They were still threats, and Rutledge took them very seriously.
“It’s no’ in your hands,” Hamish reminded him. “Whatever Napier has said. But either way, ye’re sacrificed as well.”
“Not if I can help it,” Rutledge said as he turned the crank and brought the car to sputtering life. He got in and drove to the Wyatt farm, his mind full of Hamish:
“If you no’ can finish this business, you’ll be back in yon hospital, crouched in a dark corner of your soul. It’s got to be finished, look you, and not for the woman’s sake, for your own!”
Jimson was working in the yard, mending the wheel on a barrow, his gnarled hands deftly shifting the shaft to bring the worn place within reach. He didn’t look up until Rutledge’s shadow fell across his shoulder and onto the dirtstained wood of the long handles.
“Lord, you know how to startle a man!” Jimson said, straightening up and dropping the shaft. “Now look what you’ve done,” he went on in an aggrieved voice, his face twisting to see Rutledge against the brightness of the sun.
“I need your help,” Rutledge said. “I can’t go to your master or your mistress, the police from Singleton Magna are coming soon with a search warrant. But I want to go through the house and the barn. Now. Before they get here. Will you walk with me?”
“What’re you looking for, then? What’s the police after?”
“A suitcase belonging to a dead woman. A pretty hat. A murder weapon.”
“Pshaw! There’s no pretty hat here. Nor suitcases I don’t know about. If it’s a murder weapon you want, take your pick.” He gestured to the array of tools lying in the dust at his feet. “Any one of those will kill a man.”
Hammer, a spanner, a pair of clamps, all of them—he was right—potential weapons.
But Rutledge shook his head. “No. Not these.”
“Then what?” Jimson demanded. “That stone? A length of wood?”
“I don’t know. All right, we’ll forget the weapon for the time being. The suitcase. We’ll search first for that.”
“What does it look like, then? Mrs. Wyatt, she has suitcases in the attic.”
“I don’t know, I tell you! If I did, I wouldn’t be here. Look, this is useless, Jimson! I need to walk through that house, I need to see for myself what’s in the barn. Hildebrand and Truit will be here in the morning—”
“Truit, is it?” Jimson demanded, incensed. “We’ll see about that. All right, then, the front door’s open, and I can see it from here. Touch anything that don’t need touching, and I’ll know it.”
Rutledge thanked him and walked around to the door. It was unlocked, as it had been before. Thinking about that, Rutledge opened it wider and stepped into the hall, where the stairs rose to the first floor. To his left and right were a pair of rooms, opening into the broad hallway. He gave them a cursory glance, certain that they would hold no secrets. The floors creaked as he moved about, but Jimson wouldn’t hear that. The old man’s bedroom was in the back to one side of the kitchen and appeared to have been a maid’s room at one time, for there were roses on the wallpaper and the iron bed had a floral design at its head. The lamp was serviceable, as were the chair, the stool, and a table. The washstand was oak and had seen better times, the mirror cloudy with age. A jug of water stood on a second table by the bed, and there was a pipe rack next to it, with a tin of tobacco beside it. From the look of the pipes, none of them had been smoked for years, but the aroma of Turkish tobacco lingered and stirred when Rutledge moved one or two.
Upstairs were several bedrooms and a pair of bathrooms. One of the rooms had a rocking chair beside a marble-topped washstand with fresh towels on the racks on either side, a pitcher of water in the bowl. Clothes hung in the closet, mostly coveralls and worn men’s shirts that must have been Simon’s at one time but carried Aurore’s scent now. A pair of straw hats stood on the closet shelf, one of them with a hole in the brim, the other with a sweat-stained band.
The room had an intimate feel to it, as if she’d just left. The candlestick on the bedside table was burned down to half. He wondered if sometimes she’d spent the night here. The bedsheets were soft with age but freshly washed.
The other rooms bore the signs of neglect, a fine sheen of dust on the furniture, a cobweb hanging down above a bedpost, but clean enough for all that. No one had been in these rooms, he thought, for months.
The attic was filled with bits and pieces of old furniture, leather luggage green with age, chairs without seats, broken lamps, a child’s crib and a nursing rocker. He looked into corners, behind the headboards of beds, beyond the empty trunks, into the empty cases, and there was nothing to be seen.
In the end he gave up and went to the barn, quartering it while a cat followed him about, rubbing against his trouser legs when he stopped to look at a box of gear or a stack of tiles or old boots crammed into a bin.
But the barn yielded nothing, and he stood there in the loft, looking at the thick piles of hay, wondering if it was worth his while to dig through the lot. Hamish, tired and irritable, said, “You’ll no’ solve the riddle here.…”
And it was true, but he made the effort to look into the outbuildings and into overturned carts, startling a hen with a clutch of eggs under one. She squawked sharply at him, dashing off with wings flapping.
When he came back to where Jimson was finishing his work on the barrow, the old man said, “Well, you wanted to do it, didn’t you? And for what? You haven’t found what you was looking for.”
“No.” He turned to look at the sky. The sun was sinking toward the west, casting long shadows and golden stripes across the lawn and the fields behind the barn. It would be dark quite soon. Seven or eight heavily uddered cows were staring at him from the gate near the milking shed, and he could hear the lowing of others making their slow way home. Jimson wheeled the barrow toward the barn. Rutledge called his thanks but remembered that the man couldn’t hear his voice. Couldn’t hear a car or footsteps in the house at night.
He found himself wondering if Aurore might have entertained lovers there.
Feeling depressed, he got back into the car and drove to Charlbury.
“At least,” Hamish offered, “you did na’ find anything.”
“I was one man. Hildebrand will bring half a dozen. More.”
Henry Daulton was standing by the churchyard, his eyes on the rooks wheeling above the truncated tower, settling uneasily for the night. He waved as Rutledge passed. Then Mrs. Prescott was hailing him, and he stopped the car.
“I hear that there’s to be an arrest tomorrow. That Inspector Hildebrand is coming to do it himself. I thought you were in charge! The man from London.”
“No. It’s his investigation. I came to coordinate the search for the children. That’s finished.” He felt tired, his eyes gritty from the dusty barn and the staleness of the farm’s attics.
“But what about Mr. Simon? What’s to happen to him?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. He isn’t the person Hildebrand is after.”
“Why would anyone want to kill Betty Cooper,” she demanded, “much less a friend of the Wyatts! It makes no sense. That’s what you ought to be saying to the police in Singleton Magna, why would the Wyatts want to harm her? If you want to save Mrs. Wyatt from the gallows and her husband from a death of grief, that’s the question you ought to be asking!”
Rutledge shook his head. “I’ve asked that question and found no answer. If you have any, I’m willing to hear them. Besides, no one can be sure that the other body is Betty Cooper’s. The timing isn’t there, Mrs. Prescott, whatever you want to believe. Betty left six months ago, not three.”