Search the Dark - Charles Todd [20]
His first stop was at the small, thatched stone house, marked by a sign, where the Charlbury constable lived. But there was no answer to his knock. Rutledge took out his watch and looked at the time. The man must be making rounds, then.
He drove back to the inn and got out, leaving the motorcar in the yard beside it. The inn was old, stone built, with a tidy thatched roof that overhung the dormers like a thick rug. It was comfortably situated where the street began a gentle curve to the common, and there was a small garden in front, in the middle of which rose a wooden post, covered for half its length by a profusely flowering vine. Hanging above that, incongruously, the sign portrayed a distinguished, graying man in frock coat and Edwardian whiskers, one arm raised as if giving a speech, THE WYATT ARMS was scrolled in gold above his head.
Wyatt? The name was familiar, but Rutledge couldn’t place it immediately.
Two farmers were coming out of the bar and held the door for him, nodding in countryman’s fashion as he passed. Inside the room was dark paneled oak, and Rutledge nearly stumbled over a chair before his eyes adjusted to the stygian atmosphere. Then he saw another doorway and went down a narrow passage into a room that looked out over a neatly kept garden with several tables set up beneath a striped awning. They were presently filled with women listening to a thin, elderly speaker reading from a sheet of paper.
He stopped.
“The ladies find it more to their liking than the parlor, on fair days,” a voice said out of the dimness, and a strong man in a white apron came in after him, gesturing to the garden. “That’s the Women’s Institute meeting. The ladies take their tea out there often, on a fine afternoon. What can I do for you, sir?”
A graceful but heavyset woman with dark hair and an unusual white streak that ran from her temple to the bun at the nape of her neck interrupted the speaker with a question. The speaker deferred to her, then went on.
Rutledge said, turning away from the windows, “Time for a pint, I think. Will you join me?”
The bar and the snug were empty, and the landlord said affably, “Don’t mind if I do. Thank you, sir.”
Rutledge sat at the heavy wooden bar—as black as the walls and the beams that supported them—on a stool worn shiny by generations of trousers sliding across the wood. The landlord lighted a lamp to one side of the mirror, and it gave a sense of reclamation to the room. The brass appointments gleamed like gold.
“Passing through?” the innkeeper asked as he pulled a pint and set it on the bar in front of Rutledge.
“I’m staying at Singleton Magna,” Rutledge said, sidestepping the question. “Yesterday and this morning I’ve been taking in the countryside.”
“Any word on the murders over there?” As if Singleton Magna were across the Channel, somewhere in the neighborhood of Paris, and news was hard to come by. “Sorry business,” he added, echoing the words of the woman at the Swan. He pulled a second pint and drank deeply, appreciatively, as if he enjoyed his own wares.
“They’ve got the man in custody. You probably know that. But no signs of the children still. They—that family, I mean—never came as far as Charlbury?”
“No, we don’t run to many visitors here. Not like in the old days. Not since the war, at any rate. I see strangers once or twice a month at best.”
“What brought visitors before the war?”
“Some came because of the Wyatts. Old Mr. Wyatt was MP for nearly forty years, and that drew the curious. He cut quite a dashing figure in his youth and was as popular in London as he was here. Mr. Simon was cut from the same cloth. Mr. Wyatt served this constituency his life long, and we all looked up to him in Charlbury, aye, and so did most of Dorset.”
The memory clicked. The sign—and the family that had made a name for itself in Parliament for three generations. Like the Churchills and the Pitts, a long tradition of public service and golden oratory.
“He’s dead, I think?”
“Aye, in the last year of the war, that was. He wanted to see his son take his seat, and he lived three