tarlton, if this one’s already rotting. Nor yet anyone around Charlbury, that I can think of. But it makes you wonder, don’t it, if a woman’s safe these days, out on the roads. When I was a girl, you could walk to Lyme Regis, if you’d cared to, and not a thing to fear any part of the way. I ask you again, do you believe that man Mowbray’s to blame?”
“What do you think?”
She tilted her head to look up at him against the sun. “I don’t see this part of Dorset is a likely place for murderers to congregate by the half dozen, waiting their chances! They’d be more like to die of boredom!”
He said, keeping his face grave, “Are you saying the killer is a local man-or woman?”
“I have a thought or two I’m working on,” she told him, an undercurrent of seriousness changing her voice. “Mind, I’m not saying it’s the most likely way things happened! Only that I suppose it could have.”
Surprised, he thought she was telling the truth, rather than trying to tweak his interest.
“I’d be careful who I told,” he warned her. “If it’s not Mowbray, safely locked away, your thought or two might well make a killer very uncomfortable.”
Mrs. Prescott gave him a straight look. “I’m no fool,” she told him bluntly. “You’re Scotland Yard, and safe enough. Constable Truit,” she added, glancing over her shoulder at his house, “w a fool. I hear the talk around this part of Dorset. Only it doesn’t go in one ear and out the other. Like that quilt I was telling you about-bits and pieces, bits and pieces-they add up.”
“Have you got enough to baste together a whole story? If you do, I’d like to hear it.”
She shook her head. “Not yet. No, early days yet! I just wanted you to know that I was working at it.” She smiled crookedly. “I’ve a fond spot for Simon Wyatt. And I detest that Hazel Dixon. I’d just as soon see her nose put out of joint! She’s one to cause trouble out of spite. Pure spite!”
He said again, “I’d refrain from meddling, if I were you.”
“I won’t meddle,” she told him. “I’ll just listen, that’s all.”
23
Rutledge realized that his unguided steps had led him to the small surgery of Dr. Fairfield. The doctor was in and prepared to give him five minutes. The coolness was still there, but Fairfield knew his duty and did it precisely.
“There’s only one question, it won’t take more than five minutes. It’s about the body found here in Singleton Magna-Mrs. Mowbray or Miss Tarlton. I’d like to know if that woman had borne children?”
“That was one of the first questions Hildebrand asked me. And yes, she had. At the time, my answer provided additional evid
ence that she must be the Mowbray woman. Whether it applies as well to Margaret Tarlton, I can’t say.”
“It may be that Miss Tarlton also had a child. Out of wedlock.”
Fairfield said, “I’m afraid medical science can’t tell us whether the mother was wearing a wedding band or none at the time of birth.”
“And the body at Leigh Minster?”
“I’d say she hadn’t. It is harder to be sure, given her time in the ground. That’s two questions.” He pulled out his watch and glanced at it.
Rutledge took the hint as it was intended, and left.
***
He found himself wishing he could interview Thomas Napier, to test the theory of his involvement with Margaret. But Rutledge knew what Bowles would have to say to that request. And Napier himself might well refuse-he had made a point of staying in the background, except for what might be judged as reasonable concern for a young woman in his employ and still under his protection. Even his visits to Bowles’s office could be construed as a man acting in the place of a father. Bowles would most certainly interpret it that way. It made his own life simpler and easier.
The next best choice was Thomas Napier’s daughter.
It was time to ask Elizabeth Napier a few blunt questions.
She was in the museum, a pinafore over a pretty summer dress in blues and greens, busily dusting the new shelves that had replaced the fallen ones.
Rutledge greeted her and asked her to come for a walk with him, out of the house and away from other ears. Somewhere he could hear the maid Edith beating a carpet and Aurore’s voice speaking to Simon.
Surprised, Elizabeth removed her pinafore and said, “I don’t see the need for such secrecy, I’ve nothing to hide. But if you insist-very well.”
They walked down toward the common and the pond. A dog slept peacefully by the water’s edge and ducks swam smoothly in small flotillas, conducting loud conversations as they went. Rooks called in the trees, and he could hear the blacksmith’s hammer. There was a bustle in Charlbury’s streets, the shops doing a brisk business, but here it was quiet enough except for Hamish, muttering in the back of his mind.
