Search the Dark - Charles Todd [24]
Then why, in God’s name, had there been no gossip about the Mowbray children?
Even Hamish had no answer to give to that.
He retrieved his car from the inn and was halfway out of Charlbury when he saw the constable coming toward him on foot, a sturdy, youngish man with red hair, the stiff collar of his uniform unbuttoned in the heat.
Pulling over to the side of the road, Rutledge waited for him, and the man came up to the motorcar with an arrogance to match his stride.,
“Something you’re wanting, sir?” he asked, his eyes sweeping over Rutledge in what was close to incivility. Hamish growled under his breath, describing the man and his ancestry in Highland terms.
“Inspector Rutledge, from London. I’ve been looking for you, Truit,” he replied, and the constable’s eyes narrowed, but there was no other change in his manner. “I’ve been scouting the ground between here and Singleton Magna, looking for any information that’s still to be found.”
“It’s not very much,” Truit answered. “As far as I can find out, the Mowbray woman never got this far. Nor did we see any sign of the accused, Mr. Mowbray. He wouldn’t have come this far either, would he? A long hot walk, not for the likes of small children, and he’d know that. Besides, we haven’t had many strangers in Charlbury, not this summer. And I haven’t found any connection between Mowbray and any of our local people. I asked at every house, to be certain, though I knew from the start it wasn’t very likely.”
A policeman seldom finds what he’s already convinced can’t be found, Rutledge thought.
It was one of the faults of the profession, an ease of making up the mind when the most obvious facts seemed to point in one direction. And sometimes in the general run of crimes, where the facts pointed turned out to be right. But where there was murder, there was often a complexity of personalities and secrets that could take an investigation in any direction—or ten directions at once. If he wasn’t prepared to follow the most unlikely possibilities as well as the most likely, a policeman ran the risk of committing an injustice.
“The family might have been offered a ride. On a dray or a cart. In a car.”
“As to that, if they were taken up by a vehicle, it won’t have been a local one,” the constable said pedantically, as if explaining matters to a man of limited intelligence, “which tells me they’d be far beyond Charlbury by now. What would persuade them to stop here, when they could be miles away with a farmer who came from anywhere ’twixt here and the Somerset border?”
“Even so, he didn’t have wings! How did he reach Somerset without passing through Charlbury? Or Stoke Newton? This farmer of yours? He couldn’t drive his wagon through one of these villages without being seen by someone.”
“A number of carts and a wagon came through Charlbury,” Truit admitted. “None of them with any passengers! I asked around about that. And no one in my town offered a lift to someone coming from Singleton Magna.”
“Then why haven’t we found the other bodies?” Rutledge asked, not intending any reflection on the constable’s efforts, his mind instead on what the carts and wagon might have carried, and whether three people, two of them children, might have hidden themselves behind or under the cargo. But Truit chose to take the remark as a distinct challenge.
A deep flush spread up the man’s face. “That’s a matter you’ll have to take up with Inspector Hildebrand, sir. It’s not my place to answer for him!”
Washing your own hands, are you? Rutledge thought, but said only, “You’re right, of course,” and left it at that
But as he drove on, he and Hamish entered into a lengthy discussion of Constable Truit’s abilities and how he did his job. Hamish had taken a strong dislike to the constable and made no bones about it.
A chain was no better than its weakest link. And in the chain of villages that blocked the most likely direction the Mowbrays had taken from the railway station at Singleton Magna, the other two constables had been brisk, business-like, and courteous, men who knew their worth