by Charles Todd
She saw him on the stairs and said, “My God, it’s worse than London—the roads turn to muddy ruts and everywhere you put your foot there’s a puddle! I looked for you earlier, hoping you might dine with me.” She regarded him for a moment and added, “Inspector Hildebrand told me he thought you’d gone to the Wyatt Arms instead.”
“No. I had business elsewhere.”
Coming up to him, she said, “You look tired! Have you eaten at all?” Taking his silence for no, she turned to the woman at the desk. “Is your cook still here? I’d like a private parlor, if you please, and something hot to eat Soup will do. With tea.” Without waiting for an answer, she said to Rutledge, “I’ll take my death of cold, even in August, if I don’t change these wet clothes. I’ll only need five minutes!” She swept past him in an aura of damp wool that matched his own.
But it was almost fifteen before she came down the stairs again and considered him approvingly. He had changed his shirt and his shoes, and wore a sweater in place of his coat With his hair still damp and unruly, she thought he looked much younger than he seemed before.
There was soup and fresh bread set out in one of the smaller rooms, with tea on a table by a fire someone had hastily laid. It took a little of the chill and an air of mustiness from the room, giving it a cozy, almost intimate feeling.
Rutledge, curious, wondered what her reasons were for creating this comfortable setting. Whatever they might be, he preferred her company to his own thoughts in the silent room upstairs.
Elizabeth served him and then herself, although from the way she ate he thought it was out of politeness instead of hunger. He felt suddenly ravenous.
The soup was mutton, with barley, carrots, potatoes, and what tasted like turnips. The aroma alone was sustaining. He wondered if Elizabeth had commandeered the staff’s first course.
She waited until he’d finished half his soup before launching into her real purpose for waylaying him.
“My father says, if you need more men, he’ll ask the Yard to send them.”
Wouldn’t Bowles be delighted with that request! he thought, but said only “Thank you. But no, they’d only be underfoot. If the searches that Hildebrand’s conducting haven’t brought us any answers by this time, additional men—and strangers at that—aren’t going to.” He helped himself to a second bowl of soup and cut more bread. There was butter in a covered dish as well, as he discovered.
She said, “They aren’t going to find the children. I know that. You know that. But Hildebrand insists he has to find them. I spoke with the rector here in Singleton Magna this afternoon. Mr. Drewes. I felt I ought to do something about a headstone. My father wanted to remove the body to London. He’s taking Margaret’s death very hard, I can tell you. Ten years—you grow fond of someone in ten years. It isn’t surprising, I was very close to her myself.”
He said nothing, letting her carry on in her own fashion.
“Mr. Drewes was rather confused, I must say. He’d been informed of course that the dead woman was Mrs. Mowbray, and I don’t think he was too happy at the thought of changing the church records. I told him to blame Inspector Hildebrand for being overhasty.” She tilted her head and smiled wryly. “He thinks I’m utterly charming, so I must have put it less bluntly than that Of course he never said as much to my face, I overheard him talking to that woman at the desk, after he’d very gallantly walked me back to the Swan, holding his umbrella over me and getting himself thoroughly wet. His wife will have had something to say about that!”
He found himself wondering if Mrs. Drewes would even hear the story. Elizabeth Napier had a seductive way of sitting, her back straight, her shoulders slightly at an angle. Her hair, brushed back from her face, was gleaming in the firelight, and he could smell the faint scent of heliotrope.
“My father says if you find yourself in any difficulty with the local people, you have only to tell him. He made it clear to your superintendant this afternoon that he expects you to handle this business about Margaret.”
He felt a surge of irritation at her meddling—or was it Napier’s?
“I don’t believe that will be necessary,” he said. “But thank you,” he added, knowing it was what she wanted him to say. To satisfy her own sense of self-importance or her father’s silent need to be involved in the matter?
“What do you think of Aurore Wyatt?” she went on. She was making conversation as an experienced hostess might at a dinner party, interspersing the salient points as if they were commonplace remarks. Now she was down to what interested her most She rose to refill his tea cup, indicating she was giving him an opportunity to respond. Out of politeness if nothing else.
“I don’t think about her,” he said. “My task is to locate the rest of the Mowbray family—if they exist—or find out what part in this business Margaret Tarlton played. Which reminds me. I’d like to know something about her—not as your secretary, but as a woman might see her.”
“Which is as adroit a way of changing the subject as any I’ve seen since my mother’s uncle used to make excuses for his forgetfulness!” she said lightly, turning aside his refusal. “I think Aurore has turned your head as easily as she has Simon’s. And my father’s! He likes her, you know. He says if the French army had been made up of soldiers half as brave as Aurore, we’d have won the war three years ago.”
Rutledge said, “They lost their best men early on. And the rest lost heart.”
“And we paid in British blood for their inadequate weapons and their inadequate generals. Not that we didn’t have a few incompetent generals of our own! Frankly I wasn’t prepared to like Aurore. But I do. She’s got a quality of stillness that I admire—I’ve never been able to stop my mind or my tongue from working as they pleased. I can quite understand why Simon fell in love with her. And out of love with me!”
“War does strange things to people,” he said, falling back on the old cliché and wondering if he could shift the conversation one last time to Margaret.
“It certainly changed Simon,” she said, a wistfulness in her voice. “I was frightened by what I saw in him today. A fragility. It wasn’t there before! He was a man who had never known personal defeat, never had any doubts, always had his eye well set on the mark. It was what I truly loved in him, you know. His certainty. Not quite arrogance, just an assurance that he knew his way and was confidently following it. It was a guarantee of safety, that assurance. I felt safe in his care.” Toying with her teaspoon, she stopped, then added, “I asked Aurore if she’d noticed it—after all, she hadn’t known Simon before the war, she might not have been aware of any change in him. But she said, ‘He’s terribly afraid.’” Elizabeth paused thoughtfully. “I can’t accept that. I’ve never known Simon to be afraid of anything. Or any one!”
But Rutledge knew what Aurore meant. It wasn’t a question of lacking courage. Surviving had frightened Simon. He hadn’t expected to live. He couldn’t comprehend how he’d deserved to live. And there was a feeling, deep down inside, that God would remember him one day and rectify the error.
“Simon isn’t afraid of anyone or anything. That’s not what his wife was trying to tell you. He’s alive and so many other good men are dead. There’s a sense of guilt in that. It breeds fear of a different kind.”
She stared at him. “Were you in the war? Do you feel that way?”
Oh, God, he thought, as Hamish echoed the question in the depths of his soul. Guilt was—it was the agony of spirit that made every day bleak. The fear that you might not live up to the cost of your survival—that you might not, somehow, justify the whim of fate that let Death miss you and take so many around you. The drive—and the brake—on all that you did and thought and felt, when the Armistice came and you were alive to see it. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. There was a biblical ring to that, straight out of the Old Testament, the sort of resounding phrase that thundered from the pulpit and terrified small boys even when they didn’t know what in God’s name was being said.<
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She saw his unwitting reaction and said quickly, “No, don’t answer that, I’d no right to ask it of you!”
“Then tell me instead about Margaret Tarlton.”
She sighed. “Margaret grew up in India. It made her—I don’t know quite how—seem much older than I was. As if all the things she’d seen and done and learned gave her a different sort of maturity from mine. And heaven knows, I’d grown up quickly myself, in a household where political intrigue was mother’s milk!”
“Did she come from a family with status? Money?”
“No, although from what I know of her father, he had aspirations, and he used to tell her as a child that England was her hope. If the family could just return to England, they’d be fine. If they could find the money for passage, they’d be fine. I don’t know what golden rainbows he saw for her, or why, but he made her hungry for a way of life she wasn’t going to have unless she married well. In the end, both her parents died of malaria, and she came without either of them. There was a younger sister too, who died near Suez of a fever several men brought back to the ship after going ashore. Margaret arrived in England alone, with no one to call family but distant cousins she’d never met She finished her education at the same school I was sent to; there was a family in Gloucester who provided a scholarship. They’d been missionaries or some such, and often did such things in the hope that it might make the recipient think of taking up the same burden. Well, they reckoned wrong with Margaret! She thought the heathen were quite happy with their own ways and would profit very little from being persuaded to try ours. Buddhism, she told me, made life a long series of chances to try to do better and see oneself more clearly. She didn’t care for Hinduism as much—she said it was as class-conscious as the Church of England. In my opinion, these beliefs—Hinduism and Buddhism—put far too much emphasis on the fate of the individual rather than on the good of mankind as a whole. It sustained a sort of—I don’t know—selfishness. I saw that from time to time in Margaret too, as if she’d been infected by it.”
“It seems she’d have made a perfect assistant for Simon. With her deep knowledge of the East.”
But Elizabeth Napier evaded that question very neatly. “I’m no judge. It wasn’t a subject she usually cared to speak of. Most people had no idea she’d lived anywhere but England.”
“She spoke of India to Captain Shaw.”
Elizabeth’s face went very still. “Captain Shaw heard it first from me,” she said. “He couldn’t understand why Margaret wasn’t in love with him. She wouldn’t tell him, and I felt he was owed an answer. I asked him not to bring it up with her, but I think he did anyway. I don’t know that Margaret had a capacity for love. If she did, it was buried under such layers of wanting that she’d nearly smothered it. Whatever drove my secretary, it was so fierce she was blind to anything else. I hope her death came quickly; she would have hated dying before she’d gotten what she was after. It was the ultimate failure, you see.”
The next morning, before he’d had time to order his breakfast or think about the day, Rutledge came face to face with Hildebrand.
“You ought to come see Mowbray,” he said. “He’s got something on his conscience, and damned if I can find out what it is. I’ve sent for Johnston, in the event it’s a confession. He might speak to you or his lawyer.”
Rutledge left with Hildebrand, crossing the street in time to see Johnston just passing though the station’s door.
Inside it was damp and musty from the rain, and this morning, although the clouds were moving northeast, the sun hadn’t shown its face.
They moved down the passage to the cell where Mowbray was kept, and Rutledge could feel Hamish growing tense, uneasy.
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—”
&
nbsp; “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.