Search the Dark

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR CHARLES TODD’s

INSPECTOR IAN RUTLEDGE SERIES

SEARCH THE DARK

“I won’t soon forget author Charles Todd’s Ian Rutledge in SEARCH THE DARK.”

—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Entertaining, well plotted and perfect for vacation reading.”

—Lawton (OK) Constitution

“The third compelling Ian Rutledge mystery takes the sensitive and appealing Scotland Yard inspector, a former WWI officer, to the countryside of Dorset … [A] fine period mystery.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A well-crafted historical.”

—Library Journal

“SEARCH THE DARK continues in the fine tradition of its predecessors by serving up a complex, entertaining mystery as well as insight into the aftermath of war.”

—Harriet Klausner, Painted Rock Reviews

“Sensitively written and intelligently plotted, SEARCH THE DARK is a magnificent story of the lost generation and the agonies they suffered. As compelling as a Hemingway novel, this book totally involves the reader in the characters and their fates. The tale is so intense and involving that you will close the book with a feeling of regret and a longing to find out what fate holds in store for Rutledge.”

—Romantic Times (4½ Stars)

WINGS OF FIRE

“[Todd wraps] his challenging plot, complex characters and subtle psychological insights in thick layers of atmosphere.”

—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

“Fine writing. A spectacular conclusion that rejuvenates the cliché ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ ”

—Washington Post Book World

“A strong mystery, filled with fine characterizations, a superb eye for Cornwall and for post World War I attitudes, and a wise and wily explanation of how some of us deal with guilt.”

—Robin Winks, The Boston Globe

“Todd writes exceptionally about a time when people found not just meaning but healing in poetry, when intuition was viewed as kind of ‘second sight,’ and when everyone was stamped by war—not just the legless men, but also the women who lost their loves and so their futures.”

—San Jose Mercury News

“Novelist Charles Todd now joins that growing little circle of American authors like Elizabeth George and Martha Grimes who have made themselves at home in the exclusive field of the British literary mystery.”

—The Buffalo News

“Todd’s writing is graceful and evocative of a bygone time and place.”

—The Miami Herald

“[Rutledge] makes a welcome return in the haunting WINGS OF FIRE … Thoughtful and evocative, Todd’s tale offers interesting, three-dimensional characters.”

—The Orlando Sentinel

“Splendid imagery, in-depth characterization, and glimpses of more than one wounded psyche: an excellent historical mystery.”

—Library Journal

“A brilliant return … Memorable characters, subtle plot twists, the evocative seaside setting and descriptions of architecture, the moors and the sea fully reward the attention this novel commands.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A TEST OF WILLS

named a New York Times Notable Book of the year

and one of Publishers Weekly’s six best mysteries of the year

“Both a meticulously wrought puzzle and harrowing psychological drama about a shellshocked police inspector who investigates a murder.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“The emotional and physical carnage of World War I is used to remarkable effect in A TEST OF WILLS, an excellent new mystery and, one hopes, the first of a series.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Psychologically sophisticated, tautly written, and craftily plotted.”

—San Jose Mercury News

“Todd seems to have perfect pitch in his ability to capture the tenor and nuances of English country life with its clearly defined social strata. A TEST OF WILLS may on the surface be another whodunit, but Todd raises disturbing issues of war and peace that still confront us today.”

—Orlando Sentinel

“A newcomer returns us to the essential pleasures of the well-crafted puzzle in this debut, the absorbing story of a young British WWI veteran returning from the war to his job as a Scotland yard Inspector … Todd, an American, depicts the outer and inner worlds of his character with authority and sympathy as he closes in on his surprising—and convincing—conclusion.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Strong, elegant prose; detailed surroundings and sound plotting characterize this debut historical.… Highly re commended.”

—Library Journal

“The 20th century hasn’t happened in Upper Streetham, which seems to have been cast out of REBECCA, or in first-novelist Todd’s deeply old-fashioned storytelling, which eschews the slightest impropriety in favor of the patient subtlety and circumlocution that held readers in thrall 70 years ago. A feast for the like-minded.”

—Kirkus Reviews

SEARCH

THE DARK

CHARLES TODD

For J.

For all those places on the map

and all the memories that went with them.

1

The murder appeared to be a crime of passion, the killer having left a trail of evidence behind him that even a blind man might have followed.

It was the identity of the victim, not the murderer, that brought Scotland Yard into the case.

No one knew who she was. Or, more correctly perhaps, what name she might have used since 1916. And what had become of the man and the two children who had been with her at the railway station? Were they a figment of the killer’s overheated imagination? Or were their bodies yet to be discovered?

The police in Dorset were quite happy to turn the search over to the Yard. And the Yard was very happy indeed to oblige, in the person of Inspector Ian Rutledge.

It began simply enough, with the London train pulling into the station at the small Dorset town of Singleton Magna. The stop there was always brief. Half a dozen passengers got off, and another handful generally got on, heading south to the coast. A few boxes and sacks were offloaded with efficiency, and the train rolled out almost before the acrid smoke of its arrival had blown away.

Today, late August and quite hot for the season, there was a man standing by the lowered window in the second-class car, trying to find a bit of air. His shirt clung to his back under the shabby suit, and his dark hair lay damply across his forehead. His face was worn, dejection sunk deep in the lines about his mouth and in the circles under tired eyes. He was young, but youth was gone.

Leaning out, he watched the portly stationmaster helping a pale, drooping woman to the gate, the thin thread of her complaining voice just reaching him. “… such hardship,” she was saying.

What did she know about hardship? he thought wearily. She had traveled first class, and the leather dressing case clutched in her left hand had cost more than most men earned in a month. If they were lucky enough to have a job.

There had been no work in London. But he’d heard there was a builder hiring down Lyme Regis way. The train was a luxury Bert Mowbray couldn’t afford. Still, jobs didn’t wait, and you sometimes had to make the extra effort. He refused to think what he would do if he’d guessed wrong and there was nothing at the end of his journey but a grim shake of the head and “No work. Sorry.”

His gaze idly followed a porter awkwardly trundling his cart fall of luggage across the platform, followed by a pair of elderly women. The cars were already jammed with families on their way to the seaside, but room was found for two more. Then his eye was suddenly caught by another woman outside one of the cars farther down the train, kneeling to comfort a little girl who was crying. A boy much younger, not more than two, clung to the trouser leg of the man bending protectively over them, speaking to the woman and then to the little girl.

Mowbray stared at the woman, his body tight with shock and dismay. It couldn’t be Mary—

“My God!” he breathed, “Oh, my God!”

Turning from the window, he lunged for the door, almost knocking the wide-brimmed hat from the head of a startled farmer’s wife who couldn’t get out of his way fast enough. He tripped over her basket, losing precious seconds as he fought for his balance. Her companion stood up, younger and stouter, and demanded to know what he thought he was doing, her red, angry face thrust into his. The train jerked under his feet, and he realized it was moving. Pulling out—

“No! No—wait!” he screamed, but it was too late, the train had picked up momentum and was already out of the small station, a few houses flashing by before the town was swallowed up by distance and fields.

He was nearly incoherent with frustration and the intensity of his need. He yelled for the conductor, demanding that the train be stopped—now!

The conductor, a phlegmatic man who had dealt with drunken soldiers and whoring seamen during the war years, said soothingly, “Overslept your stop, did you? Never mind, there’s another just down the road a bit.”

But he had to restrain Mowbray before they reached the next station—the man seemed half out of his mind and was trying to fling himself off the train. Two burly coal stokers on their way to Weymouth helped the conductor wrestle him into a seat while a prim-mouthed spinster wearing a moth-eaten fox around her shoulders, never mind the heat, threatened to collapse into strong hysterics.

Mowbray had gone from wild swearing and threats to helpless, angry tears by the time the train lurched into the next town. He and his shabby case were heaved off without ceremony, and he was left standing on the station platform, disoriented and distraught.

Without a word to the staring stationmaster, he handed in his ticket for Lyme Regis and set off at a smart pace down the nearest road in the direction of Singleton Magna.

But the woman and children and man were gone when he got to the town. And no one could tell him where to find them. He went to the only hotel, a small stone edifice called, with more imagination than accuracy, the Swan, demanding to know if a family of four had come in by the noon train. He stopped at the small shops that sold food and the two tearooms nearest the station, describing the woman first, then the children and the man. He badly frightened one clerk with his furious insistence that you must have seen them! You must!

He tracked down the carriage that served as the town taxi and angrily called the driver a liar for claiming he hadn’t set eyes on the woman or the man, much less the children.

“They’re not here, mate,” the middle-aged driver declared shortly, jerking a thumb toward the back. “See for yourself. Nobody like that came out of the station today while I was waiting. If you was to meet them here, it’s your misfortune, not mine. May be that you got your dates wrong.”

“But they can’t have vanished!” Mowbray cried. “I’ve got to find them. The bitch—the bitch!—they’re my children, she’s my wife! It isn’t right—I tell you, if she’s tricked me, I’ll kill her, I swear I will! Tell me where she’s got to, or I’ll throttle you as well!”

“You and who else?” the man demanded, jaw squared and face flushed with an anger that matched Mowbray’s.

All afternoon he haunted Singleton Magna, and a constable had to caution him twice about his conduct. But the fires of anger slowly burned down to a silent, white-hot determination that left him grim-faced and ominously quiet. That evening he called at every house on the fringes of the town, asking about the woman. And the children. Had they come along this road? Had anyone seen them? Did anyone know where they’d come from, or where they were going?

But the town shook its collective head and shut its collective doors in the face of this persistent, shabby stranger with frantic eyes.

Mowbray spent the night under a tree near the station, waiting for the next day’s noon train. He never thought of food, and he didn’t sleep. What was driving him was so fierce that nothing else mattered to him.

He stayed in Singleton Magna all that day as well, walking the streets like a damned soul that had lost its way back to hell and didn’t know where to turn next. People avoided him. And this time he avoided people, his eyes scanning for one figure in a rose print dress with a strand of pearls and hair the color of dark honey. By the dinner hour he had gone. Hardly anyone noticed.

When a farmer discovered a woman’s body that evening, the blood from her wounds had soaked deeply into the soil at the edge of his cornfield, like some ancient harvest sacrifice. He sent for the police; and the police, with admirable haste, took one look at her there on the ground and ordered a warrant for the arrest of the man who had been searching for her. Although there was no identification on the body, they were fairly sure she wasn’t a local woman. And the way her face had been battered, there had been a hot, desperate anger behind the blows. The missing wife, then, had been found. All that was left was to see that her murderer was brought to justice.

Late that same evening Mowbray was run to earth, roughly awakened from an exhausted sleep under the same tree outside the railway station. In a daze, not understanding what was happening to him or why, he allowed himself to be led off to the small jail without protest.

Afterward, the inspector in charge, congratulating himself on the swift solution of this crime practically on his doorstep, boasted to the shaken farmer on the other side of his tidy desk, “It was all in a day’s work. Just as it should be. Murder done, murderer brought in. Can’t stop crime altogether, but you can stop the criminals. That’s my brief.”

“I thought he was the one hunting all over town for his lost family?”

“So he was. Silly bugger! All but advertising what he was going to do when he found them.”

“But where are they, then? The husband and the children? They aren’t somewhere in my fields, are they? I won’t have your men tramping about in my corn, do you hear, not when it’s all but ready for the cutting! My wife will have a stroke, she’s that upset already! The doctor’s been and gone twice.”

Inspector Hildebrand sobered. He much preferred expanding on his success to any discussion of his failure. “We don’t know where they are. Yet. I’ve got my men searching now along the roadside. More than likely he’s done for the lot, but so far he’s sitting in his cell like a damned statue, as if he’s not hearing a word we say to him. But we’ll find them, never fear. And they’ll be dead as well, mark my words. Probably saved the woman for last, she got away from him, and he had to chase her. Just a matter of time, that’s all. We’ll find them in the end.”

He didn’t. In the end, it was Scotland Yard and Inspector Rutledge who had to sort through the tangled threads of deception and twisted allegiances. By that time it was far too late for Hildebrand to retreat from his entrenched position.

2

Ian Rutledge drove through the countryside with Hamish restive and moody in the back of his mind. Around them in the car the warm air carried the heavy smell of new-mown hay.

The scent of phosgene...

Will any of us ever be free of that memory? Rutledge asked himself. Of the silent destroyer that had rolled across the battlefields of the Front in clouds of gas? One learned quickly enough to tell them apart—mustard or phosgene or CNS. But familiarity had made them more terrifying, not less—knowing what they could do.

“It’s no’ the gas I can’t forget,” Hamish said roughly, “but the haying. August ’Fourteen. I did na’ know there was an archduke getting himself killed somewhere in some place I’d no’ heard of. The hay … and Fiona dusty with it on the wain, and the horses dark with sweat God, it was fair, that August, and the MacDonalds swearing like wild men because they couldna’ keep up wi’ one MacLeod …”

“Yes, you told me that, the night—” Rutledge began aloud, and then quickly stopped. Corporal Hamish MacLeod had talked to him about the August haying the night he’d died. In France. Odd that memory turned on something as simple as the smell of new-mown hay!

And yet he was accustomed to answering the voice in his head out of old habit. The Somme. A bloodbath for months, the toll climbing astronomically, and men so tired that their minds simply shut down. Assault after futile assault, and the German line still held.

Set against such appalling losses, one more casualty was insignificant. Yet in the midst of such horror, the death of a young Scottish corporal had incised itself on Rutledge’s soul.

The man hadn’t been killed by enemy fire. He had been shot by a firing squad for refusing a direct order in battle, and it was Rutledge’s pistol, in the shell-riven darkness before dawn, that had delivered the coup de grâce.

The act had been military necessity. Not cowardice, but exhaustion—and the sheer bloody senselessness of throwing lives away—had broken him. Hamish MacLeod had refused to lead his men into certain death.

Military necessity. For the sake of every soldier watching, an example had to be made. For the sake of thousands of men readying for the next assault an example had to be made. You had to know, facing death, that you could depend on the man next to you, as he depended on you.

Rutledge could still feel the late summer heat. Hear the din of artillery, the rattle of machine-gun fire, the cries of wounded men. Smell the fear and the rotting corpses. He could still see the defeated look in his corporal’s eyes, the acceptance that it was a relief to die rather than lead his men back into the black hail of German fire.

And all for nothing!

The artillery shell found its mark an instant later, buried living and dead, officers and men, in heavy, stinking mud. Killing most of them outright and leaving the wounded to suffocate before the search dogs could find them many hours later. And ironically, the next shell sprayed shrapnel into the machine-gun position they had failed to take all that long night.

Rutledge had barely survived. Deaf and blind, badly stunned, he lay under the corpse of one of his men in a tiny pocket of air. It had sufficed. He hadn’t known until someone told him at the aid station that it was Hamish’s blood soaking his coat, Hamish’s flesh clotting his face and hair, the smell of Hamish’s torn body haunting him all the rest of that day as he lay dazed. Severely claustrophobic from a living grave, severely shell-shocked, bruised and disoriented, he was allowed a few hours’ rest and was then sent back to the front. And Hamish went with him. A living reality in his mind. A voice with its soft Scottish burr. A personality as strong in death as it had been in life.

Rutledge never spoke of it. He fought it alone, silently, as certain as the breath in his body that it was only a matter of time before death—or madness—put an end to it. That expectation kept him sane.

And so he had brought Hamish home again, not as a ghost to be exorcised but as a deep-seated presence in the shocked and numbed recesses of his brain where only sleep could shut it out.

He’d shared his thoughts with a dead man for so long it was easier to respond than risk the tap of a ghostly hand on his shoulder to attract his attention or see a white, empty face at the edge of his vision, demanding to be heard. That hadn’t happened—yet—but Hamish was so real to him that Rutledge lived in mortal dread of turning too quickly one day or glancing over his shoulder at the wrong instant and catching a glimpse of the shadowy figure that must surely be there, just behind him. Within touching distance. Close enough for its breath to ruffle his hair or brush his cheek.

“There was a picnic, that August,” Rutledge said, desperate to change the drift of thought. “Up the Thames, beneath a stand of beeches so heavy the sun came through the leaves in purple shadows—”

And that particular memory led to Jean … she was as dead to him as Hamish. This very week he’d seen her engagement announced in the Times. To a man who’d served in a diplomatic posting in South America through most of the war. Away from guns and carnage and nightmares.

“He’s in line for a position in Ottawa,” Frances had said when she called round to offer what comfort there was to give. His sister knew everyone there was to know—few bits of gossip failed to find their way to her. “Away from all this.” She waved a languid hand in the air, and he’d known what she meant.

Away from a Britain still wearing the scars of death and pain and the poverty of peace. Away from Rutledge’s torment, which had frightened Jean.

“Jean has a knack for ignoring unpleasantness,” Frances had added wryly. “You won’t let it bother you, will you? That she found someone else so quickly? It simply means, my dear, that you’re well out of it, whether you’re aware of it yet or not. Shallow women make damnably dull and demanding wives. Although I must say, even I thought there was more to her. Or was that wishful thinking on my part too? Well, never mind, you’ll soon meet someone you can truly care about.”

Why was it that the mind was so adept at finding its own punishment? Jean—or Hamish—to fill his thoughts.

A bitter choice, Rutledge acknowledged with a sigh. The woman who had promised to marry him or the man whose life he’d taken. There was no surgery to mend a broken heart nor any to mend a broken mind.

The doctors had shrugged and told Rutledge, “Shell shock makes its own rules. When you’re able to sleep better—when the stress of the Great War—of your work—of your memories—fades a little, so will the reality of Hamish MacLeod.”

But stress was the nature of war. Stress was the very heart of his work at the Yard. He lived with death and blood and horror every day. It was what he did best, investigating murders. Hardly the most suitable work, perhaps, for a man back from the trenches, but he was trained for no other and didn’t have the spare energy to look for any other. And a prospective employer might well dig more deeply into his medical file than the Yard had done, taking him back after the war. Opening a Pandora’s box of things best left locked away.

Superintendent Bowles knew more of Rutledge’s war years—Rutledge was convinced of it—than anyone else at the Yard. It was there in his eyes, watchful and wary. In the sneer that sometimes passed for a smile. But there had been no overt attack on Rutledge’s character. Only the assignments that no one else wanted, for one reason or another. Like the summons taking him now to Dorset.

“Inspector Barton’s wife’s in the middle of a difficult pregnancy, and Dorset might as well be on the moon, she’s that upset about him leaving her. And Trask’s no countryman, they’ll be sending out search parties for him! As for Jack Bingham, he’s due for leave in two days.” Or so Bowles had claimed.

Not that it mattered; Rutledge was glad to be out of London. Loneliness had its own compensations, even when it brought Hamish in its wake.

Rutledge found his turning from the trunk road at the next signpost and was soon moving more southwesterly into the heart of Dorset. And with it the scent of hay faded. His mind found its way back from the past and slowly focused on the present.

This was Hardy country. But it was the difference in light that impressed Rutledge more than the author’s dark and murky characters. There was a golden-brown tint to the light here that seemed to come from the soil and the leaves of the trees. Not washed pastel like Norfolk, nor rich green like Kent. Nor gray damp like Lancaster. Dorset had been wool trade and stone, cottage industry and small farming towns strung along old roads that the Saxons had laid out long before the Norman conquest. Outlying meadows where cattle quietly grazed.

Rutledge found himself wishing he could ask a painter like Catherine Tarrant if she saw light in the same way, or if it was only his undependable imagination.

He came into the town of Singleton Magna almost before he knew it was there, the abrupt shift from fields to houses almost as sharp as a line drawn in the earth. The railroad’s tracks parted company with him and ran on to the station.

Slowing as he motored down the main street, with its shops still doing a brisk business and farm carts pulled up at the curbs, he searched for the local police station.

It was no more than a cubbyhole next to the town’s one bank, a small offshoot of the main building that must at one time have been a shop. The front window had been painted white with the letters POLICE in black, and the heavy green door was nicked by time and hard use, its iron handle worn with age. The bank it adjoined was more majestic, with a handsome porch above its door, as if it too had begun life as something else, a merchant’s house or a church office.

After finding a place to leave his car and stepping out into the warmth of the afternoon, he saw a tall, stooped man of middle age just coming out of the green door. The man looked at him, frowned, and came over to speak. “Are you Inspector Rutledge, by any chance?”

“Yes, I’m Rutledge.”

The man held out a long-fingered hand. “Marcus Johnston. I’m representing that poor devil Mowbray. Nasty business. Nasty. And he’s not saying a word, not even to me. God knows what kind of case I can build for him. My advice at the moment is to throw himself on the mercy of the courts.”

Rutledge, whose father had followed the law, said only, “I don’t know a great deal about the man or his crime, except for the scant information the local people sent up to the Yard. He was searching the town for his wife, I understand? And her body has been found, but not the others he was after.”

“That’s right. The police have done their best, they’ve covered the ground hereabouts for miles in every direction. No bodies. No graves. More important, no one inquiring about her. No distraught husband and sobbing children, I mean.” He sighed. “Which leads to the conclusion that they’re dead. And all Mowbray will say to me is that they were his children, why should he want to kill them?” A woman passed and Johnston tipped his hat to her. She nodded and then eyed Rutledge with curiosity as she walked on.

“I did some checking before I left London. I’m told Mowbray was in France in 1916 when the bombing occurred. He was sent home on compassionate leave to bury his wife and children. They were identified by the constable when they were pulled from the rubble of the building. Mother and two children, dead. Mowbray himself never saw the bodies; he was told it was better to remember them as they were.”

“Inspector Hildebrand believes there must have been a mistake of some sort—the constable felt fairly certain the bodies were Mowbray’s wife and children, but they could have been another family altogether. The bombing demolished one building, as I understand it, and that brought down those on either side. Fifty or more dead. Easy mistake for the constable to have made—especially at night, fires, injured people everywhere. Absolute horror and chaos.” Johnston grimaced. “Bombs and tons of masonry don’t leave much to look at, I don’t suppose.”

“If it had been another family who died in the raid, why hasn’t someone come looking for them? Parents? Sisters? Husband home on leave? Seems odd no one did, and discovered the mix-up.”

“God knows,” Johnston answered tiredly. “My guess is, there was nobody to care about the dead woman—and Mowbray’s wife probably took advantage of that to start a new life. Makes sense, especially if she’d grown tired of waiting. Take happiness while you can. No fuss. Easier than a divorce.”

In France half a dozen men under Rutledge’s command had applied for compassionate leave at one time or another, most of them men whose wives wanted to leave them and had told them so in a letter. One had been furiously angry….

“Private Wilson,” Hamish reminded him. “He said he’d have her back or know the reason why. He was brought up on assault charges in Slough and given six months.”

Johnston seemed to know what Rutledge was thinking, adding, “Hard on the poor sod who’s told his family’s dead, but I daresay she never thought about that. Only that he wouldn’t come tearing home in a rage.” He squared his shoulders with an effort, as if the weight of the world lay on them.

Rutledge studied the long, thin face, lined with something more than age or exhaustion. That was a look he, Rutledge, had seen often enough since he came home from France. And recognized. This man had lost a son in the war and was still grieving hard. The murder of a young woman, someone he didn’t know and didn’t love, had less reality to him than the death in a foreign country of the only flesh and blood that had mattered to him. Johnston was going through the motions for his client. That was all he could do.

“Thank you for being so frank,” Rutledge said, preparing to walk on into the police station.

Johnston seemed to realize how hopeless he himself thought the evidence was. He summoned a smile and added, “Early days yet, of course! Early days!” But there was a hollowness in the words and the smile.

Rutledge watched him move on down the street, then opened the door of the station, finding himself in a scene of turmoil. There were some half a dozen people crammed into a room meant to hold two at best, and the sudden sense of claustrophobia that swept over him was so fierce he drew in his breath with the shock of it.

Someone looked up, a constable, and said sharply, “What is it you want?”

“Rutledge, from London,” he managed to say, but it came out harshly. Everyone in the room turned to stare at him, making the sense of suffocation worse. He could feel the knob on the door behind him jammed into his back.

“Ah!” the constable replied noncommittally. “Come this way, sir, if you please.” He led Rutledge through the anarchy and into a dark, stuffy hall that smelled of cabbage and dust. “That’s the leaders of the next search parties,” he said over his shoulder. “We’ve not found the others—the man or the children.”

Rutledge didn’t answer. They reached a door painted brown, and the constable knocked, then turned the knob.

The room beyond was bright with late sun, and a long pair of windows stood wide, looking out into a small courtyard overgrown with weeds. Although the windows provided little air movement, they gave the sense of openness he badly needed—an escape into light and freedom. Hamish, in the back of his mind, sighed with a relief as great as his own.

“Inspector Rutledge, Inspector Hildebrand. If you’ll excuse me, sir …?” The constable left the end of his request dangling in the silence as he retreated, closing the door softly behind him.

Hildebrand looked Rutledge up and down. “They said they were sending an experienced man.”

“I was with the Yard before the war,” Rutledge replied.

“But away through the better part of it,” Hildebrand finished for him. He himself was white-haired, with a youngish face. Rutledge put his age at not more than forty-five. “Ah, well. Sit down, man! Here’s what we have. Murder victim presumed to be Mrs. Mary Sandra Mowbray, of London. Matches the general description of the late Mrs. Mowbray, or I should say, presumed late. Even Londoners can’t die twice, can they? In his wallet Mr. Mowbray had a photograph of her with the children, taken in 1915, just before he was shipped over to France. We’ve had copies made to circulate. So far nothing’s come of it.” He tossed a file across the cluttered desk, and Rutledge found himself looking down at a faded photograph of a woman facing the camera and the sun at the same time, squinting a little. She was wearing a floral print dress and a single strand of pearls. Her hair seemed dark blond or a light brown, the way the sun caught it. Her face was oval and pretty, with fine bones and a distinct look of breeding handed down from some remote ancestor. The children by her side were a little clearer. The boy was no more than two, wearing a sailor suit and a hat that had fallen to a rakish angle over one eye. He grinned, squinting, while his hands clutched a ball nearly as large as he was. The little girl, not as childishly plump, had the same fairness as the mother. She could have been a large four or a small five, judging from the shy smile that showed all of her front baby teeth quite clearly. Her hand clutched her mother’s skirts, and her head was tilted in a way that promised a sweet nature rather than a rowdy one as she peered up through her lashes with no hint of roguishness.

When Rutledge had scanned the faces, he saw that the file also included official copies from London of a marriage license in the name of Mary Sandra Marsh and Albert Arthur Mowbray, a pair of birth certificates for the children, and the death certificates for all three. Signed in a scrawl by a London doctor. “Severe injuries from falling debris” they all read, and the autopsy had gone on to catalog them.

“Sad business,” Hildebrand said after a moment. “Young woman with a husband over in France. Lonely. Probably told the poor devil she took up with that he was dead. Well, it wasn’t altogether a lie, was it? So many of them did die. Only not her husband. He lived to come home, didn’t he? Must have been one of her worst nightmares, the chance of running into him some day! And as luck would have it, he goes from London to the coast in search of work, and there she is, standing in the station at Singleton Magna. Plain as day!”

“You think she saw him? Leaning out the train window?” Rutledge asked, reading down the statements of a conductor and several witnesses, one of them a farmer’s wife and her sister, the other two stokers returning to their ship.

“Stands to reason, I’d say. Explains why the four of ’em left town in such haste. Not a glimpse of them anywhere! One or two possible sightings of her at the station, probably before Mowbray spied her. After that, she was covering her tracks for dear life. I asked around myself, didn’t leave that to my men.”

“Very proper,” Rutledge said absently, rereading one of the statements. “Still, we have only Mowbray’s word that this was his wife and family.”

“As to that, I checked with London,” Hildebrand said with satisfaction. “There were quite a few casualties the night Mrs. Mowbray’s street was bombed. Constable Tedley identified her and the children. They were in the stairwell of the block of flats where she lived. And she didn’t show up later to prove him wrong, did she? And no one came round looking for someone who should have been alive, did they? Straightforward, as far as London was concerned.”

Rutledge nodded and handed the statements back to Hildebrand. Then he asked, “How did Mowbray catch up to her later? Has he told you?”

“Man’s in no case to talk. Deep depression, according to the doctor. Just sits there, staring at the floor, face drained of emotion. Stands to reason,” he said again, as if he used the expression often. “Wife died twice, didn’t she? Once when he was told she’d been killed by the Zeppelins and now by his own hand. Shock. That’s what it is. I daresay any of us would feel much the same. Not that it explains or excuses, of course. But you can see how it would happen.”

Shock. It was something Rutledge understood very well In a different voice he asked, “What weapon did he use?”

“Now that’s an interesting question. Blunt force to batter her face in, which means anything from a heavy stone to a tool of some sort. We examined the tools Mowbray had with him. Hammers, screwdrivers, a pair of saws, a level, that sort of thing. No blood or hair on any of them. Which says to me he got rid of whatever it was. I’d guess it’s where he left the other corpses.”

“And the wounds? Where were they?”

“In the face, mostly. Repeated blows, eight or ten, the doctor says. But there’re marks on her neck too. As if he’d caught up with her, running, and grabbed her by the throat, pulled her down, and then went for the face. That’s often what you find where jealousy is the motive—make her so hideous even in death that the rival can’t bear to look at her anymore. Doctor says the force used was savage, as if driven by terrible anger or fear.”

“And no blood on Mowbray or his clothing?”

“No. But then he could have cleaned himself up, couldn’t he? Changed shirts even. There’s no way of telling how many he’d brought with him. We found one other work shirt in his satchel, and a white one for Sunday. He might have had more.”

Rutledge closed the file. “I’d like to see Mowbray, if f may.”

Hildebrand got to his feet. “Much good it’ll do you!” he said willingly enough. “Let me fetch the key on the way.”

They went along the same dark hallway to the end, where the key was kept in a small cupboard. Then Hildebrand turned to another door just to his left and unlocked it. The iron key made a scraping sound that jangled the nerves. As the door swung open, Hildebrand said, “Someone to see you, Mowbray. Scotland Yard. On your feet, man!”

The man on the cot, lying on top of the gray blanket, slowly swung his feet to the floor and stared up at his visitors. His face was empty, and he made no effort to do more than sit, as if doing even so much had drained him of life and hope.

Rutledge picked up the chair on the far side of the narrow cell and brought it over nearer the cot. The room was wider than it was long, and there was no window. The air was stale, seeming to hover in visible layers around them as he sat down. In the back of his mind Hamish was pointing that out, over and over again. After a moment Rutledge said, “Mr. Mowbray?”

The man shifted his feet a little and nodded.

“Did you kill the woman who was found in the field? The woman dressed in pink?” Rutledge kept his voice low, quiet, no hint of accusation in it, only curiosity.

“She was my wife, I’d never harm her,” he said gruffly after a time.

“The cabby has said you threatened to kill her—” Hildebrand began from the doorway, but Rutledge waved him into silence.

“You were angry with her, weren’t you? For deceiving you, for putting you through such anguish. When you believed you’d come home and buried her with the children? And then—suddenly—she was alive, and so were they, and the first emotion you felt was anger. A great, fierce anger.”

“It was the shock—and the train wouldn’t stop—I was beside myself—I said things I didn’t mean. I’d never harm her.”

“Not even for taking your children and going to live with another man?”

Mowbray sat with his head held by the palms of his hands on either side of his temples. “I’d want to kill him” he said huskily, “for getting around her. Making her do it. I’d blame him, not her.”

“His solicitor’s just left,” Hildebrand put in again. “told him what to say. You’ve heard more from him already than I have! It’s—”

But Rutledge ignored him, cutting across the flow of words as if they hadn’t been spoken. “Where did you leave the children? Can you take us to them? Let us help them?” He waited for an answer, then added gently, “You’d not want the foxes or dogs to find them first.”

Mowbray raised his head, and the pain-filled eyes made Rutledge swear under his breath as he met them. “I don’t know,” the man said wretchedly. “I don’t know where they are. Tricia was always afraid of the dark. I’d not leave her alone out in the dark! But I can’t remember—they tell me I killed her, and my Bertie, but I can’t remember! Night and day—that’s all I can see in my mind. The children. It’s driving me mad!”

Rutledge got up from his chair. He’d seen men break, God knew he of all people could recognize the signs! There were no answers to be had now from Mowbray. The haunting images he’d seen—or been told he’d seen—had been seared deep into his brain, and separating them from reality would be nearly impossible.

Hamish, in the back of his own mind, was dredging up memories that were also safer concealed in the shadows, and he fought them grimly.

Mowbray was watching him like a beaten dog, and Rutledge turned to go, not trusting his voice, unable to offer any comfort. Mowbray’s eyes followed him. Then the two men were out the door, leaving their prisoner to the silence and his conscience. Rutledge said nothing as the key rasped again in the lock and Hildebrand turned to put it back in its cupboard, but he could still feel the sense of suffocation, of hopelessness and horror and fear they’d left behind them.

“You could pity the poor sod—if you hadn’t seen what he’d done.” Hildebrand was waiting with polite impatience for Rutledge to precede him down the passage to his office.

“Put a suicide watch on him,” Rutledge said finally. “I want a constable with him, night and day. Never out of sight for an instant.”

“I’m short of men—we’re seaching for the others—”

“Do it! If he kills himself before you find those bodies, they may never turn up.” Rutledge walked away, leaving Hildebrand fuming behind him, wanting to argue. He didn’t care. He’d stayed as long as he could stand it in this dark and grim place.

“I can’t work miracles, I tell you!” Hildebrand was saying.

Rutledge, still struggling against the strong presence in his mind as Hamish harshly pointed out that Mowbray didn’t have such luxury of choice—could never again hope to walk out into the air and sun—silently reminded the bitter voice that Mowbray was very likely the murderer of children and had chosen his destruction himself. “I’ll hold you personally responsible if that man dies,” he went on as the inspector caught up to him.

Hildebrand answered through clenched teeth, “that one’s not likely to miss the hangman, if I can help it. Right, then! You’ll have your watch.”

3

Rutledge found a room at the Swan Hotel, on the second floor overlooking the main street. He set his suitcase down by the tall wardrobe and went to open the windows. A gust of hot air seemed to roll in, then with the help of the open door behind him, the stirring draft began to relieve a little of the afternoon’s heat.

He stood there by the windows, watching the traffic in the street below. The last of the farm carts had gone, but between the trees at the upper end of the street and the old market cross at the lower end he could count some half a dozen carriages still waiting. Two cars were standing just opposite the hotel, and another one was driving away, the echo of its motor rising from the house fronts as it climbed the hill.

He felt depressed. Hamish, silent for some time now, had nothing to say, leaving Rutledge with the heaviness of his thoughts and the sense of guilt for doing nothing to help Mowbray. Instead he’d made certain that the man lived to be hanged. From one suffocation to another …

Mowbray was a tragedy. A man who was not, by nature, a killer. Who may have killed out of surprise and shock and instant, overwhelming fury. Which probably didn’t matter very much to the young mother who had just died at his hands! It would very likely be kinder to everyone if Mowbray carried out his own sentence of execution. But the law forbade suicide, and it was the duty of the police to prevent it. And let the poor bastard suffer from the knowledge of what he’d done until His Majesty’s hangman legally put him out of his misery.

Sighing with the uselessness of it all, Rutledge turned to unpack. There was a tap at the door and the chambermaid came in bearing a tray. “I thought you’d like some tea, sir. It’s too late to have it in the parlor, but there were still cakes and half a dozen sandwiches in the kitchen.” She smiled shyly.

“Thank you—” He hesitated, and she supplied the name for him as she set the tray on a table and whisked off the napkin that covered dainty egg and cucumber sandwiches and a plate of iced cakes. There was also what looked like two fresh pasties. Apparently tea at the Swan was hardy fare.

“Peg, if you please, sir.”

“Thank you, Peg.”

She curtsied, then turned for the door. He stopped her, asking, “Do many of the passengers from the noon train stop here at the hotel?”

“No, sir, not often. Mostly they live around here, in the town or one of the villages with no station. We have more guests on market day. Today, that was. Or when there’s an inquest. Sometimes for a funeral, if the deceased was well known.” She grimaced. “I saw that man, sir. Mr. Mowbray. When he came to ask if his wife and the children were staying here. Upset he was, nearly snapping my head off when I told him Mr. Snelling—that’s the manager—was on the telephone and couldn’t come out to speak to him just then.”

“Did you see Mowbray’s wife and the children?”

“No, sir, they never came here. Constable Jeffries showed me the photograph, but the only children in that day for luncheon were Mr. Staley’s, and I’ve known them since they was born! Now Mrs. Hindes said she believed she saw Mrs. Mowbray at the station, when she was there to pick up her niece from London. But Miss Harriet’s never comfortable on a train, and Mrs. Hindes was that worried about the girl being sick before they reached home, she never really paid much heed to the other passengers.” Peg grinned. “Miss Harriet is always being sick. It’s her revenge for having to stay two weeks with her auntie.”

Rutledge smiled, and Peg recollected her place. “If there’s nothing else sir?” She left, closing the door softly behind her.

He ate the pasties and two of the cakes, drank his tea while it was hot, then wished he hadn’t. Leaving his coat over the back of his chair, he opened the door again for whatever air was stirring and finished unpacking, his mind on the dead woman.

Singleton Magna was not where she lived. Everyone in such a small town, including Hildebrand, would have known her instantly if this had been her home. And she didn’t live close by, or by this time someone would have recognized her photograph or the children in it. Or come looking for her.

The question then was, had she and the man with her left the train because they’d seen Bert Mowbray there in one of the cars, staring at them in shocked surprise, and in a panic decided to make a run for it? Or had the family been on its way to a place beyond Singleton Magna? If so, how had they planned to travel that distance after leaving the train?

Could they have been completely oblivious of the man watching them?

Because sometimes you felt eyes on you, when there was some strong emotion behind the stare. Had she sensed them, as the guilty often did? And what had she told the man with her? “There’s my husband! The one thinks I’m dead!” Or had she told lies? Anything to make him trust her?

Come to that, how much did the man himself know? Enough to make him accept the need for haste and putting distance between themselves and Mowbray? Or was he as much a victim of her scheming as Mowbray himself?

What if, somewhere along the road, the truth had sunk in and he’d decided that running wasn’t the answer. And instead chosen to confront the man from this woman’s past? Or—decided to leave her to face the consequences of her folly alone.

Interesting conjectures, but only that—conjectures. They’d know when the other bodies were found.…

Rutledge spent what was left of the afternoon coordinating a widening search. Making telephone calls to towns along the railway in both directions, asking local police for assistance in locating any passengers on Mowbray’s train who might have information about the woman and her children. He persuaded police in the busy holiday towns along the coast to do the same, though they were not sanguine about finding any needles in the haystack of people on their doorstep. They had already passed around the circular Hildebrand had sent them. It hadn’t brought any response.

He called in more searchers from the nearest towns and outlying villages, telling constables and sergeants and inspectors that any men they could spare would be greatly appreciated. A thinly veiled order, couched in the politest terms. Then he and Hildebrand looked at a rough map of Singleton Magna and its environs, already quartered with lines showing where the search had scoured the landscape. Next Rutledge read reports from earlier parties, all of them ending with the same last line: “Nothing to report.”

Hamish, reflecting his tiredness, pointed out that it was useless to go back over the same ground again and again, but Rutledge knew the value of many pairs of eyes. What one had missed, another might see. It was harder to convince Hildebrand of that.

“I can’t grasp how a man in his state of mind could be so clever,” he said again, tossing his pencil back on the cluttered desk. “It’s not likely he knew more about this territory than we do. Stands to reason! And yet we’re fair flummoxed! I can’t understand how we’ve missed them.”

“I don’t know that it’s cleverness,” Rutledge said thoughtfully. “A small child can be buried in a field. Tucked under a hedge or loose stones by a wall. Stuffed in the hollow of a tree. He might have felt compelled to bury them, whether he remembers it or not. It’s the man whose body should have turned up by this time.”

“I’ve climbed up church bell towers,” Hildebrand told him defensively, “taken pitchforks to haystacks, walked the railway tracks for five miles in both directions, even looked down wells and run sticks up chimneys.”

“Very resourceful of you,” Rutledge applauded, sensing ruffled feathers. “What we need now, I think, is to try to follow in his footsteps. It might be helpful to send men back to every person Mowbray encountered, then use the time they saw him as a map to chart his movements. That could give us a better idea of where he might have gone when no one was looking.”

Grudgingly Hildebrand agreed. “If those extra men come in, I’ll see to it. I’ve looked into what gaps I discovered. But I suppose it won’t do any harm to go over those two days again.”

He stared consideringly at Rutledge. Quiet enough, and competent, he had to give him that. One to check every detail, which was frustrating, knowing how thorough he’d been on his own. Still, that wasn’t unreasonable, it was the sort of thing he himself would expect, in Rutledge’s shoes. Hadn’t arrived demanding an office and a sergeant either, setting himself up as God Almighty, wreaking havoc in another man’s patch. But somehow distant, not the sort you’d ask to join you for a pint at the end of the day. And there was an intensity about him, underneath it all. Hildebrand found himself wondering if the Londoner was still recovering from war wounds. That thinness and the tired, haunted eyes …

None of which was worrying to the local man in charge. It was more a matter of pride that drove him.

Rutledge didn’t appear to be a meddler, but you could never be sure. There’d been rumors about what he’d done in Cornwall. Simple enough case to begin with—and look how that’d been turned inside out! Well, Scotland Yard would learn soon enough that Singleton Magna knew what it was about.

Best course of action, then, was to say yes to everything and quietly do as you thought best. And hope to hell London was kept well occupied sorting out jurisdictional squabbles.

Hamish, without fuss, said, “Watch your back, man!”

Rutledge nodded. But whether in answer to Hildebrand or his own thoughts it was hard to tell.

When a frail thread of cool air ushered in the evening, Rutledge went down to his motorcar and drove out of Singleton Magna on the road that led to the farmer’s field where the body of Mrs. Mowbray had been found. The sun slanted low in the west, turning trees and steeples and rooftops to a golden brightness that seemed timeless and serene.

The place was comparatively easy to find—a field of grain that ran gently down a hillside toward the road and then continued for some forty feet across it. Beyond the lower field, a pattern of mixed dark green led on toward a clump of trees along a small stream, and beyond that he could just see the tall church tower of Singleton Magna, apparently not so far away as the crow went, but possibly four miles by the high road.

To the west of where he pulled over and got out of his motorcar, he noticed a Y in the road and a weathered signpost, its arms pointing toward more villages out of sight over the slight rise.

As a place to commit murder, he thought, standing there in the golden light, this was as isolated a spot as any.

And by the same token, as isolated as it was—how had Mowbray and his victim come to meet here? Or had they come here together from some other place?

“Ye’ll not be getting answers from yon puir sod in the gaol,” Hamish reminded him. “He’s a witless man.”

Which was a very good point, Rutledge thought.

This case, so obviously clear-cut and so near to being closed, was going to sink or survive in the courtroom on the basis of cold, hard fact. Weapon. Opportunity. Motive. And the how and when and where of the act.

“Aye,” Hamish replied, “broken men conjure up sympathy. Unless they’re branded cowards …”

Rutledge winced and turned his back on the motorcar, looking up at the field. Why here? he asked himself. Because she had gotten away from Mowbray, as someone had suggested? And it was here that he’d caught up with her again? Simple happenstance?

All right, then, where had she run from?

To search for the children, he told himself, I’ll have to work out the direction she’d be likely to come from—and how Mowbray had followed her.

Yet there was nothing in any direction to suggest a sanctuary where a frightened, weary family might have taken refuge.

He tried to picture them, the children crying, spent and thirsty, the mother trying hard to shush them and soothe them at the same time. The man—her husband? her lover?—carrying the little girl, while she held the boy. Four miles—but still not far enough. They would want to get clear of Singleton Magna and the pursuing Furies as quickly as possible, which told him they wouldn’t have asked for a ride on a wagon. Nor would they stop at a farmhouse door to ask for a glass of water or an hour to let the children rest. Either way would leave traces of their passage.

It had taken Mowbray two days to catch up with her….

Consider a different point of view. Where had the family intended to leave the train? They could have been traveling to the Dorset coast or any town in between. Or beyond, to Devon, even to Cornwall. All right, given that their direction was south, or even southwest, they’d most likely keep to that. However indirectly. Which meant, in theory, that they’d have left Singleton Magna by the same road he’d just traveled. Where, then, had they spent that last night?

Rutledge slung his coat over one shoulder and walked on to the signpost where the road divided.

Two arms pointed southwest. The faded letters read STOKE NEWTON and LEIGH MINSTER. From there the road might well carry on to the coast. The third arm pointed northwest, to Charlbury.

He went back to the field and climbed the shallow bank—his footsteps lost in a morass of many prints now—and walked toward the spot where the tidy rows of grain ended in a flattened fan. Just before he reached it, he saw the darker stains in the dark earth, barely visible now but clear enough if someone searched for them. Here she’d died, bleeding into the soil, and here she’d been abandoned.

He knelt there in the trampled dust and stared at the earth, trying to reach out to the mind of the woman who had lain here. Hamish stirred restlessly, but Rutledge ignored him.

A terrified woman. Coming face to face with a man bent on vengeance, knowing she was going to die—knowing her children were already dead—or soon would be—

Did she beg? Make promises? Was there anything she had left that Mowbray wanted, besides her life? Or was death an end for her to terror and horror—the doorway into the silence where her children had gone before her?

Had she hidden them and protected them with her own Wood? Knowing that once she was dead—and couldn’t be made to tell—they’d be safe? Buying time while they reached some kind of safety.

Was that why he’d beaten her face so savagely? Trying to force the truth from her, trying to make her give him what he believed was his, his flesh and blood?

But the ground here was silent. And Rutledge, listening for answers in his own mind, seeking something real and deeply felt that could show him the way, could hear nothing. Whatever had brought this woman to the edge of an abyss, whatever emotions had roiled the air and left grisly traces on the ground were still her secret.

In the end he stood up and shook his head, unable to reach what had happened here. My fault? he wondered, and Hamish said it was.

What about Mowbray’s point of view? Take the living man, instead of the dead woman, and delve into his feelings.

He’d killed her here—and abandoned her here.

Why? Why not pull the body into the rows of grain, where only the field mice and crows would spot it so soon? Why leave it close to the road, where the farmer, coming to look over his crops, might stumble across it and raise the alarm?

“Because,” Hamish answered him, “the man was no’ thinking with cold logic. He was distracted and angry and vengeful.”

“Yes,” Rutledge agreed aloud. “He wanted her dead, he didn’t care whether he’d be caught or not. They found him, after all, asleep under a tree.”

He looked from this vantage point around the circle of corn and trees and distant church tower, the horizons of this place of death. But he saw nothing to draw his attention. No shed, no barn with its roof falling in, no farm house. The clump of trees, then? They were far enough off the road

Rutledge spent a good quarter of an hour searching among the trees and came up emptyhanded. No sandwich wrappers, no scuffed earth, no suitcases—

Suitcases.

No one had mentioned the family’s suitcases. Had these been left on the train? Or had they tried to drag their luggage with them, down the hot and dusty road? It was a point to consider. Another point to consider …

He went back to his motorcar, hot and dusty himself, to drive on down the left, southwestern, fork in the road.

It led to two straggling villages, houses lining the road, water meadows at their backs on either side, and farms in the outlying fringes. In each one Rutledge sought the local constable and questioned him. The first one was still enjoying a belated dinner, and the other was in his shirtsleeves gossiping over the garden wall with his neighbor. But they answered him readily enough.

Rutledge learned that Hildebrand, in his thoroughness, had preceded him here, and there appeared to be nothing left for him to discover in either Leigh Minster or Stoke Newton. No strangers have come through here in the past week—both constables assured him of that, and he believed them. They appeared to be steady, careful men who knew their patch well. Nor had an ownerless suitcase turned up in the middle of a field or under some hedge. Apparently neither village had been pulled—wittingly or unwittingly—into the tragedy at Singleton Magna.

Back in his motorcar again, the cooling wind of twilight swirling about his shoulders, Rutledge listened to the voice in the rear seat. It seemed to breathe on him, though he knew very well it was only the soft Dorset air.

“I do na’ think he’d have come so far. The man was certain his wife was still in Singleton Magna—he went raving about yon town for two days, searching. People saw him. And he was asleep there when the police came looking for him! But what’s no’ been answered is, what made him so certain they’d be found there? That the townsfolk must have hidden them from him?”

“I don’t know,” Rutledge said. “In the end, he did find the woman close by. He caught up with her there in the cornfields. And he killed her there and left her there. Unless …”

“Aye, unless. Unless the man with her got rid of her because she was the one Mowbray wanted. And he and the children got clean away.”

Rutledge had been considering that possibility. “If he killed her here in the open and the children saw him do it, how could he persuade them to come away with him after that? It was a bloody crime, she’d have screamed the first time he struck her. They would have cried out in alarm, pulled at his coat, his arms—trying to stop him—then fought to stay by her, because they wouldn’t have understood that she was dead. And if she was a liability to him, why did he stop at killing her? Why not rid himself of both the children—they weren’t his, after all. No, that line of investigation is taking us nowhere.”

“But it’s the children that’ll tell you the rest of the truth. Alive or dead.”

“I know,” Rutledge said. “And where shall we find them?”

It was nearly dark when he got back to Singleton Magna and left his car behind the inn. In his absence Hildebrand had come to find him and written a message on hotel stationery, its thick, crested paper incongruously scrawled over in heavy black ink.

“London just replied to your request for more information on Mrs. Mowbray. She was from Hereford. No known connection with Dorset. That may mean that the man with her lived or worked or had relatives in this county. I’m looking into that now.”

It was one of the telephone calls Rutledge had made that afternoon, asking a canny sergeant he knew in London to look into Mrs. Mowbray for him. Gibson always had his ear to the ground. If anyone could uncover information on the dead woman, it was he. A pity there was no way Gibson could do the same for the man.

And Rutledge didn’t hold out much hope that Hildebrand would fare any better, with so little to go on. It might take weeks to trace him—if he belonged in Dorset. Or years, if he came from another part of England.

“If he got clear, they’d hide him, him and the children. Family. Friends. If he asked,” Hamish said as Rutledge took the stairs two at a time.

“Very likely,” Rutledge answered aloud, before he could stop himself. “Unless they know that Mowbray is safely in jail.”

“But the children are no’ his,” Hamish pointed out. “And the mother’s dead. If yon man wanted to keep them—”

“—he’d stay out of sight. He’d have to turn them over to the police if he came forward. Yes, that’s an interesting thought, isn’t it?”

The children, again …

They were beginning to haunt him.

4

Rutledge spent a restless night, his room too warm for comfortable sleeping, and his mind too busy.

The images flitted and dissolved in a kaleidoscope of anguish. Of Mowbray, broken and in despair in his cell—of the bloody body of his wife lying at the edge of a field in plain sight when the farmer went to see to his crop—of children crying for their mother and a man who wasn’t their father offering what comfort he could—of a gallows waiting for a prisoner who might not understand why he was being hanged.

And as always, Hamish, attuned to the tumult in his mind, reminded him of his own fallibility, a policeman driven by his own pain attempting to get to the bottom of another man’s. A murderer’s. Both of them—murderers.

“It’s love that’s at the bottom of this,” Rutledge said aloud in the darkness, trying to silence the voice in his head. And then swore because the word conjured up memories of Jean. Jean, in a fashionable blue gown with ecru lace and the flowers he’d given her pinned at her shoulder. Jean laughing as she swung and missed, and the tennis ball went smashing into the backstop. The sun on her face as they walked through Oxford early on a Sunday morning, drinking in the quiet and peace.

But what kind of love? It had so many faces, so many names. Jealousy wove a thread around it, and envy, and fear. People died for love—and killed for it. And yet in itself it was indefinable, it wore whatever passions people brought to it, like a mountebank, with no reality of its own.

Somewhere in the town outside his window he could hear laughter and music. Happy laughter, without restraint or burdens.

Once Jean was married and off to Ottawa, he told himself, he could finally put her out of his mind. As he had nearly put her out of his heart. Olivia Marlowe had taught him more about the quality of love than Jean ever had.

“What will teach me to forget my Fiona?” Hamish said softly. “Do ye never remember her? Do ye never hear her weeping by yon empty grave, while I lie in France with no way to call out to her or offer comfort? What peace can Ian Rutledge find, loving any woman, when there’s Hamish MacLeod on his conscience!”

In the darkness Rutledge turned his head away from the insistent voice. It was true. What woman would be willing to share his life with such demons in his mind?

In the morning Rutledge met Hildebrand for breakfast in the Swan’s dining room, the bright chintz curtains bellying like sails in the early breeze. The tablecloths were blindingly white. Hildebrand appeared to be suffering from a headache. Several times he massaged his eyes as if they burned, and he growled at the middle-aged woman who waited on their table. She gave him a withering look as she walked away and said, “I knew you as a lad, with your braces broken and your face dirty! Don’t come the grump with me!”

Rutledge suppressed a smile.

Hildebrand, ignoring her, said, “I had a hellish conference last night with my chief. He wants those children found. Yesterday wouldn’t be soon enough! Makes the entire county look bad, he informs me, bloody maniacs running about slaughtering their families. He says we’re to make haste and finish this business, or he’ll know the reason why! It might have taken some of the wind out of his sails if you’d been here to placate him.”

“I went out to the scene of the murder. I don’t know where they could have hidden themselves—or been hidden, near that field. I keep coming back to Singleton Magna. And whether someone in the town is keeping silent—assuming the children and the man are still alive.”

Hildebrand stared at him, then pulled one of the flyers out of his pocket and tossed it across to Rutledge’s plate, where it landed on the toast he had just spread with marmalade.

Rutledge picked it up, wiped the back with his serviette, and then said, “What’s this in aid of?”

“The fact that that flyer was given to every household in the town and all the outlying farms. Somebody—somebody!—would have come forward with information. Stands to reason! If not the family, a nosy neighbor, the old biddy across the road, some child wanting to be noticed. Do I have to spell it out for you?”

“No,” Rutledge said, reining in his temper. He was looking at the flyer, at the faces. “This should have brought results. I agree. But it hasn’t. And I keep asking myself why no one has come forward.”

“Which tells me,” the other man responded acerbically, “that they’re dead. The man and the children. Which is where we’ve been for some days now—looking for their bodies.”

“There can’t be all that many hiding places within walking radius of the town. And if Mowbray caught up with his wife by that field along the high road, it narrows our search even more. The western side of Singleton Magna, not the east. Otherwise he’d have had to bring her—or chase her—through the town itself. And that’s not on.”

“We’ve looked. There isn’t a stone as large as that plate in front of you that we haven’t lifted, not a tree we haven’t climbed, not a stream we haven’t walked through up to our knees. Not a wall, a plot of disturbed ground, a shed, an outhouse, bridges, or any other conceivable place we haven’t searched at least three times. And are searching yet again!”

They’ve vanished, then, Rutledge thought. Like foxfire, the nearer you come, the farther away it appears to be.

Hamish was saying something, but Rutledge ignored him.

“I went on to Leigh Minister and Stoke Newton. You’ve searched there as well?”

“Yes, on the premise that the train was going south.”

“What about the other fork?”

“The way to Charlbury? That’s another three miles distant. We spoke to the constable there, in the name of thoroughness, but I wasn’t surprised when we drew a blank. A long way for a man and a woman to walk, encumbered with children. And Stoke Newton’s closer than Charlbury. Stands to reason, if Mrs. Mowbray was looking for sanctuary, she’d have chosen Stoke Newton.”

“What if she considered that herself—and chose Charlbury instead, to throw us off the track?”

Hildebrand shrugged. “It’s possible. But likely? No. You’re hunting for straws, man!”

“Then clear up another puzzle for me. Why was Mowbray so certain he’d find her here in Singleton Magna?”

“I spent most of the night turning that over in my mind. I don’t think he was certain. Look, she wasn’t on the train when he saw her, she was already on the platform, kneeling to speak to the little girl. They’d gotten off the train before he saw her—and very likely before she saw him. Stands to reason, he’d tell himself, if they got off here, this was where they planned to be. So he hunted for her here—and in the end, he got it right.”

Was that how it had happened? It might explain why the suitcases hadn’t been found. He mentioned them to Hildebrand, who shook his head.

“I’ve thought about that too. Mowbray’s not the only poor sod out of work. If someone had come across the cases and had need of whatever was inside, what’s to prevent him from keeping the lot and his mouth shut at the same time?”

Rutledge felt depression settling in, and Hildebrand didn’t seem to find the endless circle of supposition any more joyful. He rubbed his eyes again and turned the subject to title men who had arrived that morning, and where he had sent them to search.

“Meanwhile, I’ve got my own men asking questions in town. They know what they’re after, we should have some answers by late afternoon.”

When they’d finished their coffee, Rutledge stood up. “I’ve one or two matters needing my attention. I should be back by three o’clock.”

Hildebrand felt relief wash over him. Out of sight was out from under foot. London’s task was diplomacy, where the investigation crossed parish boundaries and sensitive toes might feel trod upon. If that kept Rutledge occupied most of the day, he himself might accomplish a hell of a lot more.

With a brief nod, Hildebrand strode out the door like a man with a heavy schedule ahead of him.

Rutledge stared at the flyer again, deep in thought.

The woman who’d waited on them looked down and saw it. “A sorry business!” she said pityingly. “I blame the war. Disrupting a family, putting ideas into her head. It’s the little ones I feel most for, truth to tell. Losing their father, and a mother no better than she ought to be!”

“From all accounts she was a good mother.”

“That’s as may be! But it’s a sorry business, and mark my words, it’s her that’s to blame!”

“Small as they are, how much would these children remember about Mowbray?” he asked, curious. “He was in France most of their lives. Surely they’d come to accept any replacement as their real father?”

The woman looked up at him, her face scornful. “What makes you think this was the first and only man she’d taken up with?”

It was a very good question!

As she piled dishes on her tray, she added, “My eldest daughter lost her children to the influenza. Too little to live, the doctor told her. I don’t think she’s slept a night since they died. And here’s someone puts her own fancies before her children. Doesn’t sound to me like a good mother!” She lifted the heavy tray and marched off toward the swinging door that led to the kitchens, her pain evident in her straight, unyielding back.

Too little to live…

His war had been broken bodies and the sucking black mud. Unbearable noise—and unbearable silence. Artillery barrages, machine guns, strafing aeroplanes. Horses and men dying, their screams splitting the mind, the sound going on and on long after it had stopped. A war of attrition—meant to kill to the last man. Where one’s own survival seemed beyond any prayer.

In England it had been different. For the exhausted people at home, carrying the burden of deprivation, stunned by the long lists of dead and wounded, worn down by helpless waiting and uncertainty, influenza had come as the silent, stealthy scythe of God, striking without warning, killing with the same certainty as wounds in the flesh gone septic but not confining itself to the trenches. It killed young and old, without rhyme or reason, striking down the healthy, sparing the ailing, leaving children without mothers and mothers without—

He stopped halfway to the hall and spun on his heel to look back at the still swinging door to the kitchen.

Too little to live…

He stared down at the flyer in his hand. The pale faces of the children stared back at him.

Why hadn’t the children changed since 1916? Mowbray had described them as he’d seen them on the train platform as if they’d not altered from this faded photograph. Children who should have aged three years—in size and appearance. Did that mean he hadn’t seen them, except in grieving imagination?

No wonder the flyers hadn’t brought any results!

“But the woman’s dead—she was real enough,” he told himself.

Missing suitcases. A woman who’d vanished for over twenty-four hours, between hastily leaving the train and her murder. The ages of the missing children. Questions that niggled at the edges of his mind, with no answers.

Unless the poor devil living with his own madness in that jail cell had killed a woman and children he’d never seen before!

Gentle God!

Rutledge took the stairs to his room two at a time, as if trying to outrace the horror he’d evoked. There he picked up his hat, stood thoughtfully in the middle of the floor as he debated the best course of action, then ran lightly down the steps again and out to his car.

On the road west, he could see small groups of men in the distance, searching, covering again ground they’d already tramped over three and four times. Heads bent, sticks poking into undergrowth and among the thick boughs of trees, they moved steadily and carefully across the terrain assigned to them. In the field where the body had been found the grain was alive with them, and there was a fuming, red-faced man sitting his horse at the edge of the corn. The farmer, most likely. Rutledge considered stopping to speak to him and then decided it could wait until the man’s temper had subsided. This was his best crop of the season, trampled through no fault of his own. A policeman from London would be no different in his book than one from Singleton Magna.

At the signpost, Rutledge took the northwest road this time, toward Charlbury. He drove slowly, scouting for a likely outbuilding that might offer shelter. But the two dilapidated sheds he did investigate were empty of anything except pigeons, mice, and a swarm of insects rising into the stuffy air from the dust beneath his feet.

Tramping back to his car, he heard the sound of another automobile coming fast along the lane. He stopped to watch it, his coat over one shoulder, his shirtsleeves rolled up on his forearms, wishing he’d thought to bring a Thermos of tea or water with him. His throat felt parched.

The motorcar slowed as it came nearer and then braked as it drew abreast of him. A woman was driving it, and he knew the instant he saw her face that she wasn’t English. There was something about the way her dark hair was swept up into a bun, the blue dress she wore with a scarf around the throat. Style. His sister Frances would have recognized it instantly.

She was French—

“Are you in trouble?” she asked, her English lightly and fascinatingly accented. He found himself suddenly at a loss for words.

It wasn’t beauty. Not that she wasn’t damned attractive. But it was more subtle. Good bones, his sister Frances could have told him. A sensuality that came from within, a curve of the lips, a lift to the eyebrows. The way her clothes set off her coloring, the shades of blue in the scarf like stained glass, vivid and rich, bringing light to the gray eyes that shifted as he watched from clear, still water to dark, unfathomable pools of speculation.

He spoke quickly, and in French. “No, I’m a policeman. Inspector Rutledge from London. I’m taking part in the search for the missing Mowbray children.”

She smiled a little, hearing his French, unexpected in a deserted lane in the middle of Dorset, then she caught what he was saying. “Ah. The children. It is very sad, is it not? I hope they will be found alive. But one wonders, as the time goes by. I have no children—” She stopped, then went on wryly, “—it is something one feels, I think, about children, whether one is a parent or not.”

The smile, even as brief as it was, had been like sunlight over the sea. What in God’s name had brought such a creature as this to England? Rutledge glanced at her hands on the wheel and saw a wedding band. That explained it then. A man …

“Yes.” He moved slightly, away from her car.

She took that as a signal that the conversation was finished, although he’d meant it in another sense. “Then I shall leave you to your search. I wish you success with it—and living children at the end of it.”

The motorcar moved off, and as he watched her drive on, he cursed himself for being a tongue-tied fool. He hadn’t even asked her name, or where she lived. And what had brought her here, to this stretch of road connected with a murder investigation. If she knew of any place the police had not thought to search—

“She’s a stranger here hersel’,” Hamish reminded him. “She’d no’ be likely to ken what the police have na’ thought of.”

Which was true. He couldn’t hear her engine in the distance now. She was gone.

Rutledge started his car again and got in.

“And a woman like yon is naught but trouble!” Hamish added for good measure. “Leave her out o’ this business.”

Rutledge laughed. But he could still see the softness of her skin, warm with the sunny day, and the dark tendril of hair that swept across her cheek like a caress. Why was it that French women had a knack for disturbing a man, whether they were beautiful or not? Whatever it was, most of them were born with it, and he didn’t need to understand it to recognize it.

In a ramshackle barn, swaybacked with age and a roof half fallen in, he was startled by a small hawk he’d disturbed. She came sailing down toward him, defending her fledglings, and swooped near enough for him to hear the soft whish of her wing feathers on the still air. And then she was back in the beams again, well hidden. He could feel her eyes watching him. Nothing here, only prints of the heavy nailed boots of searchers.

He hadn’t expected to find anything. The effort had been made in the name of thoroughness. A policeman needed patience. And hope?

At the outskirts of Charlbury, which straggled in Saxon style along the road like beads on a string, he paused long enough to get his bearings.

It was no more than a village, houses facing each other across the high road and, at the far end, a stone church. There was a long narrow green, with its pond and white geese sailing above their reflections like frigates in the sun, an inn, some half-dozen shops, and on a slope behind an outlying farm, a round building with a thatched roof, gleaming whitely. It looked as if it had been stranded there, with no connection to Charlbury except perhaps fate.

Most of the houses were small, but between the common and the church they were larger and better kept. He thought it likely that the well-to-do farmers lived there. The grandest of the lot, with a slate roof and a sizable wing on its westerly side, was set well back from the street and boasted a fine garden behind a low, gated stone wall. There was little activity in Charlbury, as if people were working in their back gardens or on the farms that spread out around the outskirts. One shopkeeper was washing his windows, and farther along a small boy squatted by a bench, teasing a cat with a string. It played with the end desultorily as if preferring to doze peacefully in the sun. The boy gave up as Rutledge watched, and turned to run toward the pond. As he did, he cannoned into a man coming out of the small bakery, who bent double from the force of impact and swore feelingly at the child. The words carried in the warm air.

They didn’t appear to have much effect. The boy was soon throwing sticks at the geese on the pond. A woman coming out of another shop, a basket over her arm, called to him, and he came reluctantly to walk beside her, his shrill voice bouncing off the water as he wanted to know why. The town brat, Rutledge thought, amused.

Then he noticed that the man the boy had run into was still leaning against the baker’s wall, as if in pain. Finally the man straightened gingerly and moved on. From the blacksmith’s shop came a sudden gust of black smoke as the bellows were worked. Somewhere Rutledge could hear cattle lowing.

His first stop was at the small, thatched stone house, marked by a sign, where the Charlbury constable lived. But there was no answer to his knock. Rutledge took out his watch and looked at the time. The man must be making rounds, then.

He drove back to the inn and got out, leaving the motorcar in the yard beside it. The inn was old, stone built, with a tidy thatched roof that overhung the dormers like a thick rug. It was comfortably situated where the street began a gentle curve to the common, and there was a small garden in front, in the middle of which rose a wooden post, covered for half its length by a profusely flowering vine. Hanging above that, incongruously, the sign portrayed a distinguished, graying man in frock coat and Edwardian whiskers, one arm raised as if giving a speech, THE WYATT ARMS was scrolled in gold above his head.

Wyatt? The name was familiar, but Rutledge couldn’t place it immediately.

Two farmers were coming out of the bar and held the door for him, nodding in countryman’s fashion as he passed. Inside the room was dark paneled oak, and Rutledge nearly stumbled over a chair before his eyes adjusted to the stygian atmosphere. Then he saw another doorway and went down a narrow passage into a room that looked out over a neatly kept garden with several tables set up beneath a striped awning. They were presently filled with women listening to a thin, elderly speaker reading from a sheet of paper.

He stopped.

“The ladies find it more to their liking than the parlor, on fair days,” a voice said out of the dimness, and a strong man in a white apron came in after him, gesturing to the garden. “That’s the Women’s Institute meeting. The ladies take their tea out there often, on a fine afternoon. What can I do for you, sir?”

A graceful but heavyset woman with dark hair and an unusual white streak that ran from her temple to the bun at the nape of her neck interrupted the speaker with a question. The speaker deferred to her, then went on.

Rutledge said, turning away from the windows, “Time for a pint, I think. Will you join me?”

The bar and the snug were empty, and the landlord said affably, “Don’t mind if I do. Thank you, sir.”

Rutledge sat at the heavy wooden bar—as black as the walls and the beams that supported them—on a stool worn shiny by generations of trousers sliding across the wood. The landlord lighted a lamp to one side of the mirror, and it gave a sense of reclamation to the room. The brass appointments gleamed like gold.

“Passing through?” the innkeeper asked as he pulled a pint and set it on the bar in front of Rutledge.

“I’m staying at Singleton Magna,” Rutledge said, sidestepping the question. “Yesterday and this morning I’ve been taking in the countryside.”

“Any word on the murders over there?” As if Singleton Magna were across the Channel, somewhere in the neighborhood of Paris, and news was hard to come by. “Sorry business,” he added, echoing the words of the woman at the Swan. He pulled a second pint and drank deeply, appreciatively, as if he enjoyed his own wares.

“They’ve got the man in custody. You probably know that. But no signs of the children still. They—that family, I mean—never came as far as Charlbury?”

“No, we don’t run to many visitors here. Not like in the old days. Not since the war, at any rate. I see strangers once or twice a month at best.”

“What brought visitors before the war?”

“Some came because of the Wyatts. Old Mr. Wyatt was MP for nearly forty years, and that drew the curious. He cut quite a dashing figure in his youth and was as popular in London as he was here. Mr. Simon was cut from the same cloth. Mr. Wyatt served this constituency his life long, and we all looked up to him in Charlbury, aye, and so did most of Dorset.”

The memory clicked. The sign—and the family that had made a name for itself in Parliament for three generations. Like the Churchills and the Pitts, a long tradition of public service and golden oratory.

“He’s dead, I think?”

“Aye, in the last year of the war, that was. He wanted to see his son take his seat, and he lived three years longer than anybody thought he might. But to no purpose.” A veil came down over the man’s eyes, as if the subject was ended.

Rutledge paid it no heed. “His son died in the war?” It was no more than an attempt to keep the innkeeper talking, but something flared behind the veil.

“No, Simon Wyatt came through it with hardly a scratch. But somewhere along the way he lost his taste for politics.”

It was a warning not to ignore the message a second time. Rutledge changed the subject. “And once the Westminster connection was gone, Charlbury settled back into tranquility again?”

The innkeeper made a wry face. “Not so’s you’d notice,” he said reluctantly. He put down his beer and looked out at the garden. “People are queer, you know that? Simon Wyatt’s grandfather, now, the one on his mother’s side of the family, he lost his wife early on. Nothing seemed to count with him after that, he couldn’t settle to farming or anything else. Then one fine day he went off to see the world. Sent home boxes of whatever struck his fancy—dead birds and strange-looking statues and other knick-knacks he picked up along the way. He was set on making a museum, though who’d come to look at such oddities, I ask you?”

“Not every man’s taste,” Rutledge agreed. “In London? That might make a difference.”

“No, here in Charlbury,” the innkeeper said. In the back toward the kitchen a man’s voice called, “Mr. Denton?”

He answered over his shoulder. “Aye, I’m coming, man!”

“Shall I carry down the next keg, then?”

“Put it with the others, Sam. I’ll sort it out later.” He smiled ruefully at Rutledge. “Anything else, sir? The dray brought my beer this morning. If I don’t watch, Sam’ll be drunk as a lord on whatever he can find that’s open. Old fool! But help’s hard to find. If there’s no work on the farms, the younger ones are off for London or wherever they can find a job. If he wasn’t so good with the horses, I’d have been shut of him years ago.”

Rutledge drained his glass and thanked Denton, then made his way out into the sunlight again. Sitting on a bench outside the door was the man he’d seen earlier. He was pale, his face beaded with sweat.

“Are you all right?” Rutledge asked. “I saw what happened.”

“Bloody brat! His mother can’t do anything with him. Needs a man’s firm hand. Preferably applied to the seat of his pants!” He cleared his throat and said, “I’m all right. As right as I’ll ever be.”

Something in the timbre of his voice made Rutledge turn to look at him. “Canadian, by any chance?”

“I lived there for a time. Alberta. Damned beautiful part of the country! Ever been there?”

“Never had the chance,” Rutledge answered. “I met a number of Canadians in the war.”

The man held out his hand and Rutledge took it. “My name’s Shaw. You aren’t a Dorset man.”

“Rutledge. I’m from London.”

“I hate the bloody place. Too crowded, too dirty, too old. A man can’t breathe there.”

“No,” Rutledge said, knowing what Shaw meant. “Do you have family here?” It was the opening he’d waited for, to bring up the subject of the Mowbrays.

“I’m Denton’s nephew. He’s kept an eye on me since I left hospital. The doctors won’t let me go back to Alberta, and I’ve not made up my mind what to do with myself.” Shaw grimaced. He wasn’t used to telling strangers his life story. It was a bad habit to get into.… “Sorry! I’m not usually this garrulous. It’s the fault of that bloody child!”

“I don’t mind, if it helps. Anything is better than what they give out in hospital for the pain.”

“God, yes!” Shaw got to his feet and took a deep breath. “It never lasts long,” he said, although the tension around his eyes hadn’t gone away. “Thanks for not making a fuss.”

As Rutledge nodded, Shaw opened the door and went inside. As if afraid that staying would lead him into other confessions he didn’t want to make.

5

Rutledge turned toward his parked car and then changed his mind, walking back up the street instead. He knocked several times at the constable’s door, without an answer.

A woman busily sweeping her walk shaded her eyes and said, “If you’re needing Constable Truit, he’s out.”

“Know where I might find him?”

“Business or trouble?”

Rutledge laughed. “I wanted to ask him how to grow fine marrows.”

She grinned, not a bit affronted. “Well, he’s not likely to be back before the day’s out. There’s no Mrs. Truit, you see, and he’s got courting on his mind.”

Rutledge said with interest, “Makes a habit of not being at home, does he?”

“Makes a habit of being wherever Mrs. Darley’s daughter is. In my view, she’s leading him a merry dance before choosing Danny Marker. Danny works over to Leigh Minster and comes to Charlbury only at the week’s end.”

A born gossip …

“I wanted to ask Truit about the day that man in Singleton Magna killed his wife. I’d like to know if there were any strangers in Charlbury at that time.”

She cocked her head and looked him over. “You aren’t from the London papers?”

Rutledge said apologetically, “No.”

She sighed. “I thought not. You must be the London policeman, then, the one they was expecting over to Singleton Magna.” She waited, pointedly, until he gave her his name. “There was a guest at the Wyatts’, that came by car. But no one on foot, no woman with small children, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s a long walk, anyway, for little ’uns. D’ye know what I think?” She didn’t give him a chance to answer. He’d have her opinion, wanting it or not. “They’re buried in a churchyard. What’s a better grave than a fresh one, to hide bodies in!”

“Anyone dead of late in Charlbury?” he asked, amused by the ghoulish relish with which she offered her suggestion.

“No.” There was disappointment in the admission. “We’ve got a maid missing, but no one’s likely to want to kill her. She was uppity, and good riddance, Mrs. Bagley says.”

“How long has she been missing?”

“Getting on for five, six months,” the constable’s neighbor admitted reluctantly. “I’ve got a sheet with the picture of that family on it. Constable Truit, he was handing ’em out. Betty’s hair was darker, nothing like the woman they was looking for. Besides, she weren’t married, nor had any children. At least, not that we knew of! But pretty enough to want more from life than scrubbing another woman’s floors. Gone to London, more than likely. Looking for trouble.”

Rutledge thanked her and turned to go.

“If you’d come in another month, you’d’ve seen the museum open,” she said to his back, eager to keep his attention. “There’s to be a party then. They’re hoping for grand guests down from London, but they won’t come. Not now that Mr. Wyatt is dead. What’s the point? Unless it’s curiosity brings them. But who’s likely to want to see pagan statues and dead birds? I ask you!”

He glanced toward the churchyard farther along the road. Someone was standing there, watching, from the shadows of the tall trees. “You never know.”

She laughed, a hoarse croak. “No. Not with people, you never do.”

And with a final whisk of her broom she walked back inside her door. Having had the last word? And garnered enough information from him to regale her neighbor on the other side?

Constable Truit would hear about Rutledge’s visit before he turned the knob of his front door.

Hamish said out of a long silence, “If yon constable has his mind on courting, he’ll no’ see all that happens.”

“But that woman will, be sure of it.” Rutledge walked slowly along the street, getting a feeling for Charlbury. As in most villages, people went about their own business and left others to mind theirs. Dorset had not held a very large place in English affairs, over most of the country’s history, and seemed content to leave it that way.

Beside the church was the tidy rectory, the gardens by its front windows heavy with August bloom, and the path to the door was neatly raked. He stopped, as if admiring the effect.

Yes, the figure he’d seen in the trees was still there. He continued on his way. The church was strikingly Norman, with a truncated tower just roof high that seemed to be wanting the rest of itself, as though the builders had stopped working one day and never returned to finish the job. The apse was firmly rounded and the walls appeared to be thick, for the windows were deeply set. They caught the sunlight with darkness rather than light, as if they hadn’t been intended to shed a glory of color across the nave. There was no grace or symmetry here, only a statement of power and might. He thought the builders might have anticipated using it as a fortress one day, for want of a castle nearby.

Peripherally he could observe the man in among the heavy, low-branched trees. Reasonably tall, straight—young. A shadow across his face. And something in his cupped hands—

Rutledge froze. The man held a bird in his fingers.

Turning to him, Rutledge called, “What’s the date of the church, do you know?”

“Yes,” he replied, coming toward Rutledge and into the light. “Early Norman with some later additions. It was never worth anyone’s time to rebuild it in a later style. So it hasn’t changed much in six hundred years.” The words sounded as they’d been spoken by rote—or the man was so accustomed to the question he needn’t give the answer any thought. Then he held up the bird. It was just beginning to struggle in the light clasp. “Flew into one of the church windows and knocked himself silly. Cat would have had him if I hadn’t found him first!” He opened his fingers very carefully, and after a moment, the freed bird shook itself and took off toward the nearest tree. He grinned at Rutledge. The very blue eyes were wide and guileless.

Looking into the man’s face, Rutledge saw that the odd blankness was explained by the terrible, deep scar that started over the bridge of his nose and ran above one eyebrow around the side of the head. The fair hair had grown back stiffly over the healed wound and stuck out at odd angles.

“In the war, were you?” he asked conversationally.

The man nodded. “Everybody asks that. Do I look like a soldier?” The question was serious, considered.

“Yes,” Rutledge answered after a moment. “You stand quite straight.”

He smiled, sudden pride in the damaged face. “Yes, I do, don’t I?”

Rutledge said, “I must go now. Thank you for the information on the church.”

“My father was rector here all my life,” the man said as Rutledge turned. “He died of the influenza. I know every nook and cranny of the church. Even some he didn’t find!”

Rutledge studied the open face, his thoughts going suddenly to the missing children. But there appeared to be no intentional double meaning in the remark, only simply a statement of fact and unassuming self-satisfaction. In this one thing, if nowhere else, he had exceeded his father.

The man’s eyes followed him as Rutledge turned back down the street toward the inn. Hamish, as aware of it as he was, muttered uneasily. “He’s no’ a simpleton,” he said. “There’s the mind of a child, all the same. I canna’ trust it.”

“He let the bird go,” Rutledge silently reminded Hamish. “No, I don’t think he’d harm children. Although he might be persuaded to hide them.…”

As he passed the largest house, the one with the wing set back beside it, he heard a woman calling a man’s name from somewhere out of sight. And then, more clearly, the response.

“No, don’t bother me with that. Not now!”

The owner of the voice came around the corner of the house, carrying one end of a ladder and in his rough clothes looking more like a laborer than the man lugging the other end did. But his fair hair and fairer skin, flushed with heat and exertion, weren’t a working man’s. He shifted the ladder with dexterity and said as he lifted it to the gutters, “No, let me go first! It will save time!” and went smoothly up to the roof with the apparent ease of long practice.

The Wyatt home? Rutledge asked himself. It was the only one he’d seen so far with room enough to house a museum, even a tiny one.

Outside the milliner’s shop, a woman came hurrying through the door to hand a small box to a younger woman pushing a pram. The two of them looked up at Rutledge as he passed, then began speaking again in lowered voices. The news of his arrival was already moving quickly along the village grapevine. As interesting gossip always did, it seemed to fly on the very wind.

Then why, in God’s name, had there been no gossip about the Mowbray children?

Even Hamish had no answer to give to that.

He retrieved his car from the inn and was halfway out of Charlbury when he saw the constable coming toward him on foot, a sturdy, youngish man with red hair, the stiff collar of his uniform unbuttoned in the heat.

Pulling over to the side of the road, Rutledge waited for him, and the man came up to the motorcar with an arrogance to match his stride.,

“Something you’re wanting, sir?” he asked, his eyes sweeping over Rutledge in what was close to incivility. Hamish growled under his breath, describing the man and his ancestry in Highland terms.

“Inspector Rutledge, from London. I’ve been looking for you, Truit,” he replied, and the constable’s eyes narrowed, but there was no other change in his manner. “I’ve been scouting the ground between here and Singleton Magna, looking for any information that’s still to be found.”

“It’s not very much,” Truit answered. “As far as I can find out, the Mowbray woman never got this far. Nor did we see any sign of the accused, Mr. Mowbray. He wouldn’t have come this far either, would he? A long hot walk, not for the likes of small children, and he’d know that. Besides, we haven’t had many strangers in Charlbury, not this summer. And I haven’t found any connection between Mowbray and any of our local people. I asked at every house, to be certain, though I knew from the start it wasn’t very likely.”

A policeman seldom finds what he’s already convinced can’t be found, Rutledge thought.

It was one of the faults of the profession, an ease of making up the mind when the most obvious facts seemed to point in one direction. And sometimes in the general run of crimes, where the facts pointed turned out to be right. But where there was murder, there was often a complexity of personalities and secrets that could take an investigation in any direction—or ten directions at once. If he wasn’t prepared to follow the most unlikely possibilities as well as the most likely, a policeman ran the risk of committing an injustice.

“The family might have been offered a ride. On a dray or a cart. In a car.”

“As to that, if they were taken up by a vehicle, it won’t have been a local one,” the constable said pedantically, as if explaining matters to a man of limited intelligence, “which tells me they’d be far beyond Charlbury by now. What would persuade them to stop here, when they could be miles away with a farmer who came from anywhere ’twixt here and the Somerset border?”

“Even so, he didn’t have wings! How did he reach Somerset without passing through Charlbury? Or Stoke Newton? This farmer of yours? He couldn’t drive his wagon through one of these villages without being seen by someone.”

“A number of carts and a wagon came through Charlbury,” Truit admitted. “None of them with any passengers! I asked around about that. And no one in my town offered a lift to someone coming from Singleton Magna.”

“Then why haven’t we found the other bodies?” Rutledge asked, not intending any reflection on the constable’s efforts, his mind instead on what the carts and wagon might have carried, and whether three people, two of them children, might have hidden themselves behind or under the cargo. But Truit chose to take the remark as a distinct challenge.

A deep flush spread up the man’s face. “That’s a matter you’ll have to take up with Inspector Hildebrand, sir. It’s not my place to answer for him!”

Washing your own hands, are you? Rutledge thought, but said only, “You’re right, of course,” and left it at that

But as he drove on, he and Hamish entered into a lengthy discussion of Constable Truit’s abilities and how he did his job. Hamish had taken a strong dislike to the constable and made no bones about it.

A chain was no better than its weakest link. And in the chain of villages that blocked the most likely direction the Mowbrays had taken from the railway station at Singleton Magna, the other two constables had been brisk, business-like, and courteous, men who knew their worth and took pride in exhibiting it.

Rutledge, thinking about it, decided he was coming back to Charlbury. Something at the back of his mind, unformed and more intuitive than rational, was aroused. Even Hamish was aware of it, though he said only, “It’s trouble you’re stirring up, but you’ll no’ be satisfied until you’ve sorted that one out!”

“He’s not dependable,” Rutledge pointed out. “He tells you whatever he thinks will make less work for him. He’s certain there’s no connection in Charlbury with the Mow-brays, and he may be right. But what if he’s wrong?”

“You no’ can walk away from it,” Hamish agreed. “Until somebody’s found the bairns!”

6

Hildebrand was out to lunch when Rutledge walked down to the police station, and rather than wait in the dark smothering confines of the place, he asked if he could speak to Mowbray instead.

The constable on duty, mindful of the tightrope he walked between this man from London and Inspector Hildebrand, dithered for two whole seconds, thinking it through. But Rutledge knew his man, and with the commanding presence of a former army officer standing in front of him and brooking no nonsense, the constable came down on the side of prudence and offered to take Rutledge back personally.

They found another constable in the cell with Mowbray, a cadaverously thin policeman who looked to be in the last stages of tuberculosis, but his voice was strong and deep as he stood up, speaking politely to Rutledge.

“He doesn’t have much to say, sir,” the watcher told him. “Just sits and stares. Or cries. That’s the worst, just tears rolling down his face and no sound.…”

“Go have yourself a smoke,” the first constable told him, and he left with a swift stride that spoke volumes. “We can only keep a man here two hours,” he went on to Rutledge in an undertone. “I’d have a riot on my hands, else. Not the best of assignments.”

“No.” Rutledge turned to Mowbray, and said in a firm, quiet voice, “Mr. Mowbray? It’s Inspector Rutledge, from London.”

The bowed head came up with a jerk, the face tight with fear. “You’ve found them, then?” he asked, voice a thread of sound. “Are—are they—dead?”

“No. But I’d like to ask you—it’s hard searching for someone you’ve never seen. I’d like you to describe the children for me. As you saw them on the railway platform.”

Mowbray shook his head. “No, please—I can’t—I can’t!

“It would help,” Rutledge told him gently, “if we knew. If they seemed healthy—lively—or were quiet, shy—”

Mowbray clapped his hands over his ears, swaying with pain and grief. “No—don’t! Oh, God, don’t!”

He was relentless, it had to be done. “They grow fast, children do. Would you say Mary was a good mother? That she’d cared for them properly? Were they well filled out? Or had she neglected them, let them grow thin and pale—”

The bowed head came up again, eyes suddenly fierce behind the tears. “She’s a good mother, always was, I’ll not hear anything against my Mary!”

“You must have found it easy to recognize her—but much harder to be sure of them. The little girl must have gone up like a weed—they do, sometimes—”

But perseverance got Rutledge nowhere. With a gasp Mowbray threw up his hands, as if warding off blows. “I tell you I couldn’t harm them—they were alive!—I loved them—I wanted to hold them—for God’s sake, I loved them!”

Rutledge reached out and touched the stooped shoulder, avoiding the eyes that looked into hell.

Like Hamish’s eyes, if he ever turned and found them watching him—

Rutledge spun on his heel and went out of the room, his breathing disordered, his mind in turmoil. The constable came after him, then stopped. “You got him to speak—it’s more than I’ve been able to do!”

“Not that it did any good! Are you coming?”

“I’ll have to wait for Hindley to return,” he said. “If you don’t mind—”

“No, I’ll find my own way!” Rutledge walked down the passage, his breath coming roughly in his throat. Outside on the steps of the building, he ran into Hildebrand.

“You look like you’ve seen your own ghost,” he said, staring at Rutledge. “What’s happened?”

I’ll not go back into that building! Not yet! Rutledge told himself and said aloud, “Nothing has happened. But I want to speak to you where we can’t be overheard. Shall we walk down to the railway station?”

Grumbling about the heat, Hildebrand followed him as he strode off. “I’ve been out in the sun most of the morning,” he was saying. “I’ll be dead of sunstroke before we find those bodies. And half my men with me!”

“That’s what I want to speak to you about. I don’t think Mowbray saw either his wife or his children at the railway station—”

“Don’t be daft, man!” Hildebrand said harshly, stopping to stare at Rutledge. “Of course he did! That’s what started the poor sod’s rampage!”

“Listen to me, damn it! I think he believed he saw his wife—or someone who strongly resembled her. And children of the ages he remembered. They reminded him so forcibly of his family that he was thrown into emotional confusion. Just then the train pulled out, which meant he couldn’t confront the woman and sort it all out. By the time he’d made his way back to Singleton Magna again, he was convinced he had to be right, that she and the children had somehow survived. But when he couldn’t find any trace of them here, the longer he searched the more certain he was that there must be a conspiracy afoot to conceal them. And the angrier and the more determined he became—”

Hildebrand watched him with disbelief. He was in no mood for folly—

“The sun’s turned your wits, man! He knew his wife, he came after her, he killed her, and that’s why we’re searching high and low for those children—”

“Mowbray may well have killed the woman,” Rutledge agreed, holding on to his own temper. “But every time we ask anyone about the missing woman or the missing children, we begin by telling them that we’re searching for the Mowbrays. And no one has seen them! If we had another name to put to the woman—the children—even the man—we might hear a different answer.”

“The man’s name? You’re saying that if he believed he married her, and we knew what name she’d taken, we could set things straight by saying ‘Here, we’re looking for the Duchess of Marlborough, this is her photograph, and these are her children,’ and some bored footman might say, ‘She’s gone to visit her cousin over in Lyme Regis, we don’t expect her back for days!’ And we find ourselves telling him that she’s not in Lyme Regis, she’s dead.”

Rutledge took a deep breath. “If we knew who was missing, we might have a place to start. Yes. That’s what I’m saying. After a fashion.”

“But we’ve known that all along!” Hildebrand retorted, exasperated. “And you’re not having me believe that it wasn’t Mrs. Mowbray that’s dead. I don’t believe in coincidence!” His instincts had been right—this one was a meddler!

“It isn’t coincidence. It’s the mind of a man who sees someone out a train window, thinks he’s recognized her, and by the time he’s walked all the way back to Singleton Magna, he believes it. And he finds a woman outside of town, on foot and vulnerable, and he kills her, because the only woman he’s able to think about by this time is his wife!”

“And what, pray, was the poor woman doing on foot outside of town? And where did she come from? And what name shall we give her? And why hasn’t anyone come looking for her? Answer me that!”

It was hopeless. Rutledge, on the point of bringing up changes in the children’s ages, decided it would fall on deaf ears now. Instead he said, “I don’t have all the answers. I don’t even have most of them. Not yet! But those search parties aren’t finding what they’re after, and I for one am willing to look in any direction that might clear up this murder.”

“We’ve cleared up the murder, hasn’t anyone told you? What’s Mowbray doing in my jail, watched day and night by my men, if we haven’t? If you can’t help me do what has to be done here, for God’s sake don’t muddy the waters with notions that make about as much sense as—as flying from that rooftop!”

“In my experience—” he began.

“Rubbish!” Hildebrand swung away from Rutledge, then angrily turned back to face him, jaw clenched. He said, “This is my investigation. You’ve been sent from London to find the children. Or their bodies. To get me whatever I need from another jurisdiction easier and faster. And here I’m the one setting up the search parties, running about in the bloody sunshine while you chase phantoms. Get about your own work, man, and leave the rest of this business to me!”

“Look,” Rutledge said, trying a last time, “if you bring Mowbray to court in his present condition, the jury will want to see proof that he did what you’re claiming he did. They’ll want means and motive and a weapon, they’ll want to know those children are dead, and at his hand, so they can convict a witless man without having it rest heavy on their conscience. His defense will run you in circles, making your life a misery before it’s over. They’ll put him on the stand and have him swearing he’s Jack the Ripper or the Czar of Russia before they’ve finished with him. And if we’re wrong—about any particular—”

“Have you met Mowbray’s barrister? Johnston? The man’s already in the grave with his son. He’ll not fight any evidence we present, he’ll be happy enough to see his client sent to an asylum instead of the gallows. And that’s supposing he cares one way or another! Once we find the other bodies, no jury in England will let Mowbray off!” Hildebrand strode ten feet and swung around a second time, too angry to let it go. “Do what you were sent to do, man! This isn’t Cornwall, you’ll not be finding any deep, dark secrets in my patch, and you’ll not spoil my case.”

And he was gone, arms swinging in a barely suppressed need to hit something, anything, if it released the tension in his body. Rutledge watched him, oblivious of the stares of passersby, as Hildebrand crossed the street and disappeared into the Swan.

“I could ha’ told you—” Hamish began.

I don’t want to hear it!

Rutledge turned and walked on, up the hill toward the common, where the coolness of the trees closed over him.

Mowbray. Was he guilty of murdering his wife? And had he killed his children? Or was the body waiting to be claimed in the makeshift morgue a stranger’s, with nothing more than coincidence dragging her into another man’s madness? And the children—or the man with them? Did they exist, or were they something from the dark reaches of grief, conjured up with the pain of jogged memory?

What was wrong with this murder, what was it that lay beneath the surface, like a corpse beneath the ice, waiting to rise and point an accusing finger when the time came?

Hamish said, “Yon policeman wants his answers tidy, like a birthday box done up in ribbons and silver paper. Never mind what’s truly happened. You’d do well to heed him and not meddle. He can make a bad enemy!”

“There’s a dead woman to be thought of,” Rutledge reminded him. “And that man in the cell.” But what could be done for Mowbray now, even if they found a dozen murderers to take his place? The poor devil was broken by his own torment. He looked up at rooks calling from the branches arching high over his head. “I don’t think we’ll find the children,” he added pensively.

“Then where’ve they got to?” Hamish demanded.

“To safety,” he answered, and for the life of him, he couldn’t have explained where that notion had come from.

* * *

He took his lunch at the Swan, eating in solitary splendor in the dining room. It was nearly two o’clock, and the young woman waiting on him was yawning in a corner, her eyes drowsy as she filled the sugar bowls and then collected the salts and peppers in their turn. She looked enough like Peg, the chambermaid, to be her sister. Rutledge listened to the clink of the silver tops as she worked with them, his own thoughts busy with details.

He had called in at the railway station and persuaded the master to ask down the line whether suitcases had been unclaimed when the train made its last stop.

The telegraph key had clicked swiftly and surely, and then silence. “There’s a chance they were found by the conductor, long before the end of the line,” the man reminded Rutledge.

“I’d thought of that.” But the conductor who had put Mowbray off the train was an experienced man and according to the file had been questioned by Hildebrand himself. He’d have been the first to see the significance of any uncollected luggage that had come to light then or later.

The key began to click in response. The stationmaster listened and then shook his head. “No unclaimed luggage,” he said. “Not that day. Nor that week either.”

“Then contact any stops in between—”

“All of them?” the man demanded, staring at Rutledge.

“All of them,” he agreed. But the second message sent out by the stationmaster brought in the same response. No unclaimed luggage …

“They might not’ve had much baggage with them,” the man said, “if ’twere only a day trip. It might help if we knew what we were looking for.”

Rutledge shook his head. “I don’t know. If anything more comes over the wire, I’m at the Swan. Send word to me there.” It was a far-fetched hope.

And so he’d gone for his belated meal, letting the stationmaster do the same. “My wife’s waiting my dinner,” the man had said, following Rutledge out of the small, cluttered office. “She’s ill-humored when I’m late!”

“Tell her it was police business,” Rutledge responded, and walked on.

But it was over his meal that answers began to come to him. And he went over them again and again, to be sure he was right.

Whatever else had happened here in Singleton Magna, there was a dead woman.

And with that one incontrovertible fact, he must start.

7

Rutledge spent what was left of the day and into the dusk looking for the dead woman.

In Singleton Magna, everyone saw her as Mowbray’s wife. The one the man, burning with anger and injustice, had scoured the town to find.

Everyone told Rutledge that. Describing encounters they’d had—or someone they knew had had—with Mowbray. Believing in his anger and his intent to kill. The woman, on the other hand, was dead. They could tell him nothing about her. It was as if she had no other identity or reality than that of victim.

Even Harriet Mason, the woman who had arrived on the same train for a visit with her aunt, remembered nothing. “I was that sick from the journey, I didn’t know or care about anything but getting here to Auntie’s,” she said pointedly, looking at Rutledge through thin, pale lashes.

Mrs. Hindes, stiff with rheumatism and a strong dislike of being a burden on anyone, said, “The only person besides Harriet I noticed coming out of the station that day was the woman who was met by Mrs. Wyatt. The one in the fetching hat. But of course Harriet was feeling faint and I really didn’t have time to pay particular attention to anyone else, though there must have been half a dozen or so passengers arriving.” She smiled wryly, her strong face suddenly mischievous. “You must excuse us, Inspector, we are the lame and the halt, I fear.”

And she watched with quiet satisfaction as Harriet bristled.

Early the next morning Rutledge left the town to stop at every house near the main road, with no success. From there he drove on to Stoke Newton, the home of three passengers who had arrived on the noon train the day Mrs. Mowbray had been seen on the platform. The farmer, his wife, and their young daughter had been met by a tenant, “fetched home in the wagon,” Mrs. Tanner told him jovially in a parlor dominated by a giant aspidistra. To Rutledge it seemed to smother his chair with its broad leaves. “Like so many sides of beef!”

“You didn’t see Mrs. Mowbray on the train? Or the children with her?”

“Lord, Inspector, the train was that crowded leaving London! Holidaymakers, mostly, families with children any age between six months and ten years. Full of sauce, they were, but I don’t mind, a lively child’s a healthy child, I say. I’m sure we was lucky to find a seat!” Mrs. Tanner answered. “No, we’ve talked it over, amongst ourselves. If Mrs. Mowbray and her young ones was on that train, we took no notice of them—no reason to, one family among so many!”

In the afternoon he found himself in Charlbury again, asking Denton at the pub for the Wyatt house. It was, as he’d thought, near the church.

“Can’t miss it. Big, with that wing they added just before the war. That was to be Mr. Wyatt’s office, and Mr. Simon’s as well, when the time came. Now it’s being refurbished to house that museum Mr. Simon’s so set on.”

Rutledge opened the gate and stepped into a front garden of pink geraniums and warmly scented lavender, with white stock and taller white delphiniums behind them. He climbed the two steps to the small porch, but a maid answered the door before he could ring the bell.

She said in some distress, “If you’ve come about them shelves that’s fallen down, Mr. Wyatt is over in the new wing.”

Rutledge followed her pointing finger and took the brick path to the second door of the house, which led into the newest part. Someone shouted, “Come in!” to his knock, and he entered a scene of chaos.

There were boxes strewn about the floor like snowdrifts, and glass-fronted cases filled with the most exotic collection of statuary and weaponry and musical instruments that he’d seen in some time. Eastern, most of them, as far as he could tell. Exotic dancers stood on shelves beside squat gods and animal masks, while daggers and swords were displayed in fans, their points gleaming in the sunlight Tiered parasols in red, yellow, black, and white were fringed in what appeared to be gold bullion, and there were what looked like parts of doorways or windows, heavy with carved scenes. Garish puppets elbowed each other, some of them three dimensional while others were flat, painted on hide. Below, on another shelf, were fantastic butterflies pinned in tidy rows, like enameled brooches in every color of the rainbow. Nothing in England was that spectacular. Hamish was absorbing the scene with Presbyterian horror, pointing out that these items were pagan and therefore suspect.

Before Rutledge could answer him, a man’s voice called, “Well? What are you doing, loitering out there? Come look at this disaster!”

Rutledge went through a doorway to find a man on his knees collecting shells that had tumbled from a tall bookcase, its shelves haphazard and half out of their moorings.

“You’re damned lucky they didn’t shatter! You swore they’d support—” He was halfway through the sentence when he saw his visitor and realized it wasn’t the carpenter he’d sent for. “Who the hell are you?”

It was the fair-skinned man he’d seen yesterday, carrying the front end of a ladder. “Mr. Wyatt? I’m Inspector Rutledge, from Scotland Yard. I’ve come to speak to you—”

“Not now, man! Can’t you see what’s happened here? I’m expecting Baldridge or one of his minions, and he’s got some explaining to do! I told him a dozen times if I told him once that these shelves had to be well anchored against the weight, or they’d be over before we knew where we were! And I was right.”

He got to his feet. Tall, slender, with a face that was both strong and intelligent. There were lines at the corners of his blue eyes that spoke of laughter—belied now by the deep grooves bracketing his mouth. The marks of strain. He surveyed the disaster. “Some of these shells are priceless. They’ve come from half the islands in the Pacific, and each one was carefully numbered and kept in a box so as not to separate sets. And now look! I suppose I’ll have to bring someone down from London to be sure we’ve got them in the right order again.”

“Mr. Wyatt. I only need a minute of your time,” Rutledge broke in. “I understand that on thirteen August you or your wife collected a guest from the railway station in Singleton Magna. Is that true?”

“Yes, yes, that was Miss Tarlton, from London. She’s my new assistant. Or she will be if I can persuade my wife to let me take her on. Mrs. Wyatt is nothing if not stubborn, and just because—” He stopped, aware that he was talking about his personal affairs with a stranger, and a policeman at that. “Miss Tarlton was recommended by someone whose opinion I trust. Mrs. Wyatt and I hold different opinions on that subject. I hired the young lady, and she’s to return at the end of the month to take up her position here.” His mouth set sternly, as if he could foresee the battle ahead.

“She returned to London after the interview?”

“Yes, yes. Ah—Baldridge,” he said, looking beyond Rutledge. “Come see this mess your workmen have made! I ought to make you return every penny I paid you.”

Rutledge turned to see a youngish man in a dark suit standing foursquare in the doorway. “I told you, Mr. Wyatt, to let the bolts dry before you set anything on the shelves!” he was saying.

“Wet plaster, is it! And my fault!” Wyatt snorted scornfully. “I told you to anchor the shelves firmly, and just look at your interpretation of ‘firmly’!”

Rutledge said, “Mr. Wyatt—”

Wyatt said, “Go next door and talk to my wife, Aurore. She’ll tell you whatever it is you need to know!” And he was already shaking his finger at Baldridge, not waiting to see if Rutledge was pleased with the suggestion or not.

Rutledge left the two men to it and walked back through the first room, wondering if Denton wasn’t correct in his assessment of the museum planned for Charlbury. In this out of the way village, who would come to see such exotica?

When he arrived again at the front door, the maid answered the bell and said, “I’m sorry, sir! Mr. Wyatt didn’t tell me who to expect. It was the builder in Sherborne he’d been on the telephone shouting at most of the morning, and someone was promised to come.”

Rutledge said, “No matter. I’d like to speak to Mrs. Wyatt if I may.”

“She’s in the back garden, sir. If you’ll wait in the parlor, I’ll fetch her. What name shall I say, sir?”

“Rutledge. I’ll walk out with you, it will save time.” He was tired of the Wyatt reluctance to put aside their own business for his.

She looked up at him doubtfully and then led the way through the house and out a tall pair of french doors that overlooked the gardens. He could see someone working in a potting shed at the end of the path and said, “I can find my way from here. Thanks.”

The maid stopped, and said, “I think I ought to—”

He looked down at her. “It will be all right. Mr. Wyatt suggested that I talk with his wife, and this is as good a place as any.”

That seemed to reassure her, and she left him to continue down the path to the shed. The woman inside, dressed in a gray smock, turned as she heard his footsteps crunching on the graveled path and came out into the dappled sunlight

They stared at each other in mutual surprise. Rutledge said, “Mrs. Wyatt?”

She inclined her head. “Inspector—Rutledge, is it not?” For an instant she seemed at a loss. “My husband is in the other wing, I think.”

“It’s you I’ve come to see.”

Her eyes darkened. “You haven’t—they haven’t found the children.”

“No. I’m here in a different capacity today. Asking questions about anyone who got off the train at Singleton Magna at the same time Mrs. Mowbray and her family did. I understand from Mr. Wyatt that you had a guest who also arrived on thirteen August. Can you tell me about her?” Without thinking, he’d begun speaking to her in French. It had seemed natural. Midway through the last sentence, he realized it and switched to English.

She replied in the same language. “Yes, a Miss Tarlton, from London. She came to be interviewed by my husband concerning the position of his assistant.” She answered freely enough, but warily. He could hear the nuances in her voice.

“She arrived at the station and was met?”

“I went to meet her myself. Simon was busy—the museum keeps him quite busy these days.” There was, he thought, a faint overtone of irony in the words.

“How long did she stay with you?”

“Only two days.”

“You drove her back to the station?”

“I was supposed to drive her, yes. But I was delayed at the farm—I’ve taken over running it, while Simon is so occupied with the museum. She was already gone when I came back to collect her. I expect he saw to it, in my place. Trains don’t wait for cows with colic,” she added wryly.

“No, I don’t suppose they do,” he answered, reminding himself that she was no different from any other witness he might question. And yet he’d met her first with no knowledge of her role—if there was any—in his investigation. It seemed to give her, somehow, an edge. As if she judged him, even as he judged her, because they had begun as equals.

She waited for him to go on. There was a stillness about her that struck him as she stood there, composed and quiet Even her eyes were still, absorbing him somehow. As if time were not an issue of concern to her. Or possibly to him either. It was a very strong impression and he found it distracting.

Most of the Frenchwomen he’d met spoke with self-possession and a natural sense of self-worth. Vivacity was to them a tool of conversation, half flirtatious, half a mannerism that reflected their view of life. This woman was different It was something deep inside, a well of stillness that seemed without end. But not, he thought, a well of serenity.…

Hamish said, apparently out of context, “She’s no’ a killer.”

She drew off her gardening gloves and pulled the smock over her head. “I’ve missed my tea, waiting for Simon. Will you have a coffee—or some wine—with me? There’s a table under the trees there. I’ll just find Edith.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve not quite learned to like tea. But I’m trying.”

He walked back to the french doors with her. The fragrance of lily of the valley came to him suddenly, and he realized that it was her perfume. It surprised him; the sweetness wasn’t what he’d have thought she might have chosen for herself. Something headier—or at least more provocative. And yet today in her plain gray dress with its buttoned belt and square white collar, she was anything but provocative. Quakerish, perhaps.

She called to Edith as she walked through the french doors, leaving him in the garden.

Hamish, unsettled in the back of his mind, reminded him he was a policeman on duty. And to keep his wits about him.

It was a timely reminder. Rutledge walked over to the small table and shook a butterfly off the nearest chair. He wondered what it would think of its gaudy brethren on display in a glass case inside this house. Served them right, for drawing attention to themselves?

Aurore Wyatt came back and took the chair opposite the one he’d moved. “Edith tells me you’ve already been to the museum. What do you think of it?”

“Unusual,” he replied dryly, after some thought.

Her laughter, husky and rich, was unexpected. “How very English of you,” she said. “The English are masters of understatement, are they not?” Then she added as if it mattered to her, “It’s become Simon’s life. I hope it is what he wants to do and not what he feels he ought to do.”

“In what sense?”

“The Wyatts have always gone into politics. For generations. It was expected—before the war, you understand—that he would stand for Parliament as well. From childhood he was prepared for nothing else. And by nature it suited him. Handsome, able, a genuinely charming man who commanded respect. He never speaks of it now. Only of this museum, about which he knows so little.” There was a wryness in her eyes. “But we are none of us the same after four years of war. And he married me, which was not very wise in a politician. An English wife would have been safer. More—comme il faut?”

He said nothing, but had a sudden mental picture of Aurore Wyatt among the male and female voters of a quiet Dorset constituency. The cat among the pigeons … “I understand his other grandfather was an explorer of sorts.”

“Yes, in the Pacific and Indian oceans. He left Simon his collections—I think, in the hope that he might display them and make his grandfather as famous as Darwin or Cook. Simon had said nothing of this to me in France. It wasn’t until I arrived in England that he seemed to remember anything at all about his grandfather’s boxes. They were stored in London, had been for ages. And suddenly he would not hear of anything but this museum.” She shrugged in that way that only Frenchwomen have, lifting her shoulders with her head to one side, as if denying any understanding of the matter. “That is why I wonder, sometimes, if he feels an obligation to satisfy one ancestor if not the other. If not Westminster, then this museum. It would be very sad, would it not?”

“What does Simon Wyatt himself want in life?”

“Ah!” Aurore answered ruefully. “If I knew that, I would be a very fortunate woman.”

Edith came out with a tray of glasses and a bottle of wine. “The coffee’s not done,” she said apologetically.

“Wine will do very well, for me,” Aurore said, and offered a glass to Rutledge before pouring her own. He accepted, and found the wine very good indeed, dry and perfect for a warm afternoon. She watched him savor it, her eyes observing without judging. “You were in the war, I think?”

“How do you know?”

She tilted her head and thought for a moment before answering him. “You speak French very well. And you know a good wine when you taste it.” But he knew that it wasn’t what she might have said, if she’d been honest.

“The war was neither wine nor language,” he said, more harshly than he intended. “It was a very hard four years. They are finally over.”

Somewhere Hamish echoed softly, “Over?”

“But not yet forgotten,” she said astutely, looking at the man’s face and eyes, and reading more there than he was comfortable having her see. “No, I understand. I also have seen too much pain and death. And my husband as well. I thought—there was a time when I thought he might not survive the war. I watched him, and I knew he was expecting to die. Which sometimes means that it will happen. Like so many of the young men marching off to war, he didn’t understand that he was mortal. He came to the fighting as if it were a game, there on the steps at Eton. And when he discovered it was not like this, it was too late. There was nothing to be done but fight and wait for death to come. And even death failed him. Sometimes I think the survivors feel guilty for having lived, when so many died.”

Thinking of Hamish, Rutledge looked away. It was too near for comfort.

She said, putting down her glass, “Is there anything that can be done?”

“No.” He wanted to offer her hope, and couldn’t. He had none to give. After a moment he realized that Hamish was trying to draw his attention to something—that her digression had led Rutledge away from what had brought him here. Out of purpose? Or because he had listened with some sense, some knowledge of the suffering she was talking about?

“Why do I tell you these things?” she asked, frowning. “I have not spoken of them to anyone, not even the nuns!”

“She’s no’ a woman to do anything by chance,” Hamish reminded him.

He brought the topic of conversation abruptly back to Miss Tarlton’s visit. “I’m under the impression that Mr. Wyatt offered Miss Tarlton a position. As assistant. Is that true?”

Aurore Wyatt looked away. Even in profile, the stillness about her was striking, as if her body were attuned to it in blood and bone. Yet there was a strength too, which seemed to mask a great, unspeakable pain. Part of that she had told him about—but not all. Not nearly all. He was sure of it.

“If you are asking if I approved, no. But not because of Miss Tarlton. She seems to be both respectable and capable, with a surprising knowledge of Asia. Her family had served in India for generations, as I understand it. As an assistant she would have been very useful to Simon. It was—my opinion—that Simon himself should have advertised. Instead he left the task to someone else.”

“I’m afraid I don’t see the problem. If she’s competent.”

Aurore turned to look at him, her fingers on the rim of her glass, her eyes a darker gray that he remembered. “My husband’s assistant will live here, in this house. Take meals with us. Share our lives. That will not be comfortable when I am strongly aware that this person does not approve of me.

He was surprised. “Why? Surely not because you’re French? She can’t know anything else about you in such a short time.”

“Yes, because I am French! I married Simon Wyatt in France, during the war. There are some who think—well, never mind. It is not your affair, you wish to speak of Miss Tarleton, not of me!”

After a moment he said, “They think you took advantage of Mr. Wyatt’s loneliness?”

She lifted her glass and drank, then set it down. “You didn’t know my husband before he left for France. Nor did I. But I’m told—very often I’m told!—that he was destined to be a famous cabinet member—a great prime minister—or God Himself, for all I know! They believe—his father’s friends and associates—that the change in him now is the result of his marriage. And so my doing. They blame me, because it is much easier than understanding why he prefers this ridiculous museum to what he was bred to do!”

“As long as Wyatt doesn’t blame you, what difference does it matter what other people think? Or say?”

“How like a man,” she said in gentle derision. “You do not live in a woman’s world, you don’t know the savagery there. It can be worse than the jungle—”

At that moment Simon Wyatt came storming through the french doors and out into the garden. “It’s my fault, he says! Idiot! I’d like very much to nail him to that wall with one of his own damned bolts!” Coming to the table, he pulled up the third chair. “What’s that? Wine! Good God, I hope you offered him gin or a scotch first!”

“Edith will bring you one, if you prefer it,” she told her husband. “But I think the inspector was leaving. I’ll see him to the door.”

Surprised, Rutledge finished his wine and set the glass on the table. “Thank you, Mrs. Wyatt.” He stood, offering his hand to Simon. “I hope the museum is a success,” he said.

Simon said, moodiness settling in on him like a cloak, “I don’t know that it will be. But the important thing is to try. It’s all I can do.” He shook Rutledge’s hand, and then Rutledge was following Aurore into the house.

At the front door she said, “I hope we’ve answered your questions.”

“There’s one other,” he told her reluctantly. “I’d like Miss Tarlton’s full name, and her direction if you have it.”

“Her first name is Margaret. And she lives somewhere in Chelsea. You’ll have to ask Simon for the street and number.”

“Thank you,” he replied. “Good-bye, Mrs. Wyatt.”

She nodded and watched him walk away.

The watching bothered him. It hadn’t been simple curiosity, nor the look of a woman intrigued by a new man in her sphere, only uneasiness.

But whether it was uneasiness for herself—or for Simon Wyatt—he couldn’t tell.

Margaret Tarlton. Of Chelsea, London.

He had a strong feeling that she wasn’t the woman he was searching for.

Rutledge placed a call to London as soon as he reached Singleton Magna. The reply came before he went down to his dinner.

Bowles said peremptorily, “What’s this Tarlton woman got to do with the Mowbrays?”

“She was on the same train. She got off at Singleton Magna that day. We want to know what she saw—if anything.”

“See to it you’re not stepping on any toes, man!”

“I’m care itself.”

Satisfied or not, Bowles became crisp and to the point. He said, “We sent a man around to find Miss Tarlton. Her maid says she went down to Singleton Magna last week and afterward was to go on to Sherborne. To the country house of a Thomas Napier. One of the political Napiers, Rutledge! He’s in London, but his daughter, Elizabeth Napier, is staying in the house presently. We haven’t been able to reach her”

“Never mind,” Rutledge said. “I’ll drive over there myself.” He jotted the names in his notebook and closed it. “Any information available on Miss Tarlton or this Miss Napier?”

“Nothing about Miss Tarlton, except that she comes from an Anglo-Indian family that settled in London around the turn of the century, after her father died. Mother’s dead as well now. Several aunts and cousins, I’m told. They live in Gloucestershire.” There was a pause. And then Bowles went on, “You might be interested in one discovery we’ve made about Miss Napier. She was engaged to be married to Simon Wyatt, who lives in Charlbury, not far from Singleton Magna. Her father’s his godfather, I’m told. In fact, it was Wyatt Miss Tarlton was going to visit, to apply for a position. She used to be Miss Napier’s secretary, from 1910 to last year. Lived in the Napiers’ London house.” The voice stopped again, then added with relish, “Small world, isn’t it?”

8

As Bowles hung up, Rutledge took out his watch and considered time and distance. It was still light. He could make it to Sherborne by a reasonable hour. If Margaret Tarlton was there, it would save time to interview her tonight. If he telephoned, she might put him off. Or … he refused to consider the alternative, that he might not find her at the Napiers’.

He found he didn’t want to go back to the Wyatts’ house. If Margaret Tarlton was in Sherborne, he had no other business in Charlbury.

Finding Peg in the kitchen, he persuaded her to put up some sandwiches—“But the meat’s left from luncheon, sir!” she’d exclaimed. “And the dinner roast won’t be finished for another half hour. Can’t you wait for that?’—and set out in a westerly direction for the town of Sherborne.

It was famous for its abbey church, built of golden stone like soft butter, and for the school for boys that had had a reputation for their athletes when he’d been at Oxford. Three former Sherborne scholars had stood between him and a chance at a Blue.

The Napier house was harder to find than he’d expected, set well back from the main road on an unmarked lane that wended its way first this direction and then that, before making up its mind to connect with the gates and the drive up to the house. He could see it ahead, after he’d made the turn.

It was built of the same lovely stone as the abbey and looked to be nearly as old, with oriel windows and pointed arches. The porch was a handsome affair of niches, statues, and a stone balustrade on two sides. He thought this might once have been a small manor belonging to the abbey. Someone had added a wing in the same style, probably a hundred years ago. He could just see the roof of it on the south front. As a gentleman’s country house, it was still rather small, but more than made up for that in its architectural quality. Thomas Napier’s forebears had possessed both the taste and good sense not to meddle with the fabric. And possibly a thin purse? Often that determined how many changes were made as the family’s fortunes rose.

A dark-haired maid in stiff black with an apron so starched it gave the impression it would break before it bent opened the door to him and said, “Yes, sir?” as if he’d taken a wrong turn and had come to ask his way.

“Inspector Rutledge, from Scotland Yard,” he said. “I understand a Miss Tarlton is staying here, as a guest of Miss Napier’s. Is she in?”

“Miss Tarlton, sir? No, she’s not. But I’ll ask if Miss Napier’s receiving visitors. She’s just sat down to her dinner.” Her voice was doubtful.

“This won’t take long,” he said. “There are one or two questions she might be able to answer.”

“I’ll ask, sir. If you’d care to wait?” She opened the door for him to step into the hall, and he was pleased to see that it was as handsome as the porch, with an elegantly carved fireplace and a high, medieval ceiling. The fine portraits on the walls, placed to catch the eye, were of a succession of men impressively magisterial in bearing, who bore a strong family likeness. Four generations, staring down at him in formidable array.

Rutledge smiled, studying them. He recognized Thomas Napier himself—painted at the age of thirty, at a guess, when he took his seat in Parliament. “A bonny man” was Hamish’s verdict. Tall, distinguished, with a short Edwardian beard and dark hair brushed back from a high forehead. The hair had grayed at the temples now, but the firmness of the features hadn’t changed at all. Napier was still a striking man. Father, grandfather, and great-grandfather possessed the same strength.

There were no women here. And no sons of Thomas’s?

He heard the tap of heels on the stone passageway down which the maid had disappeared, and a slender dark-haired woman came through the door to greet him, her resemblance to the men on the walls very clearly marked. Except that in her the same strong, distinguished features had been softened by femininity. For she was very feminine, in appearance and manner.

“Inspector Rutledge?” she said with a graciousness she must have been far from feeling, for her serviette was still in her left hand and her dinner would be growing cold. “I understand you’re seeking Miss Tarlton. May I ask why?” Her voice had a girlish lightness, but she was all of thirty, if he was any judge.

“Miss Tarlton, I’m told, took a train on thirteen August from London to Singleton Magna, where she was met and taken to Charlbury by Mrs. Simon Wyatt. That was the same day, sadly, that a Mrs. Mowbray and her children traveled on the same train. As you may know, we believe Mrs. Mowbray was killed soon after that. We’re trying to locate anyone who might remember her or her children or the man believed to be traveling with her. We very much hope that Miss Tarlton can give us information we badly need.”

“No, I had heard nothing of this!” she said with a ring of surprise and truth in her voice. “You had better tell me more, I think.”

He did, starting from the beginning, when Mowbray had stood in the window of the train, looking out at the woman on the platform. But he stopped with the finding of the body in the field.

She listened intently, without comment, as if he had come to make a report to her father. Her blue eyes were on his, steady and intelligent, reflecting her concern. He was careful in his choice of words, cushioning the purpose of his visit as well as he could, but he quickly realized that Elizabeth Napier’s softness covered a very strong mind.

“This Mrs. Mowbray was killed—murdered, you mean?” she asked, swiftly moving to the heart of the problem. “How dreadful! And they have caught this man? Her husband?”

“We have her husband in custody. It’s the children we’re still trying to locate. Any help Miss Tarlton might give us will be greatly appreciated.”

She frowned. “What do you mean—trying to locate?”

“We—aren’t sure what’s become of them.”

Elizabeth Napier shivered. After a moment she said, “I’ve worked in London with the poor. I’ve seen men who have lost all hope, who have killed their families rather than watch them starve. But this is different, isn’t it? He wasn’t trying to spare them.”

“We have no reason to believe that’s the case,” he answered. “But Miss Tarlton might be able to throw some light on the matter.”

“Margaret isn’t here,” she said reluctantly. “I was expecting her a week ago, but apparently she went back to London instead.”

“You’ve spoken with her on the telephone?”

“No, she hasn’t called or written. But she was expecting to take up a new position; she may not have had the time. Let me give you her London address—”

“She’s not there,” he said. “We’ve spoken with her maid. She says Miss Napier was to come directly here from Charlbury.”

“But she hasn’t—”

Elizabeth Napier stopped, looking at him in alarm, the serviette drawn through her fingers like a handkerchief, over and over again. He couldn’t quite read her fear, but it was there. “I don’t understand!” she said finally. “Please!”

He took the folded sheet of paper from his notebook and handed it to her. She looked down at the photograph on it, her brows puckered as if she had trouble seeing it. “What’s this?” she asked, perplexed by the shift in direction.

“A photograph of Mrs. Mowbray and her children. Does Miss Tarlton bear any resemblance at all to the woman you see there?” Hamish, mindful of the effort Rutledge was making to keep his voice free of any inflections that might lead an answer, began to stir.

“To this woman? No, certainly not!”

Then she hesitated, staring intently at the face. “Well, they’re both tall and fair—I suppose that’s a similarity—but it isn’t strong. It’s more in something—I don’t know, something about their form, I think. The long bones, the fine hair, the—the delicacy, perhaps?”

“Do you have a photograph of Miss Tarlton?”

“A photograph? Why should—no, of course, there’s one in the study. When my father had a house party last spring, she helped me entertain. It was a political weekend, and they’re always the worst, the wives are bored to tears or scratching each other’s eyes out in the politest way whenever the men aren’t around. Someone had a camera. If you’ll excuse me—”

He could feel the tension in his body now. That odd sixth sense had already leapt ahead, his thoughts tangled with the possibilities opening before him. The warning to let sleeping dogs lie passed through his mind as well.

“Then what about the children?” Hamish was saying, voice low, urgent.

“If it wasn’t his wife that Mowbray killed, there won’t be any children.”

“But there were children at the railway station. You have na’ forgotten.”

“No. But if the Tarlton woman was visiting the Wyatts in Charlbury, she might have been in the right place at the wrong time. Mowbray might have believed he’d found his missing wife.” It was the conviction that had brought Rutledge to Sherborne. The need to settle the matter of Margaret Tarlton’s whereabouts. Such thin evidence …

Miss Napier returned, a silver-framed photograph in her hand. Instead of giving it to Rutledge she walked to the door and opened it, stepping out into the last of the daylight to compare the photograph and the printed flyer Hildebrand had had made up.

After a moment she shook her head, and Rutledge came to take the frame from her, trying to read her expression. He saw only confusion.

He too stood in the light, looking down at several women shown standing by the elegant hearth in the hall, as if posed by someone oblivious to the interplay of relationships among them. There was a stiffness that betrayed their antagonism even while their expressions portrayed polite enjoyment. But second from the left was a young woman with long bones and fair hair, who looked at the camera in much the same way—and yet not the same way—as Mary Sandra Mowbray had done in 1916. An oddly ephemeral thing …

Hamish saw the truth as quickly as Rutledge did.

Rutledge told himself, It isn’t real. This resemblance between the two women. You see it only when you look for it—there’s nothing to trigger it unless you’re consciously expecting to find it. Or hoping to see it?

“It isn’t a likeness. Is it?” Elizabeth Napier asked. “I can’t tell—”

“It isn’t a likeness,” he answered finally, “but there’s something very—uncanny—about the similarity.” He had unwittingly used the same word Hamish was repeating in his mind. “At a guess, I’d say that if the two women stood side by side, you wouldn’t notice it. There’s the voice, of course, and how each carries herself. Her expression—her nature. They’re not from the same social background. They’ve lived quite different lives. These qualities would strike you first”

“I don’t follow you—”

He said carefully, looking for flaws himself, “If you saw either woman walking down Bond Street some distance ahead, you might say to yourself, ‘I think that’s Margaret Tarlton.’ If you saw either woman in the slums or along a country road, you might pass her by without a glance, because you wouldn’t expect to encounter Miss Tarlton there.”

“Except for their clothing. How they were dressed.”

“But Mowbray, expecting to find his wife in Singleton Magna, might not know her wardrobe now, in this new life he’d already accused her in his own mind of living. He wouldn’t look for differences, he’d look for similarities.” Like the color pink … if that was a woman’s favorite color.

“I begin to see. But go on.” Her face had lost some of its color.

“This man survived the war to come back to an empty life. Out of work, no home, no family to support him, nothing safe or familiar. He desperately wants this woman to be his wife, and by the time he does find her, he can’t feel anything but anger when she denies everything. He tries to make her stop lying to him—and, in the end, kills her.” There were any number of holes in this piece of speculation. He found himself trying not to think about them.

Hamish was asking vehemently how he had overlooked the one salient fact that would negate all his fine theories.

But Rutledge made himself concentrate on Elizabeth Napier’s reaction.

“It’s still guesswork,” he said, forced to honesty. “I can’t prove any of it.”

She was looking up at his face, dawning horror on hers as she assimilated the images in her mind. “You aren’t—you aren’t trying to say—that the dead woman in Singleton Magna might possibly be Margaret Tarlton! That it explains why she isn’t here—or in London. No, I refuse to believe it!”

Yet he could tell that the conviction was growing stronger with every moment. She was an intelligent woman—

Still, she fought against it. Elizabeth stood by Rutledge’s side, her hand on his arm, her eyes scanning the two faces, one in an ornate frame, the other a grainy reproduction on cheap paper. Whatever her inner struggle, whatever the deeper emotion that lay behind her fear of the truth, she couldn’t ignore the evidence before her.

Then she spoke, with a heaviness that made him ashamed of the necessity of bringing her into this murder. There were tears standing in her eyes, and her fragility touched him deeply. “If it’s true—if that poor woman is Margaret—then it’s all my fault. I sent her there—I thought I was being quite clever. I thought it was incredibly simple and that no one would ever suspect—how very stupid of me!” She fiercely blotted her eyes with her serviette, then looked down at it in surprise, as if she’d forgotten her dinner—as if it belonged to a far distant and far different past.

Bracing her shoulders, she said, “It won’t do to cry. I’m always the first to say that! ‘Don’t cry!’ I’ve told those pathetic women in the slums. ‘It doesn’t solve anything!’ But it relieves the pain somehow, doesn’t it?”

Carefully folding the flyer, she handed it back to Rutledge along with the photograph in its silver frame. “You’ll need that, I think. And you’d better come in,” she said. “Have you dined? No? That’s good, I have need of company just now. We’ll eat what we can of dinner. Then I’ll change and go with you to Singleton Magna. I want to see this woman—or has she been buried?”

“No, she hasn’t been buried. But she isn’t—her face was badly beaten. I don’t know that you could, er, hope to recognize her.”

Her own face went white, and he thought for a moment she might faint. But she said resolutely, “Don’t tell me before I’ve eaten something! Come with me!”

Rutledge followed her back into the hall and down the passage to a room with an arched ceiling and a table down the middle that would comfortably seat twenty or more. At the far end, in isolated splendor, a place had been set for one. She walked to it, picked up the small silver bell by her plate, and rang it sharply. When the maid came to answer her summons, she said, “Another place for the inspector, please. Tell Cook I’ll have a fresh bowl of soup as well.” She waited until the maid had taken the first course back through the heavy door to the kitchens and then indicated the chair on her right. Rutledge accepted it.

Elizabeth Napier took a deep shuddering breath, closed her eyes for an instant, shutting out what she had, soon, to face, then sipped her wine as if it offered the strength she didn’t possess.

“Are you quite sure this—this woman—whoever she may turn out to be—was killed by this man, Mowbray? Is that proved beyond a doubt?”

“No. Not beyond any doubt. But he publicly threatened his wife. And then we found the … her. There’s no one else we have any reason to suspect. At any rate, he’s presently under arrest.”

“Then,” she said, “that relieves my mind—and my conscience.”

“In what way?” he asked, looking directly at her. But she was unfolding her serviette and laying it neatly across her lap. He couldn’t see—or read—her eyes.

She shook her head.

He said, “If there’s information you might have—if the woman in Singleton Magna is Margaret Tarlton, not Mary Mowbray—”

“No,” she replied vehemently. “I won’t make accusations and turn your policemen loose on an innocent person. That would be morally wrong!”

“Then why did the thought even cross your mind?”

The maid returned with a tray and two plates of a palegreen soup on it, the smell of lamb and white beans wafting to Rutledge, awakening his stomach if not his mind to enthusiasm. The sandwiches had been finished some time ago. She served her mistress and then the guest before filling his glass with wine. With a rustle of those starched skirts, she disappeared again into the kitchen.

“I—Margaret wasn’t the kind of woman to have enemies. She worked for her living and knew the importance of being pleasant to everyone. If I had to stand before God in the next five minutes and answer to Him, I’d be hard-pressed to think of anyone who would deliberately want to harm her!” She picked up her spoon and made a pretense of using it.

But Rutledge was good at the same game. “Perhaps not. But what if someone saw a way of getting to you—through Margaret? I offer this, you understand, as an hypothesis.”

She lifted her eyes, startled and wary, to his. There was something moving in the blue depths, and he suddenly knew what it was: jealousy.

“This was your suggestion, Inspector, not mine.”

And it was the last he could get out of her on the subject.

But he knew whom it was she accused. The name hung between them through the rest of the meal, like a miasma in the air, heavy and fraught with a mixture of strong emotions: Aurore Wyatt.

For the first time since she’d come to greet him in the hall on his arrival, Rutledge couldn’t have sworn, with any certainty, whether this woman was telling the truth—or lying.

9

They drove in silence through the night toward Singleton Magna, with Rutledge at the wheel and Elizabeth Napier by his side, wrapped in a light woolen cloak against the chill that had come with darkness. Her small leather case lay in the boot. A wind blew out of the west, and his headlamps picked up scatterings of leaves and dust as they swirled across the road. Shadows loomed black and indeterminate along the way, like watchers in mourning.

From time to time Hamish kept up a steady commentary on the issues in the case and the probability of Rutledge’s skills coping with them. But he ignored the voice in his ear and kept his attention on the wheel and the two shafts of brightness that marked his way.

Once a fox’s eyes gleamed in the light, and another time they passed a man shuffling drunkenly along the verge, who stopped to stare openmouthed at the motorcar, as if it had arrived from the moon. Villages came and went, the windows of their houses casting golden squares of brightness across the road.

Elizabeth Napier was neither good company nor bad. He could feel the intensity of her concentration, her mind moving from thought to thought as if her own problems outweighed any sense of courtesy or any need for human companionship before she faced the horror that lay ahead of her. He himself hadn’t seen the victim. In place her body might have told him a great deal. The coroner had already done what he could, found whatever there was to find. The children had been Rutledge’s priority, not the dead woman. Until now.

Then, as the first houses of Singleton Magna came into view, Elizabeth Napier stirred and said, “What was she wearing? This woman?”

He thought for a minute. “Pink. A floral print dress.”

She turned to look at him. “Pink? Are you sure? It isn’t a color Margaret wears—wore—very often. She likes shades of blue or green.”

“Will you mind waiting at the police station while I send for Inspector Hildebrand? It’s best if he makes the necessary arrangements.” He smiled at her. “The sooner this is finished, the easier it will be for you.”

She turned to him in surprise. “I thought you were in charge of this murder investigation?”

“I’m here to keep the peace between jurisdictions,” he said without irony, and added, “My priority has been the search for the children. So far I’ve had other questions on my mind.”

“Didn’t you care about them?” she asked, curious.

“Yes, of course,” he said testily, “but the problem has been where to look. Hildebrand has done everything humanly possible, with no results. I’ve tried to go in different directions. I’ve tried to ask myself, if they aren’t dead, why haven’t we found them? Did someone else see them at the railway station, or are they only part of Mowbray’s wretched delusions?”

“Surely not? If he was so very angry, something set him off!”

“Precisely. That’s an avenue I’ll pursue next.”

“And has it been successful?” She was interested, listening. “This rather different approach to police work?”

“I’ll know when you tell me who the victim is—or isn’t.”

* * *

It took a constable half an hour to locate Hildebrand and ask him to come down to the police station. Once there he stared at Elizabeth Napier as if she had no business in his office at this hour of the night, and he said as much to Rutledge, his eyes wary and cold.

“Couldn’t this wait until the morning? It’s been a long day, and I’m tired.”

“Miss Napier is Thomas Napier’s daughter,” Rutledge responded dryly. “I brought her here from Sherborne. It’s late, yes, but I felt you should speak with her as soon as possible. Miss Napier, this is Inspector Hildebrand.”

Hildebrand looked sharply at her. “Speak to her about what? Get to the point, man! Are you telling me she knows something about those children?”

Rutledge said, “It seems she may be able to identify our victim.” He explained, and watched Hildebrand’s face change as the man listened.

He didn’t answer Rutledge directly but was consideration itself as he turned to Elizabeth Napier. Even in the dark cloak that hung to her knees, she seemed very small and utterly feminine. Lost in this masculine world of violence and dark emotions, where the dusty file cabinets and stacks of papers concealed the secrets and deeds of humanity’s least fortunate. Outside the long windows, the shrubs dipped and swayed in the wind, like beggars imploring mercy.

“I’m truly sorry you’ve been brought into this sordid affair, Miss Napier. And for no reason. Inspector Rutledge hadn’t seen fit to confide his intentions to me—or I might have informed him of a decision taken this same afternoon. Mrs. Mowbray was laid to rest shortly before six o’clock. There’s no body to show you. The matter is closed.”

His eyes slid to Rutledge’s face, triumph in them. “In our minds, there was no question of identity—I discussed that issue thoroughly with my superiors and the rector at St. Paul’s Church. And Mrs. Mowbray had no family other than her children. There was no reason to postpone the—er—decent interment.”

There was a wild fury rising in Rutledge’s throat, choking him. He wanted to take Hildebrand by the neck and throttle him.

It had been a deliberate and cold-blooded decision on Hildebrand’s part, to make sure that his investigation wouldn’t be undermined by what he’d clearly seen as Rutledge’s interference.

Satisfied to see the sudden stiffness in Rutledge’s face and the anger that surged, barely contained, just behind it, Hildebrand smiled tightly. “I took the liberty as well of consulting your superior in London. He was in full agreement.”

Bowles. Of course the bloody man would agree!

And the one person who might have verified the identity of the dead woman was standing here, puzzled by an interaction she couldn’t quite follow.

Elizabeth looked from one to the other. “She’s been buried? But why? I must see her, I’ve come all this way!” She turned to Rutledge. “You’ve got to do something, Inspector!”

Hildebrand said, “Miss Napier—”

“No!” she told him firmly. “No, I won’t be put off! Will you please tell me where to find a telephone? I must speak to my father, he’ll know what I ought to do about this problem—” Her eyes filled with tears, and Hildebrand, who suffered agonies of uncertainty whenever a woman cried, never knowing what to do or say to stem the flood, and inevitably making things worse whatever he did, looked frantically at Rutledge.

This is your doing! his eyes accused.

Rutledge, still fighting against the anger burning inside him, said in a voice he himself hardly recognized, “How did you bury her? In the dress she was wearing when she was killed?”

Hildebrand stared at him as if he had lost his wits. “Dress? Good God, no! The rector’s wife, Mrs. Drewes, offered to send the undertaker something, and—and the necessary undergarments. What’s that to say to anything—”

“Then I’ll see her dress,” Elizabeth said, looking suddenly very tired and very distressed. “If you please?” The tears sparkled on her lashes, unshed but still threatening to fall, given any excuse. “I must have an end to this!”

Rutledge, angry as he was, heard Hamish admiring such a masterly performance. “Yon lassie’s as useful as a regiment,” he said, “though you’d no’ think it to see the size of her!”

Hildebrand was replying doubtfully, “Miss Napier—are you quite sure that’s what you want to do? At this late hour? It’s not—there’s blood over the front of it.”

She nodded her head wordlessly. He took her arm as if afraid she might faint on the spot, already promising to ask the doctor to support her through the ordeal. Over her shoulder Hildebrand’s eyes warned Rutledge to stay out of it. “You’ll be at hotel, then?” he said.

For an instant Rutledge thought that Miss Napier was on the point of objecting, but she caught some nuance of tension in the air between the two men and said only, “Thank you, Inspector Hildebrand.”

Rutledge grimly left him to it, still far too angry to trust himself. Instead he crossed to the Swan to wait in the lobby, Hamish already earnestly pointing out the unwisdom of tackling anyone about what had been done behind Rutledge’s back.

“The man’s no’ one to see beyond what’s clear in his mind. You must na’ threaten his tidy view of yon murder. And he won’t thank you or anyone for making him look a fool. If yon lassie from Sherborne tells him she has seen the dead woman’s dress before, he will na’ pay any heed.”

“What is it you want?” Rutledge demanded silently. “Dead children—hidden in a place we may never find? Or their broken bodies brought in, to tighten the noose around Mowbray’s neck? I came to find those children, and by God, after my own fashion, I think I have! And it’s a conclusion to this investigation that I for one will find one hell of a lot easier to live with!”

“Aye, but Hildebrand’s an ambitious man, and if you take away from him the one case that might ha’ brought him a promotion, he’ll no’ forgive you for it. However many children you’ve spared! He’ll no’ care, except to see what’s been done to him, and your hand heavy in it!”

Which was true. Even in his anger Rutledge recognized it. He made himself stop pacing the floor and silently responded, “It will be worse for him when the Napiers and the Wyatts begin to ask where Margaret Tarlton may have gone. And the search leads in the end to that new grave.”

“Aye, but that’s to come—and who’s to say that it will? Who’s to say that Margaret Tarlton is na’ in London or any other place that takes her fancy? Who’s to say she did na’ want this position and went off to think about it? Hildebrand’s not likely to blame himsel’ if trouble does come home to roost. He’ll find a scapegoat. Mark my words!”

“If I back down, and Hildebrand has his way,” Rutledge said, “there are still the children’s bodies to find. And the black mark will be against me, for that failure. Even though I don’t think they’re out there.”

“It’s your reputation in the balance, aye. Your choice of roads. But once you walk down it, there’s nae turning back.”

Rutledge said nothing, his anger drained away, emptiness left behind. The self-doubt, still so close to the surface—of his skills, his emotions, his wits—seemed to gnaw raggedly at his patience. “It’s your reputation.…”

Very soon afterward a distinctly wobbly Elizabeth Napier reappeared, with a solicitous Hildebrand on one side and a man who turned out to be the local doctor on the other. He was small and thin, with little to say, dragooned into service at Hildebrand’s insistence. As soon as he had turned his patient over to Rutledge with a curt nod, he was gone without excuse or farewell.

Hildebrand led them into a small private parlor and then went out to find some brandy. One lamp was lit, and it offered only a funereal lifting of the gloom. Which seemed to match the mood of the room’s inhabitants. Rutledge made no effort to turn on another and waited quietly for Elizabeth to speak. She seemed to be having trouble organizing her breathing.

“I lost my dinner,” she said after a moment, touching her mouth again with a damp handkerchief. “Made a thorough fool of myself. I thought—I was sure all my long years of service in the slums had inured me to any horror. But all that blood!” An involuntary shiver ran through her. “What made it worse was realizing it might have belonged to someone I knew, I found myself imagining what her face must have looked like—that was the worst part!” She stopped, taking another deep breath, as if she were still fighting nausea. “I don’t see how you can harden yourself to this sort of work!” she added after a moment, lifting wry eyes to meet his. “It must be wearing on the spirit.”

He said, “Nothing makes it any easier. It helps, sometimes, to remind myself that finding the murderer is my pledge to the victim.”

She said, “I don’t expect I’ll ever read or hear about a murder having been committed without picturing that dress in my mind!”

He gave her another moment or two and then said, “Can you tell me anything—” He found he didn’t want to ask Hildebrand that question.

She said shakily, “Dr. Fairfield took out the box with her clothing in it, and as soon as I saw it, I was sick. But I made myself go back, I asked them to unfold the dress for me.” She swallowed hard. “You told me the color was pink!” she went on accusingly. “It’s more a lavender rose, and of course I recognized it. Straightaway. The shoes as well. I’d seen Margaret wearing them just last month, when we went to the museum—” Realizing that in her distress she had probably said more than she meant to, she broke off.

He wondered if the purpose of a museum visit had been to refresh Margaret Tarlton’s knowledge of the East, before she traveled down to Dorset.

When he said nothing, she went on, “Your Inspector Hildebrand thinks I’m out of my mind, but he’s too worried about vexing my father to say it to my face.”

“You’re quite sure—about the dress and the shoes?”

Her eyes held his. “I can’t lie to you. I may be wrong. But I’d be willing to swear, until you show me evidence to the contrary, that the woman wearing that dress must be—must have been Margaret.”

“And as far as you know, Miss Tarlton had no connection with the Mowbray family?”

“If she did, I can’t imagine where or how she came to meet them.”

Hildebrand returned with a small glass of brandy. Elizabeth sipped it carefully, wrinkling her nose in distaste. But it brought a little color back to her face, if only because of its bite.

“I’ll see to driving you back to Sherborne, Miss Napier,” he was saying. “You’ve had a nasty shock, and I’m sorry. I hope you’ll feel better when you’re at home again. I ask your pardon for subjecting you to this ordeal. It wasn’t, as I told you before, any of my choosing!”

She nodded, and somehow the chair seemed to envelop her protectively as she leaned back and closed her eyes. After a moment she handed the brandy glass to Rutledge and then stood up tentatively, as if expecting the room to dip and sway. She said to Hildebrand, “Inspector Rutledge put my case in the boot of his car. If you could arrange to have it brought to my room? I think it’s best if I stay in Singleton Magna tonight. It’s already quite late, isn’t it?”

The Swan’s manager was delighted to provide a room for Elizabeth Napier, offering to send the bill to her father. She waited patiently while the formalities were completed and then allowed herself to be led to the stairs. As they reached the graceful sweep of marble steps, she touched her temple with her fingertips, as though her head ached. Then she said, “Um—I—don’t suppose anyone’s called Simon? No, of course not, you still aren’t quite ready to believe me, are you, Inspector Hildebrand?” She started up the first flight before he could answer her. Without looking back she added quietly, “Dear Simon, he’s known Margaret nearly as long as I have. It would be better for all of us if I were wrong. But there’s no way to undo what’s happened, is there? If it should turn out that I’m right?”

Hildebrand said nothing, trailing her in silence.

Watching her, Rutledge was reminded of something his godfather had told him once about Queen Victoria: “Small as she was, she moved with majesty,” The same could be said of Elizabeth Napier.

She knew, perfectly, what power was, and how to wield it. Few men could boast the same profound understanding. Rutledge wondered if she’d inherited her skill from Thomas Napier, or if it was natural, as instinctive as the way she held her head, as if there were a diadem balanced in her hair. It gave her, too, a semblance of the height she didn’t possess.

“I must telephone my father. He’ll want to know what’s happened. But not tonight—I couldn’t bear to go into it tonight!”

Behind her, Hildebrand grimly shook his head. Stubbornness was his shield. And in the end, it might prove to be enough.

The Swan’s manager was fumbling through the keys in his hand to find the one he wanted, oblivious of the currents of emotion around him. In the passage outside her door, he offered Miss Napier everything from a maid to help her unpack to a tray of tea, if she felt so inclined. She accepted the tea with touching gratitude and was bowed into her room as the door was unlocked for her.

Leaving Hildebrand and the manager to see to her comfort, Rutledge went down to his car. Hamish had nothing to say.

By the time he’d delivered the small overnight case to her door, Hildebrand was also preparing to leave, and they walked down the stairs in a silence that was ominous. Rutledge braced himself for the storm that was certain to break as soon as they were out of earshot of the inn’s staff.

Hamish reminded him that it wouldn’t do to lose his own temper a second time. Rutledge told him shortly to keep out of it.

The storm was apocalyptic. After a cursory glance around the quiet, empty lobby, Hildebrand launched into his grievances in a tight, furious voice that carried no farther than the man opposite him. Among other things he wanted to know why Rutledge had seen fit to go to Sherborne on his own—and why the bloody hell the Napier name had been dragged into this sordid business without Hildebrand’s permission. “I don’t know where you learned of this Tarlton woman, or why you thought she was in any way involved, but I can tell you now Miss Napier is mistaken! My God, she was too shocked to know what she was saying!” he ended. “And when her father learns what’s happened, do you know who will be to blame for this—this exercise in futility? My people! We’ll be damned lucky if none of us is sacked! Thomas Napier, for God’s sake! He makes or breaks far more important men than either of us, any day of the week!”

“Do you realize it will take an order from the Home Office to have that body exhumed?” Rutledge demanded harshly as soon as Hildebrand had paused for breath. “And now that there’s doubt—”

“Whose doubt? Yours and whatever confusion you’ve sown in that young woman’s mind? I hardly call that a positive identification, damn you!”

“It might explain,” Rutledge retorted, “why we haven’t found the children. Because there are no children to be found.”

“They’re out there! Somewhere! And when I find them—mark me, I shall find them, with or without your help!—I’ll see to it that you’re ruined! Whatever you were before the bloody war, you aren’t half that man now. And it’s time you realized it!”

He turned on his heel and left. In his wake Hamish was asking “How was it Mowbray found her—yon Tarlton lass? How did she come to be walking on the road to Singleton Magna—the Wyatts would no’ send her to the station on foot!”

Rutledge had considered that himself. On the long dark drive from Sherborne. During the shorter wait in the Swan’s lobby. No answers had come to him. Not yet …

It had all gone wrong. He told himself that if his skills had slipped so far, he was better off out of Scotland Yard. That if he had seen what he wanted to see, and not the truth …

“Just because yon fine Miss Tarlton is na’ in London and did na’ arrive in Sherborne as expected does na’ mean she’s dead! What if she’s gone to Gloucestershire, to tell her family she was moving to Dorset?” Hamish reminded him again and again. The words echoed in his head.

“Without troubling to telephone Miss Napier? Who recommended her for the position in the first place? I don’t think it’s very likely.”

Rutledge could feel the dull ache behind his eyes, the sense of isolation and depression settling in. Fighting it, he walked out into the windy night, looked up at the stars pricking brightly through tide darkness.

Damn Hildebrand!

Let it go, he told himself. He’ll know soon enough if you’re right. And London will hear soon enough if you turn out to be wrong. Sufficient unto the day …

Turning, he walked a short distance up the street, realized it was the way to the churchyard, and stopped. He had enough ghosts of his own, without invoking the murder victim’s! Coming back to the inn, he looked up in time to see the curtains being drawn in the window of the top-floor room that Elizabeth Napier had taken.

She had brought her case with her because she expected to spend the night in Singleton Magna. What Rutledge hadn’t known—but she must have considered from the start—was that she might wish to stay longer than just overnight. He’d overheard her quietly speaking to the inn’s manager as she wrote her name in the register, asking if the room might be available for several days rather than just one night.

Whether she had really been sure that the dress and shoes belonged to the dead woman, only Elizabeth Napier could say with any truth.

But she was already looking ahead to anything useful that might grow out of her identification. Inside that fragile shell was a will as strong as steel. What Elizabeth Napier wanted, she was well accustomed to having, of that he had no doubt

And he thought he knew her target. Aurore Wyatt’s husband.

He’d have been willing to wager his life on that certainty.

10

In the early morning, before the town had begun to stir, Rutledge set out again for Charlbury, his mind occupied with how and what he wanted to say. And to whom. Clouds filled the sky, promising rain, and the heat had broken.

He arrived at the Wyatt home while the family was still at breakfast. The maid left him standing in the parlor, and he looked around him at the room. The furnishings were beautifully made and well polished, handed proudly from generation to generation. They were for the most part Georgian, though two of the tables had skirts to the floor and phalanxes of photographs in frames, in the Victorian style of never is too much too much. There was a large portrait over the fireplace, a man dressed in early Victorian black, looking much like a slim and intelligent Prince Albert. At a guess, this was the first Wyatt elected to Parliament. Hinted at in the dark background behind him were the soaring pinnacles of Westminster, as if he’d been painted standing on the bridge at midnight. The inference was both subtle and powerful.

Aurore herself came out to greet Rutledge, a questioning look on her face. Before he could speak to her, she asked if he’d care to join them for a cup of coffee. “Simon is just finishing his breakfast. He’ll be happy to see you again.”

Rutledge had his doubts about that. “Thank you, no. I wanted to ask you—what was Margaret Tarlton wearing the day she left for London?”

Aurore’s face was a polite mask, as if another woman’s apparel was something she seldom gave thought to. Rutledge would have wagered she could have described everything Margaret Tarlton had brought with her. He could count on one hand the number of women he’d met who were oblivious to other women’s appearance and clothing.

She said, considering his question, “I spent most of the morning at the farm, as I told you when you were here before. I didn’t return home in time to drive Miss Tarlton to Singleton Magna. She was wearing blue at breakfast, I remember that. It was very nice with her eyes, and there was a pleat of white in the skirt, to one side, like so.” She demonstrated, pleating the soft cream skirt she herself was wearing. He could see what she meant. “But she went up to pack as I was leaving, and to change. She said it had been terribly warm on the train coming down, she thought she might prefer something lighter for the journey. I didn’t see her after that. You might ask Edith. Our maid.”

To pack. Where was this woman’s suitcase? With her in Gloucestershire or buried somewhere in Dorset? Lost suitcases—lost children …

“How did she travel to Singleton Magna, if you had taken the only car?”

“I don’t know. I assumed that Simon would make another arrangement for her. He had several workmen here, and there’s the motorcar at the inn, belonging to Mr. Denton. Simon has borrowed it before. It wasn’t impossible to find someone to take her so short a way.”

“How many motorcars are there in Charlbury?”

“Simon’s of course, which I seem to drive more often than he does these days. And we have a little carriage we use sometimes. That of the innkeeper. And the rector had one; his widow uses it now.”

“No one else?”

“No,” she said, then added dryly, “but the horse is not dead in the countryside, you know. There are far more carriages and carts and wagons than there are motorcars in a ten-mile radius. Even Dr. Fairfield who comes to the village drives a buggy. That very fierce little man from Singleton Magna, with the face that looks as if he’s bitten into a very sour lemon. If transportation was a problem, anyone in Charlbury would have been glad to take her. If only to please Simon. Why do you ask these things? They have nothing to do with the day that Margaret arrived.”

She has a very clear memory for detail, Rutledge thought. What Margaret Tarlton might have seen, arriving on the same train as Bert Mowbray, had been his excuse when he had asked for her London direction.

“We don’t know where Miss Tarlton went from Singleton Magna. She hasn’t returned to her flat in London, and she failed to arrive at the Napier country home in Sherborne. They were expecting her there.”

Her gray eyes changed as he watched. Anger—or was it resignation?—stirred in their depths. “Ah. Why does that not surprise me?”

“Did you believe Miss Tarlton was sent here as a spy in your midst?” he asked bluntly. She had nearly admitted as much before. It hadn’t mattered then.…

“But of course! Why did Elizabeth Napier all at once have no further need of her services? Why, after nearly eight years with the Napiers, was Margaret prepared to come here?”

“It’s the nature of women, sometimes, to look for a change. I don’t know that Elizabeth Napier has been an easy mistress. Or Margaret Tarlton may prefer work that reminds her of growing up in India.”

“But that’s exactly the point, Inspector. The nature of women,” she said. “Margaret is nearly twenty-nine years old. The age when a woman is reminded that if she’s to marry, it must be soon. How many eligible young men would you say there are here in Charlbury?”

He caught himself wondering how old Elizabeth Napier was, and as if she’d read his mind, Aurore said, “Elizabeth was to marry Simon in 1914. But he asked her to wait, until the war was over. And when he came home from France, there was an unexpected impediment—his French wife. She has wasted five years. She will be thirty next month.” The devastating honesty of the French.

Smothering a rueful grin, he said, “The point is, we appear to have lost Miss Tarlton. Possibly between Charlbury and Singleton Magna. It’s my task to find her, I’m afraid.”

“Then I cannot help you. She went upstairs to pack, and I went to the farm to see to the livestock. As I have already told you.”

There was nothing else he could say, except, “I’ve kept you from your breakfast long enough. I’d like to speak to your husband before I go.”

But Simon had already finished his meal and gone across to the museum, and it was there that Rutledge finally caught up with him. Looking up from the small sandalwood figure in his hands, Simon said, “I thought your business was with my wife? Look at this. Shiva dancing. Exquisite, isn’t it? Even if I don’t have the faintest idea who Shiva might be! I’ll leave such erudition to my assistant.”

“That’s what brought me here, actually. Your assistant. I need to ask you who drove Miss Tarlton back to Singleton Magna, to meet her train.”

“I thought Aurore had. Why? Does it matter?” He replaced the carving on its shelf and stood back to see if it was dwarfed by the figures on either side. He picked up one of its neighbors, the fanciful figure of a large bird in flight.

“Yes,” Rutledge said, beginning to lose his temper. “Put that thing down and pay attention to me, man! There’s a woman lying dead in a pauper’s grave at Singleton Magna. I want to know if it could be Margaret Tarlton. And if it is, I want to find out who put her there.”

“In a grave? That’s nonsense!” He frowned. “Why should you think it’s Miss Tarlton?”

“Mr. Wyatt, we can’t seem to find Margaret Tarlton. She isn’t in London, and she isn’t in Sherborne, at the Napiers’. She was last reported to be here, in your house, on the point of leaving for her train. Nor have we located the Mowbray children, and that’s the crux of our problem. It raises questions about the identity of the murdered woman. There’s just a chance—an outside chance—that the body Hildebrand found in that field near Singleton Magna wasn’t the Mowbray woman after all. If that’s the case, we’re going to have to start all over again. And I intend to start here!”

Simon shook his head. “Margaret Tarlton took the afternoon train back to London. She’s most certainly not a murder victim!”

“Then, damn it, where is she now? And how did she get from Charlbury to Singleton Magna?”

“I’ve told you—I was busy in here, and it was already arranged for Aurore to drive her.”

Rutledge swore under his breath. He knew that Simon Wyatt wasn’t a stupid man. And yet he didn’t seem to hear what was said to him, or register the gist of it. “Are you telling me that your wife is a liar?”

He suddenly had Simon Wyatt’s full attention, clearly focused. “Aurore never tells lies,” he said curtly. “If she says she didn’t drive Margaret to the station, she didn’t.”