Free Search the Dark by Charles Todd Page B

proof that he did what you’re claiming he did. They’ll want means and motive and a weapon, they’ll want to know those children are dead, and at his hand, so they can convict a witless man without having it rest heavy on their conscience. His defense will run you in circles, making your life a misery before it’s over. They’ll put him on the stand and have him swearing he’s Jack the Ripper or the Czar of Russia before they’ve finished with him. And if we’re wrong—about any particular—”
    “Have you met Mowbray’s barrister? Johnston? The man’s already in the grave with his son. He’ll not fight any evidence we present, he’ll be happy enough to see his client sent to an asylum instead of the gallows. And that’s supposing he cares one way or another! Once we find the other bodies, no jury in England will let Mowbray off!” Hildebrand
strode ten feet and swung around a second time, too angry to let it go. “Do what you were sent to do, man! This isn’t Cornwall, you’ll not be finding any deep, dark secrets in my patch, and you’ll not spoil my case.”
    And he was gone, arms swinging in a barely suppressed need to hit something, anything, if it released the tension in his body. Rutledge watched him, oblivious of the stares of passersby, as Hildebrand crossed the street and disappeared into the Swan.
    “I could ha’ told you—” Hamish began.
    I don’t want to hear it!
    Rutledge turned and walked on, up the hill toward the common, where the coolness of the trees closed over him.
    Mowbray. Was he guilty of murdering his wife? And had he killed his children? Or was the body waiting to be claimed in the makeshift morgue a stranger’s, with nothing more than coincidence dragging her into another man’s madness? And the children—or the man with them? Did they exist, or were they something from the dark reaches of grief, conjured up with the pain of jogged memory?
    What was wrong with this murder, what was it that lay beneath the surface, like a corpse beneath the ice, waiting to rise and point an accusing finger when the time came?
    Hamish said, “Yon policeman wants his answers tidy, like a birthday box done up in ribbons and silver paper. Never mind what’s truly happened. You’d do well to heed him and not meddle. He can make a bad enemy!”
    “There’s a dead woman to be thought of,” Rutledge reminded him. “And that man in the cell.” But what could be done for Mowbray now, even if they found a dozen murderers to take his place? The poor devil was broken by his own torment. He looked up at rooks calling from the branches arching high over his head. “I don’t think we’ll find the children,” he added pensively.
    “Then where’ve they got to?” Hamish demanded.
    “To safety,” he answered, and for the life of him, he couldn’t have explained where that notion had come from.

    He took his lunch at the Swan, eating in solitary splendor in the dining room. It was nearly two o’clock, and the young woman waiting on him was yawning in a corner, her eyes drowsy as she filled the sugar bowls and then collected the salts and peppers in their turn. She looked enough like Peg, the chambermaid, to be her sister. Rutledge listened to the clink of the silver tops as she worked with them, his own thoughts busy with details.
    He had called in at the railway station and persuaded the master to ask down the line whether suitcases had been unclaimed when the train made its last stop.
    The telegraph key had clicked swiftly and surely, and then silence. “There’s a chance they were found by the conductor, long before the end of the line,” the man reminded Rutledge.
    “I’d thought of that.” But the conductor who had put Mowbray off the train was an experienced man and according to the file had been questioned by Hildebrand himself. He’d have been the first to see the significance of any uncollected luggage that had come to light then or later.
    The key began to click in