Search the Dark - Charles Todd [69]
Inside it was damp and musty from the rain, and this morning, although the clouds were moving northeast, the sun hadn’t shown its face.
They moved down the passage to the cell where Mowbray was kept, and Rutledge could feel Hamish growing tense, uneasy.
The heavy key turned in the lock, the door swung back, and the misery inside was almost palpable. The smell of unwashed flesh and hopelessness was enough to make Johnston stop in his tracks. “My God, haven’t you allowed him even the decency of soap and water!”
“We’ve brought him soap and water,” Hildebrand said curtly. “We can’t dip him into it. My constables are already complaining it’s not fit in here for beast or man. That’s why you’re here. To get to the bottom of this!”
Mowbray sat where Rutledge had last seen him, head in hands, shoulders slumped. The picture of dejection and despair. His hair seemed to have grown longer, wilder than the gray-streaked ten-day-old beard, and his clothes looked worn, shabby, and grimy.
Johnston stepped forward and said, “Mr. Mowbray. It’s Marcus Johnston. I represent you. Do you remember me?”
But there was no response, although Johnston gently tried pleading, cajoling, and coaxing for a good ten minutes to break through the man’s apathy.
Finally he gave up and moved back out into the passage, breathing as if he’d felt short of air.
Hildebrand turned to Rutledge. “See what you can do, man! I’ll take any help I can get!”
Rutledge could feel his own heart pounding, and Hamish was a live presence in his mind. But he forced himself with every shred of will he possessed to step into the cell. The constable on duty was a large, heavy man who seemed to fill the corner he stood in like some ancient pillar rooted there in the dimness. His face was tense, his eyes on Mowbray like a lifeline.
Hildebrand crowded in after Rutledge, and Johnston, seeming to feel his responsibility like a dead weight that couldn’t be shoved aside, pushed in after. It was Rutledge’s worse nightmare, and he was on the brink of panic when he finally made his voice work.
“Mowbray? Good God, man, what would Mary think of you, filthy and unshaven?” he asked, more harshly than he’d intended. “It’s a matter of pride!”
“Mary’s dead,” Mowbray mumbled at last, as if finally jarred into the present. “She can’t see me now, she can’t hear you.”
“What makes you so certain the dead are deaf and blind?”
“They say I killed her! Is it true?” He looked up, his own personal hell raging in the red-rimmed eyes. Rutledge wondered how much the man could understand, or if this apparent conversation with Mowbray was merely something the sane men in the room believed in.
Catching Johnston’s eye, Rutledge answered, “I don’t know. A woman’s body has been found. You’d been searching for your wife, you’d made public threats against her, whether you remember them or not. The woman seemed to match the photograph of your wife we found in your wallet. What else should we believe?”
“I remember seeing her by the train. I remember it! But if she died in London, how could that be? How could she end up in this place? I don’t even know where I am.” It was as if he’d forgotten that a man was supposed to have been with the woman. He looked vaguely around him, as though his eyes weren’t focusing on the cell walls, that they saw things visible only to him.
Like Hamish …
“What was she wearing when you saw her?”
“I saw her. The wind blew her hair like I remembered, and she had that smile when she looked at the children, that smile. …”
“How was she dressed?” Rutledge persisted. “Was she dressed in blue? Green?”
“She wore pink for me. She always did, when she wanted to make me happy. I took a photograph of her once in pink. I have it here—” He fumbled for his wallet and not finding it, gave up.
“And the children? How were they dressed?”
But Mowbray couldn’t face thinking about his children, and Rutledge nearly lost him again to the depths of apathy.
“There was a woman along the road. Walking by herself,” he went on quickly.