Elizabeth had succeeded in putting up her hair and was lying with her head against the back of the sofa, her eyes closed. Aurore, sitting stiffly in a chair, her face still, looked up as he came in. He shook his head but made no other explanation for the time it had taken to fill one glass with water. He thought she must have guessed that Simon was nowhere to be found.
He gave the glass to Elizabeth, who drank it slowly with her eyes closed. The red, bruised marks on her throat were very clear now. They looked very real as well. Studying them, he couldn’t see how she could have made them herself.
She said, returning the glass to him, “Thank you.” She coughed and swallowed again, as if her throat were painful. “I have never been so terrified! I thought—for an instant I thought I was going to die!”
“It was a man?” Rutledge asked.
“Oh, yes. He was tall, strong. It was horrible!” The distaste in her face was real as well. “I thought I was going to die!” she said again, unable to stop herself from thinking it “It was Shaw, it must have been! The man is mad, he ought to be put in jail. I won’t go back to the Wyatt Arms tonight, I won’t!”
“I’ll look for him,” Rutledge said. And added to Aurore, “Please lock the door when I leave. You’ll be safe enough.”
“You’ll come back?” she asked.
“Yes.” He knew why she was asking. Come back to arrest her.
“That’s all I need to know.” She went with him to the door, and as he stepped out onto the walk, she said, “Please—Simon—”
“Aurore. I must find the hat. That’s why I’m going.”
She seemed startled, remembered it, and said, “Yes, of course!” as she shut the door firmly.
The townspeople had gone back to their beds, reassured by Mrs. Daulton. He could see her lantern bobbing up to the rectory again. It occurred to him that she was a very courageous woman. But then she was no longer young or pretty. As Margaret Tarlton and Betty Cooper were said to have been. As Elizabeth Napier was. Perhaps that was why she had felt safe. Or perhaps it was in her nature to take risks for the sake of others. Some women did. He had seen them nursing the worst influenza cases, working with septic wounds, braving weather that would have given a strong man pause.
As he walked toward the church, his mind was busy. What was it Mrs. Prescott had said about Margaret Tarlton, and Truit had told him about Betty Cooper? “She had such lovely hair.” Mrs. Prescott’s voice came back to him, admiring, envious. And Truit had said “—sleek as a cat sunning itself in a window,” or words to that effect.
They weren’t merely pretty women. They were both quite sure of their attractions … not flaunting them, just sure of them.… Tantalizing. Tempting.
But that still left Shaw out of the equation. He’d been in love with Margaret. At least he’d claimed he was.
If it had started with Betty Cooper—and Rutledge was now almost certain it had—then love had a great deal to do with the murders. But there wasn’t time to go into that now.
With Hamish alive in his mind, Rutledge was already scanning the shadows, looking for Wyatt, looking for Shaw. The hat was nowhere to be found, although he searched carefully. The small case that Aurore had left leaning against the trunk of a tree was still there. He walked up to the church, on guard, wary.
But there was nothing there. The stand of trees, the graveyard beyond, the shadows by the heavy walls, were empty of life. He went around the church itself twice, moving cautiously, slowly, taking care to be sure. Then he tried the door on the porch.
It opened under his hand, swinging with a deep groan across the stone paving. In an island of darkness, there were candles ahead, burning on the stone altar, casting strange, flickering shadows across the aisles, the Norman pillars, the high arched roof. There was a golden warmth to the light, and the man sitting in one of the chairs in the nave turned to look at him, his own face golden in its reflection.
It was Henry Daulton. “I’ve looked everywhere. There’s no sign of anyone. I stepped in here instead of going back to the house. It’s quiet here. I thought Simon might come back. I don’t like to hear a woman scream, it tears at my nerves.”
“Yes. It’s very quiet,” Rutledge answered, his voice echoing and his footsteps rebounding from the stone paving as he walked down the aisle toward Henry. “Did you see what happened?”
“I was out looking for Simon Wyatt. He was walking again, Shaw told me. He’d seen him and then lost him. A few minutes later Elizabeth asked me to help her find him. She was worried about him. I told her it was all right, that he’d come home on his own, but she insisted.”
“You knew he walked?”
“I don’t sleep well sometimes. Once or twice I’ve seen him go out on the lawn and stand like a statue for a quarter of an hour or more. Another time I met him coming down the shortcut from the farm—it ends over by the churchyard. My mother’s concerned about him, she says he’s on the edge of collapse. But he isn’t. He’s worried about money and Aurore and the museum. He doesn’t see how it’s going to work out, and that’s what makes him black out. To stop thinking.”
Which was an oddly penetrating observation.
“About tonight—” Rutledge reminded him.
“He was in the church earlier. Standing there in front of the altar, lighting candles. Praying, I thought at first. Then he took one of them and started in the direction of the crypt. I don’t think he was walking then.”
“What would interest him in the crypt?” He remembered something Henry had confided to him when he first came to Charlbury. “There are hiding places in the church, aren’t there? Does Simon know about them?”
“I don’t know. He probably does. I didn’t stay very long. But later he came out with a suitcase. I’d seen it before, someone had left it under that stone altar down in the crypt. The old altar, from the Saxon church. Nobody ever uses it, but there’s an altar cloth on it. My mother ironed it every week when my father was alive and kept fresh flowers on it. My father always said it was useless work, but she took pride in it. It’s keeping to tradition, she’d say. I’d hide under its skirts whenever I didn’t want to be found. I think I told Simon about that, but I can’t be sure. I don’t always remember things now.”
“Henry. He knew the suitcase was there—or looked and found it there?”
“Well, he came out carrying it. And don’t ask me where he went with it, I can’t tell you because I don’t know. But I don’t think he wanted to be seen. And almost in the next instant Elizabeth Napier was coming up the church walk again. And you were there under the trees talking quietly to Mrs. Wyatt. I thought it best to go home then.”
If Simon had collected the suitcase, where would he have taken it?
Rutledge thought he knew. The farm—And the police were going to search there in the morning. Damning evidence against Aurore, if it was found there!
He said to Henry, “I’ve got work to do still. Will you be at the rectory or here?” He hadn’t finished with Henry, but there wasn’t time to ask him any more now. It could wait. Simon couldn’t.
“Here, probably. When I can’t sleep, I come here to think. My father had always hoped I’d be rector, just as Simon’s father had expected him to stand for Parliament. But the war put paid to such hopes, didn’t it? I suppose that’s why I can’t sleep. Guilt that I’m not the man I might have been.”
It was a poignant remark, but Henry seemed to accept his circumstances stoically, whether his mother did or not. As if he knew, and shielded her as best he could from the truth. Her insistence that he was making steady, observable improvement must have hurt him many times. The scar was very deep. It had healed. But not the brain behind it.