T
he other chair in the room, across the desk from Hildebrand, was occupied by a man holding a small boy on his knees, one arm protectively around the little girl some two years older, who was leaning anxiously against the side of the chair. Both children stared at Rutledge, eyes round and frightened. The boy began to suck his thumb. The man, looking up, was dark haired, of medium height and weight, his pleasant face wearing a distinctly uncertain expression.
Rutledge, with Hamish hammering at the back of his mind, took a deep breath, like a drowning man coming up out of the sea into life-giving air.
“The Mowbray children?” he asked into the lengthening silence.
Hildebrand, rocking on his toes, anger apparent in every line of his body, held Rutledge’s glance as it swung back to his grim face. “No. But close enough. At least it seems that way. You’re the expert from Scotland Yard. That’s why you were sent here. You make the decision.”
Anger of his own surged through Rutledge, but he turned to the man in the chair, holding out his hand. “My name’s Rutledge,” he said, “Inspector Rutledge.”
“Robert Andrews,” the man said, taking it awkwardly over the boy’s head.
“And these are Albert Mowbray’s children?” He paused. “Tricia and Bertie?” He smiled at them, first the girl and then the boy.
The children stared back at him, unmoved by familiar names.
Andrews looked quickly at Hildebrand. “Well, no, they’re mine, actually. This is Rosie and young Robert.” The little girl shyly smiled as her father spoke her name, her head pressed against his shoulder. They were pretty children, both of them—
and of the ages Bert Mowbray’s son and daughter had been on the day they died in London.
“Then how are you connected with this—er—investigation?”
“Hasn’t he told you?” Andrews asked, looking again at Hildebrand. “I thought—Well, never mind what I thought!” He cleared his throat. “I was on the train that passed through Singleton Magna on thirteen August. My wife was expecting our third child in two weeks, and I’d promised to take Rosie and her brother to Susan’s mother—she has a house down along the coast—close to the time. And I did. Rosie was tired and wishing the long trip over, weren’t you, love?” He touched her hair briefly with his free hand. “And she tried to leave the train, only she fell on the platform and scraped her knee. That was when the woman came over and bound a handkerchief around the cut, telling her what a brave little girl she was … .”
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 tricked the mind. How what you believed was shadowed and shaped by what you had done. Mowbray hadn’t been in London to save his wife or his children, he’d been away in France. He’d come home to bury them. He’d missed them every day since. To the point that in a desperate time of his life, he had seen what he wanted most in the world to see … a return to what had been.
“We don’t know that!” Hildebrand repeated stubbornly. “A child that age in a courtroom? It would be a farce, the
questioning could tangle her into knots. Are you willing to put that family through such a nightmare?”
“What are you going to do instead? Will you continue this search, widen it, go on looking until there’s nowhere else to try?”
“I fail to see that it’s any of your business! If we
have
found those children, you may return to London and leave the rest to the local police.”
“Then allow me one final test. Let Mowbray see them—”
“Have you run stark mad—”
“No, listen to me!” As their voices clashed, the constable on duty at the desk opened the door at the head of the passage and stared down it. He quickly shut it again at a gesture from Hildebrand. “What I want to do is this.”
An hour later it was arranged. Not without complaints from Robert Andrews and from Hildebrand and from Marcus Johnston, Mowbray’s attorney.
A call put in to Bowles in London by an irate Hildebrand caught the man in a fierce mood, not a receptive one. Even when the receiver was turned over to Rutledge, Bowles’s voice rang down the line in deafening vowels.
“I’ve had Thomas Napier calling in from his office to see what progress we’ve made toward finding Miss Tarlton,” he said shortly. “I don’t like to have politicians breathing down my neck. It’s your
fault,
Rutledge, for dragging the Napiers into the issue in the first place!”
“If the dead woman is Miss Tarlton, Mr. Napier will do more than breathe down our necks,” Rutledge said. “He’ll be camping in your office! From all reports he was as fond of her as he was of his own daughter.” Fonder, very likely … .
“Then find out, once and for all, if these children are Mowbray’s or not. Do you hear me? Put Hildebrand on again, I’ll set him straight.”
And so it was arranged.
When they went to fetch Mowbray, sunk in the darkness
of his terrors, he came shuffling and blinking into the light in Hildebrand’s room, his face gaunt, unshaven, his hair lank and dull. He said nothing as Johnston, his own face stiff, greeted his client. A silence fell.
Mowbray seemed not to know or care who they were, what they wanted. He had been brought here. He suffered that with the same awful patience he gave to everything he did now, from eating his food to lying on his cot through the night. Nothing touched him. In the courtyard outside Hildebrand’s windows, a ball came bouncing across the debris of leaves and dust.
Johnston was talking when the first child appeared. It was the same age as Robert Andrews, and nearly the same coloring, a little boy chasing exuberantly after the red ball.
Mowbray started up, crying, “No—don’t torment me—”
Rutledge said quietly, “Is that your Bertie, Mr. Mowbray?”
“No, God, no. I killed my Bertie, you told me so yourself!”
Another small boy came running into the yard, fiercely demanding his turn with the ball, and the first turned away with it, leading to a screaming match between the two. A third boy appeared, a little older now, closer to the age the Mowbray boy would have reached if he’d lived.
Watching Mowbray carefully, Rutledge said, “You must look at them, Mr. Mowbray. You must help us know if one of these boys is your son.”
Mowbray, his eyes wet with frantic tears, turned toward Johnston for help. Johnston, shaking, said,
“Inspector!”
in warning.
The fourth child came reluctantly into the courtyard. Mowbray suddenly started, half rising from his chair. Johnston reached out to stop him, and Rutledge reminded him softly, “Remember! There is no way he can reach them!”
Before Johnston or Hildebrand could move, Mowbray had come across the room to the window, sinking to his knees before it, his face contorted with tears. “Bertie?” he cried, his hands raking the glass. “Bertie?
Is it you, lad?
”
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 turmbling 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.