Search the Dark - Charles Todd [104]
The body had been made as presentable as possible, which wasn’t saying much. Even the sheet covering it seemed stark and horribly suggestive.
When it was drawn back, Joanna Daulton gasped and seemed for an instant to cringe into herself. Then she recovered, from what inner wells of strength, Rutledge couldn’t tell, but he felt only admiration. She looked down at the battered face, tatters of rotting flesh and yellowed bone, the broken nose. Her eyes were wide, observing. Careful.
Then she shut her eyes, reached out a hand, and turned away. Rutledge took the trembling fingers and held them in his. They were icy cold.
“I—that might be Betty,” she said shakily. “There’s—a resemblance—of a kind. Still—Could I have some air, please?”
Rutledge transferred his grip to her arm and led her out into the main surgery, while the doctor quietly drew the sheet back over the dead woman’s face. Mrs. Daulton took the chair Rutledge drew away from the desk for her and sat down with a suddenness that told him she was close to fainting.
He thrust a waiting glass of cold water into her hand and said bracingly, as he would have done to a raw recruit shaking with reaction after his first battle. “That was well done. You were very brave, and it’s over now.”
“No, I wasn’t,” Mrs. Daulton said quietly after she had drank the water and rested for a moment. “I shall see that face in my nightmares for a very long time to come. The sad thing is, I appear to have been no help at all to you. I’m sorry.”
And to his astonishment, she buried her face in her hands and began to cry.
Rutledge delivered a subdued Mrs. Daulton and her son to the rectory in Charlbury and then, after two other stops, went back to Singleton Magna for his lunch. He was sick of death and bodies and questions.
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