He glanced toward the churchyard farther along the road. Someone was standing there, watching, from the shadows of the tall trees. “You never know.”
She laughed, a hoarse croak. “No. Not with people, you never do.”
And with a final whisk of her broom she walked back inside her door. Having had the last word? And garnered enough information from him to regale her neighbor on the other side?
Constable Truit would hear about Rutledge’s visit before he turned the knob of his front door.
Hamish said out of a long silence, “If yon constable has his mind on courting, he’ll no’ see all that happens.”
“But that woman will, be sure of it.” Rutledge walked slowly along the street, getting a feeling for Charlbury. As in most villages, people went about their own business and left others to mind theirs. Dorset had not held a very large place in English affairs, over most of the country’s history, and seemed content to leave it that way.
Beside the church was the tidy rectory, the gardens by its front windows heavy with August bloom, and the path to the door was neatly raked. He stopped, as if admiring the effect.
Yes, the figure he’d seen in the trees was still there. He continued on his way. The church was strikingly Norman, with a truncated tower just roof high that seemed to be wanting the rest of itself, as though the builders had stopped working one day and never returned to finish the job. The apse was firmly rounded and the walls appeared to be thick, for the windows were deeply set. They caught the sunlight with darkness rather than light, as if they hadn’t been intended to shed a glory of color across the nave. There was no grace or symmetry here, only a statement of power and might. He thought the builders might have anticipated using it as a fortress one day, for want of a castle nearby.
Peripherally he could observe the man in among the heavy, low-branched trees. Reasonably tall, straight—young. A shadow across his face. And something in his cupped hands—
Rutledge froze. The man held a bird in his fingers.
Turning to him, Rutledge called, “What’s the date of the church, do you know?”
“Yes,” he replied, coming toward Rutledge and into the light. “Early Norman with some later additions. It was never worth anyone’s time to rebuild it in a later style. So it hasn’t changed much in six hundred years.” The words sounded as they’d been spoken by rote—or the man was so accustomed to the question he needn’t give the answer any thought. Then he held up the bird. It was just beginning to struggle in the light clasp. “Flew into one of the church windows and knocked himself silly. Cat would have had him if I hadn’t found him first!” He opened his fingers very carefully, and after a moment, the freed bird shook itself and took off toward the nearest tree. He grinned at Rutledge. The very blue eyes were wide and guileless.
Looking into the man’s face, Rutledge saw that the odd blankness was explained by the terrible, deep scar that started over the bridge of his nose and ran above one eyebrow around the side of the head. The fair hair had grown back stiffly over the healed wound and stuck out at odd angles.
“In the war, were you?” he asked conversationally.
The man nodded. “Everybody asks that. Do I look like a soldier?” The question was serious, considered.
“Yes,” Rutledge answered after a moment. “You stand quite straight.”
He smiled, sudden pride in the damaged face. “Yes, I do, don’t I?”
Rutledge said, “I must go now. Thank you for the information on the church.”
“My father was rector here all my life,” the man said as Rutledge turned. “He died of the influenza. I know every nook and cranny of the church. Even some he didn’t find!”
Rutledge studied the open face, his thoughts going suddenly to the missing children. But there appeared to be no intentional double meaning in the remark, only simply a statement of fact and unassuming self-satisfaction. In this one thing, if nowhere else, he had exceeded his father.
The man’s eyes followed him as Rutledge turned back down the street toward the inn. Hamish, as aware of it as he was, muttered uneasily. “He’s no’ a simpleton,” he said. “There’s the mind of a child, all the same. I canna’ trust it.”
“He let the bird go,” Rutledge silently reminded Hamish. “No, I don’t think he’d harm children. Although he might be persuaded to hide them.…”
As he passed the largest house, the one with the wing set back beside it, he heard a woman calling a man’s name from somewhere out of sight. And then, more clearly, the response.
“No, don’t bother me with that. Not now!”
The owner of the voice came around the corner of the house, carrying one end of a ladder and in his rough clothes looking more like a laborer than the man lugging the other end did. But his fair hair and fairer skin, flushed with heat and exertion, weren’t a working man’s. He shifted the ladder with dexterity and said as he lifted it to the gutters, “No, let me go first! It will save time!” and went smoothly up to the roof with the apparent ease of long practice.
The Wyatt home? Rutledge asked himself. It was the only one he’d seen so far with room enough to house a museum, even a tiny one.
Outside the milliner’s shop, a woman came hurrying through the door to hand a small box to a younger woman pushing a pram. The two of them looked up at Rutledge as he passed, then began speaking again in lowered voices. The news of his arrival was already moving quickly along the village grapevine. As interesting gossip always did, it seemed to fly on the very wind.
Then why, in God’s name, had there been no gossip about the Mowbray children?
Even Hamish had no answer to give to that.
He retrieved his car from the inn and was halfway out of Charlbury when he saw the constable coming toward him on foot, a sturdy, youngish man with red hair, the stiff collar of his uniform unbuttoned in the heat.
Pulling over to the side of the road, Rutledge waited for him, and the man came up to the motorcar with an arrogance to match his stride.,
“Something you’re wanting, sir?” he asked, his eyes sweeping over Rutledge in what was close to incivility. Hamish growled under his breath, describing the man and his ancestry in Highland terms.
“Inspector Rutledge, from London. I’ve been looking for you, Truit,” he replied, and the constable’s eyes narrowed, but there was no other change in his manner. “I’ve been scouting the ground between here and Singleton Magna, looking for any information that’s still to be found.”
“It’s not very much,” Truit answered. “As far as I can find out, the Mowbray woman never got this far. Nor did we see any sign of the accused, Mr. Mowbray. He wouldn’t have come this far either, would he? A long hot walk, not for the likes of small children, and he’d know that. Besides, we haven’t had many strangers in Charlbury, not this summer. And I haven’t found any connection between Mowbray and any of our local people. I asked at every house, to be certain, though I knew from the start it wasn’t very likely.”
A policeman seldom finds what he’s already convinced can’t be found, Rutledge thought.
It was one of the faults of the profession, an ease of making up the mind when the most obvious facts seemed to point in one direction. And sometimes in the general run of crimes, where the facts pointed turned out to be right. But where there was murder, there was often a complexity of personalities and secrets that could take an investigation in any direction—or ten directions at once. If he wasn’t prepared to follow the most unlikely possibilities as well as the most likely, a policeman ran the risk of committing an injustice.