Search the Dark (17 page)

Read Search the Dark Online

Authors: Charles Todd

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Historical

BOOK: Search the Dark
2.37Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
The heavy key turned in the lock, the door swung back, and the misery inside was almost palpable. The smell of unwashed flesh and hopelessness was enough to make Johnston stop in his tracks. “My God, haven’t you allowed him even the decency of soap and water!”
“We’ve brought him soap and water,” Hildebrand said curtly. “We can’t dip him into it. My constables are already complaining it’s not fit in here for beast or man. That’s why you’re here. To get to the bottom of this!”
Mowbray sat where Rutledge had last seen him, head in hands, shoulders slumped. The picture of dejection and despair. His hair seemed to have grown longer, wilder than the gray-streaked ten-day-old beard, and his clothes looked worn, shabby, and grimy.
Johnston stepped forward and said, “Mr. Mowbray. It’s Marcus Johnston. I represent you. Do you remember me?”
But there was no response, although Johnston gently tried pleading, cajoling, and coaxing for a good ten minutes to break through the man’s apathy.
Finally he gave up and moved back out into the passage, breathing as if he’d felt short of air.
Hildebrand turned to Rutledge. “See what you can do, man! I’ll take any help I can get!”
Rutledge could feel his own heart pounding, and Hamish was a live presence in his mind. But he forced himself with every shred of will he possessed to step into the cell. The constable on duty was a large, heavy man who seemed to fill the corner he stood in like some ancient pillar rooted
there in the dimness. His face was tense, his eyes on Mowbray like a lifeline.
Hildebrand crowded in after Rutledge, and Johnston, seeming to feel his responsibility like a dead weight that couldn’t be shoved aside, pushed in after. It was Rutledge’s worse nightmare, and he was on the brink of panic when he finally made his voice work.
“Mowbray? Good God, man, what would Mary think of you, filthy and unshaven?” he asked, more harshly than he’d intended. “It’s a matter of pride!”
“Mary’s dead,” Mowbray mumbled at last, as if finally jarred into the present. “She can’t see me now, she can’t hear you.”
“What makes you so certain the dead are deaf and blind?”
“They say I killed her! Is it true?” He looked up, his own personal hell raging in the red-rimmed eyes. Rutledge wondered how much the man could understand, or if this apparent conversation with Mowbray was merely something the sane men in the room believed in.
Catching Johnston’s eye, Rutledge answered, “I don’t know. A woman’s body has been found. You’d been searching for your wife, you’d made public threats against her, whether you remember them or not. The woman seemed to match the photograph of your wife we found in your wallet. What else should we believe?”
“I remember seeing her by the train.
I remember it!
But if she died in London, how could that be? How could she end up in this place? I don’t even know where I am.” It was as if he’d forgotten that a man was supposed to have been with the woman. He looked vaguely around him, as though his eyes weren’t focusing on the cell walls, that they saw things visible only to him.
Like Hamish …
“What was she wearing when you saw her?”
“I saw her. The wind blew her hair like I remembered, and she had that smile when she looked at the children, that smile … .”
“How was she dressed?” Rutledge persisted. “Was she dressed in blue? Green?”
“She wore pink for me. She always did, when she wanted to make me happy. I took a photograph of her once in pink. I have it here—” He fumbled for his wallet and not finding it, gave up.
“And the children? How were they dressed?”
But Mowbray couldn’t face thinking about his children, and Rutledge nearly lost him again to the depths of apathy.
“There was a woman along the road. Walking by herself,” he went on quickly. Johnston made an abrupt movement, trying to stop Rutledge. Hildebrand opened his mouth to speak and was ignored. “She had on a pink dress, this woman. Pink with lavender and rose. But it wasn’t your wife. It was someone else. Did you see her? Did you speak to her?”
But Mowbray’s head was back in the cradle of his hands. He was weeping silently.
“God damn it!” Hildebrand exploded. “You’ll muddle the waters worse than they are—”
“I didn’t agree to this line of questioning!” Johnston began at the same instant.
“Hildebrand. Send the man in the corner there to bring that dress to us. I want to show it to Mowbray.”
“No, that’s out of order, I won’t—”
“I’ve got to consider the ramifications if he should identify it—we don’t know—” Johnston was blustering. “I can’t follow your reasoning!”
“I want the dress,” Rutledge said. “Send the man for it!”
“It’s on your head!” Hildebrand retorted. “Do you hear
me?
”
But in the end he relented. And the heavyset constable, relief visible on his face, diffidently strode past them and was gone.
They stood in angry, volatile silence while he was away. Mowbray’s weeping had stopped, and he seemed to be asleep where he sat, his breathing very irregular and harsh, as if dreams haunted him. Then suddenly he started into
full wakefulness, crying out in anguish, throwing out his hands as if to ward off what had come out of the depths of his mind.
“As ye’ll be doing one day!” Hamish reminded Rutledge, chilling his blood.
Mowbray turned and begged, “Where are my children? Have you seen my children? Oh, God, I don’t know where to look for them anymore.”
The constable returned at that instant, breaking the spell that had held the witnesses in stunned thrall. He carried a carefully wrapped bundle in his hands and looked first to Hildebrand before passing it on to Rutledge.
Rutledge opened it, concentrating on the string and the knot, on the folds that led inward, until he held a garment within the white sheets of tissue paper, dark against their paleness. After a moment, without arranging the dress or the paper, he went to kneel on the cold, hard floor in front of Mowbray.
“Will you look at this?” he asked gently, making no attempt to touch the man, who was staring blindly into nothingness again.
It was some while before he coaxed Mowbray into glancing down at the dress he held out like an offering to some vacant god.
Mowbray frowned as if he couldn’t make out what it was, much less recognize it. But Rutledge was very patient. He could feel his feet and knees beginning to ache from the awkward position, but he kept himself steady and quiet, offering no distraction.
After a time Mowbray reached out a work-hardened finger and touched the fabric of the dress as if testing to see if it was real. Lightly, not with interest so much as his inability to decide what it was. Then he saw that it had a shoulder, a sleeve—a collar—and knew.
“I thought the bombs killed her. I wasn’t there when it happened. I was in France, Captain Banner was telling me I had to go to London. That something had happened. I think they took me by car to the port. It was raining and
dark and I couldn’t feel anything—not even in the service in the chapel—”
The dark bloodstains were visible now, black and stiff, a long soaked patch and the splatters, like black dots on the cloth with no attempt to place them becomingly, no sense of artistry, only marks of the intensity of the attack.
“They wouldn’t open the casket and let me see her. They said I shouldn’t. Was this what she was wearing, then? Is—
oh, God, it must be her blood!”
He recoiled, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets as if to keep them away from the horror. “I wanted to hold her again and they wouldn’t let me—
they didn’t tell me there was so much blood!”
“Stop this,” Johnston cried, in nearly as much horror as Mowbray. “It’s inhumanly cruel, it’s—you’ve got to stop!”
He came forward, pulling at Rutledge’s shoulders, forcing him backward. Hildebrand, swearing, was trying to tell the constable to get back into that room, damn it! Their voices echoed in the cramped space, loud and frightened.
Rutledge threw off Johnston’s grip, kept his balance by a miracle of muscle and tendon, and protected the dress from the floor. Mowbray, looking in amazement from one to the other, as if startled into brief sanity, said quite clearly, “That’s not the pink she liked! Who gave that to her? Was it him?
Was it the man with her?”
He fingered it again, puzzled. “It’s the wrong color, I tell you—
I knew when I saw her it was the wrong color!”
For an instant Rutledge thought Mowbray was going to lunge at his throat and choke him, but it was the dress the hands were reaching for, groping, clutching, then holding it up, peering at it in the dimness, trying to see, and turning toward the door, toward Hildebrand, who’d arrested him.
“It’s not hers, it’s a trick! She’s smaller than this, I know my own wife’s clothes! Why did the Hun want to kill her, she was never any harm to anybody, never an unkind word! I’ll make him pay, see if I don’t! I’ll kill every one of the bastards I can put hand to, I’ll grind him into the mud—pound until there’s no face left, and keep on pounding until you can’t tell brains from earth. I swear it to God, I do!”
Hildebrand managed to get the dress out of his grip without ripping it, and Johnston tried to push him back to the cot, while Rutledge stood there and watched the spate of words he’d released.
They hadn’t cleared Mowbray of murder. He may not have killed his wife, the dead woman might well be Margaret Tarlton, but he’d just described in passionate, intense detail the way the dead woman had died.
It took time to settle him down again, but when the adrenaline finally subsided and he had some small grip again on his surroundings, he sank back into the same posture they’d found him in, rocking himself with the pain and the uncertainty, as if he had no recollection of the dress, the men around him, or tensions so taut that Hamish was warning Rutledge to go—
go!
But he stayed, walked back down the passage with Hildebrand and Johnston berating him in vicious terms, spilling out their own shock and horror in a tirade that left them both breathless and stumbling over each other’s words without noticing it.
Rutledge stopped at the door to the front room, and turned.
“It may have been unorthodox,” he said coldly. “It was most certainly necessary. There’s a possibility he saw Margaret Tarlton alive—and killed her thinking she was his wife.”
You sacrifice the man for the woman
—“Or even more likely, came across her dead body. Which may explain why he was so quick to believe the charges against him. Because Margaret Tarlton’s not in London, not in Gloucestershire, and not in Sherborne. You tell me where she is—and why we can’t find her. There’s a death certificate for Mrs. Mowbray, but it’s Miss Tarlton who’s missing! Can’t you understand what I’m telling you?”
“You’re not going to turn my case into a circus, I’ll have you recalled first—”
“How can I build any reasonable defense after what we just heard—”
“That’s beside the point,” Rutledge said. “I’m not interested
in solving your problems, I’m interested in what’s at the bottom of this murder. I’m interested in saving that poor devil if he’s innocent and convicting him if he’s guilty. I want to find answers to the riddle of who’s lying in that grave in your churchyard—and why she’s there. I believe I’m on the right track. If you won’t help me prove I’m right, then for God’s sake, show me where I’m wrong.”
Johnston said, “You forced my client to all but convict himself out of his own mouth, before witnesses! I don’t see how that’s supposed to save him!”
“Did you listen at all to what he was saying? That the dress in Hildebrand’s hands isn’t Mrs. Mowbray’s color or size! But Elizabeth Napier swears it’s
Margaret Tarlton’s
color and size. If we were wrong about his victim, can’t you see that we may also be wrong about his part in her death?”
“Are you claiming that it’s my investigation that’s at fault? By God!”
Rutledge could feel frustration battling his need for air and space. He said, “No. We’re all in this muddle together, Hildebrand. Only, if we’re wrong at the end of it, it will be Mowbray who pays for any blunders we’ve made, not you or I.”
“And what do we do about those wretched children, then? Answer me that—pretend they never existed, and hope to hell we’re right?”
The door behind Rutledge opened suddenly, bringing in a sweep of air because the outer door was also standing wide.
A breathless sergeant, red-faced and muddy, said over Rutledge’s shoulder, “Inspector Hildebrand, sir? We’ve found a body, sir. I think—you’d best come and see it!”
R
utledge drove. Hildebrand sat in the seat beside him while Sergeant Wilkins occupied the space that Hamish considered his own.
That made Rutledge edgy. If he turned around, would Hamish be there in the shadows beside the sergeant? Or had the sergeant unwittingly exorcized his fellow passenger?
Hildebrand sensed his uneasiness and attacked. “Rather throws your theory into a cocked hat, doesn’t it?”
“I won’t know until we get there.”
Hildebrand laughed. “Yes, that’s it, slip off the hook. You’ve done bloody little else since you got here!” Then, remembering the presence of his sergeant, he added to the man, “Tell me again. Slowly this time!”
The sergeant repeated the story he had spilled out in Hildebrand’s office, the words tumbling over each other in frantic haste. His voice was calmer now, as he ordered his thoughts and remembered details. “We’d broadened the search, like you’d said, and it was that young chap, Fenton, who saw the earth seemed different in the one place, sunken like, as if something had been buried and the soil had settled in around it. Well, he began to dig a bit, thinking it might be somebody’s old dog or the like, and instead he
comes up with a muddy edge of cloth. Appeared to be part of a blanket at first, then we could see the corner, with a bit of lining. A coat, we thought. You could see the color, a dark blue. Then the white of bone. We stopped there and I came for you straightaway. Not wanting to disturb anything before you’d seen it like it was.”
“Yes, well done! You’re
sure
it’s a coat, not a blanket? You’d wrap a dog in an old blanket!”
“It’s not made the same as a blanket. And there’s no fur, sir. You’d find fur too, if it was an animal. That lasts.”
“Yes, yes!” Hildebrand answered testily. “No sense of size—child, fully grown adult?” He was not a man who enjoyed suspense, he wanted his answers now, questions later. Sometimes in policework there were no answers at all. He’d been afraid this Mowbray investigation was heading in such a direction. But if they’d found either the children or that damned Tarlton woman, all to the good. He felt his spirits suddenly rising. If it was the Tarlton woman, it’d get Rutledge off his back, by God, and leave the Mowbray business out of it altogether!
“No, sir, as I said, we didn’t want to disturb the ground more than needful.”
A silence fell, and Rutledge found himself thinking,
This is too far for Mowbray to have come.
He’d have had to pass through two villages—someone would have seen him—and bone meant the body had been in the ground for some time. In the trenches, you learned how long it took a man to rot … .
He was still tired from the session with Mowbray, feeling the intensity of emotion, the rawness of the man’s fears—his own reaction to them.
“I hope to God the body has nothing to do with Mowbray!” he told himself.
“Or with Charlbury …,” Hamish added softly, startling him.
By the time they’d reached the makeshift grave, a small crowd had collected, standing just out of sight of the remains. They were mostly from Leigh Minster, according to
the sergeant. The news hadn’t traveled to Stoke Newton or Charlbury yet.
Rutledge pulled off the road, braked the car, and Hildebrand was out almost before it had stopped moving, wanting to be the first on the scene. The sergeant followed. Rutledge let them go. It was their jurisdiction, after all.
The scrub ground had been pastureland at one time, allowed to go wild and overgrown now with weeds that reached to his knees, a few of them shrubby and tenacious, dragging at the fabric of his trousers like bony fingers. From where he was walking he could see a distant rooftop, a barn, he thought, very likely the last outpost of Leigh Minster. That was to his right, and on the left was a field, already cut. Ahead, a slight rise. He turned to look behind and saw that there was a burned-out chimney marking the ivy-grown foundations of a house across the road. A blackened stump, with rooks perched on the broken edges calling raucously.
If you’d looked for a place to bury a body, this was ideal for the purpose, invisible unless someone came along the road. Which brought to mind the next question: Who had known such a place was
here
? Certainly not Mowbray, a stranger in Dorset!
Rutledge walked through the knot of voyeurs who whispered behind their hands, trying to decide what was behind the sudden influx of policemen and what was attracting their attention just out of sight behind the weeds. The general opinion appeared to be the discovery of the missing children. He heard Mowbray’s name several times as he passed. Ahead, around the depression in the earth, stood six or seven men. He recognized the constable from Leigh Minster and nodded to him. Hildebrand and the sergeant were on their knees studying the cloth that emerged like a small sail from the rough hole that had been dug by the sergeant and his men. Blue, and wool, if he, Rutledge was any judge. But cheap wool, thin rather than thick.
It wasn’t until he reached the others that he saw what appeared to be a knob, dirty white, with bits of flesh still
attached, like a half-chewed bone, and the clinging mud from recent rain.
It was human, not animal—
That was the first question Hildebrand asked, looking up. “Human, then?”
“Yes. I think it is.”
Hildebrand nodded. “All right, lads, let’s see a bit more, shall we?”
He straightened and moved aside while the sergeant handed the shovel to a thickset constable with sleeves already rolled above his elbows. He set to carefully, as if he’d done this sort of thing before. Scraping, wielding the shovel as a broom more often than the work it was designed to do, the man made slow progress. Hildebrand, tight-faced, impatience in every line, watched. But he didn’t hurry the constable, and after several glances at Hildebrand, the sergeant made no comment either. The clang of the shovel, the grunting of the constable, and the distant rooks broke the stillness. And then the rest of the bone came into view. A shred of stocking clung to the flesh, and at the end, an ankle in a black, heeled shoe.
A woman. The grave was not deep; at a guess no more than a foot of soil covered her body. She appeared to have been wrapped in the coat rather than wearing it.
It had been far too hot for a wool coat the day the woman in the farmer’s cornfield had died. This wasn’t Margaret Tarlton or Mrs. Mowbray. And it wasn’t the missing children.
Hildebrand sighed. Another damned
question
…
It took an hour or more to uncover the remains to the point where the men watching and waiting could look at her and form any opinion of age, class, or time in the ground.
The constable from Leigh Minster squatted to peer into the makeshift grave, studying the body. After a time he said, “Don’t recognize her! We’ve no one missing, I’d know if there was. Who is she then? Can anyone say?” He got to his feet, looked around at the men on either side.
It was difficult to judge what she had once looked like. The face was badly decomposed, with signs that it had been damaged before death. The dark hair was tangled and mixed with clots of damp earth. Hildebrand turned to the constable from Stoke Newton. “Anything?”
“No, sir. There was a woman went missing some while back. A maid. But I wouldn’t—” He looked more closely and then shook his head. “I don’t think this one’s been in the ground long enough. It’s hard to say, but I’d guess from the coat and shoes she’s not a servant girl on her day off. Dressed more like a woman gone to market. Still—early days yet!”
Listening, Rutledge thought, I was right. An able man, that one! Aloud he said, “The face. It hasn’t been beaten the way the Mowbray woman was?”
Hildebrand said, “Hard to say.” He squatted on his heels as the constable had done. “There’s injury here. Nose damaged, and that right cheekbone. But the teeth aren’t broken, nor the forehead. We can’t be sure a beating’s what killed her. Could be there’s a stab wound in the body. Or a bullet. Doctor will tell us that.” He got to his feet. “All right, lads, send that crowd away, and let’s get her back to Singleton Magna.” He paused and looked at Rutledge. “Anything you want to add?”
Rutledge shook his head.
“Then it’s my business,
Dorset
business, not part of what brought you here.” It was a warning.
Stand clear.
Time enough to challenge that, Rutledge told himself, when and if there was a need to do it. Not now. Not in front of Hildebrand’s subordinates.
“So far I’ve seen nothing to show me that this involves the Yard,” he answered neutrally. Because he hadn’t. Still, the words were carefully chosen, not signifying capitulation, while reserving the right at any point to change his mind.
Hildebrand chose to regard them as a promise, not as a provisional agreement. More to the point, a promise before witnesses. He was pleased to be magnanimous and added,
“Your suggestion that we search a wider area brought her to light. I’m grateful. Look, you’d better drive back to Singleton Magna. I’ll stay here until we’ve got her sorted out, and then I’ll send these men on about their search. Could be an hour or so before we bring her in.”
Rutledge, politely dismissed, left. But Hamish was already considering the connection between this body and the last one. As Rutledge put up the crank and got into the driver’s seat, Hamish said, “It’s no’ to do with Charlbury. No’ the same manner of death. And this woman was put in the ground, not left in a field for anyone to find.”
“Yes, that’s what interests me. Whoever killed her must have known that she wouldn’t be missed. It was safe to hide her body. No search—and there wasn’t one, was there?—and no notice taken of her absence from wherever she came from. But in the case of the body outside Singleton Magna, I’m beginning to think she wasn’t hidden because there was a scapegoat available—Mowbray—and because Margaret Tarlton
would
be missed. By a number of people, one of them with the power to raise heaven and earth looking for her.” He drove sedately through Stoke Newton, where small knots of villagers stood on the street gossiping, as if the news had finally reached them and speculation was rife. Once on the high road again he added, “But I can’t believe that was the reason our body’s face was battered. I think there was passion behind it, not an attempt to hide her identity. It served that purpose of course—but it wasn’t the intention.”
“Aye. Which means you’re one body short and yon Hildebrand is one body long! Better him than you!”
Rutledge shook his head. “I’d have been happier if that corpse had solved the puzzle of ours. If it meant those children were safe. And that the killer, whoever he or she was, had nothing to do with that poor bedeviled soul in the cell.” He couldn’t seem to get Mowbray out of his mind.
“You did na’ need yon second dead lassie to prove that. You know and I know where the answers are. And I do na’ think she’ll change what’s happened in Charlbury.
You’ve got a murderer to find
there
, and the sooner the better! Unless, like Hildebrand, ye’re satisfied to put it on Mowbray’s head.”
He couldn’t. Even Hamish knew that it was impossible.
By the time Rutledge arrived at Charlbury—breakfastless and in a moody frame of mind—the news had flown before him. In the form of a man in the pub of the Wyatt Arms who had enjoyed regaling anyone who would listen with all the gruesome details.
From the sound of them, Rutledge knew, the man had not seen the body.
“Another killing,” he was telling a fresh recruit to his gathering audience, “just like the one in Singleton Magna. That man they’ve got in jail there—might not be the first time he’s gone looking for his missing wife. Left a trail of bodies over half of England if you want to know what I think. Sees a woman out on her own, walking along a road, like, or waiting for someone to come fetch her, and the first thing pops in his head is ‘There’s my wife, by God!’ And before Bob’s your uncle, he’s killed her!”
Rutledge, taking a late breakfast in the corner by the window, tried to shut out the voice. Looking out into the back garden, he realized there was a woman sitting there at one of the empty tables under the trees where the Women’s Institute had met. She was turned away from the windows, a glass of something in front of her. The soft green of her dress made her oddly invisible in the leafy shadows.
It was Aurore Wyatt.
He took his tea cup and went out to the garden.
She looked up as he said, “May I join you?”
He indicated the vacant chair at an angle to hers. The wind was softly stirring the leaves, giving a sense of tranquility to the garden compared to the uproar of voices in the bar.
Her eyes looked tired, as if sleep were something she knew very little about. “Is it business? I’ve heard them
talking in there. There’s been another body found, I’m told.”
“No, not business. I missed my breakfast. Now I’ve been served bones with my toast. I came out here to escape.”
“Then, please, I’d be happy to have company more cheerful than my own thoughts!” She waited until he sat down. “How did you miss your breakfast? Tell me lies, please! Something humorous, and a little silly.”
Rutledge grinned, all at once feeling better. “There was a giraffe loose in the kitchen of the Swan in Singleton Magna. The police are still investigating. What are you drinking? I’ll fetch another.”

Other books

Glass Swallow by Golding, Julia
A Taste of Honey by Iris Leach
Season of Ponies by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
La señora McGinty ha muerto by Agatha Christie
Night Terror by Chandler McGrew
Dirty by Gina Watson
No Other Story by Dr. Cuthbert Soup
Slap Shot by Lily Harlem