Search the Dark - Charles Todd [95]
Simon answered slowly, “I expect it does. But it’s early days yet to cross that bridge. No one knows for certain, if you’re telling me the truth, whether Margaret is dead—or has simply disappeared for reasons of her own. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about women, Inspector, it’s that they have a logic all their own! She might well turn up alive and surprise all of us.”
Before turning to go, Rutledge asked, “Will you go back to politics, if the museum is a success and you’ve satisfied your duty to your grandfather?”
“Why does that matter so much to everyone?” Sudden anger sent a flush into Simon’s face and he looked directly at Rutledge. “What was your excuse for leaving Scotland Yard to fight in France? Or are you the only one who’s allowed to dig into another man’s soul?”
Rutledge owed Wyatt honesty for honesty. He said slowly, “I believed it was a sense of duty. Of responsibility to King and Country. Not patriotism, you understand, it wasn’t the parades and speeches and flag waving. I remember thinking I have an obligation here. If these men can walk away from their families and their careers, and serve, so must I.”
And Jean had said only, “You know, you look very handsome in uniform!” As if he were dressed for a masquerade… dear God.
“Why did you go back to the Yard? Afterward?”
“Because it was what I did best.”
“Duty, again. I’m no longer sure I know what that means. Even the women in my family were politically astute and politically ambitious. It never occurred to any of them that I might not be cut out of the same bolt of cloth. It never occurred to me. I went away to war to be a hero. I came home a failure in the eyes of most people. No medals, no appetite for politics, no fashionable marriage.”
“Is that why you have taken the trouble to build this museum?” Rutledge gestured to the shelves around them, the mysteries of another world, another culture. So foreign in this English house in an English county. And with a French wife … but that was something he couldn’t say aloud.
It was as if Simon hadn’t heard him. “I wasn’t a bad soldier, I fought hard, I served as well as any man. I don’t know why I survived. I don’t see how any of us did. It was a bloody lottery. I win, you lose.”
Rutledge felt the coldness of memory. The times he’d been terrified that he might die—and the long months when he was terrified that he wouldn’t.
“It wasn’t a pretty war,” Simon finished. “And I discovered that I was no Churchill. In the shambles of the trenches I couldn’t make a pretense of being dashing and flamboyant. It would have been obscene.”
Rutledge, feeling a flatness that pervaded his spirit and gave him a sense of loss, walked slowly back to the inn, where he’d left his car. Had he finally reached the bedrock of Simon Wyatt? In those last words, he thought perhaps he had. “I discovered that I was no Churchill.” Was that the torment that sent him out into the night alone, reliving something that was past?
“Nae mair than you do!” Hamish said with savage honesty.
All right then. Why did he himself persist in this business of policing? Why had he ever taken it up after the war?
“Because it was all you are fit for,” Hamish reminded him.
It was, after all, what he had told Wyatt.
“Then why do I sometimes get it so bloody wrong!”
He started the car and climbed in, shutting the door and letting in the clutch with half his attention on his thoughts. All at once he realized that Shaw was coming out of the inn and hailing him, bent almost double with the effort it took to hurry and shout at the same time.
Rutledge stopped the car so suddenly he killed the engine. A sense of cold foreboding swept through him.
Shaw reached the passenger side and said breathlessly, “Bloody hell, Rutledge, didn’t you hear me?”
“I’m sorry—” Rutledge began, but Shaw shook his head.
“You’re needed in Singleton Magna straightaway. As soon as you can get there. Hildebrand had someone telephone to the Wyatt house, but you’d already left. Aurore passed the message on to my uncle.”
Rutledge thought, They’ve found