Search the Dark

by Charles Todd

  Not wanting to startle her, he said quietly, “Is there anything I can do?”

  She said huskily, “Go away. No.”

  He moved closer, still some six yards from her, but near enough that his voice wouldn’t carry to anyone else.

  “I brought back the war, that’s all it was. Simon had built a very high wall, but not high enough. It was—Elizabeth came to see what was wrong, she must have heard us—and she thought I’d badgered him. Blame me for what happened.”

  Aurore turned to face him. There were streaks of tears on her face. He felt a surge of self-disgust, as if he himself had been the one to make her cry. “You brought back the war. Yes, I think that was true. But it was Elizabeth who used it for her own ends. He won’t turn to me for comfort anymore. Did you know? He shuts me out, as if he doesn’t want me to see what he believes is weakness in him! He thinks—if this museum is a success, I’ll admire him, look at him with love and pride for what he’s accomplished. He thinks—he thinks that it will wipe out the past. I saw him break, you see. A man can forgive a woman anything but that. If I’d slept with half the British army, he could forgive me. If I had betrayed his soldiers and got them killed, he’d find a way to forgive me. But not this!”

  He understood her better than she realized. He found himself wondering if perhaps Jean had been clever enough to know that he might come to hate her in the end, if she’d married him after seeing him in hospital, broken and in despair. Then he knew it wasn’t an excuse he could make for her—Jean had been half embarrassed, half horrified by what she couldn’t understand. She’d been so tightly wrapped in her own dread she hadn’t seen the urgent need to reach out and comfort him.

  He said, “There were men who came home damaged. Physically, most of them. Emotionally, a good many of them.”

  Aurore replied with a heaviness that spoke of long sleepless nights waiting for a man to show he cared. “I don’t think most of the English soldiers who went to France were prepared for what this war was going to do to them. Battles, yes, they expected battles. Great glorious charges, like Waterloo, where there’s no time to think or feel, just the intensity of trying to survive. Instead they sat in filthy trenches. How do they explain this at home? Simon’s father wrote over and over, ‘Where are the letters you promised? Why are they not coming through? Is it a problem with the censors? And the photographs, where are they? Is the camera working? Do you have film? For God’s sake, why are you letting this opportunity slip through your fingers? Where is the next Churchill?’ And Simon couldn’t tell him what was wrong. That he was faced with mortality, and what he’d been born and bred to do no longer seemed to matter. I think he realized for the first time that he hadn’t chosen his political future, it had been thrust at him. But in its place, what did he want? What else was he fit for? How do you decide such things on a battlefield? He was the walking dead. Waiting for death to remember he was still there and come for him. There was no future. And yet he desperately wanted one.”

  For an instant she put her hands to her eyes, as if pressing them might stop the aching in her head. Or the aching in her heart. She took a deep shuddering breath, to steady herself.

  “Do you even know what I’m saying? I gave him hope. I gave him something to hold in his heart until death came. My body and my love brought him a little peace before the end. Only—he lived. And he wasn’t prepared for that Or for a marriage that might last after all. Or for his father dead and Thomas Napier furious with him for jilting Elizabeth, who was desperately trying to be brave and noble about it. He came home to change—and an accounting. And I was the living symbol of how far he’d fallen from grace in the eyes of those whose good opinion was important to him.”

  She turned to look up at the church tower, truncated and heavy. Like a wasted promise … When she went on, there was no self-pity in her words.

  “It was very difficult for both of us. But divorce is hard to come by, you know, it leaves a stigma. And I am Catholic, there is nothing for me afterward. I believed I’d be happier trying to make my marriage work than standing at the quayside and waving good-bye, admitting that I’d failed Simon. And myself as well. I was braced to fight. But I can’t fight them all. I don’t know how. It would be much better for me to be hanged, guilty or not, sparing Simon the embarrassment of publicly acknowledging that his marriage was a mistake.”

  She stopped, her body suddenly rigid. “No, I didn’t mean that! He would never harm me. He still cares. …”

  But she had just given Rutledge a motive for her husband to kill.

  He said carefully, after a time, “I told you before that I didn’t believe Elizabeth would stay. After this is finished. There’s nothing to keep her here, except blatant self-interest. And somehow I don’t see her confessing to that.”

  “If I am convicted of murder, she will have Simon without the messy aftermath of divorce. And if I am not, she will have shown him that she still cares. It is something from the past, you see. Something he had thought he’d given up. I don’t know—”

  He could see the tears glistening in her lashes. “He’d be a fool to choose Elizabeth Napier over you!”

  She gave him a watery smile and said for the second time that day, “You are very kind. But you know and I know that this murder has brought to the fore more than just one woman’s death. It is something I must face. I don’t know how I shall do that. I don’t know where it will end, but I shall find the strength I need.”

  He stood there, helpless, unable to touch her, unable to offer any comfort that didn’t sound like kindness.

  “Mrs. Wyatt—Aurore—”

  She shook her head. “No. You must not say anything. Tell me again about the giraffe in the kitchen of the Swan. Forget you’re a policeman and I am a suspect, and tell me instead how the giraffe came to wander so very far from home.” She gasped as she realized that what she’d said was a reflection of her own dilemma.

  Hamish was vigorously protesting that Aurore was trying to distract him.

  Rutledge ignored him. He said, “It wasn’t so very far from home. Or lost. Only misplaced for a little while. I shouldn’t worry for its sake.”

  “Animals have no complexity in their lives, do they?” she agreed. “How very fortunate they are!”

  She walked away, leaving him there in the trees, her back straight, her head held high. Not toward the house but to the church. She was telling him that she wanted privacy and a little time alone.

  But he thought perhaps she hadn’t stopped crying.

  When Rutledge came back for his car, which was parked by the inn, he saw Mrs. Prescott, Constable Trait’s neighbor, with a market basket over her arm and a sense of mission in her stride.

  She saw him and crossed the street hastily to waylay him.

  “What’s to do with Mrs. Wyatt? She seemed that upset when she came hurrying out of her gate! Walked right past me without so much as a how-do-you-do, Mrs. Prescott! And you on her heels, like the wrath of God!”

  “She’s well enough,” Rutledge answered. “There was something about a giraffe, I think, worrying her.”

  Mystified for a moment, Mrs. Prescott then gave him a lopsided smile. “Which is another way of saying I ought to mind my own business. Well, you wouldn’t be the first to tell me that. But gossip’s like making a quilt. Sorting where the patches belong and where they don’t. Weighing size and color and shape. That takes skill, of a kind. I like to gossip, anybody in Charlbury will tell you that!”

  “What’s Charlbury saying about this body found outside Leigh Minster?”

  “I could tell you how many teeth she had in her head, and whether her stockings was cotton or silk!”

  “Can you put a name to the teeth?”

  “Not yet. She’s too long in the ground, they say, to be Miss Tarlton, and too fresh to be that Betty Cooper. Another stranger, d’you think? We’re getting fair swamped with strange corpses! I’m told it’s none of your business, anyhow. Except that it keeps Inspector Hildebrand busy
on two fronts and out of your way.” She paused, then said tentatively, “If you don’t mind my asking, do you think a man or a woman’s behind Miss Tarlton’s killing?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does at this point.”

  “What killed her, then?”

  “We don’t have a murder weapon.”

  “If that’s what’s worrying you, I’ll give you a free word of advice,” Mrs. Prescott said. “A man, now, he’d pick up any tool and feel comfortable with that. A woman will be more likely to reach for something familiar, something she’s used to. If I was angry enough to kill, I’d pick up that iron doorstop of mine. The one shaped like an owl—”

  She could see the change in his face. The thought awakening in his mind. Curiosity was lively in her eyes. She started to speak, then thought better of it.

  He thanked her and was already hurrying toward his motorcar.

  It was stupid of him! he told himself. A rank beginner would have thought about it a long time ago. But then a rank beginner might not have been dazzled by Aurore Wyatt’s unusual attraction.

  He hadn’t gone out to the Wyatt farm. Where Aurore claimed she’d spent the morning Margaret Tarlton was scheduled to leave. Where the car had been driven that same morning, instead of being available at the house to take a guest to the station …

  The farm …

  He could hear Frances’s voice: “Where would I hide a suitcase? Where no one ever goes. …”

  In the back of his mind Hamish was saying, “I’ve tried to tell you—”

  17

  The road that ran west through the village climbed a low knoll on its outskirts, twisted down again, and within a hundred feet passed a pair of stone gates that stood at the head of a narrow lane. An ornate W was engraved on a worn tablet on one of the posts. The farm itself was nearly invisible behind a stand of trees. He turned in through the gates, swearing as his wheels bumped heavily along ancient ruts made by carts and drays. The lane was arrow straight, leading through a double row of trees, shaded and quiet except for a blackbird singing somewhere in the thick branches. It ended in a muddy yard, where a small stone house was backed by a great barn, a long open shed for farm equipment, and a number of smaller, shabby outbuildings. The property was not run down, as he’d expected, but the signs of neglect were there to be seen: in the old thatch on the house that should have been renewed five years ago; the shingles missing from the barn’s high roof and the pointing badly needed in some of the courses of stone; the weathered wood of the sheds; the rank grass that grew up in corners and under rusting bits of gear scattered about the barn’s yard behind the house.

  Chickens could be heard, clucking and squabbling, and a horse neighed from the dim, cool recesses of the barn. The hay rick, not fresh and new, was half gone, the new hay left in the sun to dry.

  The house seemed empty—sometimes, Rutledge thought, you could tell by the feel of it. He walked to the door and peered in the nearest window. The room he could see was clean and tidy, but the furniture was castoffs from the past, the carpet threadbare, and there were no curtains at any of the windows. He could just see a staircase that rose to the next floor from the entrance hall. When he tried the door, the knob turned under his hand, but he didn’t go inside.

  He moved on to the barn, stepping inside the great open door. Dust motes floated in heavy air smelling of manure and hay and moldering leather. An old side saddle was propped over a wooden bench. In the far dimness, a pair of horses turned their heads to stare with interest at him. A cat, stretched out along the top of a shelf, yawned and stared at him as well, through narrow, yellow eyes. Doves cooed desultorily from the rafters of the loft.

  And where was the caretaker? Out in the fields? Or in one of the scattered outbuildings?

  He went back to his motorcar and blew the horn. Once, then twice. In the silence that followed he thought he heard the lowing of cows, softened by distance. He blew the horn again. After a time a man in ragged coveralls peered out of one of the smaller sheds. He was tall, wiry, his white hair cut short, his face weather-lined. It was hard to judge his age. Fifty? Older, Rutledge thought.

  As he came warily toward Rutledge his stiff gait said closer to seventy.

  “Lost, are ye? Well, that’s the difference between one of them newfangled motorcars and a horse. A horse has sense when you don’t!”

  He smelled strongly of ale and a mixture of manure and dried earth.

  Rutledge said easily, “My name is Rutledge, I’m helping the local police look into the disappearance of a young woman who was found murdered a few miles from here—”

  “You’re not a local man,” the farmer said, shading his eyes from the sun to stare at Rutledge’s face. His fingernails were crusted with dirt from working in the vegetable gardens, and his chin was poorly shaved, as if he couldn’t see to use his razor.

  “No. I’m from Scotland Yard.”

  “Ha! London, is it?” He spat. “That Truit needs all the help you can give. Whoring son of a bitch, can’t keep his eyes or his hands to himself. Or hold his liquor!” There was disdain and disgust in the loud voice. “Constable, my left hind foot!” He considered Rutledge for a moment. “I thought they’d caught the man who’d done the killing.”

  “We don’t know if we have or not, Mr.—” He left the sentence unfinished.

  After a moment the caretaker said, “Jimson. Ted Jimson.” He was still watching Rutledge closely.

  “How long have you worked here?”

  “Worked here? Nigh all my life! What’s that to do with a murder?”

  Rutledge said idly, as if it was more a matter of curiosity than anything else, “I understand that Mrs. Wyatt was here on fifteen August, from around eleven o’clock until well into the afternoon, working with a sick animal.”

  Jimson thought for a time. “The fifteenth, you say? Aye, as I recollect, she was. That colicky heifer had to be fed from a bottle and cosseted. Damn near lost it, and we’d paid high enough for the bull! Stayed till nigh on four, I’d guess, getting it back on its legs. I’ll say one thing, French or not, she has a way with cattle!” He gave the impression that he was of two minds about his mistress.

  “And where were you?”

  “Loitering in my bed, waiting for the servants to bring me my breakfast! Where the hell do you think I might be? Working, that’s what! Besides the milking, there was rotting boards in the loft that had to be shored up and potatoes to be dug, and the fence in the chicken yard had rusted, some of the little ’uns was running loose.” Yet Aurore had said he had had a cold … or a hangover.

  “Could you see Mrs. Wyatt from where you worked?”

  “You don’t keep a heifer in the loft, nor with the chickens!”

  “Could she see you?”

  “I doubt she could, but she wouldn’t miss the hammering in the loft. What’s this in aid of, then? You think I had something to do with this killing?”

  Rutledge felt a sense of tension in the man, as if he had told the truth but skirted the edges of lying. How far would he go for Aurore—or for Simon Wyatt?

  “We need to be sure where everyone was that afternoon. Often people aren’t aware that they are witnesses. Was Mrs. Wyatt driving that day, or did she walk here?”

  “Aye, driving. I saw her when she came up the lane in the Wyatt car. She waved to me when she got out. But it didn’t appear to me she wanted to talk.”

  “Did the car leave during the time you thought she was here?”

  “Not that I could say. But I didn’t set and watch it either.”

  “And so Mrs. Wyatt stayed with the sick heifer, missing her luncheon?”

  “How should I know? When I’d finished with the chickens and wanted my own meal, I didn’t look for her to ask permission!”

  “You didn’t offer her lunch?”

  “Lord, no! What I cook ain’t fit for a lady’s taste!” he said, horrified. “Bacon and cheese, it was, with onionsl”

  A countryman’s meal. But the Frenc
h took the same simple ingredients, added eggs and herbs, producing an omelet. It was all, Rutledge thought, in what you were used to.

  “You are sure neither Mrs. Wyatt nor the car went away, from the time she arrived to the time she left. From eleven, let’s say, until four.”

  The watery gray eyes flickered. “I didn’t see her leave,” Jimson answered. “But she’d come in to wash up, her boots was out by the kitchen door.”

  “You mean she didn’t leave between eleven and four, or you didn’t see her go home at four?” He couldn’t seem to get a straight answer from Jimson.

  “I didn’t see her go at four. When I came back from mending a fence down by the water, closer to five it was, the car was gone. I know, because I went around the house to fetch the milk cans from the road, and the lane was empty.”

  Rutledge turned and looked back the way he had come. The trees were old, heavy with late summer leaves, the shadows under them dark and cool. Once this had been a thriving farm, children had been born and patriarchs had died in the house behind him, smoke had risen from the chimneys, washing had hung on the lines, the smell of fresh bread and baked pies had wafted from open windows. Dogs had run in the yard and flowers had bloomed in the weed-grown beds. Until the first Wyatt discovered the power and authority of Westminster, and the family had bettered itself.

  “Do you live in the farmhouse?” he asked Jimson.

  The man didn’t answer. Rutledge turned around and repeated the question, his mind still probing the past. If Simon Wyatt hadn’t gone to war, Aurore his wife would never have come to England and this place. Was it very like the home she’d left? Was this farm her sanctuary, however run down it was, because it reminded her of her parents and peace and a life very different from the one she lived in Charlbury?

  Jimson said testily, “I’ve a room at the back. That and the kitchen, it’s all I want—or need.”

  “Does anyone else use the other rooms?”

  “Aye, we’ve got the King in one and the Queen in t’other! Are ye daft?”

  “It’s a large house for one man.”