“Yes, yes. Ah—Baldridge,” he said, looking beyond Rutledge. “Come see this mess your workmen have made! I ought to make you return every penny I paid you.”
Rutledge turned to see a youngish man in a dark suit standing foursquare in the doorway. “I told you, Mr. Wyatt, to let the bolts dry before you set anything on the shelves!” he was saying.
“Wet plaster, is it! And my fault!” Wyatt snorted scornfully. “I told you to anchor the shelves firmly, and just look at your interpretation of ‘firmly’!”
Rutledge said, “Mr. Wyatt—”
Wyatt said, “Go next door and talk to my wife, Aurore. She’ll tell you whatever it is you need to know!” And he was already shaking his finger at Baldridge, not waiting to see if Rutledge was pleased with the suggestion or not.
Rutledge left the two men to it and walked back through the first room, wondering if Denton wasn’t correct in his assessment of the museum planned for Charlbury. In this out of the way village, who would come to see such exotica?
When he arrived again at the front door, the maid answered the bell and said, “I’m sorry, sir! Mr. Wyatt didn’t tell me who to expect. It was the builder in Sherborne he’d been on the telephone shouting at most of the morning, and someone was promised to come.”
Rutledge said, “No matter. I’d like to speak to Mrs. Wyatt if I may.”
“She’s in the back garden, sir. If you’ll wait in the parlor, I’ll fetch her. What name shall I say, sir?”
“Rutledge. I’ll walk out with you, it will save time.” He was tired of the Wyatt reluctance to put aside their own business for his.
She looked up at him doubtfully and then led the way through the house and out a tall pair of french doors that overlooked the gardens. He could see someone working in a potting shed at the end of the path and said, “I can find my way from here. Thanks.”
The maid stopped, and said, “I think I ought to—”
He looked down at her. “It will be all right. Mr. Wyatt suggested that I talk with his wife, and this is as good a place as any.”
That seemed to reassure her, and she left him to continue down the path to the shed. The woman inside, dressed in a gray smock, turned as she heard his footsteps crunching on the graveled path and came out into the dappled sunlight
They stared at each other in mutual surprise. Rutledge said, “Mrs. Wyatt?”
She inclined her head. “Inspector—Rutledge, is it not?” For an instant she seemed at a loss. “My husband is in the other wing, I think.”
“It’s you I’ve come to see.”
Her eyes darkened. “You haven’t—they haven’t found the children.”
“No. I’m here in a different capacity today. Asking questions about anyone who got off the train at Singleton Magna at the same time Mrs. Mowbray and her family did. I understand from Mr. Wyatt that you had a guest who also arrived on thirteen August. Can you tell me about her?” Without thinking, he’d begun speaking to her in French. It had seemed natural. Midway through the last sentence, he realized it and switched to English.
She replied in the same language. “Yes, a Miss Tarlton, from London. She came to be interviewed by my husband concerning the position of his assistant.” She answered freely enough, but warily. He could hear the nuances in her voice.
“She arrived at the station and was met?”
“I went to meet her myself. Simon was busy—the museum keeps him quite busy these days.” There was, he thought, a faint overtone of irony in the words.
“How long did she stay with you?”
“Only two days.”
“You drove her back to the station?”
“I was supposed to drive her, yes. But I was delayed at the farm—I’ve taken over running it, while Simon is so occupied with the museum. She was already gone when I came back to collect her. I expect he saw to it, in my place. Trains don’t wait for cows with colic,” she added wryly.
“No, I don’t suppose they do,” he answered, reminding himself that she was no different from any other witness he might question. And yet he’d met her first with no knowledge of her role—if there was any—in his investigation. It seemed to give her, somehow, an edge. As if she judged him, even as he judged her, because they had begun as equals.
She waited for him to go on. There was a stillness about her that struck him as she stood there, composed and quiet Even her eyes were still, absorbing him somehow. As if time were not an issue of concern to her. Or possibly to him either. It was a very strong impression and he found it distracting.
Most of the Frenchwomen he’d met spoke with self-possession and a natural sense of self-worth. Vivacity was to them a tool of conversation, half flirtatious, half a mannerism that reflected their view of life. This woman was different It was something deep inside, a well of stillness that seemed without end. But not, he thought, a well of serenity.…
Hamish said, apparently out of context, “She’s no’ a killer.”
She drew off her gardening gloves and pulled the smock over her head. “I’ve missed my tea, waiting for Simon. Will you have a coffee—or some wine—with me? There’s a table under the trees there. I’ll just find Edith.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve not quite learned to like tea. But I’m trying.”
He walked back to the french doors with her. The fragrance of lily of the valley came to him suddenly, and he realized that it was her perfume. It surprised him; the sweetness wasn’t what he’d have thought she might have chosen for herself. Something headier—or at least more provocative. And yet today in her plain gray dress with its buttoned belt and square white collar, she was anything but provocative. Quakerish, perhaps.
She called to Edith as she walked through the french doors, leaving him in the garden.
Hamish, unsettled in the back of his mind, reminded him he was a policeman on duty. And to keep his wits about him.
It was a timely reminder. Rutledge walked over to the small table and shook a butterfly off the nearest chair. He wondered what it would think of its gaudy brethren on display in a glass case inside this house. Served them right, for drawing attention to themselves?
Aurore Wyatt came back and took the chair opposite the one he’d moved. “Edith tells me you’ve already been to the museum. What do you think of it?”
“Unusual,” he replied dryly, after some thought.
Her laughter, husky and rich, was unexpected. “How very English of you,” she said. “The English are masters of understatement, are they not?” Then she added as if it mattered to her, “It’s become Simon’s life. I hope it is what he wants to do and not what he feels he ought to do.”
“In what sense?”
“The Wyatts have always gone into politics. For generations. It was expected—before the war, you understand—that he would stand for Parliament as well. From childhood he was prepared for nothing else. And by nature it suited him. Handsome, able, a genuinely charming man who commanded respect. He never speaks of it now. Only of this museum, about which he knows so little.” There was a wryness in her eyes. “But we are none of us the same after four years of war. And he married me, which was not very wise in a politician. An English wife would have been safer. More—comme il faut?”
He said nothing, but had a sudden mental picture of Aurore Wyatt among the male and female voters of a quiet Dorset constituency. The cat among the pigeons … “I understand his other grandfather was an explorer of sorts.”
“Yes, in the Pacific and Indian oceans. He left Simon his collections—I think, in the hope that he might display them and make his grandfather as famous as Darwin or Cook. Simon had said nothing of this to me in France. It wasn’t until I arrived in England that he seemed to remember anything at all about his grandfather’s boxes. They were stored in London, had been for ages. And suddenly he would not hear of anything but this museum.” She shrugged in that way that only Frenchwomen have, lifting her shoulders with her head to one side, as if denying any understanding of the matter. “That is why I wonder, sometimes, if he feels an obligation to satisfy one ancestor if not the other. If not Westminster, then this museum. It would be very sad, would it not?”