Watching Mowbray carefully, Rutledge said, “You must look at them, Mr. Mowbray. You must help us know if one of these boys is your son.”
Mowbray, his eyes wet with frantic tears, turned toward Johnston for help. Johnston, shaking, said, “Inspector!” in warning.
The fourth child came reluctantly into the courtyard. Mowbray suddenly started, half rising from his chair. Johnston reached out to stop him, and Rutledge reminded him softly, “Remember! There is no way he can reach them!”
Before Johnston or Hildebrand could move, Mowbray had come across the room to the window, sinking to his knees before it, his face contorted with tears. “Bertie?” he cried, his hands raking the glass. “Bertie? Is it you, lad?”
Robert Andrews the younger turned toward the man at the window, looking at him in alarm. Then he turned back to the ball players and scooped up the ball they had dropped in their struggle. Racing away up the walk toward the street shouting, “Mine! Mine!” he vanished.
Mowbray cried, “No—no—come back! Bertie!”
And at the same time he caught sight of Rosie, being led by the hand into the courtyard by a slightly older child. On such short notice, they’d had difficulty finding girls of the right age…. He stared at her, drinking in the sight of her, a strange look of wonder on his face. Rosie, her hand confidingly in that of the other girl, looked straight at the window and then away again. That same shy smile lit her face.
“Tricia, love?” Mowbray asked, his body trembling as if he had a fever. “They said I’d killed you and left you in the dark for the foxes—”
He broke down then, his eyes turning to Rutledge for one brief moment, in their depths something shining. It was the brief, terrible spark of hope.
Johnston was openly moved, his face wet with tears. Hildebrand swore under his breath, the same words over and over and over again.
Rutledge, ignoring the savagery of Hamish’s anger, looked at Mowbray and told himself that it had had to be done—for Margaret’s sake—for Mowbray’s sake, above all else. He went to the prisoner and touched his shoulder. “They are the children you saw,” he said gently. “The children at the train station. Is that what you’re telling me? The little boy who picked up the ball, and that smaller girl. Are you quite sure?”
“Yes, yes, they’re my children, they’re alive—” His shoulders moved with the sobs racking his lungs, his words tumbling out incoherently. He pressed his face against the glass as the two girls turned and went back the way they’d come, eyes straining for a last glimpse of them. He repeated the words, more clearly this time, as if finding them easier to believe with each breath.
“No,” Rutledge said. “No, I’m afraid they aren’t Bertie and Patricia. Their name is Andrews. Think, Mowbray! Your Bertie would be four now, nearly five. Like the older boy you saw. And the little girl, Patricia, would be seven by now. These two children—the ones who remind you so much of your own two—are younger, the ages Bertie and Patricia were when they died in London.”
“Their mother?” Mowbray asked huskily, suddenly remembering. “Is she out there too?” Raw need gleamed like fire in his eyes.
“No.” His voice was very low, with infinite compassion in its timbre. “The mother of these two children who remind you so much of your own is in London, recovering from the birth of her third child. She’s auburn haired, and—er—plump.” He pulled from his pocket the photograph that Robert Andrews had let him borrow. “Do you see that?”
After a moment the words seemed to register. Mowbray looked at it, frowning with the effort. The woman captured by the camera had dark hair, far darker than that in the photograph Mowbray himself had carried, and she weighed at least two stone more. “That’s not Mary!” he said in surprise. “She doesn’t look anything like Mary!” His eyes swiveled to Johnston and Hildebrand. “Where’s Mary?” he demanded accusingly, as if she might still be conjured up with the children.
Hildebrand opened his mouth but Rutledge got there before him. “Look at this photograph,” he said, passing the one he’d borrowed from Elizabeth Napier. “Do you see your wife among these women, Mr. Mowbray? Look carefully at all of them, and tell me.”
He studied it, distraught and weeping. “She’s not there,” he said, hope dying again. “She’s not there.” He looked up at Rutledge and said with such pathos that it brought silence to the three watchers, “Did I kill my Mary, then?” Rutledge stood there, looking down at the frightened, ravaged face. Against the judgment of the policeman he’d trained to become, he said quietly, “No. You didn’t kill her. The German bombs did, a long time ago. She can’t suffer anymore. And she can’t come back to you. Neither can the children.”
But he made no mention of Margaret Tarlton.
After the angry doctor had taken Mowbray back to his cell and given him a sedative to swallow, Johnston walked out of the police station saying only, “I don’t know what you’ve accomplished. I just don’t know what to believe!”
The constable was busily sorting out the children by the front door, thanking the parents from whom he’d borrowed them, and watching Andrews crossing to the hotel with a very sleepy little boy on his shoulder and a little girl dragging her feet in the dust, head down and yawning.
“What happened?” the constable asked Hildebrand, and then quickly went back into the station, minding his own business with industry.
Hildebrand said, “Johnston is right. What’ve you accomplished? If those are the children we’ve been searching for—and for the sake of argument, I’ll accept it for now—there’s still the dead woman. If she happens to be this Miss Tarlton, Mowbray killed her mistaking her for his wife! That’s the long and short of it. Stands to reason. We’ve still got one victim, and we’ve got her killer.”
“Have we? He didn’t recognize Margaret Tarlton, did he? How did he meet her? And where is her suitcase? Where is her hat? We’re back to the same quandary we’ve faced all along. If Mowbray killed that woman and then went to sleep under a tree, ripe picking for the police when the body was found, why did he bother to clean the blood off himself, get rid of the weapon, and hide her suitcase? To what end? Why not leave them there, beside her?”
“Who knows what goes on in the mind of a madman!”
“Even the mad have their own logic!”
“No, don’t come the Londoner with me, Rutledge! Madness means there’s no logic left in the mind.”
“I submit, then, that whoever killed Margaret Tarlton took away the suitcase, the hat she was wearing, and the weapon.”
“Oh, yes? Walking down the road with them in his hand, was he?”
“No. He—the killer—was taking Margaret Tarlton by car to the station in Singleton Magna. And it was into the car that he shoved the hat and the weapon and the missing suitcase, until he could dispose of them later!”
“Oh, yes?” Hildebrand repeated. “But came through his front door spattered with blood and said, ‘Don’t mind this lot, I’ll just have a quick bath before tea!’ ”
“Yes, it’s the blood that’s the problem,” Rutledge admitted. “We don’t know where either Mowbray or anyone else might have washed off the blood.”
But there was only one place, and he’d already felt the words burning in the back of his mind like red-hot brands.
At the farmhouse, Aurore Wyatt could easily have walked inside after tending a sick heifer and bathed her face and hands and thrown away a stained shirtwaist, or burned it in the kitchen fire. Except for the deaf old man who worked there, who would have seen or paid any heed to what she did? By the time she got back to her own house,