Search the Dark - Charles Todd [105]
“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