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.