Authors: Charles Todd

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Historical

Search the Dark (6 page)

BOOK: Search the Dark

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

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

“Know where I might find him?”

“Business or trouble?”

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

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

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

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

A born gossip …

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

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

Rutledge said apologetically, “No.”

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

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

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

“How long has she been missing?”

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

Rutledge thanked her and turned to go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even Hamish had no answer to give to that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You no