Search the Dark - Charles Todd [16]
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!”
“Then clear up another puzzle for me. Why was Mowbray so certain he’d find her here in Singleton Magna?”
“I spent most of the night turning that