But there was no respite. Halfway through his meal, there was a telephone call from London.
He expected it to be Bowles, complaining and demanding. Instead it was Sergeant Gibson.
“Inspector Rutledge, sir? I’ve been doing some digging in Gloucestershire, looking for that Tarlton woman. No luck, I’m afraid, but I’ve come across a small bit of information that you might want to hear. The cousins who live there are middle-aged, I’d say closer to forty than thirty. They’ve got a little boy of three or thereabouts. Proud as punch of him, they are. But one old gossip down the street tells me Mrs. Tarlton—that’s the cousin—couldn’t have children, it was the sorrow of her life, and this is a miracle baby.”
Rutledge felt a ripple of excitement. “Have you spoken to Mrs. Tarlton’s physician?”
“Aye, I did that, and he said—mind you, he didn’t like it one bit!—that Mrs. Tarlton had seen fit to go to Yorkshire to have the lad. He hadn’t even known she was pregnant. Returned with her baby, looking like the cat that ate the cream, very pleased with herself indeed. He didn’t have the direction of the doctor who’d delivered the boy, didn’t know, if you ask me! So I took it upon myself to look up the boy’s birth certificate. Very interesting reading, that. Sarah Ralston Tarlton, mother, father listed as Frederick C. Tarlton. Which is as it should be, if the boy’s truly theirs. I went next to the attending physician in York, and he says Mrs. Tarlton stayed in a rented house with her sister-in-law, an older woman. Her husband came several times to visit.”
He waited.
Rutledge said, “Any description of him?”
“Vague. Fits Freddy, right enough. The doctor said they were there only a few months, until Mrs. Tarlton and of course the baby were fit to travel. They were emigrating to Canada, he thought. But I’ll be willing to wager that it was all a farce, and our Miss Tarlton had a baby which she handed over to the cousins. She wouldn’t be the first young woman in London to slip up with some soldier.”
But was it “some soldier”? Or was the child Thomas Napier’s? If the arrangements had been so carefully made from the start, that link would be buried deepest. Napier had enemies; they would like nothing better than to catch even the faintest whiff of scandal.
“Well done, Sergeant! You’re vastly underrated. Has anyone told you that? I owe you a drink when I get back to London.”
“As to that, sir, rumor here says you’ve taken root in Dorset.” There was a deep chuckle at the end of the line as Gibson hung up.
“Interesting information or no’,” Hamish was saying, “what’s it got tae do wi’ this business?”
“Everything—or nothing,” Rutledge said, replacing the receiver. “It could give Elizabeth Napier a damned fine motive for murder.”
“Or yon Daniel Shaw. If he was to learn what happened.”
Or even Thomas Napier, if he was tired of moral blackmail.…
None of which accounted for the second body.
Rutledge found himself restless, unable to settle to any one thought or direction. Every time he’d made any progress in this investigation, he seemed to slip back into a morass of questions without answers. He walked as far as the church yard, then turned down a shaded lane that led past the back gardens of half a dozen houses before winding its way to the main road again.
The source of his restlessness was easy to identify. The problem of Betty Cooper. He’d stopped at the Darley farm on the way back to Singleton Magna, to question Mrs. Darley. She had been bitter, as Joanna Daulton had foretold.
“I did my best by that girl! I gave her a home, I taught her to be a good maid, and I would have helped her find a place when she was ready. Instead, she walked away in the night, without a thank-you or a good-bye. Whatever trouble she got into afterward is none of my concern.” She was a woman with thinning white hair and a harassed expression, worn by years of hard work. “I’m sorry if she’s got herself killed, I wouldn’t have wished that on her. But a green girl goes to a place like London and she’s likely to find trouble, isn’t she?”
“Would she have been likely to come back to you for help? If she’d needed it?” he’d asked. “If she’d found herself in trouble?”
The room was full of sunlight, but there was a darkness in Mrs. Darley’s face. “She’d have been sent away with a flea in her ear, if she had! I have no patience with these modern girls who don’t know their place or their duty.”
“Was there anyone she was close to in the neighborhood? A man or a woman? A maid at someone else’s home?”
“Women didn’t much care for her, she put on airs. Above herself, she was. As for men, they’d come around, as men will, but she wouldn’t give them the time of day either. Saving herself for better things, she was. Well, that’s all right in its way, but she had notions she shouldn’t of. When Henry Daulton came back from the war, she said if he hadn’t been wounded so bad, she’d have had a fancy for him. Then she met Simon Wyatt, and she was all for finding herself a gentleman. Mr. Wyatt had interviewed her only as a favor to Mrs. Daulton, but she couldn’t see that, could she? Took it personal, just because he’d seen her himself, rather than leaving her to his French wife.”
“She told you this?” Rutledge asked, surprised.
“Lord save us, no! I overheard her talking to one of the cowmen. He was teasing her, like, and she said a gentleman didn’t have dirt under his nails nor smell of sweat, nor drink himself into a stupor of a Saturday night, and knew how to treat a lady. Much taken with Mr. Wyatt she was. She said he’d gone and got himself a French wife, but it wouldn’t last. He was home now, and not in France. That’s when I came around the corner from looking at the cream pans and told her I’d not have talk like that under my roof. My late husband didn’t stand for that kind of sauciness, and neither do I! It wasn’t more than ten days later, if that long, before she was gone. And I haven’t seen her, nor wanted to, since. I don’t wish her harm, no, but some learn the hard way, don’t they?”
Rutledge also tracked down Constable Truit, who had—according to Joanna Daulton—tried to court the dead woman.
He shook his head when Rutledge began his questions. “Inspector Hildebrand asked me to have a look at the body when it was first brought in. I couldn’t see any likeness to Betty. Miss Cooper. Sleek as a cat, she was, sunning itself in the window. Not like this one, thin, cheap clothes and shoes. Not Betty’s style.” His confidence was solid, convincing.
Rutledge wondered if Truit saw what he wanted to see or if this was a considered opinion. All the same, the answer contradicted Mrs. Daulton’s tentative identification.
A dead end. And yet … if the dead woman was Betty Cooper, she’d come back to Dorset. Someone had killed her, when she did, to silence her.
Just as someone had killed Margaret Tarlton, when she came back to Charlbury for the first time since 1914.
“That’s wild supposition,” Hamish said.
But was it?
What did these two women have in common? Or—to put it another way, what threat had these two women posed, that cost them their lives?
The common thread, if there was one, seemed to be Simon Wyatt. And a savage beating that was the cause of death in both cases. But it was as tenuous as gossamer, that thread. One tug, to see where it might lead, would snap it.…
If Elizabeth Napier had killed her secretary because Margaret had borne an illegitimate child to Thomas Napier, it made no sense for her to have killed a serving girl months before.
If Daniel Shaw had killed Margaret out of jealousy, he had no motive to kill anyone else.
If the connection was Simon Wyatt, then he, Rutledge, was back to Aurore.
“Or Simon himsel’,” Hamish pointed out. “For yon bonny house and the money it will bring in.”