A Pale Horse

18

If she had intended to shock him, Sarah Parkinson succeeded.

Rutledge had walked in those gardens, admiring them. He had seen how carefully they were maintained, and never guessed that they were, in effect, Mrs. Parkinson’s memorial.

He said, “Is that why neither you nor your sister live at Partridge Fields?”

“Would you?” she demanded. “If every time you looked out at the gardens, you felt her presence? I thought it might be comforting, somehow, but it isn’t. She’s a restless, unhappy ghost, and we’re afraid of her.”

“Yet you or your sister—or both of you—keep the gardens the way they must have been when she was alive.”

He could see her bite her lip. “I hate it. She’s there, scattered about the beds, and we’re caught up in her revenge. If we let the gardens go to seed, if they’re overgrown and ugly, we’re desecrating her grave. If we dig and plant and weed, we’re touching her ashes. It’s as if the flowers draw their strength from her bones and morbidly flourish. My father left it to us to decide what to do about the grounds. And it was the cruelest thing he did.”

She walked to the door of the motorcar. “I’m tired, I want to go home. I’ve talked too much as it is.”

“You must decide, between you, who will come to Yorkshire with me and bring your father’s body back to Wiltshire.”

“No. I’ll have no part in any such thing. Let him stay where he is, unloved and unwanted.”

She hadn’t asked why her father had gone to Yorkshire, or had died there.

Hamish said, “It would ha’ been easy for them to kill him. If he was lured to the house.”

Were either of the women capable of murder? He rather thought that Rebecca Parkinson was. Her hatred was still white-hot and ran deep. There was grief mixed into Sarah’s emotions. But she would surely have supported her sister after Parkinson had been killed. The only other choice would have been to refuse, then see Rebecca caught, convicted, and hanged.

But if the sisters had killed their father, why do it in Yorkshire?

Or had he got away the first time they’d tried, and they had gone after him?

A chilling thought.

The question was, how was he going to go about proving it?

“Did your father have enemies, anyone who would have liked to see him dead?” It was the standard question to put to survivors.

“Not that I know of. Although there was one man in London whom my father didn’t trust. He told my mother once that he’d been invited to bring us up to London to dine with this man, and my father didn’t want us to go. I only remember because Becky and I were so disappointed. But my father said that London was quite dull because of the war, and it wouldn’t have been as exciting as we’d thought.”

“What was this man’s name?” Rutledge asked, although he had a very good idea.

“I don’t think I ever heard it. My father referred to him as the Dreadnought. But that was the name of a ship, wasn’t it?”

Deloran?

In the end he let Sarah Parkinson go, after asking how to find her if he needed her to answer more questions. He had no grounds on which to keep her.

But then as she put the motorcar in gear, Rutledge put a hand on her door. “There’s been a murder in the cottages. A man called Willingham. Did he know your father, by any chance?”

“A murder? How dreadful.” She shook her head. “I don’t think my father would have come here to live if he had known any of his neighbors. He was running away. From the house, from Mother’s ghost, from us—from the army. Possibly even from himself. Who knows? For that matter, who cares? It was selfish, whatever his excuse was.”

Watching her motorcar out of sight, Rutledge found himself pitying the unwanted, still nameless body in Yorkshire.

Hamish said, “He made his own grave whilst he was still living.”

And it was true, in many ways. But in the end, Rebecca and Sarah Parkinson would have no choice but to bring their father home.

If Mrs. Parkinson still haunted the house where she’d died, Parkinson would be satisfied to lie in the churchyard, far from the flower beds at Partridge Fields. But which name would be engraved on the stone over him?

If Rebecca and Sarah Parkinson denied that he was their father, Deloran would be only too pleased to add his own statement that the murder victim was an unknown unhappy man named Partridge, dead at the hands of person or persons unknown. And in a year or two all of this would be forgotten.

Brady might be brought in to testify, and disclaim any knowledge of an assignment to watch a scientist who had resigned prematurely from Porton Down. He was merely an ex-soldier, down on his luck and trying to sober up.

And Rutledge would be left looking a fool.

He walked back to the inn and retrieved his motorcar. It was late to be driving to Partridge Fields, but the roads were fairly empty and he made good time, keeping awake through sheer physical effort by the time he was twenty miles away.

He opened the gates and drove through them, leaving the car near the shed.

The house was dark, the gardens black in the moonlight, the brash colors of spring disguised as varying shades of gray.

The kitchen door, as he’d thought, was unlocked.

This was the country. No one came to rob the house, there was no need to lock doors.

Carrying his torch, he walked through the kitchen quarters and then through the formal rooms of the house.

The glancing beam of his torch illumined the brilliant colors of draperies and carpets and upholstery, the gold filigree around a mirror, the rich tones of polished walnut and mahogany, the shimmer of silk wallpaper and cut glass in the chandeliers.

Someone had had money. Mrs. Parkinson’s dowry? Parkinson’s wages from the government? A family inheritance? Enough at least for a comfortable life and a well-appointed home.

He moved quietly in the silent house, and avoided windows. Portraits watched him as he passed, and once a mouse scurried out of the wainscoting and across the floor, squeaking as it dived into the cold hearth.

Like the gardens, the house was meticulously maintained.

Even without Hamish’s harsh reminder, Rutledge was well aware that he had no authority to open doors, look in drawers, and investigate the contents of desks, but he rather thought he would find nothing, even if he did.

Even so, he saw no trace of Parkinson here, although there were several photographs of a fair woman with two fair and pretty daughters set in silver frames. Looking at them, he could almost see the girls grow from room to room as the array of photographs marked the changes of years.

He studied Mrs. Parkinson’s likeness. She was slim, very pretty, and her eyes reminded him of a doe, sensitive and vulnerable. She should have married a country squire, he thought, not a man whose training in chemistry had taken a far different turn from anything either of them could foresee.

Rutledge broke his own rule only once, looking in the wardrobe in what appeared to be the master bedroom. As he’d expected, it held only a woman’s clothing, as if Parkinson had taken everything of his with him, leaving nothing behind because he never intended to come home again.

And reciprocally, his daughters had banned him from the house by carrying out their mother’s wishes. He was shut out, lock, stock, and photographs. There were none that included him. Was that why the one on his desk was so precious to him?

“Taken the day we climbed the white horse…”

Rutledge inspected the lamps in the master bedroom, and turned the key gently, listening to the soft hiss of gas wafting into the room before shutting it off again. It would be a simple matter to close the doors and windows and lie there in bed, waiting to fall asleep and die. But then Mrs. Parkinson had been ready to die.

Had Parkinson been asked to come here for a reconciliation, and then drugged enough to keep him from waking up when someone slipped in, turned on the gas, and laid towels outside the doors? Retribution without pity, but without having to watch a father die.

Hamish said, “Aye, but no’ in this room, and no’ in this house. He wouldna’ sleep here.”

Which might explain why the body had been discovered in Yorkshire; but even if Parkinson had somehow been lured there, where was the gas jet that killed him? Even two young women would have a problem dragging a dead man out of a hotel without being noticed.

Hamish said, “Ye ken, it may ha’ been one of Deloran’s men who lured him to where he was killed.”

Counting on the fact that the newspapers wouldn’t concern themselves with a nobody’s unfortunate death? Then why dress the body in mask and cloak, attracting attention to it?

Hard to believe that Deloran would stoop to murder, but then Rutledge was still in the dark about why precisely the man cared what happened to either Gaylord Partridge or Gerald Parkinson. It would be easier, surely, to discredit him than to murder him.

Aloud Rutledge said, “Then why send the Yard here, when Parkinson went missing? Drawing attention to him. Why not leave well enough alone?”

“To wash his hands. There’s the watcher. He could ha’ sworn that nobody knew where Partridge had gone, just as nobody kenned where he’d vanished before.”

“Yes, well, I think tomorrow it’s time to speak to Mr. Brady. Drunk or sober.”

Keeping his torch from striking the glass, he went to the window and looked down on the dark gardens. Clouds were moving across the face of the moon as it set, and he could almost imagine something out there as the shadows shifted. Very likely the horse fountain, showing itself in ghostly white fragments as the shrubs moved in the wind. But add a little guilt to that, and he could understand how the family must have felt about this room and the gardens.

In the passage leading to the stairs, Rutledge paused to consider the nature of the silence around him. The ashes in the garden must have been the last straw, not the first. He had a strong feeling that this family had broken apart long before Mrs. Parkinson’s suicide. What had really brought her to the brink of despair? It must have gone far beyond her belief that her husband was squandering his gifts and talents on work that he loved and she hated.

He reached the kitchen, made certain that he’d not tracked mud from the yard onto the stone flags by the door, and left the house exactly as he’d found it. Standing for a moment in the night’s darkness until his eyes adjusted, he thought he heard an owl call from the trees beyond. Then he walked to the motorcar without looking back.

Hamish remarked, “It wasna’ wise to come here.”

“It could do no harm,” Rutledge answered, going down the drive without his headlamps, and turning the bonnet toward Berkshire.

“Aye, so ye may think now. And later live to regret it.”

In fact, Hamish was right. Rutledge was eating a late breakfast at The Smith’s Arms when the door opened and Rebecca Parkinson strode in.

“What the devil did you think you were doing,” she asked harshly, “when you went to my mother’s house in the night?”

Rutledge, caught off guard, said, “If there are no servants in the house to protect it, if doors are left unlocked, anyone can walk in. How many times did your father go back to that house without your knowledge? Or for that matter, the man he called Dreadnought?”

She opened her mouth to say something, and then shut it smartly. After a moment she asked, “What could you possibly know about Dreadnought?”

“His real name.”

That took her aback. In the silence that followed, she tried to absorb the implications of what he’d said.

“My father disliked him intensely. It was personal and professional. He told me once that the name suited the man—he feared nothing and he used people for his own ends. If you’ve been sent here by Dreadnought, I’m not surprised that you would stoop to anything.”

“I told you, I’m from Scotland Yard. But I have met the man. Now, why should you think that someone had been in the house at Partridge Fields?”

Returning to the grievance that had brought her here, she said, “The gardener at one of the houses down the road was coming home late last night from a wedding, and he saw lights moving from room to room. He’s known my family for ages, my mother and he often exchanged plants. He came to find me this morning, to tell me that something was wrong. Something about the lights troubled him, and he was afraid to investigate. He’s an old man and he may have thought it was my mother’s spirit. But I knew better. It wasn’t my mother’s poor ghost, it was you. When you couldn’t badger me, you went to the house on your own, thinking no one would learn of it.”

He had been careful not to show a light. And he remembered the flicker of movement he imagined he’d seen in the shadows near the horse fountain. Had someone else been there after he left? Deloran might have had reasons of his own for taking the risk of searching the empty house. If so, what was he looking for?

“He wouldna’ go himself, ye ken,” Hamish remarked. “His hands are clean.”

Rutledge said to Miss Parkinson, “But you yourself couldn’t see evidence of someone there?”

“Of course not. You’re a London policeman, you aren’t going to leave muddy footprints in the passages. What I want to know is what you took away?”

“If I was there, it was without any legal right to take anything from the house.”

“I should have known you wouldn’t have the decency to tell me the truth.”

Rutledge smiled faintly. “Yes, all right, I was there. But I touched nothing. I wanted to see what drove your father away from his home—why he chose to live where he did. I was hoping that if I could understand that, I could explain some of the other things I don’t understand. Please, sit down, and let Mrs. Smith bring you a cup of tea. I have a few questions to ask you and we might as well get them over with.”

She was still angry. “You went into my mother’s room. Where she died. Why should I want to talk to you? I wouldn’t give you that satisfaction.”

When she had first confronted him, he’d noted how much like her mother she looked, but in the course of their conversation Rutledge could see how much stronger she was than her mother must have been. Her spirit, he thought, must have come from her father. However much she would fiercely deny it.

Before she could turn and stalk out of the inn, he said, “I can arrange to have you taken into custody to help us with our inquiries if you prefer that.”

“On what charges?” she demanded. “I’ve done nothing except refuse to speak to you. And I can’t be forced to speak, as you well know.”

“On the charge that you murdered your father.”

Rebecca Parkinson sat down. “That’s utter rubbish.”

“Yes, but I rather think I could prove it. It might be worth a cup of tea to find out what I know.”

“I don’t want tea. Whatever you have to say, it had better be said quickly, or I’m leaving.”

“I told you the first time we met. We’ve found your father’s body.” It was blunt and intended to be.

Her angry flush faded. “He’s alive and well, and living in those wretched cottages under the White Horse.” Her denial wasn’t completely convincing. As if she knew her father was dead but must keep up the pretense that it was a lie. Her vehemence on their first meeting had been stronger.

“But he went missing, you see. And now his body is lying unclaimed in a Yorkshire village. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Or the fact that he might have been murdered?”

“It has nothing to do with me.” The line of her jaw was defiant.

“He didn’t die where we found him. That’s why we have to suspect murder. I’m here to make sense of what little we do know, and that means I have to follow him if I can every step of the way from those cottages to Yorkshire. To do that, I need information about his life, his family, his friends, his enemies. Whether you like it or not.”

She said, “Make sense of whatever you like. Just leave me out of it.”

“Do you hate your father so much that you’d prefer to see his killer go free?”

She glanced down, so that he couldn’t see her eyes. “I’ve told you, I don’t really care.”

“Did you know that one of the other people in those cottages was murdered last night? A Mr. Willingham. I need to know what connection he might have had with your father.”

She looked up then, startled. “I don’t believe you.”

“Ask Inspector Hill, in Uffington. He’s handling that case.”

Leaning back in her chair, she considered him, her mind working. “I don’t know anyone named Willingham. A coincidence. It must be.”

“That’s possible, of course. But in such a small community two murders in a few weeks has to be regarded with suspicion. I’m forced to wonder what Mr. Willingham might have known about your father’s disappearance. If he saw someone come for your father and take him away. The bicycle your father sometimes rode and his motorcar were both where he kept them. Surely your father didn’t walk all the way to Yorkshire.”

He thought her mouth was dry. She ran her tongue over her lips and said, “If you’ll summon Mrs. Smith, I believe I’ll have that tea now.”

It was a surprising change of heart. Rutledge was wary.

He went to find Mrs. Smith, though Hamish warned him that Rebecca Parkinson would be gone when he returned. It was a risk he had to take.

He was relieved when he came back, tray in hand, to find she was still at his table.

Rutledge passed her the fresh cup, waited until she had added milk and sugar, then taken the first sip.

“I spoke to your sister last night.”

She nearly choked. “I don’t believe you. You don’t even know where to find her.”

“She’d come to stand on the hill by the White Horse. I don’t know what it was she was thinking. But I distinctly heard her crying.”

“Sarah has always had a soft heart. She’s like my mother, taking in lost kittens and stray dogs, worrying about young men we knew who went to France and stayed there in unmarked graves.”

“Still, I had the strongest feeling that she must know more about your father’s death than she’s comfortable with, and her conscience is tormenting her. It’s rather too much of a coincidence, isn’t it, that she came to grieve the night after Willingham died.”

Rebecca Parkinson stood up so quickly she knocked over her cup and tea splashed onto the skirt of her dress.

“You leave my sister alone, do you hear me? Don’t go near her again. Or I shall have you up for harassment. Do you understand me?”

“What are you afraid of, Miss Parkinson? That she’ll break before you do? Murder doesn’t always sit easily on one’s conscience. But sometimes a second killing is necessary to protect the secrets of the first. The police may consider that possibility, you see, in investigating Willingham’s. Whatever part she played in your father’s death will eventually drive her to confess. What will you do to stop her?”

Rebecca Parkinson leaned forward, and with all the strength of her shoulder behind the blow, slapped Rutledge as hard as she could across the face. “Leave my sister alone!”

And then she was gone, slamming the door hard behind her.

Mrs. Smith came hurrying from the kitchen. “I heard such a noise—and look at the tea, spilled all over my clean floor! What happened?”

“I’m afraid the young woman who was here has a chink in her armor,” he said. “And I’ve just found it.”

Rutledge walked down to the cottages and tapped lightly on the smith’s door.

Slater, looking as if he hadn’t slept, opened it and said, “I don’t think Inspector Hill wants you to talk to me.”

“Not about Willingham, no,” Rutledge said, stepping inside before Slater could shut his door. “I’m here to talk about Mr. Partridge. Did you know that he had two daughters?”

“No, of course I didn’t. He never talked about his family. I thought he must not have any. No one came to spend a Sunday afternoon with him, that sort of thing. It was just a guess that the girl who knocked at his door was his daughter. Mrs. Cathcart likes happy endings. For all we know, she might well have been the daughter of a friend. You would think, wouldn’t you, that being alone would make the cottages a friendlier place, but it doesn’t work that way.”

“Is Hill still giving you trouble over Willingham’s death?”

“He’s told me I’ll be taken in to sign my statement. I don’t know when that will be. Or if he’ll keep me once he has me there.” He was morose. “I’ve not done anything wrong. But the sexton has said I’m a liar and a cheat. I don’t see that that leads a man to murder, but Inspector Hill seems to believe it does.”

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think he actually believes that you did this. But he has to look at all the possibilities. Did you know Willingham before he moved here?”

“I didn’t know any of these people. Including Mr. Partridge.”

“And what do the other inhabitants of the Tomlin Cottages have to say about the murder?”

“They aren’t saying anything. No one works in their garden, even as warm as it is this morning. No one answers the door. You’d think we collaborated on the murder, drawing straws to see who did the actual stabbing. Like Julius Caesar, in Shakespeare’s play, when everyone turns against him. I remember reading that, and thinking he should have known the Ides of March meant trouble. But I suppose there wouldn’t have been a play at all, if he’d listened to his wife in the first place.”

Rutledge smiled. “You cut through the chaff to the kernel.” The smile faded. “Are you all right, Slater?”

“As best as I can be. But I’m too anxious to work. And if I can’t work, in the end I won’t eat either. No one will bring business to me if I’m under a cloud of suspicion.”

“I must go to Brady’s cottage,” he said, “but if there’s anything you need, let me know.”

“How? If they take me away, there’s nothing you can do.”

“I can try,” Rutledge replied simply.

He left the smith’s cottage and walked on down the lane to Brady’s. There was no answer to his knock, and he’d expected none. A stranger arriving here would have sworn that all the cottages were empty, their inhabitants fled. But behind the shut doors and the drawn shades of the windows, there were people who had nowhere else to turn.

Dublin came to greet him as he returned to his motorcar, rubbing herself against his ankles, and he bent down to pet her just as a sparrow flitted by and she turned to give chase.

What did Dublin know about the murder of Willingham? She prowled the cottages, looking for mice. Had she been outside Willingham’s two nights ago when a murderer came to call?

Hamish said irritably, “It wouldna’ matter if she did. She’s no’ able to tell ye what she saw.”

He climbed to the muzzle of the horse and sat there, watching scudding clouds cross the sky. It would rain before long, and he’d be wet if he didn’t leave while he could. But still he sat there, waiting for someone to stir. He could feel the eyes watching for him, wondering where he might turn up next, and whether or not he was doing his own work or Hill’s.

And then Mr. Allen stepped out of his door. Rutledge could hear him coughing, the sound captured and bounced up the hill to where he sat. Allen puttered a little in his front garden, casting wary eyes toward his neighbors.

Cabin fever, Rutledge thought, watching him. And a small defiance in the face of death. I’m alive, you haven’t gathered me in yet…

Or was it because they all knew that Rutledge was sitting here, watching, that they felt free to move about.

Quincy opened his door and set a bowl of water down for Dublin, and looked up at the building clouds.

Mrs. Cathcart timidly crept out, and moved a flower pot to where it better caught the waning sun.

Miller was next, putting something in the dust bin by the corner of his house, and then looking fixedly at Rutledge. As if to ask why he was still here, when it was clear that Partridge wasn’t coming back.

Rutledge hadn’t met the man, but it wouldn’t do any good to hurry down to the lane. Miller would be inside long before that.

They were all accounted for, except for Brady. But he was the watcher, accustomed to peering between his curtains and not showing his face. Rutledge found it interesting that Brady was still here, when Deloran knew perfectly well that Partridge was never coming back. Just as Gerald Parkinson would never return.

It was, Rutledge thought, a fanciful public façade, Deloran keeping his watcher there to report to him and to make it appear that he himself believed Partridge was coming back. Or perhaps Brady had already been put out to pasture, and lived on here because it was his home. Rutledge expected the man would claim that, if he were questioned.

Rutledge sat there, listening to Hamish in his head, for another quarter of an hour. He hadn’t seen so much as the corner of a curtain twitch in Brady’s cottage. No sign of life that would attract Rutledge’s attention and bring him down the hill to knock again.

A crow came to perch on Brady’s chimneytop, scolding Dublin as she made her rounds. Mrs. Cathcart, seeing it, went quickly back inside. Quincy called to the cat, then shut his own door. Allen, still in the garden in front of his house, looked up at the sound of Quincy’s door closing. And after a few minutes, his defiance turning practical as the first drops of rain danced on the flagstones that made up his garden path, he disappeared as well.

Rutledge came down the hill, feeling the heavy drops strike his shoulders with some force. They were only the forerunners of the storm, but the clouds had thickened to the west and rain would come in earnest in the next ten minutes or so.

Rutledge went up the lane between the cottages and knocked again on Brady’s door, calling to him when it remained shut.

There was no answer.

Feeling a stirring of his intuition, Rutledge put his hand on the latch and lifted it.

The door wasn’t locked.

He pushed it open, calling, “Brady, I know you’re in there. I want to talk to you.”

The crow flew away, cawing as he went, shattering the silence that sometimes foretells a storm.

Rutledge stood there, waiting. But there was no response from Brady.

He stepped inside, Hamish loud in his ears, and looked at the untidy room, dishes left on a table, books and papers scattered about, a pair of field glasses standing on the shelf under the window. From his vantage point Brady had a sweeping view toward the hill of the White Horse, and also of Partridge’s cottage.

For an instant Rutledge wondered if Deloran was mad enough to send Brady to do his dirty work for him at Partridge Fields, then laughed at the thought. A man who drank as Brady was said to do couldn’t be trusted with murder…

And then as his eyes adjusted to the storm-induced gloom of the sitting room, he saw Brady staring back at him, as if accusing him of trespassing.

But Brady was not accusing anyone of anything.

A knife protruded from his chest, and both his hands were wrapped around the hilt, frozen there by death.