Search the Dark - Charles Todd [86]
Rutledge walked back to the Swan, thinking about what the doctor had said. Hamish, in the back of his mind, was reminding him that blindness could be worse than deafness. Rutledge ignored him as long as he could and then said, “It isn’t blindness. Human nature enters into it. I can’t see Aurore Wyatt beating anyone to death. You said as much yourself once.”
“Women,” Hamish said, “will kill to protect their bairns—and their man. Margaret Tarlton was Simon Wyatt’s past, returned to haunt him. She did na’ want that. And the woman wasn’t going away, she was staying.”
“Jealousy? No, I don’t see Aurore Wyatt being jealous of Margaret or anyone else.” Yet she was afraid of Elizabeth Napier.
“Who’s spoken of jealousy?” Hamish demanded.
Rutledge stopped, watching a carriage coming up the hill toward the inn. The streets were deserted, it was just the dinner hour. He stood still and could hear laughter coming from the house on his left, and people’s voices. The carriage rattled past and disappeared among the trees at the top of the hill. A cat stepped out of the inn’s yard, ears twitching, catching the distant sound of a dog’s raucous bark. Something fluttered overhead—a bat, he thought.
But deeper was another thought. Why had Simon Wyatt turned away from his future in Parliament? What was the real reason?
A foreign wife might not be an asset—but with the proper backing, even that might be overcome. If Elizabeth Napier’s father had turned against Wyatt for rejecting his daughter and putting in her place a French nobody, he was—by all accounts—an astute enough politician to know that you didn’t have to like the men you backed, you only needed to be sure of their support in the future. The Wyatt name had been magic in this part of Dorset for more than one generation. A safe seat for this constituency.
Simon and Aurore blamed his decision on the war. But what if there was something more than war weariness—or a devotion to his other grandfather—that made a very able and personable man choose seclusion over a brilliant career? A small museum without the resources to grow, hidden away in the Dorset countryside where visitors were few, where the exhibits would surely have a very narrow appeal, however interesting they were in their own right … It didn’t quite add up.
“It’s no’ what I was saying—” Hamish began.
But Rutledge cut him short. His eyes moved across to the police station where Mowbray still sat in his gloomy cell, watched day and night. “It’s a beginning, isn’t it?” he responded. “That’s all that matters!”
The station door opened and Hildebrand came out, then paused as he saw Rutledge looking toward him. An instant’s hesitation, and he walked on, as if the man on the other side of the street didn’t exist.
“You’ve spoiled his investigation,” Hamish pointed out. “He will na’ thank you for it.”
“Mowbray might,” Rutledge said. “Nobody else seems to care about him.”
After eating his dinner without being aware of what was on his plate or his fork, Rutledge went out to his car and turned it toward Charlbury.
It was late in the evening to be calling on police business, but often the unexpected worked more successfully than the routine.
The road was dark, nearly empty, except for a dog that trotted into the undergrowth as the car’s headlamps flicked over the crest of the rise. But Charlbury was brighter, and the Wyatt house looked as if it was expecting the King. There were lamps lit in most of the rooms, and in the museum wing. He left his car up by the church and walked back, making his way to the wing on foot. He thought: Curious … so much light and no sounds of voices, of people shouting or talking or laughing.
The museum was empty. The masks leered at him in the brightness, mouths agape or dark slashes, eyes black with speculation