“But she hasn’t—”
Elizabeth Napier stopped, looking at him in alarm, the serviette drawn through her fingers like a handkerchief, over and over again. He couldn’t quite read her fear, but it was there. “I don’t understand!” she said finally. “Please!”
He took the folded sheet of paper from his notebook and handed it to her. She looked down at the photograph on it, her brows puckered as if she had trouble seeing it. “What’s this?” she asked, perplexed by the shift in direction.
“A photograph of Mrs. Mowbray and her children. Does Miss Tarlton bear any resemblance at all to the woman you see there?” Hamish, mindful of the effort Rutledge was making to keep his voice free of any inflections that might lead an answer, began to stir.
“To this woman? No, certainly not!”
Then she hesitated, staring intently at the face. “Well, they’re both tall and fair—I suppose that’s a similarity—but it isn’t strong. It’s more in something—I don’t know, something about their form, I think. The long bones, the fine hair, the—the delicacy, perhaps?”
“Do you have a photograph of Miss Tarlton?”
“A photograph? Why should—no, of course, there’s one in the study. When my father had a house party last spring, she helped me entertain. It was a political weekend, and they’re always the worst, the wives are bored to tears or scratching each other’s eyes out in the politest way whenever the men aren’t around. Someone had a camera. If you’ll excuse me—”
He could feel the tension in his body now. That odd sixth sense had already leapt ahead, his thoughts tangled with the possibilities opening before him. The warning to let sleeping dogs lie passed through his mind as well.
“Then what about the children?” Hamish was saying, voice low, urgent.
“If it wasn’t his wife that Mowbray killed, there won’t be any children.”
“But there were children at the railway station. You have na’ forgotten.”
“No. But if the Tarlton woman was visiting the Wyatts in Charlbury, she might have been in the right place at the wrong time. Mowbray might have believed he’d found his missing wife.” It was the conviction that had brought Rutledge to Sherborne. The need to settle the matter of Margaret Tarlton’s whereabouts. Such thin evidence …
Miss Napier returned, a silver-framed photograph in her hand. Instead of giving it to Rutledge she walked to the door and opened it, stepping out into the last of the daylight to compare the photograph and the printed flyer Hildebrand had had made up.
After a moment she shook her head, and Rutledge came to take the frame from her, trying to read her expression. He saw only confusion.
He too stood in the light, looking down at several women shown standing by the elegant hearth in the hall, as if posed by someone oblivious to the interplay of relationships among them. There was a stiffness that betrayed their antagonism even while their expressions portrayed polite enjoyment. But second from the left was a young woman with long bones and fair hair, who looked at the camera in much the same way—and yet not the same way—as Mary Sandra Mowbray had done in 1916. An oddly ephemeral thing …
Hamish saw the truth as quickly as Rutledge did.
Rutledge told himself, It isn’t real. This resemblance between the two women. You see it only when you look for it—there’s nothing to trigger it unless you’re consciously expecting to find it. Or hoping to see it?
“It isn’t a likeness. Is it?” Elizabeth Napier asked. “I can’t tell—”
“It isn’t a likeness,” he answered finally, “but there’s something very—uncanny—about the similarity.” He had unwittingly used the same word Hamish was repeating in his mind. “At a guess, I’d say that if the two women stood side by side, you wouldn’t notice it. There’s the voice, of course, and how each carries herself. Her expression—her nature. They’re not from the same social background. They’ve lived quite different lives. These qualities would strike you first”
“I don’t follow you—”
He said carefully, looking for flaws himself, “If you saw either woman walking down Bond Street some distance ahead, you might say to yourself, ‘I think that’s Margaret Tarlton.’ If you saw either woman in the slums or along a country road, you might pass her by without a glance, because you wouldn’t expect to encounter Miss Tarlton there.”
“Except for their clothing. How they were dressed.”
“But Mowbray, expecting to find his wife in Singleton Magna, might not know her wardrobe now, in this new life he’d already accused her in his own mind of living. He wouldn’t look for differences, he’d look for similarities.” Like the color pink … if that was a woman’s favorite color.
“I begin to see. But go on.” Her face had lost some of its color.
“This man survived the war to come back to an empty life. Out of work, no home, no family to support him, nothing safe or familiar. He desperately wants this woman to be his wife, and by the time he does find her, he can’t feel anything but anger when she denies everything. He tries to make her stop lying to him—and, in the end, kills her.” There were any number of holes in this piece of speculation. He found himself trying not to think about them.
Hamish was asking vehemently how he had overlooked the one salient fact that would negate all his fine theories.
But Rutledge made himself concentrate on Elizabeth Napier’s reaction.
“It’s still guesswork,” he said, forced to honesty. “I can’t prove any of it.”
She was looking up at his face, dawning horror on hers as she assimilated the images in her mind. “You aren’t—you aren’t trying to say—that the dead woman in Singleton Magna might possibly be Margaret Tarlton! That it explains why she isn’t here—or in London. No, I refuse to believe it!”
Yet he could tell that the conviction was growing stronger with every moment. She was an intelligent woman—
Still, she fought against it. Elizabeth stood by Rutledge’s side, her hand on his arm, her eyes scanning the two faces, one in an ornate frame, the other a grainy reproduction on cheap paper. Whatever her inner struggle, whatever the deeper emotion that lay behind her fear of the truth, she couldn’t ignore the evidence before her.
Then she spoke, with a heaviness that made him ashamed of the necessity of bringing her into this murder. There were tears standing in her eyes, and her fragility touched him deeply. “If it’s true—if that poor woman is Margaret—then it’s all my fault. I sent her there—I thought I was being quite clever. I thought it was incredibly simple and that no one would ever suspect—how very stupid of me!” She fiercely blotted her eyes with her serviette, then looked down at it in surprise, as if she’d forgotten her dinner—as if it belonged to a far distant and far different past.
Bracing her shoulders, she said, “It won’t do to cry. I’m always the first to say that! ‘Don’t cry!’ I’ve told those pathetic women in the slums. ‘It doesn’t solve anything!’ But it relieves the pain somehow, doesn’t it?”
Carefully folding the flyer, she handed it back to Rutledge along with the photograph in its silver frame. “You’ll need that, I think. And you’d better come in,” she said. “Have you dined? No? That’s good, I have need of company just now. We’ll eat what we can of dinner. Then I’ll change and go with you to Singleton Magna. I want to see this woman—or has she been buried?”
“No, she hasn’t been buried. But she isn’t—her face was badly beaten. I don’t know that you could, er, hope to recognize her.”