“London just replied to your request for more information on Mrs. Mowbray. She was from Hereford. No known connection with Dorset. That may mean that the man with her lived or worked or had relatives in this county. I’m looking into that now.”
It was one of the telephone calls Rutledge had made that afternoon, asking a canny sergeant he knew in London to look into Mrs. Mowbray for him. Gibson always had his ear to the ground. If anyone could uncover information on the dead woman, it was he. A pity there was no way Gibson could do the same for the man.
And Rutledge didn’t hold out much hope that Hildebrand would fare any better, with so little to go on. It might take weeks to trace him—if he belonged in Dorset. Or years, if he came from another part of England.
“If he got clear, they’d hide him, him and the children. Family. Friends. If he asked,” Hamish said as Rutledge took the stairs two at a time.
“Very likely,” Rutledge answered aloud, before he could stop himself. “Unless they know that Mowbray is safely in jail.”
“But the children are no’ his,” Hamish pointed out. “And the mother’s dead. If yon man wanted to keep them—”
“—he’d stay out of sight. He’d have to turn them over to the police if he came forward. Yes, that’s an interesting thought, isn’t it?”
The children, again …
They were beginning to haunt him.
4
Rutledge spent a restless night, his room too warm for comfortable sleeping, and his mind too busy.
The images flitted and dissolved in a kaleidoscope of anguish. Of Mowbray, broken and in despair in his cell—of the bloody body of his wife lying at the edge of a field in plain sight when the farmer went to see to his crop—of children crying for their mother and a man who wasn’t their father offering what comfort he could—of a gallows waiting for a prisoner who might not understand why he was being hanged.
And as always, Hamish, attuned to the tumult in his mind, reminded him of his own fallibility, a policeman driven by his own pain attempting to get to the bottom of another man’s. A murderer’s. Both of them—murderers.
“It’s love that’s at the bottom of this,” Rutledge said aloud in the darkness, trying to silence the voice in his head. And then swore because the word conjured up memories of Jean. Jean, in a fashionable blue gown with ecru lace and the flowers he’d given her pinned at her shoulder. Jean laughing as she swung and missed, and the tennis ball went smashing into the backstop. The sun on her face as they walked through Oxford early on a Sunday morning, drinking in the quiet and peace.
But what kind of love? It had so many faces, so many names. Jealousy wove a thread around it, and envy, and fear. People died for love—and killed for it. And yet in itself it was indefinable, it wore whatever passions people brought to it, like a mountebank, with no reality of its own.
Somewhere in the town outside his window he could hear laughter and music. Happy laughter, without restraint or burdens.
Once Jean was married and off to Ottawa, he told himself, he could finally put her out of his mind. As he had nearly put her out of his heart. Olivia Marlowe had taught him more about the quality of love than Jean ever had.
“What will teach me to forget my Fiona?” Hamish said softly. “Do ye never remember her? Do ye never hear her weeping by yon empty grave, while I lie in France with no way to call out to her or offer comfort? What peace can Ian Rutledge find, loving any woman, when there’s Hamish MacLeod on his conscience!”
In the darkness Rutledge turned his head away from the insistent voice. It was true. What woman would be willing to share his life with such demons in his mind?
In the morning Rutledge met Hildebrand for breakfast in the Swan’s dining room, the bright chintz curtains bellying like sails in the early breeze. The tablecloths were blindingly white. Hildebrand appeared to be suffering from a headache. Several times he massaged his eyes as if they burned, and he growled at the middle-aged woman who waited on their table. She gave him a withering look as she walked away and said, “I knew you as a lad, with your braces broken and your face dirty! Don’t come the grump with me!”
Rutledge suppressed a smile.
Hildebrand, ignoring her, said, “I had a hellish conference last night with my chief. He wants those children found. Yesterday wouldn’t be soon enough! Makes the entire county look bad, he informs me, bloody maniacs running about slaughtering their families. He says we’re to make haste and finish this business, or he’ll know the reason why! It might have taken some of the wind out of his sails if you’d been here to placate him.”
“I went out to the scene of the murder. I don’t know where they could have hidden themselves—or been hidden, near that field. I keep coming back to Singleton Magna. And whether someone in the town is keeping silent—assuming the children and the man are still alive.”
Hildebrand stared at him, then pulled one of the flyers out of his pocket and tossed it across to Rutledge’s plate, where it landed on the toast he had just spread with marmalade.
Rutledge picked it up, wiped the back with his serviette, and then said, “What’s this in aid of?”
“The fact that that flyer was given to every household in the town and all the outlying farms. Somebody—somebody!—would have come forward with information. Stands to reason! If not the family, a nosy neighbor, the old biddy across the road, some child wanting to be noticed. Do I have to spell it out for you?”
“No,” Rutledge said, reining in his temper. He was looking at the flyer, at the faces. “This should have brought results. I agree. But it hasn’t. And I keep asking myself why no one has come forward.”
“Which tells me,” the other man responded acerbically, “that they’re dead. The man and the children. Which is where we’ve been for some days now—looking for their bodies.”
“There can’t be all that many hiding places within walking radius of the town. And if Mowbray caught up with his wife by that field along the high road, it narrows our search even more. The western side of Singleton Magna, not the east. Otherwise he’d have had to bring her—or chase her—through the town itself. And that’s not on.”
“We’ve looked. There isn’t a stone as large as that plate in front of you that we haven’t lifted, not a tree we haven’t climbed, not a stream we haven’t walked through up to our knees. Not a wall, a plot of disturbed ground, a shed, an outhouse, bridges, or any other conceivable place we haven’t searched at least three times. And are searching yet again!”
They’ve vanished, then, Rutledge thought. Like foxfire, the nearer you come, the farther away it appears to be.
Hamish was saying something, but Rutledge ignored him.
“I went on to Leigh Minister and Stoke Newton. You’ve searched there as well?”
“Yes, on the premise that the train was going south.”
“What about the other fork?”
“The way to Charlbury? That’s another three miles distant. We spoke to the constable there, in the name of thoroughness, but I wasn’t surprised when we drew a blank. A long way for a man and a woman to walk, encumbered with children. And Stoke Newton’s closer than Charlbury. Stands to reason, if Mrs. Mowbray was looking for sanctuary, she’d have chosen Stoke Newton.”
“What if she considered that herself—and chose Charlbury instead, to throw us off the track?”
Hildebrand shrugged. “It’s possible. But likely? No. You’re hunting for straws, man!”