Search the Dark

“Then who did? That’s what I’ve come to discover.”

The museum’s outer door opened and a woman walked in, calling Simon’s name. Rutledge, who could see the outer door from where he stood, recognized her at once. She’d been in the garden behind the inn, at the Women’s Institute meeting. That white streak in her hair was distinctive.

“Hallo, Simon—” She stopped. “Oh, do forgive me, I didn’t know you had a visitor! I was sure this young man was calling on Aurore. I’ll come back later, shall I? Nothing important—”

“Inspector Rutledge, Mrs. Joanna Daulton. She’s the cement that holds Charlbury together. Her late husband, Andrew, was our rector. He hasn’t been replaced yet, and Mrs. Daulton has taken on his work as well as her own for nearly two years now. I don’t know what we’d do without her.” He smiled at her with more affection and awareness than he’d ever demonstrated when speaking of his wife.

Mrs. Daulton didn’t pretend to modesty. She said only, “Well, someone has to do it, while the bishops make up their tedious little minds! How do you do, Inspector? Mrs. Prescott, who lives next door to Constable Trait, has already met you, I think. I’ve been looking forward to that pleasure as well.” She held out her hand and he took it in his. A woman accustomed to social responsibilities and the burden of church duties that fell to her lot as the rector’s wife, she was clearly comfortable in any situation.

“Thank you. It must have been your son that I saw the other day. By the church. He told me his father had been rector here.”

Something moved in her face, a sadness that was beyond even her ability to deny. “Indeed? Henry was severely wounded in the last year of the war. But he’s making wonderful progress; we’re all quite pleased.”

Was it a polite social response, the “I’m quite well, thank you” that can mean anything from blatant good health to one foot in the grave? Because if Rutledge was any judge, Henry Daulton’s brain was permanently damaged. But then he was no judge of how far Daulton had come.

“I’m glad to hear it,” he responded with equal politeness, then added, “Did you see Miss Tarlton during her stay in Charlbury? In particular on the last day of her visit?”

“No, I’m afraid I didn’t—to speak to, I mean. As I was coming away from the Hamptons’, she was at the gate in front of this house, standing there as if waiting for someone. Later Henry told me she’d rung the bell at the rectory, searching for me to ask if I might drive her in to catch her train. But before he could fetch me from the garden, she called out that Mrs. Wyatt had come after all, and she would go with her.”

“What was she wearing? When you saw her at the gate here?”

“Oh—I remember thinking how wonderfully cool she looked, on such a warm day. A floral pattern, quite pretty. Mauve or pink or lavender, I’m not exactly sure. It was the overall effect I noticed, and the hat.”

“Hat?” He remembered that Mrs. Hindes had mentioned a fetching hat.…

“Yes, a straw, with an upswept brim on the left side. Many women can’t wear hats like that—I’m one of them! Aurore—Mrs. Wyatt—could, of course, and certainly Miss Tarlton does them justice. It’s the height, I’m sure.”

She herself was wearing a very conservative hat, in a medium shade of blue. It had an air of efficiency about it rather than style. She was a very efficient woman, Rutledge thought. In a courtroom she would make an unflappable witness, her words well ordered and to the point.

But if that indeed was Margaret Tarlton murdered in a field, where was her hat? Suitcases, hats, children …

“I’d like to ask your son if she was wearing her hat when she came to your door.”

“May I ask why all this interest in Miss Tarlton’s apparel?” She looked from Simon to Rutledge. “Is anything wrong?”

Besides being efficient, she was clearly no fool.

“Just a matter of routine. We’re interested in everyone who arrived in Singleton Magna on the train last week.”

“Ah, yes, that poor man who killed his family. I sometimes think the war has driven all of us into madness!”

Rutledge turned to Simon Wyatt. “You still haven’t answered my last question.”

Simon took a moment to remember. “No. Because I don’t know how to answer it. I told you, I thought Aurore was going to take care of it. You’d better speak with Edith, I suppose. The maid. I’ll see if I can find her for you. Mrs. Daulton? I’m sorry—”

“No, no. Come to see me when you have time, Simon, there’s no hurry!”

Rutledge held the door for Mrs. Daulton and walked with her as far as the gate.

“What’s this all about?” she asked him. “You were questioning Simon as if he’d done something wrong. I’ve known him since he was a child; I won’t see him treated like a miscreant without knowing why!”

“It’s just a matter of checking information, Mrs. Daulton—”

Joanna Daulton stopped and looked up at him, seeing more than he expected she might. “Young man, I’m not simpleminded, and I won’t be spoken to as if I were. If there’s anything that connects Margaret Tarlton to this wretched Mowbray affair, I suggest you ask her about it. Simon still has a great deal of work to do before this museum is set to open, it’s all he thinks about. And if you want my advice, it’s best to let him get on with it! The war nearly destroyed him, and I’ve never been so grateful as I am to that ridiculous grandfather of his for putting the notion of a museum in his head. It’s brought Simon back from the edge of despair. Never mind whether it’s a roaring success or not, it has stood between Simon and self-destruction. I won’t let you upset that balance, do you hear me?”

“We can’t find Margaret Tarlton. We’ve looked in London where she lives and in Sherborne, where she was expected next but never arrived.”

Joanna Daulton stared at him, and for the first time since she had walked into the museum he watched her grapple with something that was outside her usual experience as community leader. She seemed uncertain how to take him. “You can’t find her? In the sense that you don’t know just where she may have gone—or in the sense that she’s missing?”

“That’s our dilemma, actually. We aren’t sure.”

“Well, Aurore—Mrs. Wyatt—drove her to the station. I should think that’s clear enough. Which means to me that Miss Tarlton left Dorset on the train. I should think London is a better place to start searching than Singleton Magna. I was always under the impression that the police knew their business!”

Rutledge said nothing. Hamish, hearing the exchange, said, “She reminds me of Fiona’s aunt, Elspeth MacDonald. No man in his right mind crossed her!”

She opened the gate. “Do heed me, Inspector. Walk carefully where Simon’s concerned. Don’t upset him if there’s no need for it!”

Rutledge watched her walk firmly up the street. Had she purposely—or inadvertently—sacrificed Aurore Wyatt to distract him from Simon? On the whole, he’d guess that it was on purpose. Mrs. Daulton’s first duty was to the boy she’d watched grow up, not to his foreign-born wife. On the other hand, he told himself, she might feel that Aurore was far better able to protect herself than Simon was.

Edith was nervously waiting for him in the parlor, standing stiffly by the hearth as if the portrait at her back gave her moral support.

“I’m not here to badger you,” he told her gently. “It’s just a matter of what Miss Tarlton was wearing when she left here last week, on her way to London. Do you remember?”

Surprised at the simplicity of the question, Edith smiled. “Oh, yes, sir! It was a pretty dress, quite summery to my way of thinking! Rose and lavender, with a slim skirt and a belt of the same cloth. And a straw hat that had ribbons of the same colors around the crown. But that wasn’t half as fine as what she was wearing when she arrived!” She stopped, her blue eyes alarmed. She had overstepped her bounds—

Rutledge said, “Yes, I’d like to know about that as well.”

“It was this silvery gray silk, and it shimmered like cool water when she moved, and she had the most wonderful hat to match, the silk ruched down the brim, and a low crown. The only touch of color was this thin crimson ribbon tied in a bow and set to one side. I’d never seen anything quite so—so stylish!”

Had Margaret Tarlton come prepared to outshine the French bride?

“What luggage did she have with her?”

“The one piece, sir.”

“Who drove her to the station in Singleton Magna?”

“Mrs. Wyatt was set to do it, but she was late, and Miss Tarlton was afraid she’d miss her train. So she asked if there was anyone else who might take her, if Mrs. Wyatt didn’t come in time. But she must have, because I said I’d run down to the Wyatt Arms to ask Mr. Denton for the loan of his car and his nephew, Mr. Shaw, for Miss Tarlton, but he said his nephew was over to Stoke Newton with it, and when I came back, Miss Tarlton had gone.”

“You think Mrs. Wyatt carried her into Singleton Magna, then?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Edith told him honestly. “But Mrs. Wyatt isn’t one to forget what she’s promised to do.”

As Rutledge was leaving, Aurore came around the corner of the house, a basket of deadheaded flowers over her arm. She saw him and said, “Inspector?”

He turned to wait for her. Shielding her eyes against the cloudy brightness of the morning, she looked up at him. “I wish you to tell me what’s happening. All these questions about Margaret. It makes me uneasy!”

There was a trowel in her gloved hands and a smudge of damp earth on one cheek. He found himself staring at it “I don’t know myself why I’m asking them,” he said, surprising himself. “Every time I think I’m a step closer to the truth, the concepts of what’s truth and what’s wishful thinking seem to merge, and there’s only a muddle where there had appeared to be answers.”

Because if Margaret Tarlton was wearing gray silk on the morning she arrived, how could Bert Mowbray have searched everywhere for a woman wearing pink?

Aurore reached out and touched his arm. “You will know what to do,” she said. “However difficult it is. You have courage, you see. It’s there, in the lines of your face. Suffering has taught you that.”

He found himself wanting desperately to tell her about Hamish—and Jean. The words seemed to hover on the edge of his tongue, ready to spill over, wanting understanding—absolution—and afterward, peace.

Stunned by his unexpected and overwhelming reaction to her sympathy, he stood there, at a loss.

Hamish was warning him over and over to leave—now! While you still have some measure of self-control.

He thought for one dazed instant that the warm hand on his arm was lifting to touch his face. And he knew, helplessly, that it would be his undoing.

But she stepped back, that deep sense of stillness wrapping her again in her own untouchability.

Without saying good-bye, he turned and walked through the gate. He didn’t remember turning the crank or starting the motorcar. He didn’t remember driving out of Charlbury. It wasn’t until he reached the crossroads that some measure of self-command overcame the turmoil in his mind.

Aurore Wyatt was a suspect in a murder investigation.

And she had been conscious of the effect she’d had on him.…

11

Rutledge sat in his car at the crossroads trying to shut out Hamish’s voice. “Loneliness leads a man into folly,” he was pointing out. “It’s loneliness at the bottom of it. And she saw that, man, she’s no’ above using it. The notice of Jean’s engagement’s left ye vulnerable to such wiles—”

“It was natural—she’s a damned attractive woman.”

“Aye, and she’s got a husband. Besides which, she’s French.”

Rutledge shook his head. As if being French explained a woman like Aurore. And yet, somehow it did. She knew more about men than was good for them. She saw deeper inside them. But her power was very different from Elizabeth Napier’s.

He’d have to remember that.

He sighed and let in the clutch.

He tried to shift the subject in his mind as well, to distract Hamish from coming too close to the truth. And to distract himself from the feel of Aurore’s hand resting so lightly on his arm.

What was he going to do about this problem before him? Was the dead woman Margaret Tarlton? Or Mary Sandra Mowbray?

“Aye,” Hamish reminded him, “it’s a proper puzzle, and if you canna’ get to the bottom of it, no one else will!”

Still—did it truly matter, if Bert Mowbray had been the one who killed her, what her name actually was? Murder was murder. The identity of the victim was secondary. It didn’t change anything. Death was quite final, and a man would be hanged as surely for murdering a nameless tramp as he would be for killing a peer of the realm. The only difference was in the public attention the trial would receive.

And yet Rutledge knew that to him it mattered.

A victim had no one in the law to speak for him or her. The police were bent on finding the guilty party. The courts were set up to determine guilt, and if guilt was proved, to offer sanctioned retribution for the crime committed. Prison or the gallows. Society was then satisfied by the restoration of order. Civilized order, where personal revenge and vendettas were foregone in the name of law.

Was that any consolation to the victim? Did it make up for the missed years of living?

When he himself had stood in the trenches, facing imminent death and seeing it reach out for him in a multitude of disguises, the concept of dying gloriously for King and Country had taken on a different image, a certainty of life ending in a shock of pain and sheer terror, with nothing left of the man he was or might be. Only a bloody ruin to be tumbled into a hasty grave if he was found—if not, lying where he’d fallen, obscenely rotting on the battlefield where even the crows dare not come for him. And in those months when he’d wanted to die, to bring the suffering to an end, he had thought longingly of what might have been … if there had been no war. Yes, he knew, better than most, what the dead have lost.

And where was Margaret Tarlton, if she wasn’t lying in that grave?

It always came back to the children. Find them—or not—and he would have his answer. But you couldn’t wish children dead, to solve a mystery.

Rutledge said aloud, “We’ve come full circle.”

“Aye,” Hamish said in resignation.

As he strode into the Swan, the young woman behind the desk called, “Inspector? Inspector Rutledge!”

He turned, and she went on, “A Superintendent Bowles in London has been trying to reach you. The message was, please contact him as soon as possible. He left his number for you—” She held out a sheet of paper.

He hesitated, not sure he was ready to speak to London. The young woman said helpfully, “You’ll find the telephone in the cloakroom, just there.”

It took ten minutes to put the call through and fifteen more for someone to locate Bowles. In the end, when Bowles finally called him back, Rutledge had prepared himself for a catechism.

Instead Bowles said loudly, as if compensating for the distance between Scotland Yard and Dorset, “Is that you, Rutledge? I’d like to know why Thomas Napier descended on me this morning, concerned about his daughter! What in God’s name have you done to the woman!”

“I brought her from Sherborne to Singleton Magna last night. Hildebrand showed Miss Napier the clothing the victim was wearing when she was found. According to Miss Napier, the apparel belonged to Margaret Tarlton.”

“Good God, haven’t you found her? I thought she was in Sherborne.”

“She never arrived there. I’ve located witnesses who place her in Charlbury, on the point of leaving to catch her train. I was just about to ask the stationmaster if he remembered her. Neither Simon Wyatt nor his wife seems to know who drove her to Singleton Magna.”

There was an audible sigh at the other end of the line. “First the Napiers, and now the Wyatts. I told you not to tread on any toes!”

“I haven’t.” So far. He could foresee the possibility of it.…

“What’s the Mowbray woman doing in Miss Tarlton’s clothing, anyway?”

“It’s quite possible the dead woman is Miss Tarlton.”

“Well, get to the bottom of it, man! I don’t see what the problem is! And Hildebrand’s complaining that you’re never around when he needs you, and I’m told the children still haven’t been found. That was your responsibility! There may be no expectation of finding them alive now—but find them we shall! Do you hear me? What’s taking so damned long?”

“The victim has been buried. With your permission, I’m told. If we don’t locate Miss Tarlton, we have a dilemma.”

There was silence at the other end of the line. “Are you saying you want that corpse exhumed?”

“It may be necessary—”

“No! I’ll send someone to Gloucestershire, on the off chance the Tarlton woman’s gone there. If she has, we’d look a fool, wouldn’t we? There isn’t a man in the picture, is there? Someone in London she may not want the Napiers to know about? I’ll have Worthington ask her family about that, while he’s in Gloucestershire. If she’s not with them.”

“I don’t think London is at the bottom of this business.”

“You aren’t paid to think, you’re there to find answers! And for God’s sake, placate that Napier woman before her father comes down on the lot of us! Don’t annoy the Wyatts either, do you hear me?”

There was a distinct sound of the receiver at the other end being slammed into its cradle.

Rutledge felt like doing much the same.

He found Peg, the chambermaid, and asked her to take a message to Miss Napier’s room.

“Miss Napier left not ten minutes ago, sir. Someone brought a motorcar over from Sherborne, and she’s being driven to Charlbury.”

He swore, silently, as Peg curtsied and went on her way.

“Aye, you should ha’ seen it coming!” Hamish said, commiserating. “But yon Frenchwoman addled your wits. You’ve no’ been thinking straight all the morning, and see where it’s got you! A tongue-lashing by auld Bowels, and that headstrong lassie slipping off to Charlbury the instant your back’s turned, intent on meddling in this business.”

“Making mischief isn’t at the bottom of it. Elizabeth Napier still wants Simon Wyatt. The question is, to what lengths is she willing to go, if she thinks there’s even an outside chance of getting him?”

“I’ve a feeling,” Hamish warned, “that you’d best be on your way to Charlbury, to find out.”

But Rutledge first went to the station to ask the master about Margaret Tarlton, describing her and the clothing she’d worn.

The man shook his head. “I don’t remember a woman fitting that description taking the London train. There were three men from Singleton Magna going up that day, and two women who bought tickets to Kingston Lacey. I know them both by name. That was the passenger tally, according to my records.”

“She may have taken the train south, rather than to London.”

“I doubt it. Not that many people do, from here. I’d recall that. I’d recall her as well.”

Rutledge thanked him, then walked back to the inn for his car. He might well need that exhumation order if Worthington came up empty-handed.…

Marcus Johnston, Mowbray’s lawyer, was coming down the street toward him as Rutledge drove out of the Swan’s yard. Just as he was about to make the turn for Charlbury, Johnston hailed him. “Any news? I’ve been trying to find Hildebrand to ask. But he’s out in the field again, which tells me not to be sanguine.” He came up to the car and put a hand on the lowered window.

“No. How is your client?”

Johnston took a deep breath, as if bracing himself to think about Mowbray. “Poorly. He forgets to eat, can’t close his eyes more than five minutes, which says he’s not sleeping. Distracted by whatever wretched scenes he’s seeing over and over in his head. When I try to discuss his defense with him, he looks at me as if I’m not there. Damned odd feeling, I can tell you! According to one of the constables, you persuaded him to speak. I’m surprised.”

“I was asking him about his children. He wanted to stop me, and the only way he could do that was to cry out.”

“I should have been there!”

“With four or five people crowded into that wretched cell, he’d have been suffocated! I wasn’t after a confession, I only wanted to know how much the children had grown. Since that 1916 photograph was taken. The flyer hasn’t helped; I thought perhaps we could do something more.”

Johnston shook his head. “I’m beginning to believe he’s hidden them too well. It’s unlikely, to my way of thinking, for a stranger in this town to find any place the local people don’t know about. And yet—” He let it go. “I went to the services for Mrs. Mowbray. I felt someone ought to be there besides the police and the undertaker. I don’t like funerals. This one was worst than most. The rector didn’t know what to say about the poor woman—whether she’d lived a blameless life or was no better than a whore. Which left him platitudes, most of them more apt for a sermon than a burial. No one wanted to mention the circumstances that had brought her there. Murder, I mean. I hadn’t thought to bring flowers, and the ground looked appallingly bare and lonely when they’d filled in the earth. I suppose I ought to see to a simple marker—Mowbray certainly doesn’t have the resources for it. I don’t think he truly undertands that she’s dead.”

“And you were satisfied in your own mind that you knew the victim’s identity? That it was Mary Sandra Mowbray?”

“Yes, of course!” Johnston said, surprised. “In a town this size, if anyone goes missing, there’s gossip—and everyone hears about it. I daresay Hildebrand could have told you the instant he set eyes on her that the victim didn’t belong here! A man like that knows the possibilties and can discount most of them on the spot, I should think.”

“Even though her face was so badly beaten?”

“He’s a good policeman. Thorough, dogged. And Mowbray made no secret of his intentions. The first order of business naturally would have been to bring him in and lock him up. Even I find it hard to deny the man’s guilt; I can only hope to show mitigating circumstances. And even that’s a damned narrow tightrope.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Anyway, if the woman had been someone else, it would surely have come to light by this time.”

“What if a reliable witness informed you that the dress the victim was wearing belonged to another woman, not to Mrs. Mowbray?”

Johnston smiled, the tiredness in his face reflected in his eyes. “As Mowbray’s barrister, I’d be delighted to hear it. As a realist, I’d ask myself why anyone would choose to lie about it.” He took out his watch and opened it “Good God, look at the time! I’ve another client waiting, I must go.”

He walked away, and Rutledge looked after him, his face thoughtful.

The day was gray, humid. Farmers were out in their fields, a sense of urgency about them as they worked, as if they could smell the rain coming.

Charlbury, looking drab in the dull light, seemed unchanged, and yet there was something electric in the air as Rutledge drove down the street. He wasn’t sure if that was his imagination or real.

There was another motorcar in the inn’s side yard this morning, a stocky man in a dark uniform desultorily polishing the bonnet.

Instead of stopping there, Rutledge went directly to Constable Trait’s house, getting out to knock at the door. That sense of pending catastrophe seemed to hold him in its grip as he waited for an answer. It wasn’t his imagination, it was something in the mood of the place.

For the most part the streets were empty, and the gardens too. Doors were shut. He wondered how many pairs of eyes watched him from behind starched curtains. He could feel their stares, intent and waiting.

“They know,” Hamish warned him. “They’ve already been told.”

The second summons brought not the constable but his neighbor, Mrs. Prescott. He had seen the twitch of white lace curtains as she had looked him over before deciding what to do. Curiosity, he thought, had won over prudence.

“He’s not to home,” she said, standing in her door and leaning out to speak to him. “You won’t find him here.”

“Where is he?” Rutledge asked. By God, if the man had gone courting again—!

“His turn to lead a search party.” She moved down onto the front step, and said earnestly, “Is it true then? Is that Miss Tarlton missing and given up for dead? I’d not like to think of two deaths so close to home in so short a time!”

“Where did you hear about Miss Tarlton?” Rutledge asked, though he knew full well.

“Miss Napier. She came to find the constable herself. And she was that upset to learn he’d already gone out. ‘But it can’t wait—it’s been a week, that’s enough time wasted!’ she said. I could see her hands trembling, and her face was white, she looked about to cry. I brought her inside for a cup of tea, for she didn’t want Mr. Wyatt to see her that way. Took a quarter of an hour to settle her down, poor soul.”

Two masters at work, he thought. Mrs. Prescott intent on pulling the truth out of an apparently distraught woman, while Miss Napier was carefully sowing the seeds she wanted to bear fruit.

“Did she tell you what was wrong? Why she needed Constable Truit?”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Prescott said, casting a glance up and down the quiet street. “She said her secretary, that was visiting the Wyatts, had disappeared. She wanted to know if I could tell her anything that might help. But I couldn’t,” Mrs. Prescott said, with simple honesty. “I never saw Miss Tarlton leave. Miss Napier, she asked me to make inquiries in Charlbury. Among my friends. To see if they had any word. And that’s what I did.” She paused, her eyes worried. “All Charlbury knew who she was—the Tarlton woman. She’d come to apply for that position at the Wyatt museum. They was in need of an assistant for Mr. Simon. A pretty young woman. Such lovely hair. I saw her when I carried a jar of my plum preserves along to Mrs. Wyatt. Why should anyone want to harm her?” It wasn’t a question he could answer. Yet. She added philosophically, “Well, it gives busy tongues something new to wag about We’ve nearly talked to death Mr. Simon’s choice of wife and still nobody knows quite what to make of her.”

He was furiously angry with Elizabeth Napier for giving the story her own peculiar twist. No association with Mowbray or his wife—no link with the body found outside of Singleton Magna. It was as if the two crimes—if there had indeed been a second murder—had been unconnected. As if there were still Miss Tarlton’s dead body to find, well hidden in someone’s bushes or back garden.

Small wonder the village had withdrawn behind closed doors!

Another search, this time turning Charlbury upside down. Delving into secrets that no one wanted to see exposed. Because there were always secrets—whether they had had any impact on the crime in question or not

And Hamish had been right Elizabeth Napier had adroitly outmaneuvered him, by coming here and starting her own rumors. By worrying her father and sending him directly to Bowles to complain of the police.

Hamish interjected, “Helplessness is a weapon that’s hard to fight”

And Rutledge had no taste for playing the bully.

All right then, he’d see if he could undo some of the damage!

He said to Mrs. Prescott, “We don’t know that anyone had a reason for wishing to harm Miss Tarlton. But Miss Napier is understandably concerned that her secretary can’t be found, and she’s taken it upon herself to initiate a search.”

Mrs. Prescott sniffed. “What you’re telling me, then, is just what she said you would. It looks bad for the police when there’s two mysterious goings-on in one week! First that poor woman in Singleton Magna is killed, with her children. And now Miss Tarlton can’t be found. Miss Napier says that that Inspector Hildebrand has all but told her she’s making mountains out of molehills. But she won’t give up. Not her. And I know Miss Napier from before the war, when she came to Dorset regular. She’s not one to run about like a chicken with its head off! If she’s alarmed, there’s something to be alarmed about!”

Rutledge said, “There’s no sign of foul play. For all we know, Miss Tarlton may well be visiting her family in Gloucestershire!”

“She’s not,” Mrs. Prescott said with conviction. “Miss Napier, she called them last night, and they haven’t seen Miss Tarlton since she was down in July for her cousin’s birthday!”

“Retreat while there’s a way open,” Hamish warned him. “She’ll no’ believe you, whatever you have to say.”

Rutledge for once took his advice. After thanking Mrs. Prescott, he drove back to the inn, to leave the motorcar there.

The chauffeur of the other car looked up quickly as Rutledge came to a halt, as if expecting to see someone else. Thomas Napier, perhaps? He nodded politely once he realized that Rutledge was no one he knew and went back to his task of brushing out the interior. It looked spotless.

“Is that Miss Napier’s motorcar?” Rutledge asked, getting out. It was a simple way to open a conversation. And the car was, he’d noticed, very like the Wyatts’.

“Her father’s, yes, sir,” the man replied warily. He was sturdy, in his midtwenties, and there were burns across his face and the backs of his hands. Rutledge had seen such wounds before, on airmen sent down in flames.

“Where will I find her?”

“My instructions were to wait for Miss Napier here. That’s all I know.”

Rutledge turned to look up the road toward the Wyatt house.

“I don’t know what there is about this town,” the driver said unexpectedly, coming to stand behind him. “It’s—unfriendly. I wouldn’t want to live here!”

“What’s your name?” Rutledge asked over his shoulder.

“Benson, sir.”

“I understand Miss Napier came here often in the past. Did you drive her?”

“No, that must have been Taylor. He’s retired now. I was hired some six months back to replace him.”

“Knew Margaret Tarlton, did you?” He caught himself using the past tense but let it go. He turned. If Benson noticed the slip, he gave no sign.

Instead he studied the man before him. “Who’s asking?”

Rutledge told him. Benson nodded. “You must have been the policeman who came for Miss Napier last night! Yes, I know Miss Tarlton—I’ve driven her around most of London, on occasional business for Mr. Napier or his daughter. Always tries to be punctual and says she’s sorry if she keeps me waiting.”

“She was expected in Sherborne?”

“On the evening train. Miss Napier wanted the car most of that day and said she’d go along to the station herself to fetch Miss Tarlton. But she wasn’t on the train.”

“What did Miss Napier have to say to that?”

“She said something must have detained Miss Tarlton, and she’d want me to go back on the next day. But Miss Tarlton wasn’t on that train either.”

“Which day was it that Miss Napier met the train? And where did she go beforehand? Do you know?’

“Over a week ago, sir. Thirteen August it was, sir. I don’t know where she went beforehand. It’s often to Sherborne, when I’m not asked to drive her. But that’s not to say it was Sherborne. Miss Napier just told me I’d have the day and the evening free.”

Hamish stirred with sharpened interest

It was on 13 August, in the late afternoon, that the murdered woman’s body had been found outside Singleton Magna.

Rutledge said, “Does Thomas Napier ask you to—er—keep an eye on his daughter? He’s a prominent man, and she seems to do some sort of charity work in the London slums. He must feel some concern about that.”

“No, sir. He’s never seemed to have a particular concern in that direction. It’s Miss Tarlton he’s always wanting to know about.”

12

Rutledge walked up the road to the Wyatt house. Hamish, still mulling over Benson’s last remark, demanded, “Why did you no’ ask him what he meant?”

“Because Elizabeth Napier might question him, if she saw us there talking together. I’d rather bring up her father to her, not the chauffeur. Bowles might have been on to more than he realized, when he asked about a London connection—”

He saw Mrs. Daulton and her son, Henry, coming toward him. Mrs. Daulton paused to speak to him as he touched his hat, and said in her usual no-nonsense way, “You find the cat firmly ensconced among the pigeons, Inspector.”

Was she using the term metaphorically? Or was she being careful not to say in plain terms what Henry might hear and repeat?

He nodded to Henry, who responded in kind.

“You’re a policeman,” he said, as if glad to have this straight. “I thought you liked old churches.”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Rutledge answered truthfully. He’d always had an interest in architecture, thanks to his godfather. David Trevor probably knew more about any given British building than the men who had originally put it up. Stone and brick and wood were profession, passion, and pastime to him.

Mrs. Daulton was saying, “Miss Napier seems to believe something’s happened to Miss Tarlton. She’s quite worried, in fact. She came to see me before she went to speak to Simon. To collect herself before they met, I expect. I thought there might have been more to your questions than you told us earlier!”

“I don’t know myself what my interest is in Miss Tarlton,” he replied. “At first it was as a witness. That was true enough. Now she could be involved, in one way or another.”

“You’re right, young women of her class don’t vanish into thin air. But I refuse to believe that there’s a murderer loose who might slaughter all of us in our beds—three parishioners have already come to see me this morning with such a story. Apparently they had it from Mrs. Prescott.”

“I don’t think Charlbury is in grave danger,” he agreed.

“Then you feel that that poor man in Singleton Magna’s jail may have killed Margaret Tarlton—that he may have mistaken her for his wife.”

“It’s possible,” he replied. She was an intelligent woman, one who was plain and uncompromising in her view of life.

“Then it’s time I set matters straight. As my late husband would say, the sooner you scotch a snake, the better.” She suddenly smiled, transforming her face, giving it an attractiveness and youthfulness that surprised him. “I do not, of course, refer to Miss Napier as the snake.” The smile faded as she looked down the empty street behind him. “Still, you can see for yourself what suspicion and fear can do in a small place like this. Everyone is staying indoors.”

Henry said, “The last time it was the influenza. Like a plague. Frightened everybody. I’d read about the plague at school.” He frowned, then said, “I think I remember Miss Napier. From before the war.”

“Of course you do,” Mrs. Daulton said calmly. “You and Simon, Miss Napier and Marian were friends.” To Rutledge she added, “Marian was my daughter. She died in childhood.”

“She died of lockjaw,” Henry put in. “It wasn’t very pleasant.”

In the brief silence that followed, Rutledge seized his opportunity. He said to Henry, keeping his voice on a conversational level, “Do you remember Miss Tarlton coming to the rectory last week? I expect she was looking for someone to take her to Singleton Magna.”

Henry nodded. “She wanted to know if I could drive her. Or failing that, my mother. She said she didn’t want to go in Denton’s car.”

With Shaw? Interesting! “How was she dressed? Do you recall?”

He smiled. “I don’t know much about women’s clothes, Inspector. It was summery, like flowers. I do remember her straw hat, though. I didn’t much like it. Her hair was pretty enough without it.” His eyes were clear, untroubled.

“And after that?”

“She went away. I think she was quite angry.”

“Do you know why?”

“She said something about a train. She was afraid she might miss it.”

Mrs. Daulton was gazing at her son with rapt attention, hanging on his words as if he were delivering the profoundest of answers, making her enormously proud of him. Rutledge found himself thinking, This man’s tragedy isn’t his, he doesn’t know what he’s lost. It’s his mother’s. His wounds are the death knell to any ambitions for him, and she can’t accept it. She’ll push her son as long as she can. She’s another civilian casualty, like Marcus Johnston.…

She turned back to him. “Inspector, if you should want to speak with me at any time, leave a message at the rectory. I always check the little basket by the door.” With a nod, she walked on. Henry followed.

Hamish said, “She’s a strong woman. I think it did na’ come naturally to her. It’s there in her eyes. Long years of pain. Did you take note of it?”

“Yes, I saw it.” But Rutledge’s eyes were on the Wyatt house. He could just pick out the shape of someone in an upstairs room, looking out. He would have sworn it was Aurore.

When Rutledge stepped through the garden gate, he could hear voices from the museum, Simon’s deeper tones, and then, as counterpoint, Elizabeth Napier’s lighter responses.

He turned that way but glanced up at the window on the first floor. Yes. Aurore was standing there looking out, her face still, her body like a statue in its unyielding stance. And yet behind the stillness was not rigidity, nor was it tranquility. There was only an air of waiting.…

He knocked at the door of the museum, although it was open to the muggy air. Surely not, Rutledge told himself, very good for the hide puppets or the small, fragile wings of butterflies.

“Come in!” Simon called impatiently.

Rutledge stepped inside and found Wyatt with his guest in the second room. Elizabeth was holding a lovely sandalwood carving in her hand, this one of a god with an elephant’s head, human foot lifted as in a dance, one arm raised.

“—Ganesh,” she was saying. “I remember Margaret mentioned him as one of her favorite Hindu figures. And much nicer, I must say, than that ugly one with all the arms! Shiva, I think? The destroyer. Yes, that matches, doesn’t it? You find yourself picturing death when you look into his face!”

“Rutledge,” Simon acknowledged, over her head. “Have you any news?”

“No,” Rutledge answered. “I’ve come to see what news Miss Napier has to tell me.” He turned to her, waiting with polite interest.

She blushed, the rich color rising into her cheeks and giving her eyes a brightness. “You’re absolutely right! I should have waited for you to come back to the Swan. But after I’d called Gloucestershire, I thought—I felt I had to tell Simon before that awful man Hildebrand took it into his head to come here, with no regard for anyone’s feelings!” There was honest contrition in her face as she swung around to him. “I’m not accustomed to the way the police work. If I’ve done anything wrong, I sincerely beg your pardon, Inspector!”

Simon said, “You’ve not done anything wrong, Elizabeth. Don’t let them harass you with their nonsense!” He added to Rutledge, “I can’t understand why you didn’t tell me your suspicions earlier! All that rubbish about what Margaret was wearing! Look, you don’t think that maniac Mowbray got to her somehow?”

“How could he? She wasn’t walking—she was, as far as I can determine, driven from Charlbury directly to the station at Singleton Magna. If she had come across Mowbray on the road and he’d attempted to stop the motorcar, she should have been safe enough. Whoever was driving the car would most certainly have gone straight to Hildebrand afterward, even if Miss Tarlton left on the train. And no such person has come forward.”

Simon said, “It was Aurore who drove her. I don’t know why she won’t come out and admit to it! I asked her myself, as soon as Elizabeth told me what she thought might have happened.”

Rutledge felt a wave of disgust. He knew how Simon, with his oddly abrupt, unfeeling manner toward his wife, must have confronted her, making her feel she had been directly accused.… “Why have you been lying about this? I’d think it would be better to come straight out with the truth—everyone knows it was you who drove Margaret.…”

“Perhaps she didn’t take Miss Tarlton to the station after all,” Rutledge replied in her defense, before he could stop himself. His task was to determine guilt, not innocence. But he refused to watch possible innocence trampled.

There was a brief silence.

“I suppose someone else might have driven her,” Simon agreed reluctantly. “There are other motorcars in Charlbury. But Aurore promised me she’d see to it. And it isn’t like Aurore to lie. I don’t understand this, any of it!”

Yet he had told Rutledge earlier that Aurore never lied.…

“I think it’s too early to go on witch hunts,” Elizabeth put in, her voice appealing for reassurance. “Margaret’s missing. It—it doesn’t actually mean she’s—dead. I don’t know where she might have gone. Do you?”

“Perhaps your father might know her whereabouts,” Rutledge countered, not allowing himself to fall into the neat trap she’d set—expecting him to bring up the dress she’d identified the night before.

There was darker color in Elizabeth Napier’s face this time, then it drained away as quickly as it had come. “I asked him myself this morning. He thought she was with me. He was understandably upset that she’d been missing a week and no one had realized it. He likes Margaret, I think everyone does. She’s one of the most dependable people I know. That’s why her position was so important.”

“Then why did she choose to apply for the position here?” Rutledge asked. “Just because some of the things in this room remind her of India? I’d say at a guess that many of them come from other places in the East. Java. Burma. Perhaps Ceylon or even Siam.”

“It’s much the same culture,” Simon impatiently pointed out. “Buddhism. Hinduism. The same roots. Margaret told me that herself. What are you doing to find her? Do you have men out looking? Has anyone spoken to the stationmaster in Singleton Magna?”

“I went to see him this morning,” Rutledge answered. “And men are searching the same ground two and three times, looking for the Mowbray children. If she’s out there, one of the teams will find her. Somehow I don’t think they will.” His glance moved on to Elizabeth. Let her tell the rest of that story, if she felt so inclined—that the body had already been properly buried. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to find Mrs. Wyatt. Is she at home this morning?”

“Yes, yes, just go around to the house,” Simon told him. “And I want a report, Rutledge. What’s being done, how you’re handling this situation. I still have connections in London. I’ll use them if I have to.”

“There won’t be any need for that,” Rutledge said. “The police are quite good at what they do. It’s a question of time. That’s all. Miss Napier.”

He turned and left, irritated by the implied threat

Aurore must have seen him coming back toward the house from the museum because she was there at the main door as he came up to knock.

“It isn’t a very fine morning, Inspector. And so I will not wish you one. Is there any news?”

“I’m afraid not. I’d like very much to talk to you,” he said. “But not in the house or the garden. Will you walk with me? As far as the church, perhaps?”

She smiled wryly. “While all those faces are pressed against their windows, wondering if you will arrest me on the way back? Yes, I know what is being said! I can feel it Charlbury is both titillated and scandalized by this affair. What is that novel one of your famous authors has written about the French Revolution? Where the old women sit by the guillotine and knit as the heads of aristocrats fall into baskets? Except here it is not knitting, I think. It is the face that is just behind the lace of the curtain, each breath stirring it with anticipation!”

“I saw you standing behind a curtain. As I came up the walk,” he said.

She smiled. “So I was! Allow me to find my sweater, Inspector!”

She was back in only a moment, as if she’d had it close to hand. They walked out of the house and turned through the gate toward the churchyard.

“I apologize for such stupid bitterness!” she told him, as if there had been no interruption to their conversation. “It is not like me. But Elizabeth Napier is a woman one cannot defend herself against. She uses innuendo like a sword. But then I must remember that I have robbed her of the man she wanted to marry. It is the most unforgivable thing one woman can do to another.”

“I think she’s worried about Margaret Tarlton.”

“Is she?” Aurore turned her head and looked at his profile. “I am glad to hear it. I thought she was worried for Simon.”

He smiled down at her. “Touché. A little of both. With Elizabeth Napier, as I am fast learning, there are no absolutes.”

She laughed, a deep, brief chuckle.

“You are an extraordinary man,” she said. “Are you married?”

“No.” It was uncompromising. She read more into it than he intended.

“No,” she repeated softly. “It explains much. Now—you wished to speak to me?” She pulled her sweater a little more closely about her, as if as a shield.

“Everyone seems to believe—although so far I’ve not found one of them who actually saw you!—that it was you who drove Margaret to the station. And therefore, in their view, you’re the person who should know whether she got there safely or not. I spoke to the stationmaster. He claims she didn’t take either train from Singleton Magna on the day she left Charlbury.”

“But I have told you. I was with a heifer that was sick. Whatever Simon may say, we can’t afford to lose livestock—Simon is pouring every penny he possesses into this museum. There was not a great deal of money to start with. His inheritance from his father was quite small. And it is this farm that will pay for our food, bur car, our clothes. Not his grandfather’s treasures.”

She matched him stride for stride, comfortably walking beside him. And he was a tall man. They had nearly reached the churchyard.

She said, stopping him with her hand outstretched as if wanting to touch him, then deciding against it, “Do you think I am lying to you, Inspector?”

He had never felt his soul stripped so bare by the eyes of another person. It was as if she searched into depths he himself had never plumbed.

“I don’t know. But I shall make it my business to find out.” He studied her face in his turn, then asked, “Did you drive Margaret to Singleton Magna, quarrel with her, and put her out along the way? Where Mowbray then came across her, walking? No one would blame you for that, you couldn’t have known. This might explain to us how Mowbray got to her. And bring an end to all these questions.”

She bit her lip. “I would be morally responsible. But you are playing fair with both of us, are you not? To ask? Very well, I will make a pact with you.” Her eyes smiled suddenly, with the humor of it. “A pact with the devil, if you like.”

“I can’t make promises—”

“This one is not a promise. It is a pact. There is a difference. Even I know that difference, in English.” She searched his face again and then said quietly, “If you come to the conclusion after your investigations that I have lied about where I was. when Margaret Tarlton left Charlbury, if you believe that there is any possibility of my guilt in any harm that may have come to her, then you will face me and say such things. Directly. You will not speak first to Simon—nor to Elizabeth Napier, nor to that policeman in Singleton Magna. Do you agree?”

“Are you telling me—”

“No, I am not telling you I have killed Margaret Tarlton. Of course not! But suspicion is a very ugly thing, Inspector, and it destroys both the innocent and the guilty. Sometimes there is no way, afterward, to make right the damage that has been done. If I am to be accused of any crime, I prefer to have it said to my face, not whispered behind my back. Can you understand this? It is not so cruel.”

“You’re trying to protect someone, is that it? Simon?”

Her mouth turned down wryly. “I am protecting myself, I think. I don’t know. But yes, Simon too—this museum must open in one month. It is not the best publicity, do you think, to have it said that the owner’s wife is a murderess? People will come out of morbid curiosity, and I could not bear that. I do not think our marriage could survive that. And so I look for a solution of sorts.”

“I don’t know,” he said, trying to make sense of her words, “what you are asking of me—”

She shrugged, that very Gallic gesture that could mean so many things. “Call it intuition, if you like. Or a sense I cannot explain. But I shall tell you this. Where Elizabeth Napier is concerned, there is no question of right or wrong in this matter. She is looking for simple justice. That is for herself, not for Margaret. And justice is sometimes blind. So—I make my pact with you. And try to spare my husband pain, if I can.”

Holding out her hand as a man might do, she waited for Rutledge to take it. But deep in his mind Hamish was already coming to another conclusion.

“She’s afraid,” he said softly, “because there is something she knows and canna’ tell. Hildebrand would no’ stand for this nonsense—”

Was it that, Rutledge wondered, or the fact that she was sure she could reach him—and so was using him to protect herself by putting on him the onus of betraying her? Using him as Elizabeth Napier was using Simon Wyatt?

“Aye. A woman does na’ think the way a man does,” Hamish told him.

But Rutledge had made up his mind.

He took the hand she held out and shook it briefly. “Agreed,” he said.

And watched the play of expressions across her face. Surprise. A certain wariness. Relief. At the last, a flare of fear.

As if she realized, suddenly and far too late, that perhaps she had misjudged him.…

Rutledge walked back to the gate with Aurore Wyatt without speaking. She had slipped into a silence all her own, as if she had forgotten the man beside her. Her face was withdrawn, her eyes shuttered behind the long lashes.

They could hear Elizabeth Napier’s voice, and Simon’s. Not the words so much as the comfortable rise and fall of a conversation between two people who had much in common. Long years of understanding, respect—love …

Aurore said, tilting her head to listen, “I knew when Margaret Tarlton came here to apply for the position of assistant that, one way or another, she would bring that woman back into our lives. I was right. Only I didn’t see the way of it. Just that it would happen.”

“He married you. That’s what matters.” As Jean would never marry him. It was finished. But then, as Hamish was busy reminding him, Rutledge himself had been the last to let go in that relationship. Why should Elizabeth Napier be any different? If the war years had changed him so much, taking Jean from him, they had also cost Elizabeth Napier Simon Wyatt. Simon too had changed.…

“Yes, he married me. But I ask myself sometimes, was it the war? Was he sorry for me and what had happened to me? Was it loneliness, or a man’s need for a woman? Or was it truly love? I thought I knew. Then. Now I am not as certain as I once was.” She put her hand on the gate, ready to open it and go inside. “Please. Find that woman. Find her soon. For Simon’s sake!”

And she left him standing there, watching her graceful stride as she went up the walk, ignoring the voices that seemed to ignore her so completely.

13

There was one other stop Rutledge wished to make in Charlbury. The inn. It was the pulse of village life, oftentimes the place where gossip and conjecture made their first rounds. The question was, would Denton tell him what was being said, or as the outsider would he be shut out of knowledge any villager might be given for the asking?

Nodding to Benson, who was still polishing the boot as if he had nothing better to fill his time, Rutledge stepped into the Wyatt Arms. He saw that Denton’s nephew, Shaw, was sitting at a table alone, an empty pint glass in front of him, idly tracing one finger through the rings left by other pints. He looked up, recognized Rutledge, and said, “Why in God’s name couldn’t you have told me that Margaret Tarlton was missing! Damn it, I had to hear it from that Prescott bitch!” The words were slurred, but behind them was deep anger.

“I didn’t know, when I was here yesterday, that she was missing.”

“Then you’re a damned poor policeman! God, it’s been over a week!”

“How did you come to know her?” Rutledge pulled out the empty chair across from him and looked around. There was no one else in the shadows of the small room, but he could hear voices from the bar, down the passage.

“Not from Charlbury, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Then where? London?”

“That’s right,” he answered grudgingly, as if the alcohol in him wanted to talk and the reticence of the man tried to hold on to silence. “I was on a troop train, on my way to the coast. She was one of those women offering hot tea and sandwiches as we came through. I didn’t even know her name! Just that she had the loveliest face I’d ever seen.” He frowned. “I took it to Egypt with me. I thought, if I die, at least I’ve seen her—touched her hand. And if I live, I’ll find her. Call it a promise to myself.…” A bargain with fate.

Rutledge looked away. How well he knew what bargains might be made with fate. To keep a man alive one day longer, one battle longer …

“Or come between a man and wanting to die,” Hamish reminded him.

“Two years later I was back in London. Sooner than I’d expected. Shipped like a sausage, strapped to a stretcher, out of my head most of the time. A fever. No one, least of all the doctors, could decide what it was or how best to treat it. They sent me home to die. But I was one of the lucky ones, it burned itself out. The first day they let me stand on my feet, all I could think of was getting back to that railway station, finding her somehow. A fool’s dream, that!”

“She must have spoken to a hundred men on each train. It’s not very likely she’d remember one of them in particular.”

“No, you’ve got it wrong! There was a benefit performance at one of the theaters, and I didn’t want to go, but a friend wouldn’t take no for an answer—and there she was, sitting in one of the boxes across from me! I couldn’t tell you, if my life was on the line, what the program was about. There was a woman singing, Italian arias or something. I thought she’d never finish! At the interval I managed to speak to Margaret. It took some doing to separate her from her party, but I wasn’t about to lose her a second time!” There was an echo of triumph in his voice and a lift to his shoulders, as if the memory were still alive in his mind.

Rutledge waited. Silence was sometimes more effective than a question.

“I’d talked to her that day about Canada—how it was out there. I don’t know why—it seemed to catch her imagination, and I was afraid she’d move on to the next window if I stopped. I told her about the place where a group of us were planting apple orchards on the slopes facing south and how we’d built the long irrigation lines, wooden troughs, but they worked. How the high peaks were heavy with snow, even into May. Whatever came into my head, to keep that look on her face! The first thing she said to me at the theater was ‘Hallo, you’re the man who lives with grizzly bears and elk!’ “

He stopped, frowned at his empty glass. “I’ve lost count,” he said. “I’ve muddled the rings too. Can’t depend on ’em anymore.” Looking up, he said, “You aren’t drinking. Why not?”

“I’m on duty,” Rutledge reminded him. “What happened after the theater?”

“I escorted her everywhere she’d let me. Riding one day, tennis another, dinner—any excuse to be with her. I was falling in love with her. What I didn’t know, couldn’t judge, was whether she cared for me. Or if I was just an available man when she needed a presentable escort, someone with both legs and two arms, who could dance with her. The doctors raised hell, they said the pace I was setting was getting in the way of my recovery. I didn’t care. The longer I was in England, the happier I was!”

Denton came in. “I heard voices,” he said, looking from Shaw’s strained face to Rutledge’s. “Thought it might be custom.”

“No, it’s all right, Uncle Jack.”

Denton nodded and left. After a moment, Shaw said, “I’d have married her. But she wasn’t interested in living in a wilderness, no matter how beautiful or exotic it might be. She’d grown up in India. ‘I don’t want to be exiled again,’ she said. “Not if I can help it!’ ” He managed, somehow, to capture the light tones of a woman’s voice. And a subtle hint of selfishness, as if Margaret Tarlton didn’t mind how she might have hurt him.

It was the first real glimpse Rutledge had had of the missing woman.

“I asked her—begged her—to tell me if there was another man, and she shook her head and kissed me and said I was being silly. But there was. I could see his eyes following her. I could see the look on his face when he came into a room and she was there. God, he was a mirror of what I was feeling! And I was stupid enough to confront her with it. The day before I was to sail. She wouldn’t see me afterward, wouldn’t answer my calls or my letters. It was—that was the last time. When I was sent home again, half my guts cut away, I knew it was finished. How could I go back to her—how could I even tell her I was alive?”

Hamish had stirred, already sure of the answer.

More sure than Rutledge was. “Who was the other man?”

Shaw grimaced, as if the tension of the last ten minutes had brought back the pain in his body. His arms were lightly clasped around his middle, to hold it in. He seemed completely sober now, eyes dark circled and heavy with memory, a man with only a past and no future.

“Thomas Napier. If he hadn’t had a daughter a year older than she was, I think he’d have married her himself. He wanted her badly enough! It was there, raw and hot, sometimes, when I’d bring her home and we were laughing, clinging to each other as we made our way up the steps, more tipsy with excitement than wine, but how could he know? When I saw her getting out of the Wyatts’ motorcar last week, I thought for one horrible instant she’d come looking for me! Out of misplaced pity or duty. But Mrs. Prescott soon put an end to that rash hope. She mentioned to Denton that it was the museum that had brought Margaret. Something about coming here as Simon’s assistant. Besides, there was no way she could have known I was here. Very few people do!”

“Did you speak to her, before she left Charlbury?”

“God, no! When I can barely stand straight, even now, without all the fires of hell lit in my belly? I’ve got some pride left, damn it! She wouldn’t have me before. What could I say that might have changed her mind now?”

“She wasn’t married to Napier, for one thing.”

“No.” Shaw looked at the dark ceiling, where the beams wore a collection of polished horse buttons. Studying them as if they were more important than anything he was thinking or feeling. A bitter concentration.

“There’s the other side of it as well—she was considering moving here, leaving the Napier household for another position.”

Shaw laughed, a rough, hollow sound. “She’d have to, wouldn’t she, if she was planning to marry him? Margaret has been Elizabeth’s secretary for years. Not Napier’s social equal, that. But if she were here, under Simon’s wing, she’d be safe enough from gossip. People wouldn’t be so fast to jump to ugly conclusions. That’s the sort of thing Margaret would think of. She must have known very well how to handle him. It was Elizabeth who stood in the way.”

His mind occupied on his way out of Charlbury, Rutledge almost missed the woman standing by the road clearly hoping to catch his eye.

She was wearing a faded housedress, the blues nearly gray now, and her hair was pinned back stringendy, as if it were being punished for trying to curl in the dampness. Was she one of the women he’d passed on the street? He couldn’t be sure. She’d have dressed differendy, going to market.

Rutledge pulled over and said, “Were you looking for me?”

“Aye! You’re the policeman from London, they say!”

“Inspector Rutledge. Yes.” Behind her, in the doorway, he could see three small children peering out with large, sober eyes. Whatever it was their mother wanted, they’d been told to stay out of the way and make no noise. Or the policeman would get them? It was a threat used often enough in some quarters of London, to keep children quiet. “Be’ave now, or I’ll fetch the copper on yer!”

The woman nodded, then hesitated, as if reluctant to give her name. But they were just outside her house, with paint peeling around the windows and a look of shabbiness about the roof where it needed rethatching. He could find her again, easily. She said, “Hazel Dixon. I heard tell you was looking for information about that woman guest at the Wyatts’. How she left Charlbury on the fifteenth.”

Hamish stirred, and Rutledge tried to keep his own expression bland. “That’s right.” Let her tell it in her own way, or she might change her mind.…

Suddenly there was a hot intensity in the pale blue eyes watching him. “It was her. Mrs. Wyatt. I saw the car. Going on toward noon, it was, two days after that Miss Tarlton came here. I heard the motor and looked out my window, and I saw it passing, in the direction of the crossroads and Singleton Magna.”

“Could you see the driver?” he asked. She would have been on the far side of the car, as he was now.

“Well, it was her, wasn’t it? She’s the one drives the car! Mr. Wyatt, he don’t care to drive himself, he’s used to having people at his beck and call. I’ve seen her, with a scarf blowing out like some banner announcing her! And the men too, turning to look, wanting in their eyes. It’s indecent, lustful! Most of ’em, including my Bill, know what she’s like. They was in France and those women had no men of their own, I know what went on! My Bill didn’t learn to—”

She stopped, this time with a rising flush. She hadn’t meant to say such things, she’d allowed herself to be led on by his way of listening.

There were shadows, moving a little, behind the children, and Rutledge realized that other women—at least two? he thought, possibly three—were in the dimly lit front room, moral support for her confession but not intended to hear whatever it was that Bill had—or had not—been taught by any Frenchwomen he’d encountered abroad.

It was a common enough anxiety of wives in wartime. That men far from home, fighting a war against loneliness and fear as well as the enemy, might have found comfort of a sort in the local women. And picked up disease or new tastes. The music halls were filled with jokes and songs about the French.

“It was her!” she repeated fiercely. “I’d swear to it!”

“Was there anyone in the motorcar with her?”

Mrs. Dixon bit her lip. “I saw something rosy—with lavender in it! Must have been that Miss Tarlton. Well, it stands to reason! Who else would have been in that car with Mrs. Wyatt!”

But he thought she might be lying now. Had she seen Margaret Tarlton at the Wyatt gate and known what she was wearing? Or was she so determined to indict Aurore Wyatt that she was piecing together bits of information garnered from the other women listening and invisible inside her house? “What kind of hat was Miss Tarlton wearing?”

Mrs. Dixon stared at him. Then she said, too quickly, “The way that Mrs. Wyatt drives her husband’s motorcar, you’d be a fool to wear a hat! It’d be blown off your head before you was out of Charlbury!”

And it was true, as Hamish was busy pointing out, that Aurore herself hadn’t been wearing a hat the first time Rutledge had seen her. But he couldn’t recall if there had been one in the seat beside her.…

“They say that that Miss Tarlton’s missing. What do they think’s become of her?” Mrs. Dixon asked, unable to stop herself. Curiosity was driving her now. “That man in Singleton Magna, he’s already killed his wife—”

“We want to locate Miss Tarlton because she arrived on the same train with Mowbray. She might have seen him, or his family.”

“They say he killed his children!” She shuddered, caught up in her own fears, glancing over her shoulder uneasily. “I’ve kept mine close, I can tell you, since I heard of that.”

“I don’t believe you have anything to fear from him now. He’s in custody.”

She turned to go. “I saw that Miss Tarlton the day she came. I was along to my sister’s house. If I’d stolen another woman’s husband, like some I know, I’d not want such a pretty face at my breakfast table! Tempting fate all over again, that’s what it is. And Mr. Simon already regretting his choice!”

“Regretting? What do you mean?” It was sharper than he’d intended.

But Hazel Dixon wouldn’t be drawn into that topic. “I’ve said enough. I saw the car, and Mrs. Wyatt in it! And that other woman. If that’s any good to you, I’m glad!”

Rutledge thought as he let off the brake that Elizabeth Napier’s presence in Charlbury was bearing its bitter fruit. In a village already rife with speculation about Simon’s wife, rumor had spread from house to house, and Hazel Dixon, encouraged and supported by her friends, was now casting the second stone at Aurore Wyatt. She wouldn’t have spoken out if the village had maintained its wall of silence, an undivided front. Elizabeth Napier, breaking the seal by openly showing her anxiety over Margaret Tarlton’s disappearance and allowing the bloody events of the Mowbray murder to find their way—even if topsy-turvy—into the story, had already shadowed Simon’s mind with doubt. And as if by osmosis, the Hazel Dixons of Charlbury had picked up the strong scent of distrust and were emboldened to strike out.

He was never sure how such things actually worked in a village. But work they did.

Aurore had been absolutely right. Seeing her in his company, even for so brief a time, had fed the hungry maws of gossip.

Hamish, from his accustomed place deep in Rutledge’s mind, asked, “Are you sae certain, then, it’s gossip and no’ the truth?”

Constable Truit still hadn’t returned from the search party he’d been summoned to join. Tired of waiting for him, Rutledge left Charlbury and halfway back to Singleton Magna made up his mind.

It began to rain long before he reached London, and the streets were shining with wet, the trees drooping heavily, when he found the house in Chelsea that he was looking for.

It was small, with a narrow porch, silk drapes crossing the windows, and on the steps pots of geraniums in a shade that complemented the brick. Even in the dull light it possessed a decided charm. At the same time it wasn’t a house that a young woman on her own could afford. Unless there was money in the family to draw on.

The maid who answered the door was small and dark, with Welsh ancestry in her round face. But her voice was pure London. Rutledge told her who he was. She led him into a small parlor attractively decorated with rosewood furnishings, a French carpet, and pre-Raphaelite prints on the walls. He recognized several of them. Either Margaret Tarlton liked the romantic aura they represented, or she knew its value as a setting. And yet, oddly, he hadn’t imagined her as a romantic. Was Thomas Napier? Sometimes men of power and prestige had buried in them a streak of the quixotic when it came to their preferences in women.

The maid offered him a chair and stood before him in her stiff black dress, hands cupped in front of her, feet together, like a child anticipating a reprimand. Worry drew her dark brows together and her face was strained, tired. He asked her name. It was Dorcas Williams. She had been employed as a second parlor maid by the Napiers before coming here to work for Miss Tarlton.

“I don’t know what I can say, sir! Scotland Yard has come twice, and still there’s no word from my mistress—I’ve told them all I can think of. There’s no news?” she asked diffidently. “Mr. Napier has been here this morning, asking!”

“Not yet. The fact is, I’m more interested in Miss Tarlton herself. Sometimes in searching for someone who’s gone missing, it helps to know more about the person. We have a better feeling for where to look.”

“Yes, sir.” She regarded him expectantly, as if prepared to cooperate in any way. But behind her eagerness, the shadow of fear still lurked.

“Let’s begin,” Rutledge said as if it had just occurred to him, “with her work for Miss Napier. Did she like what she did—did she get along well with her employers?”

“She liked her work well enough,” the girl answered willingly. “She was good at it, at organizing. Seeing to flowers and caterers and invitations being printed—finding the right musicians. Writing thank-you notes. Sometimes she’d say, ‘You’ll never guess, Dorcas, who’s coming to the luncheon on Thursday!’” She smiled. “Oftentimes I’d get it right too!”

“There was nothing she disliked about her work?”

The smiled faded. “I’ve heard her say she didn’t want to spend a lifetime planning parties in the houses of other people.”

“Did she get on well with Elizabeth Napier?”

“Yes, sir. Mostly. I think—I think there was some disagreement over her changing jobs. But I didn’t understand the rights of that. Miss Tarlton, she didn’t want it to be Dorset, and Miss Napier, she said it was just the thing.”

“Why was she against going to Dorset? Do you know?”

“No, sir.” Her face creased with the effort to remember. “I don’t think she ever spoke of that to me.”

“This house. Does it belong to Miss Tarlton? Or to her cousins?”

“Oh, it’s Miss Tarlton’s, right enough, sir. It was two years ago she moved here, and I was engaged along with the cook and an outside man.”

Two years ago, Rutledge repeated to himself. About the time Shaw was leaving England. …

“Who pays your wages?”

“Miss Tarlton, sir, of course, sir.”

“Does she have a private income? Apart from her salary from the Napiers.”

“As to that I don’t know, sir. She said once her people never did well out of India, unlike some. Her cousins in Gloucestershire are comfortable enough, I suppose, but they don’t run to servants, just a daily woman who cleans and prepares the dinner.”

He was no closer to seeing Margaret Tarlton as a woman in her own right. Yet he couldn’t put his finger on what was missing.

It was Hamish who did.

“I’d no’ like to think,” he said, “that she lived in this house and dressed so fine but had no friends to impress wi’ it all!”

“Did she have friends?” Rutledge asked. “Women? Men?”

“She didn’t have so many women friends, but there were admirers,” Dorcas answered slowly. “Mostly young men, officers home on sick leave. One or two I thought she fancied more than the others. There was a young lord, too, took her to the theater a time or two. But ‘he’s not looking for a wife,’ she’d say. ‘His mother’s a widow, and she’ll choose for him, one that suits her.’ Still, I thought she was fond of him.”

Or of his money and position? Hamish asked.

Rutledge said, “What about the young Canadian officer?”

Dorcas grinned. “He called at the Napiers often. I liked him fine,” she said, “always a word to make me laugh. Promising to find me an Eskimo when he went home! Fancy that!”

“I understand Miss Tarlton wouldn’t see him again before he went back to his regiment. He tried to reach her, and she refused to accept his calls.”

Surprised, Dorcas said, “How did you come to know that? I thought for a time—but she’d have no part of Canada. ‘Not much better than India,’ she’d tell me, ‘and not the kind of life I intend to live.’”

“She hasn’t heard from Shaw—or seen him—since the war ended?”

“She said he’d gone home. But he hadn’t I heard Mr. Napier, not a month past, tell her he was living in Dorset. ‘Is that why you’re off to Wyatt’s museum?’ he wanted to know. ‘Because young Shaw’s there?’ They was having their tea, I was passing the cups, and she nearly spilled hers. So I thought it likely she’d not known whether Captain Shaw was alive or dead. ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she told Mr. Napier. But the way she said it—I couldn’t tell, somehow, but I thought she might have been wondering if she might just see him. Now—or if she got the position at the museum.”

“What was Napier’s reaction?”

“He was fiddling with the serviette on his knee. But he was frowning, I could see that. I couldn’t help but feel he didn’t want her to go to Dorset anyway. And this was just the final straw, to his way of thinking.”

“Was Mr. Napier … fond … of Miss Tarlton?”

“He was very kind to her, she said so often enough. ‘But kindness isn’t the answer,’ she’d say. ‘I don’t want kindness, I want a house and a place in society, and children of my own, and to hold my head up, looking people in the eye, instead of being treated like a servant!’ That was last May, when she had a bad throat and was in bed for nearly a week. It was the newspaper started it, and I’ve never seen her in such an ill temper. I said, ‘I can’t think Mr. Napier and his daughter have ever treated you in such a fashion.’ And her answer was ‘No, but all their acquaintance do! I thought it would be the best possible way to move into better circles, working for Elizabeth. And it was the gravest mistake I’ve ever made.’ So when Miss Tarlton had finished with it, I looked through the newspaper, to see what it was that upset her.” She hesitated. “There was a photograph of Mr. Napier and a lady at a garden party, and speculation that Mr. Napier might be thinking of remarrying. I’d heard her say she disliked the lady intensely. ‘Madame Condescension,’ she calls her. I don’t believe she’d care to work for Miss Napier if Mrs. Clairmont became the second Mrs. Napier.”

Afterward, Rutledge walked through the house, still searching for the nature of the missing woman. In the bedroom were a number of photographs: of the Napiers at parties or on horseback; of (according to Dorcas) the cousins in Gloucestershire, wearing country clothes and shy smiles; of a small child in long skirts, seated on a rocking horse or playing with a ball, the cousins hovering protectively in the background.

In the closets hung an array of clothes, all of excellent cut and beautiful fabrics, but without designer labels. Rutledge had the feeling, touching a silk sleeve here and a linen shoulder there, that they had all been sewn by the same seamstress. Miss Tarlton had had the taste to recognize the best but not the money to buy it. It was even possible that she had made most of the clothes herself. The tailoring and needlework showed considerable skill.

There was nothing in the house from India except for a small elephant, trunk uplifted, carved in sandalwood, and a photograph of a man, woman, and two children seated in a tropical garden. She hadn’t taken pride in her roots, she had shoved them out of sight. Margaret Tarlton had created a new self for London society, clever, sophisticated, elegant—and reaching for heights she couldn’t climb alone.

Rutledge thanked Dorcas and promised to send her word as soon as he could tell her what had become of her mistress.

As the door shut behind him, he found himself wondering if ambition—or accident—had brought Margaret Tarlton to her death.

Rutledge stopped briefly at his sister’s house before leaving London.

“You look tired,” Frances said, scanning his face on the threshold. “Working too hard, that’s what it is! Give up that wretched flat of yours and come back here, where you can be looked after properly.”

Here was the London house Frances had lived in since their mother’s death. It had been left to brother and sister jointly. Tall, gracious, handsomely furnished, situated in a quiet square of similar houses, it made a proper setting for Frances, whose dark unusual beauty was complemented by a clever brain and a formidable knowledge of people that she kept carefully hidden.

He smiled. “And have you fussing over me morning and night? No, I thank you!” He followed her into the comfortable blue-and-cream drawing room.

“Fiddle! I never fuss and you know it. Well, what brings you here in the rain, my company or Father’s whisky?” She crossed to an olivewood cabinet.

“His whisky. I came, as well, for information.” He took his accustomed chair, feeling the tiredness she’d already taken note of.

She made a face at him as she poured his neat but listened to what he was saying without interruption. She had always been a good listener, it was a trait their father had cultivated in her. “A woman who pays close attention flatters a man, my dear, and that’s the first step in ruling him!”

Even as he spoke, Rutledge found himself thinking that Frances had taken stillness and turned it into an asset, whereas in Aurore it was more than likely a shield against pain. Or a waiting … but for what?

“Matilda Clairmont is the widow of James Heddiston Clairmont,” she told him when he’d finished, steepling her slender fingers as she dredged her memory. “He was something to do with the Exchequer well before the war. Thoroughly nice man. She’s the most terrible woman you can imagine, sugary sweet to everyone, just the most helpful and ingratiating way with her I’ve ever come across. If she’s likely to be hanged for murder, I can name you fifty women in town who would rejoice! And send the most expensive wreaths they can lay hands on to the funeral afterward!”

He grinned. “What’s wrong with being sweet and helpful?”

Frances shook her head. “Darling, you aren’t another woman, or you’d know. Females like Matilda are deadly. The kind who can drip venom with such graciousness you’d never scotch the rumors she’s set about.” Mimicking, her normally very attractive contralto became light and very innocent. “’My dear, I’ve been told the most dreadful thing about someone, and I can’t bear to believe it could be true! If you swear not to repeat a word, I’ll confide in you—I haven’t been able to sleep a wink since I learned that—’” She returned to her natural voice. “And by the time she’s finished, reputations are in ruins.”

“Is there any likelihood that Thomas Napier might consider marrying Mrs. Clairmont? I’m told there was some hint of it in the newspapers in the spring.”

Her eyebrows rose in interested speculation. “Now that’s a rumor that Matilda herself probably started. I haven’t heard it from a reliable source. And if you want my honest opinion, I’d say he’s very likely got a mistress tucked away. He doesn’t strike me as a man on the loose. One can always tell, you know.”

“Could his mistress be his daughter’s secretary?”

She considered that. “She might be. But she isn’t. I only know Margaret Tarlton to speak to, but she’s not one to waste herself in a boudoir. She’s ambitious, Ian. There’s not a breath of scandal about her, which is the surest proof.”

“Who bought the house in Chelsea she lives in?”

“That’s an interesting question, isn’t it? The money, I’m told, came from a trust fund her father had set up. But somehow I doubt it. He was a very junior civil servant in Delhi, and her mother was a Saddler, from Norfolk. No money there either! Whoever her sponsor is, he’s been very careful.”

“Could it be Napier?” he asked a second time.

She tilted her head to one side, considering. The lamplight caught her dark blue eyes, and they sparkled like sapphires. “Ian, are you sure about this?”

“No. It’s supposition, based on bits of conjecture, not solid fact.”

“Thomas Napier is a very fine man. Highly regarded in London, and of course with a political following that makes a false step dangerous. For you—and for him. Why this sudden interest in the Napiers and Margaret?”

“I think she’s dead. Murdered, very likely, but whether by the man we have in custody in Dorset or by someone else, I’m not sure.”

“But that’s horrible! In Dorset, you say? I don’t understand!”

“It’s still only a theory, mind you. But it has to be carefully investigated. She came down to Charlbury to apply for the position of assistant to Simon Wyatt and apparently no one has seen her since then. That’s all we have to go on now. Wyatt’s opening a museum of artifacts his grandfather brought home from the East.”

“Yes, I’ve heard about that. He’s husband to the fascinating Aurore—everyone is dying to meet her! The woman he chucked a promising political career for. Have you seen her? Is she as intriguing as everyone expects?”

“She’s—very attractive. An intelligent woman—” He broke off uneasily. The last thing he wanted was Frances on the wrong scent. “Hardly the sensational sort. If that’s the only reason for attending the museum’s opening, I expect most people will be sadly disappointed. Will they come just for that, do you think?”

But Frances was busy pursuing another thought “That Chelsea house … Richard Wyatt, Simon’s father, was absolutely mortified when he discovered Simon was married—it was social suicide, a complete disregard for the proprieties. I remember the uproar at the time—and how quickly it ended. But the timing isn’t right, is it?” She tapped her fingers lightly on the arm of her chair, musing. “Still, do you suppose Napier went to Wyatt saying Margaret has found a house she wants—it will only be for a year or two, Elizabeth will marry Simon and I’ll be free to speak. Then the house will be sold. Lend her the money, to keep Elizabeth from suspecting anything, and I’ll see it’s repaid in good time. Then—when the news came about Aurore—Wyatt called in his favor, and Napier spread the story that Elizabeth had broken the engagement first. Of course that salvaged her pride but it also seemed to salvage Simon’s reputation. Elizabeth is well thought of in London, people felt he’d treated her very shabbily!” She saw her brother’s expression and stopped. “What is it? You feel all of that is completely far-fetched?”

“No, but none of it makes any sense. If it came out that either man’s name was associated with the Chelsea property, it would ruin Margaret Tarlton too. I don’t see Napier taking such a risk.” He was playing devil’s advocate.

“Well, there are several ways around that. Buying a house for someone leaves traces, I grant you. On the other hand, if that someone buys it for herself, who’s to say where the actual pounds came from? Enemies could subject Napier’s finances to the closest scutiny and find nothing—they’d never think of looking into Wyatt’s bank balance, would they? And here’s another small bit of the puzzle. Rumor said that Simon Wyatt’s inheritance wasn’t as grand as he’d expected. Bad investments during the war, or so the story goes. I’ve heard that Simon had to sell the Wyatts’ London house to pay for that museum of his! Well, that wouldn’t be surprising, if Napier wasn’t able to keep to his own plans and marry Margaret—after all, Elizabeth is still unwed, so the house couldn’t be sold. It might also explain why Margaret got fed up and decided to change jobs.”

“It’s an interesting possibility. Still, even if you’re right that Napier borrowed the money from Wyatt, I can’t see any direct connection from that to Margaret Tarlton’s murder. How would it benefit anyone?” He stood up, the whisky failing to penetrate the gloom he felt settling around him. “For that matter, so far I haven’t found a sound reason for anyone to want to kill her. Except mistaken identity.”

“No, but you will.” She smiled as she held out her hand for his empty glass. “If there is one.”

As she walked with him to the door, Rutledge said, “If you had to dispose of a suitcase that might connect you with a murder, where would you hide it?”

“A suitcase? I’d put it in the one place everyone expects to find luggage—a hotel or a railway station.”

“Would you? A hall porter or a stationmaster would come across it in the long run and try to locate the owner.”

“Well, then—the one place no one ever goes.”

It was a thought that followed him all the way back to Dorset

14

It was late when Rutledge pulled into the yard of the Swan in Singleton Magna, and he was tired. The rain had kept up most of the afternoon and into the evening, a steady, gray curtain that soaked everything.

He stepped out of the car into a puddle, invisible in the shadowed yard, and swore. His hat, tilted against the rain, dripped unpleasantly down his coat as he turned toward the front of the inn and into the rising wind. He could feel his shirt beginning to stick to his skin across his shoulders.

At the inn door he paused to shake his hat, then squelched across the damp rug put down to stop the influx of water into the lobby proper.

There was a message waiting for him. He opened it and read, “We’ve looked where we said we would, and had no luck.” It was signed “Bowles” in a dainty penmanship that belonged to the smiling woman behind the desk. She nodded as he glanced up. “He said you’d know what was meant.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Margaret Tarlton wasn’t visiting her cousins in Gloucestershire. Elizabeth Napier had been right.

As he reached the stairs, wondering if it was too late to order a pot of tea and something to eat, the front doors opened again and Elizabeth Napier herself swept in with a black umbrella cascading rain like a young waterfall. The hem of her skirt was darkly wet as well and her black shoes left tracks on the floor crossing his. Benson took the umbrella from her as soon as she reached the relative dryness indoors and then disappeared. The sound of the car moving off into the night came to Rutledge.

She saw him on the stairs and said, “My God, it’s worse than London—the roads turn to muddy ruts and everywhere you put your foot there’s a puddle! I looked for you earlier, hoping you might dine with me.” She regarded him for a moment and added, “Inspector Hildebrand told me he thought you’d gone to the Wyatt Arms instead.”

“No. I had business elsewhere.”

Coming up to him, she said, “You look tired! Have you eaten at all?” Taking his silence for no, she turned to the woman at the desk. “Is your cook still here? I’d like a private parlor, if you please, and something hot to eat Soup will do. With tea.” Without waiting for an answer, she said to Rutledge, “I’ll take my death of cold, even in August, if I don’t change these wet clothes. I’ll only need five minutes!” She swept past him in an aura of damp wool that matched his own.

But it was almost fifteen before she came down the stairs again and considered him approvingly. He had changed his shirt and his shoes, and wore a sweater in place of his coat With his hair still damp and unruly, she thought he looked much younger than he seemed before.

There was soup and fresh bread set out in one of the smaller rooms, with tea on a table by a fire someone had hastily laid. It took a little of the chill and an air of mustiness from the room, giving it a cozy, almost intimate feeling.

Rutledge, curious, wondered what her reasons were for creating this comfortable setting. Whatever they might be, he preferred her company to his own thoughts in the silent room upstairs.

Elizabeth served him and then herself, although from the way she ate he thought it was out of politeness instead of hunger. He felt suddenly ravenous.

The soup was mutton, with barley, carrots, potatoes, and what tasted like turnips. The aroma alone was sustaining. He wondered if Elizabeth had commandeered the staff’s first course.

She waited until he’d finished half his soup before launching into her real purpose for waylaying him.

“My father says, if you need more men, he’ll ask the Yard to send them.”

Wouldn’t Bowles be delighted with that request! he thought, but said only “Thank you. But no, they’d only be underfoot. If the searches that Hildebrand’s conducting haven’t brought us any answers by this time, additional men—and strangers at that—aren’t going to.” He helped himself to a second bowl of soup and cut more bread. There was butter in a covered dish as well, as he discovered.

She said, “They aren’t going to find the children. I know that. You know that. But Hildebrand insists he has to find them. I spoke with the rector here in Singleton Magna this afternoon. Mr. Drewes. I felt I ought to do something about a headstone. My father wanted to remove the body to London. He’s taking Margaret’s death very hard, I can tell you. Ten years—you grow fond of someone in ten years. It isn’t surprising, I was very close to her myself.”

He said nothing, letting her carry on in her own fashion.

“Mr. Drewes was rather confused, I must say. He’d been informed of course that the dead woman was Mrs. Mowbray, and I don’t think he was too happy at the thought of changing the church records. I told him to blame Inspector Hildebrand for being overhasty.” She tilted her head and smiled wryly. “He thinks I’m utterly charming, so I must have put it less bluntly than that Of course he never said as much to my face, I overheard him talking to that woman at the desk, after he’d very gallantly walked me back to the Swan, holding his umbrella over me and getting himself thoroughly wet. His wife will have had something to say about that!”

He found himself wondering if Mrs. Drewes would even hear the story. Elizabeth Napier had a seductive way of sitting, her back straight, her shoulders slightly at an angle. Her hair, brushed back from her face, was gleaming in the firelight, and he could smell the faint scent of heliotrope.

“My father says if you find yourself in any difficulty with the local people, you have only to tell him. He made it clear to your superintendant this afternoon that he expects you to handle this business about Margaret.”

He felt a surge of irritation at her meddling—or was it Napier’s?

“I don’t believe that will be necessary,” he said. “But thank you,” he added, knowing it was what she wanted him to say. To satisfy her own sense of self-importance or her father’s silent need to be involved in the matter?

“What do you think of Aurore Wyatt?” she went on. She was making conversation as an experienced hostess might at a dinner party, interspersing the salient points as if they were commonplace remarks. Now she was down to what interested her most She rose to refill his tea cup, indicating she was giving him an opportunity to respond. Out of politeness if nothing else.

“I don’t think about her,” he said. “My task is to locate the rest of the Mowbray family—if they exist—or find out what part in this business Margaret Tarlton played. Which reminds me. I’d like to know something about her—not as your secretary, but as a woman might see her.”

“Which is as adroit a way of changing the subject as any I’ve seen since my mother’s uncle used to make excuses for his forgetfulness!” she said lightly, turning aside his refusal. “I think Aurore has turned your head as easily as she has Simon’s. And my father’s! He likes her, you know. He says if the French army had been made up of soldiers half as brave as Aurore, we’d have won the war three years ago.”

Rutledge said, “They lost their best men early on. And the rest lost heart.”

“And we paid in British blood for their inadequate weapons and their inadequate generals. Not that we didn’t have a few incompetent generals of our own! Frankly I wasn’t prepared to like Aurore. But I do. She’s got a quality of stillness that I admire—I’ve never been able to stop my mind or my tongue from working as they pleased. I can quite understand why Simon fell in love with her. And out of love with me!”

“War does strange things to people,” he said, falling back on the old cliché and wondering if he could shift the conversation one last time to Margaret.

“It certainly changed Simon,” she said, a wistfulness in her voice. “I was frightened by what I saw in him today. A fragility. It wasn’t there before! He was a man who had never known personal defeat, never had any doubts, always had his eye well set on the mark. It was what I truly loved in him, you know. His certainty. Not quite arrogance, just an assurance that he knew his way and was confidently following it. It was a guarantee of safety, that assurance. I felt safe in his care.” Toying with her teaspoon, she stopped, then added, “I asked Aurore if she’d noticed it—after all, she hadn’t known Simon before the war, she might not have been aware of any change in him. But she said, ‘He’s terribly afraid.’” Elizabeth paused thoughtfully. “I can’t accept that. I’ve never known Simon to be afraid of anything. Or any one!”

But Rutledge knew what Aurore meant. It wasn’t a question of lacking courage. Surviving had frightened Simon. He hadn’t expected to live. He couldn’t comprehend how he’d deserved to live. And there was a feeling, deep down inside, that God would remember him one day and rectify the error.

“Simon isn’t afraid of anyone or anything. That’s not what his wife was trying to tell you. He’s alive and so many other good men are dead. There’s a sense of guilt in that. It breeds fear of a different kind.”

She stared at him. “Were you in the war? Do you feel that way?”

Oh, God, he thought, as Hamish echoed the question in the depths of his soul. Guilt was—it was the agony of spirit that made every day bleak. The fear that you might not live up to the cost of your survival—that you might not, somehow, justify the whim of fate that let Death miss you and take so many around you. The drive—and the brake—on all that you did and thought and felt, when the Armistice came and you were alive to see it. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. There was a biblical ring to that, straight out of the Old Testament, the sort of resounding phrase that thundered from the pulpit and terrified small boys even when they didn’t know what in God’s name was being said.

She saw his unwitting reaction and said quickly, “No, don’t answer that, I’d no right to ask it of you!”

“Then tell me instead about Margaret Tarlton.”

She sighed. “Margaret grew up in India. It made her—I don’t know quite how—seem much older than I was. As if all the things she’d seen and done and learned gave her a different sort of maturity from mine. And heaven knows, I’d grown up quickly myself, in a household where political intrigue was mother’s milk!”

“Did she come from a family with status? Money?”

“No, although from what I know of her father, he had aspirations, and he used to tell her as a child that England was her hope. If the family could just return to England, they’d be fine. If they could find the money for passage, they’d be fine. I don’t know what golden rainbows he saw for her, or why, but he made her hungry for a way of life she wasn’t going to have unless she married well. In the end, both her parents died of malaria, and she came without either of them. There was a younger sister too, who died near Suez of a fever several men brought back to the ship after going ashore. Margaret arrived in England alone, with no one to call family but distant cousins she’d never met She finished her education at the same school I was sent to; there was a family in Gloucester who provided a scholarship. They’d been missionaries or some such, and often did such things in the hope that it might make the recipient think of taking up the same burden. Well, they reckoned wrong with Margaret! She thought the heathen were quite happy with their own ways and would profit very little from being persuaded to try ours. Buddhism, she told me, made life a long series of chances to try to do better and see oneself more clearly. She didn’t care for Hinduism as much—she said it was as class-conscious as the Church of England. In my opinion, these beliefs—Hinduism and Buddhism—put far too much emphasis on the fate of the individual rather than on the good of mankind as a whole. It sustained a sort of—I don’t know—selfishness. I saw that from time to time in Margaret too, as if she’d been infected by it.”

“It seems she’d have made a perfect assistant for Simon. With her deep knowledge of the East.”

But Elizabeth Napier evaded that question very neatly. “I’m no judge. It wasn’t a subject she usually cared to speak of. Most people had no idea she’d lived anywhere but England.”

“She spoke of India to Captain Shaw.”

Elizabeth’s face went very still. “Captain Shaw heard it first from me,” she said. “He couldn’t understand why Margaret wasn’t in love with him. She wouldn’t tell him, and I felt he was owed an answer. I asked him not to bring it up with her, but I think he did anyway. I don’t know that Margaret had a capacity for love. If she did, it was buried under such layers of wanting that she’d nearly smothered it. Whatever drove my secretary, it was so fierce she was blind to anything else. I hope her death came quickly; she would have hated dying before she’d gotten what she was after. It was the ultimate failure, you see.”

The next morning, before he’d had time to order his breakfast or think about the day, Rutledge came face to face with Hildebrand.

“You ought to come see Mowbray,” he said. “He’s got something on his conscience, and damned if I can find out what it is. I’ve sent for Johnston, in the event it’s a confession. He might speak to you or his lawyer.”

Rutledge left with Hildebrand, crossing the street in time to see Johnston just passing though the station’s door.

Inside it was damp and musty from the rain, and this morning, although the clouds were moving northeast, the sun hadn’t shown its face.

They moved down the passage to the cell where Mowbray was kept, and Rutledge could feel Hamish growing tense, uneasy.

The heavy key turned in the lock, the door swung back, and the misery inside was almost palpable. The smell of unwashed flesh and hopelessness was enough to make Johnston stop in his tracks. “My God, haven’t you allowed him even the decency of soap and water!”

“We’ve brought him soap and water,” Hildebrand said curtly. “We can’t dip him into it. My constables are already complaining it’s not fit in here for beast or man. That’s why you’re here. To get to the bottom of this!”

Mowbray sat where Rutledge had last seen him, head in hands, shoulders slumped. The picture of dejection and despair. His hair seemed to have grown longer, wilder than the gray-streaked ten-day-old beard, and his clothes looked worn, shabby, and grimy.

Johnston stepped forward and said, “Mr. Mowbray. It’s Marcus Johnston. I represent you. Do you remember me?”

But there was no response, although Johnston gently tried pleading, cajoling, and coaxing for a good ten minutes to break through the man’s apathy.

Finally he gave up and moved back out into the passage, breathing as if he’d felt short of air.

Hildebrand turned to Rutledge. “See what you can do, man! I’ll take any help I can get!”

Rutledge could feel his own heart pounding, and Hamish was a live presence in his mind. But he forced himself with every shred of will he possessed to step into the cell. The constable on duty was a large, heavy man who seemed to fill the corner he stood in like some ancient pillar rooted there in the dimness. His face was tense, his eyes on Mowbray like a lifeline.

Hildebrand crowded in after Rutledge, and Johnston, seeming to feel his responsibility like a dead weight that couldn’t be shoved aside, pushed in after. It was Rutledge’s worse nightmare, and he was on the brink of panic when he finally made his voice work.

“Mowbray? Good God, man, what would Mary think of you, filthy and unshaven?” he asked, more harshly than he’d intended. “It’s a matter of pride!”

“Mary’s dead,” Mowbray mumbled at last, as if finally jarred into the present. “She can’t see me now, she can’t hear you.”

“What makes you so certain the dead are deaf and blind?”

“They say I killed her! Is it true?” He looked up, his own personal hell raging in the red-rimmed eyes. Rutledge wondered how much the man could understand, or if this apparent conversation with Mowbray was merely something the sane men in the room believed in.

Catching Johnston’s eye, Rutledge answered, “I don’t know. A woman’s body has been found. You’d been searching for your wife, you’d made public threats against her, whether you remember them or not. The woman seemed to match the photograph of your wife we found in your wallet. What else should we believe?”

“I remember seeing her by the train. I remember it! But if she died in London, how could that be? How could she end up in this place? I don’t even know where I am.” It was as if he’d forgotten that a man was supposed to have been with the woman. He looked vaguely around him, as though his eyes weren’t focusing on the cell walls, that they saw things visible only to him.

Like Hamish …

“What was she wearing when you saw her?”

“I saw her. The wind blew her hair like I remembered, and she had that smile when she looked at the children, that smile. …”

“How was she dressed?” Rutledge persisted. “Was she dressed in blue? Green?”

“She wore pink for me. She always did, when she wanted to make me happy. I took a photograph of her once in pink. I have it here—” He fumbled for his wallet and not finding it, gave up.

“And the children? How were they dressed?”

But Mowbray couldn’t face thinking about his children, and Rutledge nearly lost him again to the depths of apathy.

“There was a woman along the road. Walking by herself,” he went on quickly. Johnston made an abrupt movement, trying to stop Rutledge. Hildebrand opened his mouth to speak and was ignored. “She had on a pink dress, this woman. Pink with lavender and rose. But it wasn’t your wife. It was someone else. Did you see her? Did you speak to her?”

But Mowbray’s head was back in the cradle of his hands. He was weeping silently.

“God damn it!” Hildebrand exploded. “You’ll muddle the waters worse than they are—”

“I didn’t agree to this line of questioning!” Johnston began at the same instant.

“Hildebrand. Send the man in the corner there to bring that dress to us. I want to show it to Mowbray.”

“No, that’s out of order, I won’t—”

“I’ve got to consider the ramifications if he should identify it—we don’t know—” Johnston was blustering. “I can’t follow your reasoning!”

“I want the dress,” Rutledge said. “Send the man for it!”

“It’s on your head!” Hildebrand retorted. ”Do you hear me?”

But in the end he relented. And the heavyset constable, relief visible on his face, diffidently strode past them and was gone.

They stood in angry, volatile silence while he was away. Mowbray’s weeping had stopped, and he seemed to be asleep where he sat, his breathing very irregular and harsh, as if dreams haunted him. Then suddenly he started into full wakefulness, crying out in anguish, throwing out his hands as if to ward off what had come out of the depths of his mind.

“As ye’ll be doing one day!” Hamish reminded Rutledge, chilling his blood.

Mowbray turned and begged, “Where are my children? Have you seen my children? Oh, God, I don’t know where to look for them anymore.”

The constable returned at that instant, breaking the spell that had held the witnesses in stunned thrall. He carried a carefully wrapped bundle in his hands and looked first to Hildebrand before passing it on to Rutledge.

Rutledge opened it, concentrating on the string and the knot, on the folds that led inward, until he held a garment within the white sheets of tissue paper, dark against their paleness. After a moment, without arranging the dress or the paper, he went to kneel on the cold, hard floor in front of Mowbray.

“Will you look at this?” he asked gently, making no attempt to touch the man, who was staring blindly into nothingness again.

It was some while before he coaxed Mowbray into glancing down at the dress he held out like an offering to some vacant god.

Mowbray frowned as if he couldn’t make out what it was, much less recognize it. But Rutledge was very patient. He could feel his feet and knees beginning to ache from the awkward position, but he kept himself steady and quiet, offering no distraction.

After a time Mowbray reached out a work-hardened finger and touched the fabric of the dress as if testing to see if it was real. Lightly, not with interest so much as his inability to decide what it was. Then he saw that it had a shoulder, a sleeve—a collar—and knew.

“I thought the bombs killed her. I wasn’t there when it happened. I was in France, Captain Banner was telling me I had to go to London. That something had happened. I think they took me by car to the port. It was raining and dark and I couldn’t feel anything—not even in the service in the chapel—”

The dark bloodstains were visible now, black and stiff, a long soaked patch and the splatters, like black dots on the cloth with no attempt to place them becomingly, no sense of artistry, only marks of the intensity of the attack.

“They wouldn’t open the casket and let me see her. They said I shouldn’t. Was this what she was wearing, then? Is—oh, God, it must be her blood!” He recoiled, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets as if to keep them away from the horror. “I wanted to hold her again and they wouldn’t let me—they didn’t tell me there was so much blood!”

“Stop this,” Johnston cried, in nearly as much horror as Mowbray. “It’s inhumanly cruel, it’s—you’ve got to stop!”

He came forward, pulling at Rutledge’s shoulders, forcing him backward. Hildebrand, swearing, was trying to tell the constable to get back into that room, damn it! Their voices echoed in the cramped space, loud and frightened.

Rutledge threw off Johnston’s grip, kept his balance by a miracle of muscle and tendon, and protected the dress from the floor. Mowbray, looking in amazement from one to the other, as if startled into brief sanity, said quite clearly, “That’s not the pink she liked! Who gave that to her? Was it him? Was it the man with her?” He fingered it again, puzzled. “It’s the wrong color, I tell you—I knew when I saw her it was the wrong color!”

For an instant Rutledge thought Mowbray was going to lunge at his throat and choke him, but it was the dress the hands were reaching for, groping, clutching, then holding it up, peering at it in the dimness, trying to see, and turning toward the door, toward Hildebrand, who’d arrested him.

“It’s not hers, it’s a trick! She’s smaller than this, I know my own wife’s clothes! Why did the Hun want to kill her, she was never any harm to anybody, never an unkind word! I’ll make him pay, see if I don’t! I’ll kill every one of the bastards I can put hand to, I’ll grind him into the mud—pound until there’s no face left, and keep on pounding until you can’t tell brains from earth. I swear it to God, I do!”

Hildebrand managed to get the dress out of his grip without ripping it, and Johnston tried to push him back to the cot, while Rutledge stood there and watched the spate of words he’d released.

They hadn’t cleared Mowbray of murder. He may not have killed his wife, the dead woman might well be Margaret Tarlton, but he’d just described in passionate, intense detail the way the dead woman had died.

It took time to settle him down again, but when the adrenaline finally subsided and he had some small grip again on his surroundings, he sank back into the same posture they’d found him in, rocking himself with the pain and the uncertainty, as if he had no recollection of the dress, the men around him, or tensions so taut that Hamish was warning Rutledge to go—go!

But he stayed, walked back down the passage with Hildebrand and Johnston berating him in vicious terms, spilling out their own shock and horror in a tirade that left them both breathless and stumbling over each other’s words without noticing it.

Rutledge stopped at the door to the front room, and turned.

“It may have been unorthodox,” he said coldly. “It was most certainly necessary. There’s a possibility he saw Margaret Tarlton alive—and killed her thinking she was his wife.” You sacrifice the man for the woman—”Or even more likely, came across her dead body. Which may explain why he was so quick to believe the charges against him. Because Margaret Tarlton’s not in London, not in Gloucestershire, and not in Sherborne. You tell me where she is—and why we can’t find her. There’s a death certificate for Mrs. Mowbray, but it’s Miss Tarlton who’s missing! Can’t you understand what I’m telling you?”

“You’re not going to turn my case into a circus, I’ll have you recalled first—”

“How can I build any reasonable defense after what we just heard—”

“That’s beside the point,” Rutledge said. “I’m not interested in solving your problems, I’m interested in what’s at the bottom of this murder. I’m interested in saving that poor devil if he’s innocent and convicting him if he’s guilty. I want to find answers to the riddle of who’s lying in that grave in your churchyard—and why she’s there. I believe I’m on the right track. If you won’t help me prove I’m right, then for God’s sake, show me where I’m wrong.”

Johnston said, “You forced my client to all but convict himself out of his own mouth, before witnesses! I don’t see how that’s supposed to save him!”

“Did you listen at all to what he was saying? That the dress in Hildebrand’s hands isn’t Mrs. Mowbray’s color or size! But Elizabeth Napier swears it’s Margaret Tarlton’s color and size. If we were wrong about his victim, can’t you see that we may also be wrong about his part in her death?’

“Are you claiming that it’s my investigation that’s at fault? By God!”

Rutledge could feel frustration battling his need for air and space. He said, “No. We’re all in this muddle together, Hildebrand. Only, if we’re wrong at the end of it, it will be Mowbray who pays for any blunders we’ve made, not you or I.”

“And what do we do about those wretched children, then? Answer me that—pretend they never existed, and hope to hell we’re right?”

The door behind Rutledge opened suddenly, bringing in a sweep of air because the outer door was also standing wide.

A breathless sergeant, red-faced and muddy, said over Rutledge’s shoulder, “Inspector Hildebrand, sir? We’ve found a body, sir. I think—you’d best come and see it!”

15

Rutledge drove. Hildebrand sat in the seat beside him while Sergeant Wilkins occupied the space that Hamish considered his own.

That made Rutledge edgy. If he turned around, would Hamish be there in the shadows beside the sergeant? Or had the sergeant unwittingly exorcized his fellow passenger?

Hildebrand sensed his uneasiness and attacked. “Rather throws your theory into a cocked hat, doesn’t it?”

“I won’t know until we get there.”

Hildebrand laughed. “Yes, that’s it, slip off the hook. You’ve done bloody little else since you got here!” Then, remembering the presence of his sergeant, he added to the man, “Tell me again. Slowly this time!”

The sergeant repeated the story he had spilled out in Hildebrand’s office, the words tumbling over each other in frantic haste. His voice was calmer now, as he ordered his thoughts and remembered details. “We’d broadened the search, like you’d said, and it was that young chap, Fenton, who saw the earth seemed different in the one place, sunken like, as if something had been buried and the soil had settled in around it. Well, he began to dig a bit, thinking it might be somebody’s old dog or the like, and instead he comes up with a muddy edge of cloth. Appeared to be part of a blanket at first, then we could see the corner, with a bit of lining. A coat, we thought. You could see the color, a dark blue. Then the white of bone. We stopped there and I came for you straightaway. Not wanting to disturb anything before you’d seen it like it was.”

“Yes, well done! You’re sure it’s a coat, not a blanket? You’d wrap a dog in an old blanket!”

“It’s not made the same as a blanket. And there’s no fur, sir. You’d find fur too, if it was an animal. That lasts.”

“Yes, yes!” Hildebrand answered testily. “No sense of size—child, fully grown adult?” He was not a man who enjoyed suspense, he wanted his answers now, questions later. Sometimes in policework there were no answers at all. He’d been afraid this Mowbray investigation was heading in such a direction. But if they’d found either the children or that damned Tarlton woman, all to the good. He felt his spirits suddenly rising. If it was the Tarlton woman, it’d get Rutledge off his back, by God, and leave the Mowbray business out of it altogether!

“No, sir, as I said, we didn’t want to disturb the ground more than needful.”

A silence fell, and Rutledge found himself thinking, This is too far for Mowbray to have come. He’d have had to pass through two villages—someone would have seen him—and bone meant the body had been in the ground for some time. In the trenches, you learned how long it took a man to rot. …

He was still tired from the session with Mowbray, feeling the intensity of emotion, the rawness of the man’s fears—his own reaction to them.

“I hope to God the body has nothing to do with Mowbray!” he told himself.

“Or with Charlbury …,” Hamish added softly, startling him.

By the time they’d reached the makeshift grave, a small crowd had collected, standing just out of sight of the remains. They were mostly from Leigh Minster, according to the sergeant. The news hadn’t traveled to Stoke Newton or Charlbury yet.

Rutledge pulled off the road, braked the car, and Hildebrand was out almost before it had stopped moving, wanting to be the first on the scene. The sergeant followed. Rutledge let them go. It was their jurisdiction, after all.

The scrub ground had been pastureland at one time, allowed to go wild and overgrown now with weeds that reached to his knees, a few of them shrubby and tenacious, dragging at the fabric of his trousers like bony fingers. From where he was walking he could see a distant rooftop, a barn, he thought, very likely the last outpost of Leigh Minster. That was to his right, and on the left was a field, already cut. Ahead, a slight rise. He turned to look behind and saw that there was a burned-out chimney marking the ivy-grown foundations of a house across the road. A blackened stump, with rooks perched on the broken edges calling raucously.

If you’d looked for a place to bury a body, this was ideal for the purpose, invisible unless someone came along the road. Which brought to mind the next question: Who had known such a place was here? Certainly not Mowbray, a stranger in Dorset!

Rutledge walked through the knot of voyeurs who whispered behind their hands, trying to decide what was behind the sudden influx of policemen and what was attracting their attention just out of sight behind the weeds. The general opinion appeared to be the discovery of the missing children. He heard Mowbray’s name several times as he passed. Ahead, around the depression in the earth, stood six or seven men. He recognized the constable from Leigh Minster and nodded to him. Hildebrand and the sergeant were on their knees studying the cloth that emerged like a small sail from the rough hole that had been dug by the sergeant and his men. Blue, and wool, if he, Rutledge was any judge. But cheap wool, thin rather than thick.

It wasn’t until he reached the others that he saw what appeared to be a knob, dirty white, with bits of flesh still attached, like a half-chewed bone, and the clinging mud from recent rain.

It was human, not animal—

That was the first question Hildebrand asked, looking up. “Human, then?’

“Yes. I think it is.”

Hildebrand nodded. “All right, lads, let’s see a bit more, shall we?”

He straightened and moved aside while the sergeant handed the shovel to a thickset constable with sleeves already rolled above his elbows. He set to carefully, as if he’d done this sort of thing before. Scraping, wielding the shovel as a broom more often than the work it was designed to do, the man made slow progress. Hildebrand, tight-faced, impatience in every line, watched. But he didn’t hurry the constable, and after several glances at Hildebrand, the sergeant made no comment either. The clang of the shovel, the grunting of the constable, and the distant rooks broke the stillness. And then the rest of the bone came into view, A shred of stocking clung to the flesh, and at the end, an ankle in a black, heeled shoe.

A woman. The grave was not deep; at a guess no more than a foot of soil covered her body. She appeared to have been wrapped in the coat rather than wearing it.

It had been far too hot for a wool coat the day the woman in the farmer’s cornfield had died. This wasn’t Margaret Tarlton or Mrs. Mowbray. And it wasn’t the missing children.

Hildebrand sighed. Another damned question…

It took an hour or more to uncover the remains to the point where the men watching and waiting could look at her and form any opinion of age, class, or time in the ground.

The constable from Leigh Minster squatted to peer into the makeshift grave, studying the body. After a time he said, “Don’t recognize her! We’ve no one missing, I’d know if there was. Who is she then? Can anyone say?” He got to his feet, looked around at the men on either side.

It was difficult to judge what she had once looked like. The face was badly decomposed, with signs that it had been damaged before death. The dark hair was tangled and mixed with clots of damp earth. Hildebrand turned to the constable from Stoke Newton. “Anything?”

“No, sir. There was a woman went missing some while back. A maid. But I wouldn’t—” He looked more closely and then shook his head, “I don’t think this one’s been in the ground long enough. It’s hard to say, but I’d guess from the coat and shoes she’s not a servant girl on her day off. Dressed more like a woman gone to market. Still—early days yet!”

Listening, Rutledge thought, I was right. An able man, that one! Aloud he said, “The face. It hasn’t been beaten the way the Mowbray woman was?”

Hildebrand said, “Hard to say.” He squatted on his heels as the constable had done. “There’s injury here. Nose damaged, and that right cheekbone. But the teeth aren’t broken, nor the forehead. We can’t be sure a beating’s what killed her. Could be there’s a stab wound in the body. Or a bullet. Doctor will tell us that.” He got to his feet. “All right, lads, send that crowd away, and let’s get her back to Singleton Magna.” He paused and looked at Rutledge. “Anything you want to add?”

Rutledge shook his head.

“Then it’s my business, Dorset business, not part of what brought you here.” It was a warning. Stand clear.

Time enough to challenge that, Rutledge told himself, when and if there was a need to do it. Not now. Not in front of Hildebrand’s subordinates.

“So far I’ve seen nothing to show me that this involves the Yard,” he answered neutrally. Because he hadn’t. Still, the words were carefully chosen, not signifying capitulation, while reserving the right at any point to change his mind.

Hildebrand chose to regard them as a promise, not as a provisional agreement. More to the point, a promise before witnesses. He was pleased to be magnanimous and added, “Your suggestion that we search a wider area brought her to light. I’m grateful. Look, you’d better drive back to Singleton Magna. I’ll stay here until we’ve got her sorted out, and then I’ll send these men on about their search. Could be an hour or so before we bring her in.”

Rutledge, politely dismissed, left. But Hamish was already considering the connection between this body and the last one. As Rutledge put up the crank and got into the driver’s seat, Hamish said, “It’s no’ to do with Charlbury. No’ the same manner of death. And this woman was put in the ground, not left in a field for anyone to find.”

“Yes, that’s what interests me. Whoever killed her must have known that she wouldn’t be missed. It was safe to hide her body. No search—and there wasn’t one, was there?—and no notice taken of her absence from wherever she came from. But in the case of the body outside Singleton Magna, I’m beginning to think she wasn’t hidden because there was a scapegoat available—Mowbray—and because Margaret Tarlton would be missed. By a number of people, one of them with the power to raise heaven and earth looking for her.” He drove sedately through Stoke Newton, where small knots of villagers stood on the street gossiping, as if the news had finally reached them and speculation was rife. Once on the high road again he added, “But I can’t believe that was the reason our body’s face was battered. I think there was passion behind it, not an attempt to hide her identity. It served that purpose of course—but it wasn’t the intention.”

“Aye. Which means you’re one body short and yon Hildebrand is one body long! Better him than you!”

Rutledge shook his head. “I’d have been happier if that corpse had solved the puzzle of ours. If it meant those children were safe. And that the killer, whoever he or she was, had nothing to do with that poor bedeviled soul in the cell.” He couldn’t seem to get Mowbray out of his mind.

“You did na’ need yon second dead lassie to prove that. You know and I know where the answers are. And I do na’ think she’ll change what’s happened in Charlbury. You’ve got a murderer to find there, and the sooner the better! Unless, like Hildebrand, ye’re satisfied to put it on Mowbray’s head.”

He couldn’t. Even Hamish knew that it was impossible.

By the time Rutledge arrived at Charlbury—breakfastless and in a moody frame of mind—the news had flown before him. In the form of a man in the pub of the Wyatt Arms who had enjoyed regaling anyone who would listen with all the gruesome details.

From the sound of them, Rutledge knew, the man had not seen the body.

“Another killing,” he was telling a fresh recruit to his gathering audience, “just like the one in Singleton Magna. That man they’ve got in jail there—might not be the first time he’s gone looking for his missing wife. Left a trail of bodies over half of England if you want to know what I think. Sees a woman out on her own, walking along a road, like, or waiting for someone to come fetch her, and the first thing pops in his head is ‘There’s my wife, by God!’ And before Bob’s your uncle, he’s killed her!”

Rutledge, taking a late breakfast in the corner by the window, tried to shut out the voice. Looking out into the back garden, he realized there was a woman sitting there at one of the empty tables under the trees where the Women’s Institute had met. She was turned away from the windows, a glass of something in front of her. The soft green of her dress made her oddly invisible in the leafy shadows.

It was Aurore Wyatt.

He took his tea cup and went out to the garden.

She looked up as he said, “May I join you?”

He indicated the vacant chair at an angle to hers. The wind was softly stirring the leaves, giving a sense of tranquility to the garden compared to the uproar of voices in the bar.

Her eyes looked tired, as if sleep were something she knew very little about. “Is it business? I’ve heard them talking in there. There’s been another body found, I’m told.”

“No, not business. I missed my breakfast. Now I’ve been served bones with my toast. I came out here to escape.”

“Then, please, I’d be happy to have company more cheerful than my own thoughts!” She waited until he sat down. “How did you miss your breakfast? Tell me lies, please! Something humorous, and a little silly.”

Rutledge grinned, all at once feeling better. “There was a giraffe loose in the kitchen of the Swan in Singleton Magna. The police are still investigating. What are you drinking? I’ll fetch another.”

She smiled, the light coming back into her eyes. “Lemonade. It’s very good. Yes, I’d enjoy another glass.”

He brought it to her, along with a fresh pot of tea for himself, and sat down again. Aurore thanked him and said, “Tell me more about the giraffe.” She pronounced it “jirraffe.”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t stay long enough to find out its history. Sorry.”

She turned to study his face, watching the light and shadow of the leaves playing across it. “Then tell me about yourself. But nothing that is sad.”

Which put Jean and Hamish and the war and his last two cases off limits. He gave the question some thought. “My father followed the law, and my mother was a very gifted pianist. I grew up in a house full of music and law books. The fanciful and the practical.”

“And your parents, did they expect you to follow in their footsteps? Law or music? Or were they pleased you chose to become a policeman?”

“I think my father would have been happy to see me in the law. But it wasn’t my calling. In the end I think he realized it.”

“You are quite practical, I have seen that. And fanciful?” She tilted her head and he felt the intensity of her scrutiny this time. “You are very sensitive to what people are thinking. It is a gift. And a curse. To be able to put yourself in the minds of others. Is that how you come to find your murderers?”

The light mood had vanished. “Sometimes,” he said.

And Hamish stirred, knowing what lay behind his answer.

She said, “Elizabeth came again this morning. She told us she needed work to keep her from worrying too much about Margaret. And so she is helping Simon in the museum today. I couldn’t stand it any longer. This was the only place I could think of where it might be quiet. And then there was the affair of the bones, to spoil my escape.”

“They don’t have anything to do with you,” he said gently. “Or with Margaret Tarlton.”

“I am very glad to hear it,” she told him, but she didn’t sound glad.

The sun was warmer now and brighter. He could feel it on his back. It probably would turn out to be a fine day after all. “She won’t stay, once this is finished. Once we know what has happened to Margaret, there won’t be an excuse to keep her here.”

“But will it be finished?” Aurore asked. “I don’t think so. I used to believe—as a child, you understand!—that it was very sad when someone died suddenly. That is, without knowledge that it was going to happen until it was there, facing one. I used to think that for such people, it was a severe shock, they were not prepared to die, and so they became ghosts. Intent on coming back to the world to finish whatever it was they had left undone. I’m beginning to believe that Margaret is such a one—the stuff of ghosts.”

Rutledge said quietly, “She’s dead, Mrs. Wyatt. All that’s left is to find out who killed her. And if possible, why.”

Aurore sighed. “Yes. I know. But I prefer not to think about any of it. Only, with Elizabeth Napier invading my house and my life, I am not allowed to forget!”

She drained the last of her lemonade and set the glass aside. “I must go to the farm. Cows do not care about ghosts or dead bodies. They are practical creatures, they know when it is time to be milked and time to be let out to pasture, and time to be brought in at the end of the day. The man who took care of them while Simon was away at war is too old now to carry the burden of so much work. I persuade him when I can to sit in the sun and advise me.”

She hadn’t said anything before about someone else at the farm who might have seen her there, nursing a heifer with colic.

Rutledge asked, “I’d like to speak to him. He might have seen you on the day Margaret left.”

Aurore smiled. “I don’t think so. He was suffering from a rheum—a cold—and avoided me when he could. I think it was actually too much ale, and a sour stomach. In France we say it is the liver rebelling. At his age, any rebellion is a revolution.”

“He didn’t know you were at the farm? Surely if one of the livestock was ill …?”

“From the barn he doesn’t see where I leave my car. Sometimes I go and come without meeting him at all, if he is out in one of the fields.”

“But he might have heard the motorcar.”

“Well, perhaps. It is kind of you to look for someone who can tell you positively where I was—and was not.”

“It isn’t kindness, it’s necessity,” he said, more harshly than he’d meant. “I have witnesses who saw your motorcar in Charlbury that morning and who would swear to that. And to the presence of Margaret Tarlton in it with you.”

She shrugged. “I cannot invent witnesses for myself.” Despite the shrug, she wasn’t indifferent to her predicament. There was an intensity beneath her stillness that he could feel. A very real fear.

The tranquility here under the trees had vanished like smoke on the wind. After a few minutes she excused herself and was gone.

He sat where he was, remembering what Frances had said about the Wyatt finances and wondering if there was enough money in their coffers to pay for a first-class barrister to defend Aurore. Or would Simon abandon her, to preserve his precious museum?

Was that what kept Elizabeth Napier in Charlbury, meddling?

16

Rutledge went to find Constable Trait and finally ran him to earth just outside of Charlbury, where he was supervising a group of men poking through the heavy undergrowth along a small stream.

“Trait? I wish to speak to you,” Rutledge called, tramping through a field for the second time that morning.

The man looked up, then walked toward Rutledge.

“Something happened? Sir?” He added it as an afterthought, Rutledge’s face warning him that this was not the time for overt insubordination.

Rutledge drew him farther from the curious glances turned their way. Then he said, “You may have heard. There was a body found near Leigh Minster this morning. One of the seach teams came across it.”

“Aye, I heard. Nothing to do with us.” He jerked his head toward the men desultorily digging behind him, half an ear attuned to Trait and Rutledge.

“I understand there was a woman who worked for Mrs. Darley who has been missing for some time. And that she was known in Charlbury as well.”

“Betty Cooper, yes, sir. Although she didn’t work here, she was known here. But from what I hear, can’t be her, she’d have been in the ground longer.”

“You’re sure?”

“Oh, yes. Of course it’s the doctor has to decide, but from what I’d been told, it isn’t likely. And she was found over Leigh Minster way—not very likely to be ours, is she? Long way to carry a body, and where she was found isn’t a spot strangers would be likely to know was there. Stands to reason.”

There was an echo of Hildebrand’s voice in the last words.

“Always keep an open mind, Constable!”

“Aye, that I do. Sir.”

Rutledge nodded and walked off, unsatisfied. But Hildebrand was right: The second body was none of his business, and he was just as glad to leave it.

He went instead to the Wyatt house, walking into the museum unannounced. Elizabeth Napier turned from the shells she was arranging, a smock over her deep-blue dress and a small feather duster on the floor beside her. “Hello, Inspector!” she said in surprise. “What brings you here?”

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Wyatt. Is he in the museum or at home?”

“Through that door and to your right,” she answered, speculation in her eyes. “Has there—has there been any word of Margaret? You aren’t asking Simon to break something gently—”

“Nothing, I’m afraid.” He kept walking, making his way through the clutter of empty boxes that someone had begun to flatten and set in a pile, preparatory to putting them away. He went through the far door, found a short passage and a small, cluttered room serving as an office, at the end on the right.

Simon was busy with a ledger and what appeared to be a pile of bills. Every surface in the room seemed to be occupied by some half-finished task, waiting to be remembered. He sighed as Rutledge came in, as if the interruption had spoiled his train of thought. Seeing who it was, he leaned back in his chair and began to rub the back of his neck as if it ached. “What is it? Any news?”

“No. I wanted to speak to you. Privately.” Rutledge closed the door behind him and pulled out a chair that had been shoved into one corner. After removing the stack of books it held to the floor, he sat down.

“Look, can’t this wait?” Simon asked. “I’ve got to finish this lot, and it’s going to take most of the day! I’m not good at this sort of thing, and Aurore knows it. I can’t think why she isn’t here lending a hand. Thank God Elizabeth can make some sense of those displays. I need every bit of help I can find!”

“No, it can’t wait,” Rutledge said uncompromisingly. “Take your mind out of that ledger and listen to me!”

Simon reluctantly pushed it to one side, though whether he’d shut the figures out of his mind was another matter. “Very well. What’s the problem?”

“I’ve got a corpse on my hands, I think it must be the woman you were expecting to hire as an assistant, and I have witnesses who tell me that your wife drove Margaret Tarlton back to the railway station. If they’re speaking the truth, it means that Aurore Wyatt was probably the last person to see her alive.”

He frowned. “I don’t see what the problem is. Aurore isn’t a murderess!”

Simon Wyatt had also said his wife wasn’t a liar. Rutledge found himself wondering if Simon was shallow—or under the stress of his work wasn’t able to absorb anything that wasn’t connected directly to his museum. “What do you know about your wife—her background, her family?”

“Good God, what do they have to do with it!”

“Her parents,” Rutledge said patiently, ignoring Hamish’s irritated remarks about the constable and now this man.

“They’re both dead—mother died some years before the war,” he said in some exasperation. “Father killed when the Germans came through—shot, trying to stop the looting of his house and farm. Aurore herself barely escaped—she reached a nunnery just over the Belgian border and was taken in. She was ill for weeks, exhaustion and a fever. Then she tried to make her way south, hoping to stay with a cousin in Provence. I found her, ill again and terrified, in a group of refugees that had come into our sector during the night, and got shot at for their pains. Mercifully nobody was killed, but it was a near thing, scared the very devil out of my men, I can tell you! Word had already been passed that there was movement along the German lines, and then out of the dark!… I wouldn’t put it past the Hun to think this was a great joke!”

Rutledge understood. You shot at anything that came at you out of the dark without password or provenance.

“What did you do with them?”

“Sent them to the rear, told somebody to take a look at them. That was that. It wasn’t until later that I saw Aurore again and hardly recognized her, she’d been so thin, half starved and half out of her mind when she reached us. She had some medical skills, and the doctors must have put her to work.”

It was a very superficial account, without emotion, without any sign that the woman he was speaking about was his wife.

“Tell me about your political career,” Rutledge asked, trying to find the measure of the man. “I’m told it was very promising.”

And Simon changed. There was suddenly a haggardness in his face, a tenseness in the shoulders hunched over the desk. “Why?” Abrupt. Rough. As if Rutledge had turned over a stone and found something unspeakable beneath. Clearly it wasn’t a topic he cared to pursue. “It isn’t pertinent to murder, is it?”

“Margaret Tarlton was your houseguest for two days. You spoke to her, worked with her. That makes you a suspect, as far as I’m concerned.”

For a time Rutledge was sure the man wasn’t going to answer at all. Finally Simon said, “Did you know, my father and I sat down and planned my war? Churchill has gotten a good deal of mileage out of his! Prisoner of the Boers. Grand escape across a river. People who’ve been out to South Africa tell me his ‘river’ was hardly more than a swale, but that’s neither here nor there. Good opportunity for a politically minded young man—going to war. I was supposed to write letters home that my father could circulate among his friends and colleagues. Take photographs, keep a journal. Something I could publish privately as soon as the war was finished. We’d even given it a name, that book: Journey into Oblivion. And do you know, it turned out to be very apt, that title. I went into oblivion, and I didn’t come back!”

The pain in the eyes of the man across the desk from Rutledge told him much. It was the same unbearable pain he’d read in Mowbray’s. Something so deep, so infinitely dark that it would destroy.

Rutledge had seen that look in his own face, bearded and strained, thin and half mad, in a mirror in hospital. A stranger, he’d thought, bewildered, has come back in my place!

Simon stared at Rutledge, not seeing him, not seeing the reflection of emotion that was there, naked and unguarded, if he’d had the wit to look. He was too busy trying to hold himself together, trying to force the devils back inside the small, crowded box where they’d been locked.

Slamming his fist on the desk, Simon said, “Damn you! Damn you!”

His eyes closed, and there was a white grimness about his mouth, as if he felt sick and was fighting hard against the tide of nausea that threatened to overwhelm an iron control.

The silence in the room was so deep that Rutledge could hear a clock striking somewhere in the house, a slow, deep tolling of the hour.

And then, without warning, the door opened and Elizabeth Napier said, “Dear God!”

She went protectively to Simon, her hands on his shoulders, the fingers kneading with her anger.

“Leave him alone! Do you hear me!” she cried, lashing out at Rutledge. “I won’t have it!”

As if—he thought, his own iron will struggling desperately to reassert control, Hamish pounding in his mind like hammer on anvil—as if, small as she was, she could stand in the way of the majesty of the law. “We were discussing the war—” he began in his own defense.

“The war’s over,” she told him. “It’s finished It killed, it maimed, and it destroyed—and yet none of you will let it go! You carry it around with you like sackcloth and ashes, you live with it in your very bones by day and your dreams by night, and treat it like some Holy Grail you brought back with you! Well, it isn’t; it’s a legacy of despair and hate and grievous hurt, and I won’t let it touch me anymore, do you hear me! I won’t let it!”

Rutledge looked at Simon. His eyes were still closed, his breathing ragged and harsh.

But Simon said, “It’s all right, Elizabeth. He didn’t know—he didn’t mean to stir it up. I’m sorry—”

But you did! Elizabeth’s eyes accused Rutledge. And it was just as terrible for you as it was for Simon, wasn’t it?”Go away!” she said aloud. “Go away. Before you both find yourselves on the other side of your nightmares!”

And Rutledge got to his feet, knowing he had to leave, that Simon was past questioning and his own frail peace was shattered as well.

“Simon, I’m back—” It was Aurore who had come in, blocking his escape. She looked at her husband, at Elizabeth fiercely protecting him, her hands dug into the white fabric of his shirt, his eyes closed, their bodies touching, her side against his arm, his head resting on her wrist, an intimacy between them that spoke of comfort offered and comfort accepted on a level beyond friendship. She turned to Rutledge, his face grim and his eyes haunted, staring at her as if he too saw her as an outsider.

Without a word she whirled and went out again, with such a deep grief in her movements that Rutledge could feel her pain and his own inability to assuage it

She was gone, and he still stood where he was, rooted. Until Elizabeth’s voice reached him.

“Go to her,” she said urgently. “Make her understand! I’ll see to Simon.”

“No. It’s better if you go,” Rutledge said. “She won’t trust me.”

But he found himself walking the three paces between himself and the door, and heard Elizabeth saying, “She needs comfort, and she won’t take it from a woman! She’s too strong to let me see her cry!”

And he thought that was true.

He found Aurore up by the churchyard, deep into the dark, shadowed clearing under the trees, her hand lifted to one drooping branch, her head against her upper arm.

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

She said huskily, “Go away. No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mrs. Wyatt—Aurore—”

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

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

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

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

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

But he thought perhaps she hadn’t stopped crying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can you put a name to the teeth?”

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

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

“What killed her, then?”

“We don’t have a murder weapon.”

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

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

He thanked her and was already hurrying toward his motorcar.

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

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

The farm …

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

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

17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No. I’m from Scotland Yard.”

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

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

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

“How long have you worked here?”

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

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

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

“And where were you?”

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

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

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

“Could she see you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You didn’t offer her lunch?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Does anyone else use the other rooms?”

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

“It’s a large house for one man.”

“The Wyatts always had a tenant and his family living here. I come over daily from Charlbury then. Mr. Oliphant, he went to New Zealand in 1913, and that was the end to that. The other dairymen went off to fight the Hun. Mrs. Wyatt says there’s no money to hire ’em back now, nor to fix the barn roof! I moved to the house after my wife died, just to keep an eye on the place. Mrs. Wyatt, she keeps some things in one of the upstairs rooms. Towels and coveralls.”

Rutledge had run out of questions. And yet he had a strong feeling that because he’d been partly distracted, he had overlooked something. What?

Jimson watched him, waiting.

The man wasn’t lying, Rutledge was fairly certain of that. Jimson was telling the truth as he saw it. But police work had taught Rutledge that a witness could reply to questions exactly, even honestly—and still manage to avoid the whole truth.

And suddenly the answer was there, in the man’s very watchfulness.

Jimson hadn’t heard the sound of Rutledge’s engine—and he wouldn’t have heard the Wyatt car leave—or return. Speak to him directly, while he stared at your face, and he could follow a conversation well enough to give reasonable answers. It took concentration and to some extent a painfully learned ability to read lips. This most certainly explained the tension in him.

The man wasn’t lying. He was going deaf. He had told Rutledge what his eyes had seen, but there was no way for him to know what sounds he might or might not have missed. Anyone could have come—or gone—from here. And at any time. Jimson could only say with any certainty when Aurore had come.

As an alibi for Aurore Wyatt, he was useless.

Yet she must have known… so why had she left her own safety to hang on such a fragile thread?

Rutledge asked if he might look through the house or the barn, but Jimson shook his head. “Not without permission,” he said staunchly. “I don’t have authority to let you go poking about in Mr. Wyatt’s property. He might not like it, policeman or no.”

The last thing Rutledge wanted to do was ask Aurore for permission.

Neither Hildebrand nor Bowles would authorize a search warrant. Both of them would be far more likely to read him a lecture on the exact nature of his responsibility in this inquiry.

If the suitcase was here—the hat—even the murder weapon—they would have to remain here until he had enough evidence to show cause to search.

And yet as he stood in the drive, he had a feeling that this farm had played a role in Margaret Tarlton’s death. How or why, he wasn’t sure. Alibi—or evidence? For—or against Aurore Wyatt?

Instinct, light as the breeze that ruffled the leaves of the trees and toyed with the grass at his feet, made him say to Jimson, “No matter. It was purely curiosity, not police business. This was quite a prosperous dairy in its day.”

“Aye, it was,” Jimson said, sadness in his voice as he looked around him. “The best dairy in the county, to my way of thinking. Now we’ve not got thirty cows in milk, and I see to all of them, with Mrs. Wyatt’s help. I was that proud to work here, man and boy. That’s the trouble with living too long. In my time I’ve seen more change than I liked. Mrs. Wyatt, now, she says change is good, but I don’t know. I’ll be dead and in the ground before this place turns around. There’s no money, and no hope here. If I was her, I’d go back to France tomorrow and leave it to rot, instead of watching it fall slowly to pieces.”

“She has a husband. She can’t leave.”

“Simon Wyatt’s not the man his father was. I never saw such a difference in all my life as when he came home from the war. What’s he want that museum for? Dead, heathenish things!” He shook his head. “Mrs. Daulton, now, she says it might be better for him than standing for Parliament. Choices are a good thing, she says. There weren’t no choices when I was a lad, you did what your pa did, you counted yourself lucky to find a good woman to marry, and you raised your children to be decent, God-fearing Englishmen. And the dead didn’t wander about in the night, talking to fence posts and trees, looking for their soul!”

Startled, Rutledge said, “Who wanders about in the night?” The first name that came to mind was Henry Daulton. He wasn’t sure why, except that Henry must find his mother’s steadfast belief in his full recovery overwhelming at times.

“Ghosts!” Jimson said direly, gesturing around him, and turned to walk back to the barn. Rutledge called to him and then swore, remembering that the caretaker was deaf.

But no amount of persuasion could pry another word out of the old man.

18

The police spent all day trying to find a connection between the corpse that had been discovered in the field near Leigh Minster and any of the communities ringing the location—Leigh Minster itself, Stoke Newton, Singleton Magna, or Charlbury.

But just as the constables had reported, there were no missing women. And no newly hired domestics who had failed to appear at the time set for them to begin work. No cousins, daughters, wives, sisters-in-law, or other female relatives unaccounted for. She was clearly a stranger, then. Except that there were seldom any sound reasons for killing strangers.

Hildebrand marked her down as an unsolved murder and went back to looking for the Mowbray children. He drove the teams of searchers with a determination that was both praiseworthy and single-minded.

Dr. Fairfield, a small man of few words, established the time of death at approximately three to four months earlier.

“She couldn’t have been in the ground longer,” he told Rutledge later, stripping off his white coat and hanging it on a hook behind the door of the bare room where he kept the dead. “And her clothing supports the timing. This is August. I daresay she died in late April, early May. Cool enough weather to have her coat with her. Cause of death? I’d say she was choked but not killed by strangulation. It was the beating about the head that finished the job. I found a fracture just above the temple, small but sufficient. I don’t think she was sexually molested. There’s no indication of it, from what I can see now, and her clothing is oddly tidy, as if whoever buried her had laid her out carefully on the coat.”

“Was it the same person, do you think, who killed the Mowbray woman? Or Margaret Tarlton, as she may be?”

The doctor frowned, rubbing his chin. “That’s harder to say. This one’s skin is gone, you don’t see the damage as readily. But yes, it might have been the same killer. Might, mind you! I’m not an authority on murder. Still, both women appear to have been attacked by someone who clearly intended to kill them but, in the end, didn’t know how to finish the job quickly or properly. When it’s anger that runs amok to the point of destructive force, there’s generally more damage—to the head, the throat, the shoulders. Then the blows land randomly, you see, driven by rage and intended to inflict as much hurt—and therefore as much satisfaction—as possible. Here the blows were confined to the head, mainly the face, as if to conceal identity as well as to kill.” He looked up at the taller man before him. “Does that seem odd to you? What I’m saying?”

“Not to a policeman. No.”

The doctor sighed. “Of course murder is seldom premeditated, is it? That is, with planning and preparation. And the fact is, the human being isn’t easy to murder, without the proper tools. A knife. A firearm. A garrote. Even a hammer will do. Whoever killed these two women—whether it was the same person or two different people—it was emotion that drove him or her in the beginning. And then necessity took over. He had to silence the victim, you see. And he had a quite nasty job there. If I were you, having to search for the right person, I’d find someone who”—he paused, seeking the right words—”who was determined to go on, however gruesome the task, until the woman’s pulse stopped.”

“That can run either direction—a secret to be kept, or merely the realization that a live victim can point a finger at his attacker,” Rutledge responded, thinking about it.

“Hmmm. Secrets take many forms, don’t they? From the sins of the flesh to the sins of the soul.” The doctor smiled, but without humor or lightness. “This one is terrible enough that the killer was willing to suffer horror himself—herself—in order to keep it safe. Until you’ve battered someone to death, Inspector, you can’t conceive of how much blood and flesh and bone are spattered about. Only a madman can relish that, or someone so deranged by emotion that the flecks are not even registered, until it’s over. Or someone grimly carrying on to the bitter end.” He turned out the light in the hall and led the way to the side door of his surgery. “Does what I’ve told you help at all?”

“Yes,” Rutledge said tiredly. “Unfortunately, I think it does.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” the doctor said, taking up his own coat and putting it on. “I’m late at a dinner party, and my wife won’t be happy about that. Hildebrand didn’t find my information useful. He’s a good man, Inspector, but he makes up his mind to suit the facts. If I took the same approach in medicine, I’d have filled the churchyard with my mistakes!”

Rutledge walked back to the Swan, thinking about what the doctor had said. Hamish, in the back of his mind, was reminding him that blindness could be worse than deafness. Rutledge ignored him as long as he could and then said, “It isn’t blindness. Human nature enters into it. I can’t see Aurore Wyatt beating anyone to death. You said as much yourself once.”

“Women,” Hamish said, “will kill to protect their bairns—and their man. Margaret Tarlton was Simon Wyatt’s past, returned to haunt him. She did na’ want that. And the woman wasn’t going away, she was staying.”

“Jealousy? No, I don’t see Aurore Wyatt being jealous of Margaret or anyone else.” Yet she was afraid of Elizabeth Napier.

“Who’s spoken of jealousy?” Hamish demanded.

Rutledge stopped, watching a carriage coming up the hill toward the inn. The streets were deserted, it was just the dinner hour. He stood still and could hear laughter coming from the house on his left, and people’s voices. The carriage rattled past and disappeared among the trees at the top of the hill. A cat stepped out of the inn’s yard, ears twitching, catching the distant sound of a dog’s raucous bark. Something fluttered overhead—a bat, he thought.

But deeper was another thought. Why had Simon Wyatt turned away from his future in Parliament? What was the real reason?

A foreign wife might not be an asset—but with the proper backing, even that might be overcome. If Elizabeth Napier’s father had turned against Wyatt for rejecting his daughter and putting in her place a French nobody, he was—by all accounts—an astute enough politician to know that you didn’t have to like the men you backed, you only needed to be sure of their support in the future. The Wyatt name had been magic in this part of Dorset for more than one generation. A safe seat for this constituency.

Simon and Aurore blamed his decision on the war. But what if there was something more than war weariness—or a devotion to his other grandfather—that made a very able and personable man choose seclusion over a brilliant career? A small museum without the resources to grow, hidden away in the Dorset countryside where visitors were few, where the exhibits would surely have a very narrow appeal, however interesting they were in their own right … It didn’t quite add up.

“It’s no’ what I was saying—” Hamish began.

But Rutledge cut him short. His eyes moved across to the police station where Mowbray still sat in his gloomy cell, watched day and night. “It’s a beginning, isn’t it?” he responded. “That’s all that matters!”

The station door opened and Hildebrand came out, then paused as he saw Rutledge looking toward him. An instant’s hesitation, and he walked on, as if the man on the other side of the street didn’t exist.

“You’ve spoiled his investigation,” Hamish pointed out. “He will na’ thank you for it.”

“Mowbray might,” Rutledge said. “Nobody else seems to care about him.”

After eating his dinner without being aware of what was on his plate or his fork, Rutledge went out to his car and turned it toward Charlbury.

It was late in the evening to be calling on police business, but often the unexpected worked more successfully than the routine.

The road was dark, nearly empty, except for a dog that trotted into the undergrowth as the car’s headlamps flicked over the crest of the rise. But Charlbury was brighter, and the Wyatt house looked as if it was expecting the King. There were lamps lit in most of the rooms, and in the museum wing. He left his car up by the church and walked back, making his way to the wing on foot. He thought: Curious … so much light and no sounds of voices, of people shouting or talking or laughing.

The museum was empty. The masks leered at him in the brightness, mouths agape or dark slashes, eyes black with speculation or alarm, and the weapons, doubled with their own shadows, gave the rooms an air of tension. He walked through the three main areas, into the small, empty office, and then into the room across from it, hardly more than a large broom closet. He had never been there before. It held a bed with only a blanket, military in its folds, a chair, and a wooden table of indeterminate age, rescued from the attics or a jumble sale. A cupboard held a pair of shoes and some underwear, a clean shirt and a folded, freshly pressed pair of trousers.

Rutledge stood there in silence, not needing Hamish’s comments to tell him that this was where Simon Wyatt spent most of his nights.

A gasp from the doorway made him spin around.

Aurore was there, grasping the frame with fingers that were white. “For a moment I thought—” She stopped. “Were you looking for Simon?” Her voice had steadied, sounded nearly normal. “Couldn’t you have come to the door and knocked, as everyone else does?”

“—that I was Simon?” he asked, finishing her first, unguarded reaction. “I didn’t come to the door because I saw the lights here and thought he was in this wing. I preferred not to disturb the household, calling so late.”

“Simon … is out,” she said.

But her eyes were showing the strain of worry, and he said, “What’s wrong?” His words crossing hers.

She let the door frame go, then shrugged, that French expression of I wash my hands. … “He doesn’t sleep well. At night. He hasn’t since the war. He rests here sometimes, when he doesn’t want to disturb me, moving about the house in the dark. Or if he’s very tired, sometimes in the afternoon. That’s why the bed is here. It doesn’t signify.”

It was an apology for her husband. Perhaps for the state of her marriage. And an attempt to distract him. But the tension in her was palpable.

He read her eyes, not her words. “What’s wrong?” he repeated.

“You misunderstand, there is nothing to worry you.” She looked away.

He stood there, watching her. In the end, she turned her face back to him and said, “It isn’t a police matter! Simon has gone somewhere. I was worried when he didn’t come to dinner. I waited, and finally I went to find him. But he isn’t in the house. Or in the grounds. I’ve looked. Elizabeth Napier took it upon herself to walk up to the church and to the Wyatt Arms. He won’t be there, but it gave her something to do.”

And took her out of my way…. The thought if not the words hovered between them.

“How long has he been gone? Did he take the car or one of the carriages?”

“Since teatime. I think. The motorcar is still here, and the carriage.”

“Then he must be in the village—at the Arms or at the rectory, perhaps.”

After a moment she said, “It—this isn’t the first time he has gone without telling me. But not this long, before. That’s the only reason I worry.”

She stared at him, her eyes begging but saying nothing. Refusing to betray her husband.

The dead didn’t wander about in the night, talking to fence posts and trees, looking for their soul. Jimson’s words echoed darkly in his mind.

“Can I help? Mrs. Wyatt?”

Hamish was telling him that it was not his affair, it was not police business. But Rutledge had an intense feeling that it might be. Men like Simon Wyatt didn’t walk out their door at teatime and disappear.

“You can help by returning to Singleton Magna and calling again in the morning. Everything will be well in the morning, I promise you!”

“Will it? Let me help you find him. Discreetly. People are used to a policeman prowling about. God knows, we’ve searched for days in every conceivable place for those children! Where shall I begin?”

“He hasn’t—” She stopped, then after a moment said, “Before this, he was always in the house or the gardens.” Yet her voice seemed hollow, even to her own ears. “Always.”

Again he read her eyes, ignoring her words. “But you aren’t sure of that, are you? If he often slept here, in this bed, or worked long hours in this wing, how could you be sure? Where he went—or when—or for how long! During the day or in the night.”

Aurore bit her lip. “The house—with Elizabeth Napier here, moving between the house and the museum, he must feel—I don’t know. Caught”

“But he was proposing to hire an assistant. She would have been in the house and the museum day after day.”

She said angrily, “I don’t know! Explain it however you will!”

“Do you want to come with me?”

Aurore shook her head. “No. I’ll stay. In the event …” She let the sentence run into silence again. In the event he returns of his own accord… and needs me.

He walked past her, near enough to smell the fragrance of her hair and perfume. Lily of the valley … But she didn’t turn, she didn’t say anything more.

At first he quartered Charlbury, down toward the inn, up toward the church. He saw Elizabeth Napier speaking to someone by the church door and thought it might be Joanna Daulton. Nothing.

He went on to the motorcar and began to drive toward the farm, thinking that it was a logical place for Wyatt to escape to if he wanted peace from the two women who drew him first this way and then that.

Jimson had seen him in the night—it has happened before. Rutledge didn’t need Hamish to tell him. He had already gotten there on his own.

For some reason the old man must have thought the ghosts of the Wyatts were walking their farmland again, unable to rest in peace. Peering out a window in the night, seeing the shadowy figure crossing the moonlit yard, he wouldn’t have questioned it, he would have accepted its right to be there.

The farmhouse was dark, save for a single light—a lamp—in a back room that must mark Jimson’s bedchamber. The barn too was empty save for the animals that belonged there. No one challenged Rutledge as he moved about. And the only sounds were those that belonged to the night, not to restless spirits.

Turning the other way, back toward Charlbury, he drove through the town and slowed, peering beyond his lights into the fields, trying to pin any tall, manlike shadow against the sky. He’d been good at that, in the war, as Hamish reminded him. Spotting scouts or the first wave of a silent attack coming across no-man’s-land. Swift vision sometimes made the difference in surprise….

He was close to where he’d seen the dog earlier when he realized that a tree in the middle distance had what appeared to be a double trunk. Rutledge pulled off the road and left the car, crossing the fields with swift, long strides. The figure didn’t move. It wasn’t leaning against a tree, it was simply standing beside it, as if in conversation with it Talking to trees…

“He’s mad, no better than you are,” Hamish was saying tensely.

Rutledge ignored the voice. As he slowed his pace and moved silently nearer, the figure didn’t look up or show any sign of awareness. It simply stood, a black line against the horizon, as if put there by a sculptor’s hand.

Rutledge was now within five yards. He said, “Wyatt?”

Nothing. No response at all.

He came within reach, he could have put out a hand and touched the still, straight shoulder. It was uncanny. The silence went on, unbroken except for the sound of their breathing.

Unnerving. He’d spent too many nights on the Front, listening to the sound of breathing as men waited. But what was this one waiting for?

“Wyatt?” He spoke gently, firmly, trying not to startle the other man.

Nothing. Except Hamish, growling a warning.

Undecided, he stood there, observing, peering into the darkness at the expressionless face, the rigidity of the body. Simon Wyatt was oblivious to his surroundings. Wherever he was in spirit, he neither heard nor saw anything.

After a time Rutledge touched the man’s arm, lightly, undemandingly, no more than one man would touch another in the way of acknowledgment, comfort.

Simon stirred.

Rutledge said quietly, without fuss, “It’s Inspector Rutledge. From Singleton Magna. Can I give you a lift to Charlbury? I’ve got my car. Over there.”

The sentences were short, the tone of voice neutral.

Simon turned to look at him, but even in the starlight Rutledge was sure the blank eyes were not actually seeing him. Wherever Simon was, it was a very long distance from here.

Then he said, unexpectedly, the strain intense in his voice, as if his throat were tight with fear or some inner conflict. “Major? They aren’t firing tonight.”

Rutledge felt a jolt of shock but kept his voice level. “No. It’s over for tonight. It’s time to go back.”

Simon said only, “Yes.” And when Rutledge turned tentatively, to walk back the way he’d come, Simon silently fell into step behind him.

When they reached the car, Simon spoke again, this time in a perfectly natural, if rather tired, voice. “Nice of you to give me a lift back, Rutledge.” As though he’d gone walking after his dinner and nothing else had happened.

“My pleasure,” Rutledge answered, and turned the crank.

They were halfway to Charlbury when Simon added, “I wonder what time it is.” When Rutledge told him, he said, surprised, “That late? I must have walked farther than I realized. Aurore will be worried.”

“Walk often in the evening, do you?” Rutledge said, as if making conversation and not caring whether the question was answered or not.

“No. There’s so much to do, readying the museum. No time for country pleasures. As it is I’m behind schedule. The invitations have already gone out, I can’t change the date now. Elizabeth and Aurore between them are already handling the arrangements for the catering.”

It was as if Simon Wyatt had no memory of where he’d been—or why.

19

Aurore, watching for them from the windows of the museum, came out to greet them on the front walk. Her manner was interesting. She neither touched her husband nor asked him, as a worried, frightened wife might do, what he’d been thinking of, where he’d been. Only her eyes mirrored her distress.

She said, “You must be tired.”

“I am, rather. I think I’ll turn in, if you don’t mind.” He nodded to Rutledge.

She shot a warning glance at Rutledge and said, “Yes, do that.” Then stood silently beside the man from London as her husband walked toward the house and went inside alone. Rutledge could hear her unsteady breathing.

“Where did you find him?” she asked in a low voice. “You’ve been gone for nearly an hour!”

“I went to the farm but I don’t think he’d been there. There were no lights in the house, except in the room the caretaker uses. And the barn was empty as well. I decided I should go in the other direction, out the Singleton Magna road. I found him in a field beyond the town. Standing there like a pillar of salt. He neither saw nor heard me coming, and he didn’t know who I was, until we started back to Charlbury.” He stopped, not wanting to tell her about their brief exchange in the field. And Simon hadn’t been talking to a tree—he had simply been standing, as far as Rutledge could see, in its shelter.

She nodded. “That’s how it happens. He seems completely lost to his surroundings. It isn’t wine, it isn’t a drug. By this time surely I’d know if it was those things!”

Rutledge said only, “No. He hadn’t been drinking, and his eyes were blank, but the pupils were normal. As far as I could tell he wasn’t sleepwalking either.” He paused, then added, “Mrs. Wyatt. That man is under intense stress. Do you see that? Have you spoken to a physician?”

She smiled wryly. “What can I say to a man of medicine? How could I persuade Simon to believe he needed to see such a one? If I say he suddenly loses awareness of where he is and what is happening around him, they will say oh, he is in excellent health, I assure you. Perhaps with so much on his mind, he is forgetful—”

She broke off as Elizabeth Napier came out of the house, walking toward them with swift, intent strides. “He’s home, he’s perfectly fine, Aurore! Whatever was all this alarm about? Oh, good evening, Inspector. Did she summon you as well, in her distress? How silly! All for naught.”

Aurore said nothing, as if Elizabeth’s words had put a seal on what she had just been telling him. Rutledge said, “I was driving down the Charlbury road and happened to see Mr. Wyatt there. I gave him a lift.”

“Ah! His father often took walks after his dinner. He said it cleared his head wonderfully. It’s not surprising Simon feels the same way just now, with the opening so near.” It was meant to be reassuring but managed to point out at the same time that Aurore wasn’t a part of the Wyatt legend, couldn’t be expected to know such things, wouldn’t remember—as Elizabeth did—what ran in the family. “Well, it’s late. I must go to the inn and to bed myself. Did Inspector Hildebrand tell you? I’m staying in Charlbury for the next week. Will you see me safely to my door, Inspector?”

“With pleasure.” He turned to Aurore. “I’d like to speak to you—”

But she shook her head. “As Miss Napier says, it is late and I am tired. Whatever you wish to tell me or to ask me, please, tomorrow will be soon enough.”

Upstairs a light went out. Seeing it, Rutledge wondered if Simon Wyatt was sleeping in his own bed—or making his way down to that cramped room in the back of the museum. Elizabeth Napier took his arm and said good night to Aurore, then let Rutledge lead her to the gate, closing it after them.

Aurore stood where she was, on the front walk. Light from the house windows framed her hair like an aureole but shadowed her face. He wondered what she was thinking and found himself distracted by Elizabeth Napier’s comments.

“I shouldn’t have said what I did! It’s just that I’ve known Simon for so long I feel exasperated sometimes when Aurore fails to understand him. And that’s my own failure, really, not hers. I’d worry about my husband too, in her place; the strain of this museum opening is telling on both of them!”

He wondered suddenly if she was rattling on because she knew more than she wanted him to see. Then he decided it was merely a matter of covering her tracks. They walked down the quiet street, nodding to several men passing by but to all intents and purposes they were quite alone.