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!”