Search the Dark - Charles Todd [77]
There was an echo of Hildebrand’s voice in the last words.
“Always keep an open mind, Constable!”
“Aye, that I do. Sir.”
Rutledge nodded and walked off, unsatisfied. But Hildebrand was right: The second body was none of his business, and he was just as glad to leave it.
He went instead to the Wyatt house, walking into the museum unannounced. Elizabeth Napier turned from the shells she was arranging, a smock over her deep-blue dress and a small feather duster on the floor beside her. “Hello, Inspector!” she said in surprise. “What brings you here?”
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Wyatt. Is he in the museum or at home?”
“Through that door and to your right,” she answered, speculation in her eyes. “Has there—has there been any word of Margaret? You aren’t asking Simon to break something gently—”
“Nothing, I’m afraid.” He kept walking, making his way through the clutter of empty boxes that someone had begun to flatten and set in a pile, preparatory to putting them away. He went through the far door, found a short passage and a small, cluttered room serving as an office, at the end on the right.
Simon was busy with a ledger and what appeared to be a pile of bills. Every surface in the room seemed to be occupied by some half-finished task, waiting to be remembered. He sighed as Rutledge came in, as if the interruption had spoiled his train of thought. Seeing who it was, he leaned back in his chair and began to rub the back of his neck as if it ached. “What is it? Any news?”
“No. I wanted to speak to you. Privately.” Rutledge closed the door behind him and pulled out a chair that had been shoved into one corner. After removing the stack of books it held to the floor, he sat down.
“Look, can’t this wait?” Simon asked. “I’ve got to finish this lot, and it’s going to take most of the day! I’m not good at this sort of thing, and Aurore knows it. I can’t think why she isn’t here lending a hand. Thank God Elizabeth can make some sense of those displays. I need every bit of help I can find!”
“No, it can’t wait,” Rutledge said uncompromisingly. “Take your mind out of that ledger and listen to me!”
Simon reluctantly pushed it to one side, though whether he’d shut the figures out of his mind was another matter. “Very well. What’s the problem?”
“I’ve got a corpse on my hands, I think it must be the woman you were expecting to hire as an assistant, and I have witnesses who tell me that your wife drove Margaret Tarlton back to the railway station. If they’re speaking the truth, it means that Aurore Wyatt was probably the last person to see her alive.”
He frowned. “I don’t see what the problem is. Aurore isn’t a murderess!”
Simon Wyatt had also said his wife wasn’t a liar. Rutledge found himself wondering if Simon was shallow—or under the stress of his work wasn’t able to absorb anything that wasn’t connected directly to his museum. “What do you know about your wife—her background, her family?”
“Good God, what do they have to do with it!”
“Her parents,” Rutledge said patiently, ignoring Hamish’s irritated remarks about the constable and now this man.
“They’re both dead—mother died some years before the war,” he said in some exasperation. “Father killed when the Germans came through—shot, trying to stop the looting of his house and farm. Aurore herself barely escaped—she reached a nunnery just over the Belgian border and was taken in. She was ill for weeks, exhaustion and a fever. Then she tried to make her way south, hoping to stay with a cousin in Provence. I found her, ill again and terrified, in a group of refugees that had come into our sector during the night, and got shot at for their pains. Mercifully nobody was killed, but it was a near thing, scared the very devil out of my men, I can tell you! Word had already been passed that there was movement along the German lines, and then out of the dark!… I wouldn’t put it past the Hun to think this was a great joke!”
Rutledge understood. You shot at anything that came at