Search the Dark - Charles Todd [97]
He looked at Rutledge, not sure how to go on.
“Why didn’t you come forward sooner?” Rutledge asked. “We’ve had sheets printed, police asking questions, going from house to house.” He tried to keep the anger and the shock out of his voice, for the children’s sake and his own, “It was in the papers repeatedly, both a photograph and a request for help.”
“Well, I went straight back to London, didn’t I? And a damned—and a good thing I did, because Susan suddenly went into labor that same night, and everything else went out the window, didn’t it? It wasn’t until I went back to fetch the children that my mother-in-law told me about the—er—what happened to the woman and said I was lucky it wasn’t my wife and my two that was missing. She said she’d had nightmares for days about the poor little dears. Mind you, I’d have never gone to the police if she hadn’t talked on and on about the horror of it all. Which set me to thinking.” He shook his head. “She has a morbid taste for tragedies, that woman does!”
“What happened?”
“The police saw fit to arrest me on the spot, that’s what happened, and if the rector in the church who’d married us and christened these two hadn’t come forward, I’d probably still be there!” He frowned indignantly, still unsettled by the injustice of it all. “That was last night.”
“I’m sorry,” Rutledge said soothingly. “They were trying to do their job.”
“I fail to see how arresting an innocent man is part of any policeman’s job,” Andrews replied, with the first show of spirit.
“Do you remember what the woman was wearing? The one who helped the children?”
“God, no, I don’t know anything about women’s clothes—” he began.
“Was it pink? Or perhaps yellow?” Rutledge waited. All this time, Hildebrand had been standing at his back, across the desk, silent and watchful and hoping—believing!—that Rutledge might still fail.
Andrews shrugged. “I tell you, I don’t know.”
Rutledge turned to the little girl, squatting on his heels before her. “Can you remember the woman who helped you at the train, when you fell?” he asked gently, smiling at her. “Was she pretty? As pretty as your mother?”
Rosie looked down, playing with the sash of her own dress. “Yes,” she said so softly it was just a whisper.
“Tell me.”
“She was pretty,” Rosie repeated.
Over her head Rutledge asked, “Do you still have the handkerchief?” Andrews silently mouthed no.
“I liked her hat,” Rosie said into the exchange. “I want one.”
“Do you? What color was it?”
He waited, patient, silent. After a moment she pointed to a carafe of water on the desk, a crystal jug with an upturned glass for its lid. A band of silver at the neck caught the reflected light of the courtyard, shining and clear. “Like that,” she said, and smiled shyly.
“Like light on water, silvery,” the Wyatt maid Edith had said.
Rutledge slowly straightened and turned to Hildebrand.
The inspector said abruptly, “If you’d excuse us for a moment, Mr. Andrews?” Without waiting for an answer, he went around the desk and looked at Rutledge.
The two men went out into the dark, cramped passage, carefully closing the door behind them and moving away, out of earshot. At the far end of the passage, the other door that locked Mowbray away was deep in shadow. Rutledge found himself thinking about the man inside.
“He didn’t kill them,” he said, more to himself than to Hildebrand.
“We don’t know that,” Hildebrand said.
“That child just identified the color of the hat Miss Tarlton was wearing. If it was Miss Tarlton at the station, if it was Miss Tarlton that Mowbray saw and came looking for, it means his wife must surely have died in 1916, with the two children. And it was only his imagination—” He stopped. Knowing—who better?—how imagination