Charles Todd - Search the Dark

“No! Don’t say anything more. We must go before Elizabeth or Simon comes out to find me. Please! It was our bargain, you can’t tell me you don’t remember! You, of all people!”

“Aurore. Why did you kill Margaret Tarlton?”

“I shall tell you on our way to London. Pleaser!”

“I can’t do this. I don’t believe you. Whatever you are confessing to, it isn’t murder.” He turned the hat again in his hands, striving to ignore Hamish, striving to sound patient, untroubled, the policeman doing his duty.

But not to protect the innocent, only to find the guilty -

“You promised!” she said again, her voice husky with hurt.

He said, “Listen to me! I want to know where you found this hat and why you think it was Simon who killed Margaret.”

She gasped, and this time her fingers did grip his arm in the darkness. “It was I who killed Margaret. I hit her and hit her and hit her, until my shoulder was tired and I couldn’t lift the rock any more. I drove back to the farm and bathed the blood away, and I left my things in the room there, along with her things-I knew Jimson would never open my door! It was safe, no one comes there!”

Her words and her grip were tight, convincing, and he could feel her desperation, the need to make him believe.

Rutledge said, closing his mind to Hamish and to her pain, “All right. I believe you. But tell me, why did you have to kill Betty Cooper? What had that poor girl done to make you batter her into unconsciousness and then death?”

She moved convulsively, her hand on his arm showing him as clearly as if she stood in full daylight, what emotions were passing through her body.

“Ah, yes. I thought we might come to that as well. Betty was very pretty,” she said. “But that wasn’t the reason. Simon was sending her to London, to Elizabeth. I thought-I thought she would be used by Elizabeth to drive a wedge. As Margaret would have been, later. An excuse to call Simon and say ‘About Betty… I should like to know what you think about her wages-her behavior-her future.’ It was such a small excuse. But it was an excuse!”

When he said nothing, she went on in a low, trembling voice. “I am not the woman you think I am, Ian Rutledge. I cannot be endowed with virtues I never possessed. I’m French, I think differently, I feel differently. I am a murderess, and I have lied to you from the start.”

He couldn’t see her face, he couldn’t watch her eyes, and the telltale hand had been withdrawn. But he knew beyond doubt that he had to accept her confession now.

He had no choice but to arrest her for two murders and let the courts decide for him whether she was guilty or not. The hat in his hand was proof enough, and if the suitcase had been burned, it didn’t matter. Confession, evidence…

“What did you do with the murder weapon?”

“It was a smooth stone from the car. I kept it there to put under a tire on a hill. I saw a lorry in France roll down a hill into a crowded wagon, full of refugees. It killed so many of them. I carry the stone to prevent such a thing from happening again. It is still in the car. If you look, you will find it below the rear seat. I daresay it still has Margaret Tarlton’s blood on it.”

He stood there, listening, hearing the ring of truth, hearing too the deep grief behind it. Hearing the ragged breathing.

Aurore knew too many of the details. She had brought him the hat, she had given him the murder weapon, she had given him what-to many women-would seem a reasonable motive for two deaths.

And yet-and yet his instinct told him she was a consummate liar, not a murdereress. He knew now who she was shielding-though not yet why. What was it she knew that drove her to this confession? What had given Simon away, in her eyes? The hat, perhaps lying forgotten in the back of the car? Coming out of the barn that afternoon to find the car was not there, where she’d left it? Simon’s insistence that she had taken Margaret to the train, when he knew she had not? How long had it taken her to put the facts together? A bit at a time? Or one terrible blow she hadn’t expected?

Yet Rutledge found himself thinking that Simon had been too obsessed with his museum to plot so clever a murder, so clever a way of convicting his wife. Or had that been another lie? Diabolical and cruel…

There was another possibility-that someone else had seen to it that the finger of guilt pointed at Aurore, and Simon was unwittingly suffering the same agonies of doubt and fear as she was. Had the first attempt to be rid of Aurore-killing Betty Cooper-misfired when the girl’s body was not discovered? And Margaret Tarlton, the next sacrifice, had nearly backfired too, when Mowbray took the blame for her death. Until Elizabeth Napier came to Charlbury and set Hildebrand straight… but could any of that be proved?

Rutledge said, “Very well. I’m arresting you, Aurore Wyatt, for the death by murder of Margaret Tarlton and Betty Cooper.” It was, after all, what she wanted. And it would forestall Hildebrand.

He could feel the tension drain out of her, a smothered sob of relief.

“I’m so very glad it’s over,” she said quietly. “You don’t know how hard it has been to live a lie.”

But he did-he lived one every day, he told himself as he took her arm and started for the car. His lie was that he was a competent policeman, an experienced and capable officer of Scotland Yard.

Hamish was reminding him of it with vitriolic pleasure.

They had gotten no farther than the edge of the trees when a cry, cut short, rang through the night. Aurore stopped still, listening, her head turned toward the church. “I think it came from there!” she said anxiously.

“Wait here!” Rutledge ordered, already moving.

“No! I’m coming with you!” She was at his heels as he ran toward the front of the church. There were lights coming on in the nearer houses and a light moving down the path from the rectory.

But when they reached the church porch, all they found was Elizabeth Napier in a crumpled heap by the steps, her head buried in her arms. In the blackness of the night she seemed terribly small and vulnerable.

Aurore went quickly to her, touched her shoulder, said, “Help is here, what has happened?”

Elizabeth looked up, the whites of her eyes like half-moons in her pale face. She said roughly, her voice breaking on the words, “I was attacked-”

The lantern bobbing up the walk from the rectory reached them, and Joanna Daulton said with brisk calm, “What’s wrong? Can I help?”

Her lamplight fell on Elizabeth, on the dark hair spilling down in waves over her shoulders and the torn collar of her dress. There were red marks like bruises on her throat. Elizabeth put up her hand against the invasion of the light and said, “Oh, God, I was so frightened!”

Rutledge said, “Who was it? Did you see?”

Elizabeth shook her head a little. “No-one minute he was there, startling me, his hands on me, and when I screamed, he reached for my throat, and I could feel his breath on my face-” She shuddered, her body beginning to shake with reaction. Aurore, after the slightest hesitation, knelt to put her arms around Elizabeth, cradling her head against her breast.

“It’s all right, you’re safe now, don’t think about it,” she was saying over and over in a low, soothing voice that seemed to touch all of them.

Rutledge said, “I’ll have a look around-”

“No!” Elizabeth cried. “No, don’t leave me!”

“Mrs. Daulton and Mrs. Wyatt will stay with you. I must go after him now. There may still be time to-”

“No, please, take me back. I-I don’t want to be alone,” she pleaded.

He thought it was more than that and remembered suddenly that Simon hadn’t been in the museum. That very likely Simon hadn’t been in the house.