Search the Dark - Charles Todd [99]
Robert Andrews the younger turned toward the man at the window, looking at him in alarm. Then he turned back to the ball players and scooped up the ball they had dropped in their struggle. Racing away up the walk toward the street shouting, “Mine! Mine!” he vanished.
Mowbray cried, “No—no—come back! Bertie!”
And at the same time he caught sight of Rosie, being led by the hand into the courtyard by a slightly older child. On such short notice, they’d had difficulty finding girls of the right age…. He stared at her, drinking in the sight of her, a strange look of wonder on his face. Rosie, her hand confidingly in that of the other girl, looked straight at the window and then away again. That same shy smile lit her face.
“Tricia, love?” Mowbray asked, his body trembling as if he had a fever. “They said I’d killed you and left you in the dark for the foxes—”
He broke down then, his eyes turning to Rutledge for one brief moment, in their depths something shining. It was the brief, terrible spark of hope.
Johnston was openly moved, his face wet with tears. Hildebrand swore under his breath, the same words over and over and over again.
Rutledge, ignoring the savagery of Hamish’s anger, looked at Mowbray and told himself that it had had to be done—for Margaret’s sake—for Mowbray’s sake, above all else. He went to the prisoner and touched his shoulder. “They are the children you saw,” he said gently. “The children at the train station. Is that what you’re telling me? The little boy who picked up the ball, and that smaller girl. Are you quite sure?”
“Yes, yes, they’re my children, they’re alive—” His shoulders moved with the sobs racking his lungs, his words tumbling out incoherently. He pressed his face against the glass as the two girls turned and went back the way they’d come, eyes straining for a last glimpse of them. He repeated the words, more clearly this time, as if finding them easier to believe with each breath.
“No,” Rutledge said. “No, I’m afraid they aren’t Bertie and Patricia. Their name is Andrews. Think, Mowbray! Your Bertie would be four now, nearly five. Like the older boy you saw. And the little girl, Patricia, would be seven by now. These two children—the ones who remind you so much of your own two—are younger, the ages Bertie and Patricia were when they died in London.”
“Their mother?” Mowbray asked huskily, suddenly remembering. “Is she out there too?” Raw need gleamed like fire in his eyes.
“No.” His voice was very low, with infinite compassion in its timbre. “The mother of these two children who remind you so much of your own is in London, recovering from the birth of her third child. She’s auburn haired, and—er—plump.” He pulled from his pocket the photograph that Robert Andrews had let him borrow. “Do you see that?”
After a moment the words seemed to register. Mowbray looked at it, frowning with the effort. The woman captured by the camera had dark hair, far darker than that in the photograph Mowbray himself had carried, and she weighed at least two stone more. “That’s not Mary!” he said in surprise. “She doesn’t look anything like Mary!” His eyes swiveled to Johnston and Hildebrand. “Where’s Mary?” he demanded accusingly, as if she might still be conjured up with the children.
Hildebrand opened his mouth but Rutledge got there before him. “Look at this photograph,” he said, passing the one he’d borrowed from Elizabeth Napier. “Do you see your wife among these women, Mr. Mowbray? Look carefully at all of them, and tell me.”
He studied it, distraught and weeping. “She’s not there,” he said, hope dying again. “She’s not there.” He looked up at Rutledge and said with such pathos that it brought silence to the three watchers, “Did I kill my Mary, then?” Rutledge stood there, looking down at the frightened, ravaged face. Against the judgment of the policeman he’d trained to become, he said quietly, “No. You didn’t kill her. The German bombs did, a long time ago. She can’t suffer anymore. And she can’t come back