by Charles Todd
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.”
She smiled, the light coming back into her eyes. “Lemonade. It’s very good. Yes, I’d enjoy another glass.”
He brought it to her, along with a fresh pot of tea for himself, and sat down again. Aurore thanked him and said, “Tell me more about the giraffe.” She pronounced it “jirraffe.”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t stay long enough to find out its history. Sorry.”
She turned to study his face, watching the light and shadow of the leaves playing across it. “Then tell me about yourself. But nothing that is sad.”
Which put Jean and Hamish and the war and his last two cases off limits. He gave the question some thought. “My father followed the law, and my mother was a very gifted pianist. I grew up in a house full of music and law books. The fanciful and the practical.”
“And your parents, did they expect you to follow in their footsteps? Law or music? Or were they pleased you chose to become a policeman?”
“I think my father would have been happy to see me in the law. But it wasn’t my calling. In the end I think he realized it.”
“You are quite practical, I have seen that. And fanciful?” She tilted her head and he felt the intensity of her scrutiny this time. “You are very sensitive to what people are thinking. It is a gift. And a curse. To be able to put yourself in the minds of others. Is that how you come to find your murderers?”
The light mood had vanished. “Sometimes,” he said.
And Hamish stirred, knowing what lay behind his answer.
She said, “Elizabeth came again this morning. She told us she needed work to keep her from worrying too much about Margaret. And so she is helping Simon in the museum today. I couldn’t stand it any longer. This was the only place I could think of where it might be quiet. And then there was the affair of the bones, to spoil my escape.”
“They don’t have anything to do with you,” he said gently. “Or with Margaret Tarlton.”
“I am very glad to hear it,” she told him, but she didn’t sound glad.
The sun was warmer now and brighter. He could feel it on his back. It probably would turn out to be a fine day after all. “She won’t stay, once this is finished. Once we know what has happened to Margaret, there won’t be an excuse to keep her here.”
“But will it be finished?” Aurore asked. “I don’t think so. I used to believe—as a child, you understand!—that it was very sad when someone died suddenly. That is, without knowledge that it was going to happen until it was there, facing one. I used to think that for such people, it was a severe shock, they were not prepared to die, and so they became ghosts. Intent on coming back to the world to finish whatever it was they had left undone. I’m beginning to believe that Margaret is such a one—the stuff of ghosts.”
Rutledge said quietly, “She’s dead, Mrs. Wyatt. All that’s left is to find out who killed her. And if possible, why.”
Aurore sighed. “Yes. I know. But I prefer not to think about any of it. Only, with Elizabeth Napier invading my house and my life, I am not allowed to forget!”
She drained the last of her lemonade and set the glass aside. “I must go to the farm. Cows do not care about ghosts or dead bodies. They are practical creatures, they know when it is time to be milked and time to be let out to pasture, and time to be brought in at the end of the day. The man who took care of them while Simon was away at war is too old now to carry the burden of so much work. I persuade him when I can to sit in the sun and advise me.”
She hadn’t said anything before about someone else at the farm who might have seen her there, nursing a heifer with colic.
Rutledge asked, “I’d like to speak to him. He might have seen you on the day Margaret left.”
Aurore smiled. “I don’t think so. He was suffering from a rheum—a cold—and avoided me when he could. I think it was actually too much ale, and a sour stomach. In France we say it is the liver rebelling. At his age, any rebellion is a revolution.”
“He didn’t know you were at the farm? Surely if one of the livestock was ill …?”
“From the barn he doesn’t see where I leave my car. Sometimes I go and come without meeting him at all, if he is out in one of the fields.”
“But he might have heard the motorcar.”
“Well, perhaps. It is kind of you to look for someone who can tell you positively where I was—and was not.”
“It isn’t kindness, it’s necessity,” he said, more harshly than he’d meant. “I have witnesses who saw your motorcar in Charlbury that morning and who would swear to that. And to the presence of Margaret Tarlton in it with you.”
She shrugged. “I cannot invent witnesses for myself.” Despite the shrug, she wasn’t indifferent to her predicament. There was an intensity beneath her stillness that he could feel. A very real fear.
The tranquility here under the trees had vanished like smoke on the wind. After a few minutes she excused herself and was gone.
He sat where he was, remembering what Frances had said about the Wyatt finances and wondering if there was enough money in their coffers to pay for a first-class barrister to defend Aurore. Or would Simon abandon her, to preserve his precious museum?
Was that what kept Elizabeth Napier in Charlbury, meddling?
16
Rutledge went to find Constable Trait and finally ran him to earth just outside of Charlbury, where he was supervising a group of men poking through the heavy undergrowth along a small stream.
“Trait? I wish to speak to you,” Rutledge called, tramping through a field for the second time that morning.
The man looked up, then walked toward Rutledge.
“Something happened? Sir?” He added it as an afterthought, Rutledge’s face warning him that this was not the time for overt insubordination.
Rutledge drew him farther from the curious glances turned their way. Then he said, “You may have heard. There was a body found near Leigh Minster this morning. One of the seach teams came across it.”
“Aye, I heard. Nothing to do with us.” He jerked his head toward the men desultorily digging behind him, half an ear attuned to Trait and Rutledge.
“I understand there was a woman who worked for Mrs. Darley who has been missing for some time. And that she was known in Charlbury as well.”
“Betty Cooper, yes, sir. Although she didn’t work here, she was known here. But from what I hear, can’t be her, she’d have been in the ground longer.”
“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 wa
s 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.