by Charles Todd
Simon said, “You’ve not done anything wrong, Elizabeth. Don’t let them harass you with their nonsense!” He added to Rutledge, “I can’t understand why you didn’t tell me your suspicions earlier! All that rubbish about what Margaret was wearing! Look, you don’t think that maniac Mowbray got to her somehow?”
“How could he? She wasn’t walking-she was, as far as I can determine, driven from Charlbury directly to the station at Singleton Magna. If she had come across Mowbray on the road and he’d attempted to stop the motorcar, she should have been safe enough. Whoever was driving the car would most certainly have gone straight to Hildebrand afterward, even if Miss Tarlton left on the train. And no such person has come forward.”
Simon said, “It was Aurore who drove her. I don’t know why she won’t come out and admit to it! I asked her myself, as soon as Elizabeth told me what she thought might have happened.”
Rutledge felt a wave of disgust. He knew how Simon, with his oddly abrupt, unfeeling manner toward his wife, must have confronted her, making her feel she had been directly accused… “Why have you been lying about this? I’d think it would be better to come straight out with the truth-everyone knows it was you who drove Margaret…”
“Perhaps she didn’t take Miss Tarlton to the station after all,” Rutledge replied in her defense, before he could stop himself. His task was to determine guilt, not innocence. But he refused to watch possible innocence trampled.
There was a brief silence.
“I suppose someone else might have driven her,” Simon agreed reluctantly. “There are other motorcars in Charlbury. But Aurore promised me she’d see to it. And it isn’t like Aurore to lie. I don’t understand this, any of it!”
Yet he had told Rutledge earlier that Aurore never lied…
“I think it’s too early to go on witch hunts,” Elizabeth put in, her voice appealing for reassurance. “Margaret’s missing. It-it doesn’t actually mean she’s-dead. I don’t know where she might have gone. Do you?”
“Perhaps your father might know her whereabouts,” Rutledge countered, not allowing himself to fall into the neat trap she’d set-expecting him to bring up the dress she’d identified the night before.
There was darker color in Elizabeth Napier’s face this time, then it drained away as quickly as it had come. “I asked him myself this morning. He thought she was with me. He was understandably upset that she’d been missing a week and no one had realized it. He likes Margaret, I think everyone does. She’s one of the most dependable people I know. That’s why her position was so important.”
“Then why did she choose to apply for the position here?” Rutledge asked. “Just because some of the things in this room remind her of India? I’d say at a guess that many of them come from other places in the East. Java. Burma. Perhaps Ceylon or even Siam.”
“It’s much the same culture,” Simon impatiently pointed out. “Buddhism. Hinduism. The same roots. Margaret told me that herself. What are you doing to find her? Do you have men out looking? Has anyone spoken to the stationmaster in Singleton Magna?”
“I went to see him this morning,” Rutledge answered. “And men are searching the same ground two and three times, looking for the Mowbray children. If she’s out there, one of the teams will find her. Somehow I don’t think they will.” His glance moved on to Elizabeth. Let her tell the rest of that story, if she felt so inclined-that the body had already been properly buried. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to find Mrs. Wyatt. Is she at home this morning?”
“Yes, yes, just go around to the house,” Simon told him. “And I want a report, Rutledge. What’s being done, how you’re handling this situation. I still have connections in London. I’ll use them if I have to.”
“There won’t be any need for that,” Rutledge said. “The police are quite good at what they do. It’s a question of time. That’s all. Miss Napier.”
He turned and left, irritated by the implied threat
Aurore must have seen him coming back toward the house from the museum because she was there at the main door as he came up to knock.
“It isn’t a very fine morning, Inspector. And so I will not wish you one. Is there any news?”
“I’m afraid not. I’d like very much to talk to you,” he said. “But not in the house or the garden. Will you walk with me? As far as the church, perhaps?”
She smiled wryly. “While all those faces are pressed against their windows, wondering if you will arrest me on the way back? Yes, I know what is being said! I can feel it Charlbury is both titillated and scandalized by this affair. What is that novel one of your famous authors has written about the French Revolution? Where the old women sit by the guillotine and knit as the heads of aristocrats fall into baskets? Except here it is not knitting, I think. It is the face that is just behind the lace of the curtain, each breath stirring it with anticipation!”
“I saw you standing behind a curtain. As I came up the walk,” he said.
She smiled. “So I was! Allow me to find my sweater, Inspector!”
She was back in only a moment, as if she’d had it close to hand. They walked out of the house and turned through the gate toward the churchyard.
“I apologize for such stupid bitterness!” she told him, as if there had been no interruption to their conversation. “It is not like me. But Elizabeth Napier is a woman one cannot defend herself against. She uses innuendo like a sword. But then I must remember that I have robbed her of the man she wanted to marry. It is the most unforgivable thing one woman can do to another.”
“I think she’s worried about Margaret Tarlton.”
“Is she?” Aurore turned her head and looked at his profile. “I am glad to hear it. I thought she was worried for Simon.”
He smiled down at her. “Touche. A little of both. With Elizabeth Napier, as I am fast learning, there are no absolutes.”
She laughed, a deep, brief chuckle.
“You are an extraordinary man,” she said. “Are you married?”
“No.” It was uncompromising. She read more into it than he intended.
“No,” she repeated softly. “It explains much. Now-you wished to speak to me?” She pulled her sweater a little more closely about her, as if as a shield.
“Everyone seems to believe-although so far I’ve not found one of them who actually saw you!-that it was you who drove Margaret to the station. And therefore, in their view, you’re the person who should know whether she got there safely or not. I spoke to the stationmaster. He claims she didn’t take either train from Singleton Magna on the day she left Charlbury.”
“But I have told you. I was with a heifer that was sick. Whatever Simon may say, we can’t afford to lose livestock-Simon is pouring every penny he possesses into this museum. There was not a great deal of money to start with. His inheritance from his father was quite small. And it is this farm that will pay for our food, bur car, our clothes. Not his grandfather’s treasures.”
She matched him stride for stride, comfortably walking beside him. And he was a tall man. They had nearly reached the churchyard.
She said, stopping him with her hand outstretched as if wanting to touch him, then deciding against it, “Do you think I am lying to you, Inspector?”
He had never felt his soul stripped so bare by the eyes of another person. It was as if she searched into depths he himself had never plumbed.
“I don’t know. But I shall make it my business to find out.” He studied her face in his turn, then asked, “Did you drive Margaret to Singleton Magna, quarrel with her, and put her out along the way? Where Mowbray then came across her, walking? No one would blame you for that, you couldn’t have known. This might explain to us how Mowbray got to her. And bring an end to all these questions.”
She bit her lip. “I would be morally responsible. But you are playing fair with both of us, are you not? To ask? Very well, I will make a pact with you.” Her eyes smiled suddenly, with the humor of it. “A pact with the devil, if you li
ke.”
“I can’t make promises-”
“This one is not a promise. It is a pact. There is a difference. Even I know that difference, in English.” She searched his face again and then said quietly, “If you come to the conclusion after your investigations that I have lied about where I was. when Margaret Tarlton left Charlbury, if you believe that there is any possibility of my guilt in any harm that may have come to her, then you will face me and say such things. Directly. You will not speak first to Simon-nor to Elizabeth Napier, nor to that policeman in Singleton Magna. Do you agree?”
“Are you telling me-”
“No, I am not telling you I have killed Margaret Tarlton. Of course not! But suspicion is a very ugly thing, Inspector, and it destroys both the innocent and the guilty. Sometimes there is no way, afterward, to make right the damage that has been done. If I am to be accused of any crime, I prefer to have it said to my face, not whispered behind my back. Can you understand this? It is not so cruel.”
“You’re trying to protect someone, is that it? Simon?”
Her mouth turned down wryly. “I am protecting myself, I think. I don’t know. But yes, Simon too-this museum must open in one month. It is not the best publicity, do you think, to have it said that the owner’s wife is a murderess? People will come out of morbid curiosity, and I could not bear that. I do not think our marriage could survive that. And so I look for a solution of sorts.”
“I don’t know,” he said, trying to make sense of her words, “what you are asking of me-”
She shrugged, that very Gallic gesture that could mean so many things. “Call it intuition, if you like. Or a sense I cannot explain. But I shall tell you this. Where Elizabeth Napier is concerned, there is no question of right or wrong in this matter. She is looking for simple justice. That is for herself, not for Margaret. And justice is sometimes blind. So-I make my pact with you. And try to spare my husband pain, if I can.”
Holding out her hand as a man might do, she waited for Rutledge to take it. But deep in his mind Hamish was already coming to another conclusion.
“She’s afraid,” he said softly, “because there is something she knows and canna’ tell. Hildebrand would no’ stand for this nonsense-”
Was it that, Rutledge wondered, or the fact that she was sure she could reach him-and so was using him to protect herself by putting on him the onus of betraying her? Using him as Elizabeth Napier was using Simon Wyatt?
“Aye. A woman does na’ think the way a man does,” Hamish told him.
But Rutledge had made up his mind.
He took the hand she held out and shook it briefly. “Agreed,” he said.
And watched the play of expressions across her face. Surprise. A certain wariness. Relief. At the last, a flare of fear.
As if she realized, suddenly and far too late, that perhaps she had misjudged him…
Rutledge walked back to the gate with Aurore Wyatt without speaking. She had slipped into a silence all her own, as if she had forgotten the man beside her. Her face was withdrawn, her eyes shuttered behind the long lashes.
They could hear Elizabeth Napier’s voice, and Simon’s. Not the words so much as the comfortable rise and fall of a conversation between two people who had much in common. Long years of understanding, respect-love…
Aurore said, tilting her head to listen, “I knew when Margaret Tarlton came here to apply for the position of assistant that, one way or another, she would bring that woman back into our lives. I was right. Only I didn’t see the way of it. Just that it would happen.”
“He married you. That’s what matters.” As Jean would never marry him. It was finished. But then, as Hamish was busy reminding him, Rutledge himself had been the last to let go in that relationship. Why should Elizabeth Napier be any different? If the war years had changed him so much, taking Jean from him, they had also cost Elizabeth Napier Simon Wyatt. Simon too had changed…
“Yes, he married me. But I ask myself sometimes, was it the war? Was he sorry for me and what had happened to me? Was it loneliness, or a man’s need for a woman? Or was it truly love? I thought I knew. Then. Now I am not as certain as I once was.” She put her hand on the gate, ready to open it and go inside. “Please. Find that woman. Find her soon. For Simon’s sake!”
And she left him standing there, watching her graceful stride as she went up the walk, ignoring the voices that seemed to ignore her so completely.
13
There was one other stop Rutledge wished to make in Charlbury. The inn. It was the pulse of village life, oftentimes the place where gossip and conjecture made their first rounds. The question was, would Denton tell him what was being said, or as the outsider would he be shut out of knowledge any villager might be given for the asking?
Nodding to Benson, who was still polishing the boot as if he had nothing better to fill his time, Rutledge stepped into the Wyatt Arms. He saw that Denton’s nephew, Shaw, was sitting at a table alone, an empty pint glass in front of him, idly tracing one finger through the rings left by other pints. He looked up, recognized Rutledge, and said, “Why in God’s name couldn’t you have told me that Margaret Tarlton was missing! Damn it, I had to hear it from that Prescott bitch!” The words were slurred, but behind them was deep anger.
“I didn’t know, when I was here yesterday, that she was missing.”
“Then you’re a damned poor policeman! God, it’s been over a week !”
“How did you come to know her?” Rutledge pulled out the empty chair across from him and looked around. There was no one else in the shadows of the small room, but he could hear voices from the bar, down the passage.
“Not from Charlbury, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Then where? London?”
“That’s right,” he answered grudgingly, as if the alcohol in him wanted to talk and the reticence of the man tried to hold on to silence. “I was on a troop train, on my way to the coast. She was one of those women offering hot tea and sandwiches as we came through. I didn’t even know her name! Just that she had the loveliest face I’d ever seen.” He frowned. “I took it to Egypt with me. I thought, if I die, at least I’ve seen her-touched her hand. And if I live, I’ll find her. Call it a promise to myself…” A bargain with fate.
Rutledge looked away. How well he knew what bargains might be made with fate. To keep a man alive one day longer, one battle longer…
“Or come between a man and wanting to die,” Hamish reminded him.
“Two years later I was back in London. Sooner than I’d expected. Shipped like a sausage, strapped to a stretcher, out of my head most of the time. A fever. No one, least of all the doctors, could decide what it was or how best to treat it. They sent me home to die. But I was one of the lucky ones, it burned itself out. The first day they let me stand on my feet, all I could think of was getting back to that railway station, finding her somehow. A fool’s dream, that!”
“She must have spoken to a hundred men on each train. It’s not very likely she’d remember one of them in particular.”
“No, you’ve got it wrong! There was a benefit performance at one of the theaters, and I didn’t want to go, but a friend wouldn’t take no for an answer-and there she was, sitting in one of the boxes across from me! I couldn’t tell you, if my life was on the line, what the program was about. There was a woman singing, Italian arias or something. I thought she’d never finish! At the interval I managed to speak to Margaret. It took some doing to separate her from her party, but I wasn’t about to lose her a second time!” There was an echo of triumph in his voice and a lift to his shoulders, as if the memory were still alive in his mind.
Rutledge waited. Silence was sometimes more effective than a question.
“I’d talked to her that day about Canada-how it was out there. I don’t know why-it seemed to catch her imagination, and I was afraid she’d move on to the next window if I stopped. I told her about the place where a group of us were planting apple orchards on the slopes facing
south and how we’d built the long irrigation lines, wooden troughs, but they worked. How the high peaks were heavy with snow, even into May. Whatever came into my head, to keep that look on her face! The first thing she said to me at the theater was ‘Hallo, you’re the man who lives with grizzly bears and elk!’ “
He stopped, frowned at his empty glass. “I’ve lost count,” he said. “I’ve muddled the rings too. Can’t depend on ’em anymore.” Looking up, he said, “You aren’t drinking. Why not?”
“I’m on duty,” Rutledge reminded him. “What happened after the theater?”
“I escorted her everywhere she’d let me. Riding one day, tennis another, dinner-any excuse to be with her. I was falling in love with her. What I didn’t know, couldn’t judge, was whether she cared for me. Or if I was just an available man when she needed a presentable escort, someone with both legs and two arms, who could dance with her. The doctors raised hell, they said the pace I was setting was getting in the way of my recovery. I didn’t care. The longer I was in England, the happier I was!”
Denton came in. “I heard voices,” he said, looking from Shaw’s strained face to Rutledge’s. “Thought it might be custom.”
“No, it’s all right, Uncle Jack.”
Denton nodded and left. After a moment, Shaw said, “I’d have married her. But she wasn’t interested in living in a wilderness, no matter how beautiful or exotic it might be. She’d grown up in India. ‘I don’t want to be exiled again,’ she said. “Not if I can help it!’ ” He managed, somehow, to capture the light tones of a woman’s voice. And a subtle hint of selfishness, as if Margaret Tarlton didn’t mind how she might have hurt him.