And suddenly the answer was there, in the man’s very watchfulness.
Jimson hadn’t heard the sound of Rutledge’s engine—and he wouldn’t have heard the Wyatt car leave—or return. Speak to him directly, while he stared at your face, and he could follow a conversation well enough to give reasonable answers. It took concentration and to some extent a painfully learned ability to read lips. This most certainly explained the tension in him.
The man wasn’t lying. He was going deaf. He had told Rutledge what his eyes had seen, but there was no way for him to know what sounds he might or might not have missed. Anyone could have come—or gone—from here. And at any time. Jimson could only say with any certainty when Aurore had come.
As an alibi for Aurore Wyatt, he was useless.
Yet she must have known… so why had she left her own safety to hang on such a fragile thread?
Rutledge asked if he might look through the house or the barn, but Jimson shook his head. “Not without permission,” he said staunchly. “I don’t have authority to let you go poking about in Mr. Wyatt’s property. He might not like it, policeman or no.”
The last thing Rutledge wanted to do was ask Aurore for permission.
Neither Hildebrand nor Bowles would authorize a search warrant. Both of them would be far more likely to read him a lecture on the exact nature of his responsibility in this inquiry.
If the suitcase was here—the hat—even the murder weapon—they would have to remain here until he had enough evidence to show cause to search.
And yet as he stood in the drive, he had a feeling that this farm had played a role in Margaret Tarlton’s death. How or why, he wasn’t sure. Alibi—or evidence? For—or against Aurore Wyatt?
Instinct, light as the breeze that ruffled the leaves of the trees and toyed with the grass at his feet, made him say to Jimson, “No matter. It was purely curiosity, not police business. This was quite a prosperous dairy in its day.”
“Aye, it was,” Jimson said, sadness in his voice as he looked around him. “The best dairy in the county, to my way of thinking. Now we’ve not got thirty cows in milk, and I see to all of them, with Mrs. Wyatt’s help. I was that proud to work here, man and boy. That’s the trouble with living too long. In my time I’ve seen more change than I liked. Mrs. Wyatt, now, she says change is good, but I don’t know. I’ll be dead and in the ground before this place turns around. There’s no money, and no hope here. If I was her, I’d go back to France tomorrow and leave it to rot, instead of watching it fall slowly to pieces.”
“She has a husband. She can’t leave.”
“Simon Wyatt’s not the man his father was. I never saw such a difference in all my life as when he came home from the war. What’s he want that museum for? Dead, heathenish things!” He shook his head. “Mrs. Daulton, now, she says it might be better for him than standing for Parliament. Choices are a good thing, she says. There weren’t no choices when I was a lad, you did what your pa did, you counted yourself lucky to find a good woman to marry, and you raised your children to be decent, God-fearing Englishmen. And the dead didn’t wander about in the night, talking to fence posts and trees, looking for their soul!”
Startled, Rutledge said, “Who wanders about in the night?” The first name that came to mind was Henry Daulton. He wasn’t sure why, except that Henry must find his mother’s steadfast belief in his full recovery overwhelming at times.
“Ghosts!” Jimson said direly, gesturing around him, and turned to walk back to the barn. Rutledge called to him and then swore, remembering that the caretaker was deaf.
But no amount of persuasion could pry another word out of the old man.
18
The police spent all day trying to find a connection between the corpse that had been discovered in the field near Leigh Minster and any of the communities ringing the location—Leigh Minster itself, Stoke Newton, Singleton Magna, or Charlbury.
But just as the constables had reported, there were no missing women. And no newly hired domestics who had failed to appear at the time set for them to begin work. No cousins, daughters, wives, sisters-in-law, or other female relatives unaccounted for. She was clearly a stranger, then. Except that there were seldom any sound reasons for killing strangers.
Hildebrand marked her down as an unsolved murder and went back to looking for the Mowbray children. He drove the teams of searchers with a determination that was both praiseworthy and single-minded.
Dr. Fairfield, a small man of few words, established the time of death at approximately three to four months earlier.
“She couldn’t have been in the ground longer,” he told Rutledge later, stripping off his white coat and hanging it on a hook behind the door of the bare room where he kept the dead. “And her clothing supports the timing. This is August. I daresay she died in late April, early May. Cool enough weather to have her coat with her. Cause of death? I’d say she was choked but not killed by strangulation. It was the beating about the head that finished the job. I found a fracture just above the temple, small but sufficient. I don’t think she was sexually molested. There’s no indication of it, from what I can see now, and her clothing is oddly tidy, as if whoever buried her had laid her out carefully on the coat.”
“Was it the same person, do you think, who killed the Mowbray woman? Or Margaret Tarlton, as she may be?”
The doctor frowned, rubbing his chin. “That’s harder to say. This one’s skin is gone, you don’t see the damage as readily. But yes, it might have been the same killer. Might, mind you! I’m not an authority on murder. Still, both women appear to have been attacked by someone who clearly intended to kill them but, in the end, didn’t know how to finish the job quickly or properly. When it’s anger that runs amok to the point of destructive force, there’s generally more damage—to the head, the throat, the shoulders. Then the blows land randomly, you see, driven by rage and intended to inflict as much hurt—and therefore as much satisfaction—as possible. Here the blows were confined to the head, mainly the face, as if to conceal identity as well as to kill.” He looked up at the taller man before him. “Does that seem odd to you? What I’m saying?”
“Not to a policeman. No.”
The doctor sighed. “Of course murder is seldom premeditated, is it? That is, with planning and preparation. And the fact is, the human being isn’t easy to murder, without the proper tools. A knife. A firearm. A garrote. Even a hammer will do. Whoever killed these two women—whether it was the same person or two different people—it was emotion that drove him or her in the beginning. And then necessity took over. He had to silence the victim, you see. And he had a quite nasty job there. If I were you, having to search for the right person, I’d find someone who”—he paused, seeking the right words—”who was determined to go on, however gruesome the task, until the woman’s pulse stopped.”
“That can run either direction—a secret to be kept, or merely the realization that a live victim can point a finger at his attacker,” Rutledge responded, thinking about it.
“Hmmm. Secrets take many forms, don’t they? From the sins of the flesh to the sins of the soul.” The doctor smiled, but without humor or lightness. “This one is terrible enough that the killer was willing to suffer horror himself—herself—in order to keep it safe. Until you’ve battered someone to death, Inspector, you can’t conceive of how much blood and flesh and bone are spattered about. Only a madman can relish that, or someone so deranged by emotion that the flecks are not even registered, until it’s over. Or someone grimly carrying on to the bitter end.” He turned out the light in the hall and led the way to the side door of his surgery. “Does what I’ve told you help at all?”