Search the Dark - Charles Todd [18]
Why hadn’t the children changed since 1916? Mowbray had described them as he’d seen them on the train platform as if they’d not altered from this faded photograph. Children who should have aged three years—in size and appearance. Did that mean he hadn’t seen them, except in grieving imagination?
No wonder the flyers hadn’t brought any results!
“But the woman’s dead—she was real enough,” he told himself.
Missing suitcases. A woman who’d vanished for over twenty-four hours, between hastily leaving the train and her murder. The ages of the missing children. Questions that niggled at the edges of his mind, with no answers.
Unless the poor devil living with his own madness in that jail cell had killed a woman and children he’d never seen before!
Gentle God!
Rutledge took the stairs to his room two at a time, as if trying to outrace the horror he’d evoked. There he picked up his hat, stood thoughtfully in the middle of the floor as he debated the best course of action, then ran lightly down the steps again and out to his car.
On the road west, he could see small groups of men in the distance, searching, covering again ground they’d already tramped over three and four times. Heads bent, sticks poking into undergrowth and among the thick boughs of trees, they moved steadily and carefully across the terrain assigned to them. In the field where the body had been found the grain was alive with them, and there was a fuming, red-faced man sitting his horse at the edge of the corn. The farmer, most likely. Rutledge considered stopping to speak to him and then decided it could wait until the man’s temper had subsided. This was his best crop of the season, trampled through no fault of his own. A policeman from London would be no different in his book than one from Singleton Magna.
At the signpost, Rutledge took the northwest road this time, toward Charlbury. He drove slowly, scouting for a likely outbuilding that might offer shelter. But the two dilapidated sheds he did investigate were empty of anything except pigeons, mice, and a swarm of insects rising into the stuffy air from the dust beneath his feet.
Tramping back to his car, he heard the sound of another automobile coming fast along the lane. He stopped to watch it, his coat over one shoulder, his shirtsleeves rolled up on his forearms, wishing he’d thought to bring a Thermos of tea or water with him. His throat felt parched.
The motorcar slowed as it came nearer and then braked as it drew abreast of him. A woman was driving it, and he knew the instant he saw her face that she wasn’t English. There was something about the way her dark hair was swept up into a bun, the blue dress she wore with a scarf around the throat. Style. His sister Frances would have recognized it instantly.
She was French—
“Are you in trouble?” she asked, her English lightly and fascinatingly accented. He found himself suddenly at a loss for words.
It wasn’t beauty. Not that she wasn’t damned attractive. But it was more subtle. Good bones, his sister Frances could have told him. A sensuality that came from within, a curve of the lips, a lift to the eyebrows. The way her clothes set off her coloring, the shades of blue in the scarf like stained glass, vivid and rich, bringing light to the gray eyes that shifted as he watched from clear, still water to dark, unfathomable pools of speculation.
He spoke quickly, and in French. “No, I’m a policeman. Inspector Rutledge from London. I’m taking part in the search for the missing Mowbray children.”
She smiled a little, hearing his French, unexpected in a deserted lane in the middle of Dorset, then she caught what he was saying. “Ah. The children. It is very sad, is it not? I hope they will be found alive. But one wonders, as the time goes by. I have no children—” She stopped, then went on wryly, “—it is something one feels, I think, about children, whether one is a parent or not.”
The smile, even as brief as it was, had been like sunlight over the sea. What in God’s name had brought such a creature as this to England? Rutledge glanced