A Pale Horse Part 24

Rutledge showed her his ident.i.ty card, and she studied it with suspicion, as if certain it was counterfeit.

"I don't understand why the newspapers should be interested in Mr. Parkinson," he went on in a conversational tone. "Or disturb him. Perhaps the police ought to have been called sooner."

"They were, and they did nothing." Her sense of grievance went deeper than her circ.u.mspection. "It was on account of his poor wife, of course. Like vultures they came here, battering the door, upsetting the household. It was shameful, that's what it was. No respect for the dead."

"Was she well known in London circles? Was that their interest?"

"It was the way she died. She left the gas open by mistake, and they tried to say it was suicide, but of course it wasn't. She was a good and kind lady, she would never kill herself. But they told poor Mr. Parkinson it was on purpose, and he believed them."

It was the same way Parkinson himself had died. To follow her? But then how did he come to be in Yorks.h.i.+re?

"I'm surprised the London papers saw anything newsworthy in the story."

She sighed. "It's because of what he did in the war, of course. And here at the bottom of the garden as well, with that workshop of his. Mrs. Parkinson told me herself she was heartsick over it."

Rutledge tried another tack. "I'm not sure I understand. London didn't inform me what Parkinson had done in the war."

"He worked at Porton Down, he was one of the scientists there. Ga.s.sed the Kaiser's men in return for our our boys. Got our own back, didn't he? Mrs. Parkinson was squeamish, but not I." boys. Got our own back, didn't he? Mrs. Parkinson was squeamish, but not I."

He was startled by her vehemence, even as his mind registered Porton Down. Porton Down.

It was a military facility on the eastern border of Wilts.h.i.+re, across the county from here. A place where absolute secrecy was the order of the day.

And for the first time Rutledge understood why Martin Deloran was interested in the whereabouts of one Gerald Parkinson. The army didn't care to lose track of someone like that, someone whose knowledge was more valuable than his person. Eccentricity was one thing, disliked but oftentimes tolerated. Even madness could be overlooked. Parkinson, however, had walked away from a comfortable family home, lived elsewhere under a different name, and disappeared with unsettling regularity. The War Office could do very little about it, but that didn't mean they didn't watch his every move.

Very likely Deloran had put the change in Parkinson down to excessive grief after his wife's death-give him time and he'd recover, be himself again. The war's nearly over, we can afford to be patient...But two years had pa.s.sed, and Parkinson still went his own way. And Deloran was still watching him.

Small wonder Deloran jumped at the chance to bury Parkinson under a pauper's stone in rural Yorks.h.i.+re! What sort of secrets had safely died with him?

"Guilt, ye said," Hamish reminded him, and Rutledge remembered.

That would explain Parkinson's choice to live in the Tomlin Cottages.

It still wouldn't explain where he'd died.

"He worked on the development of poison gases?" Rutledge asked to clarify what Parkinson had done for a living. It would explain too the choice of reading material he had taken with him to the cottage.

"Well, of course he did," she said with pride. "Where else, and him fascinated by chemistry ever since he was a young man at Cambridge? Mrs. Parkinson was at her wits' end with fear for the children."

"Children?"

"Indeed, the light of her life, they was. I daresay Mr. Parkinson found them a nuisance when he had his laboratory at the bottom of the garden. Always looking in the windows, trying to see what he was up to. It was when he killed the cows by accident that Mrs. Parkinson put her foot down." She rested her back against the doorframe, a tired woman with no one to talk with as she worked. "But that caught the army's attention, didn't it? So he took himself off to a new laboratory there. Posh, he said it was, everything to hand. 'Martha, they value me. They know I'm right about this new direction. Germany hasn't got there yet. But we shall, wait and see. You'll be reading about it in the newspapers, because it's likely to stop the war and the dying.' My nephew, the one ga.s.sed at Ypres, my sister's only boy, was going to be avenged, he said. Germany was the first to use the poisonous gases, but we'd be the last. We'll show 'em, he said, wait and see."

"You've worked for the family for some time, have you?"

"I was maid to Mr. Parkinson's mother, and came here as housekeeper to Partridge Fields when he bought the place, Mrs. Miggs having just died."

"And Mrs. Parkinson didn't care for the work he was doing."

"She worried that they were testing these gases on the animals. She couldn't bear to think about it. She saw my nephew when he was sent home, lungs burned right out. He didn't last long and died hard. I told her the Hun had brought it all on themselves, whatever Mr. Parkinson devised, but it didn't matter. She stopped sleeping well, wandering about the house at all hours. Like her own ghost. Small wonder she forgot and left the gas on. She couldn't even kill a spider that crept in at the window, she was that troubled about hurting anything. Which is why I refuse to believe she killed herself. But Mr. Parkinson thought she'd done it out of spite, using the gas. I'm told it's as peaceful a way as any to go, falling asleep and not waking up."

The housekeeper turned and looked over her shoulder as if a ghost could give her the answer to her question. But it was the kitchen floors that concerned her, and she said, "It's dry in there, must be by now. And I've a good bit more to do before I close up for the day."

"And you're sure you have no way of knowing where Mr. Parkinson went?"

"His daughter Becky might know. But I doubt it. He left me instructions not to say anything, and I never have. It's not my place to decide such things."

"Where will I find Miss Parkinson?"

"No, I won't tell you. She'll know who did, and I'll hear about it soon enough. No one stays in the house of a night anymore. Myself, I'm away before dark, I can tell you that. But she comes from time to time to tend the gardens."

And sometimes to knock at her father's door?

"You spoke of children-" Rutledge began, but the housekeeper shook her head firmly and disappeared inside without answering him, shutting the kitchen door in Rutledge's face.

He had no choice but to move on, rounding the house and coming again to the drive. He could almost feel the housekeeper watching him from the windows, making certain he was not sneaking about, as she would call it, but leaving the premises.

As he closed the gate behind him, he thought, This house has seen tragedy... This house has seen tragedy...

Rutledge found a small pub for his noon meal, and sat there over his pudding, thinking about Parkinson and the cottage in Berks.h.i.+re. So much made sense now. The fact that the cottage had no touches of personal warmth-it was not Parkinson's home, this house in Wilts.h.i.+re was. And his disappearances.

Hamish said, "To his wife's grave? You ken, ye thought of that before."

"Deloran probably had the churchyard watched for all we know. And going there would have bolstered Deloran's theory that Parkinson was still grieving. Wherever Parkinson went, Deloran couldn't find him, and that was the trouble."

Hamish said, "It's verra' likely that he went away to torment Deloran."

"It wouldn't surprise me that he was just being b.l.o.o.d.y-minded, rebelling against being watched, showing the War Office that he was clever enough to outfox them all. A cat-and-mouse game, to worry Deloran."

Rutledge considered another possibility-that when Parkinson couldn't stand his own company any longer, when the walls of the cottage were closing in, he might well have needed to be around people. A crowded train station, a Wednesday market, a theater. Somewhere safe to remind himself he wasn't going mad.

It was dark when he reached The Smith's Arms. Rutledge left the motorcar in the yard, then walked down to Wayland's Smithy. It was a far better place to leave an unwanted body than an abbey cloister in Yorks.h.i.+re.

Who had decided that it was time Parkinson should die? That's what it all came down to. Not where the body was left, but who had chosen to end one man's life now. It was useless to speculate, but who who had become the bedrock of the case. had become the bedrock of the case.

The heavy stone slabs that had created this ancient tomb caught his attention, and he thought about the numbers of men it would have taken to build this place for a dead chieftain or priest.

We spend our energies in different ways, he thought, standing there. How many aeroplanes and tanks and artillery caissons had it taken to end the Great War? Not to count the rifles and helmets, respirators and machine guns, the number of boots, the tunics and greatcoats and the tins in which we had brewed our tea or the casings of the sh.e.l.ls fired. A nation's fortune surely, greater than any man possessed in the centuries since this tomb was new and raw and the dead shut into it was still honored by those who had carried him here.

It was depressing to think about.

There was always a new weapon, something to kill greater numbers of the enemy than the enemy could hope to kill on one's own side. Parkinson must have been more than a pair of hands in the work he was doing on poisonous gases. Men like Deloran wouldn't have wasted an hour's thought on the whereabouts of a minor chemist who carried out tests and wrote reports. The housekeeper had said that Parkinson was pleased with something new that would help end the war sooner. Had he left with that work unfinished or at a critical stage?

If that had been the case, someone would have moved heaven and earth to get Parkinson back into the laboratory as quickly as possible.

Had he discovered a conscience when his wife died and decided that he was finished with what had always been his life's work? Had he been frightened by the man he'd become, and walked away?

Rutledge brought to mind the face in the sketch, and tried to probe behind it.

All he could find was an ordinary man, despite what he had done in his laboratories, nothing in his features to mark him, nothing that could have caught one's eye on the streets of London or Canterbury, nothing that would reflect what this person had chosen to do with his life. Neither evil nor good, just a man with no calluses on his hands and no scars, no means of telling him from a half-dozen others his size and weight and coloring.

Then what had happened to him if he was so ordinary?

Rutledge turned back toward the inn and asked Mrs. Smith if he could have his dinner brought to his room. After eating it by the window, he went on sitting there in the darkness even after the yard was silent and the road in front was empty.

Trying to picture Jean's face, the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand, he found it was difficult. He had loved her, or believed he had, and grieved for what might have been when the engagement ended.

Now, with her death, a door had closed. She was the last link with the bright summer of 1914, and happiness, and a world that was going to be his to grasp.

After a while he got up and readied himself for bed without lighting the lamp.

He had expected to lie there awake, listening to Hamish in his head. In the morning, he would go to the cottages and find out who might have wanted the death of one Gerald Parkinson, or if they had wanted to kill g.a.y.l.o.r.d Partridge.

Instead he'd drifted into sleep without dreams.

Best-laid plans have a way of going astray.

Someone was knocking on his door before the first light of dawn had penetrated his room, summoning him urgently.

He fought his way back from a deep sleep and answered.

Smith said, his voice husky, "There's been trouble at the Tomlin Cottages. You'd best come."

16.

Rutledge dressed swiftly, asking questions as he worked. But Smith knew nothing more.

In the lobby he found Slater standing there, pale and agitated.

"What kind of trouble?" he asked the smith.

"I don't know. I heard a cry. And after that, nothing."

"From the Partridge cottage?"

"There? No. Please hurry!"

Rutledge went at once into the yard and Slater followed, going to the bonnet and bending to turn the crank with his ma.s.sive hand.

Smith was calling after them, "Shall I come as well?"

"Not yet. You may be needed later."

He got behind the wheel, and Slater slid into the other seat, a hulking shadow in the light of the innkeeper's lamp.

"Which cottage?" Rutledge asked.

"Mr. Willingham's. Number Three, just above Mr. Partridge."

The old man, then.

They drove the short distance to the cottages in silence, but Rutledge could feel the anxiety in the man at his side, and reaction setting in.

"I didn't investigate," Slater said as the cottages came into view. "I've never heard anything like that. I fear there's murder done, Mr. Rutledge. Sure as G.o.d's above."

"Can you be certain he wasn't calling for help? Taken ill suddenly in the night-a fall?"

But he knew it must be more than that, to frighten Slater so badly. Slater walked the night and was of a size that brooked no interference. It wasn't fear that had shaken him, it was something closer to a primordial response to horror.

Slater said nothing, hunched in his seat, willing the motorcar to move faster.

They arrived at the cottages soon enough, and Rutledge left his motorcar beside the smith's door, rather than destroy any tracks or other evidence nearer Willingham's.

He reached for his torch, closing his eyes from habit because it was in the rear where Hamish sat. Groping he found nothing, and then suddenly his hand touched the torch, as if Hamish had pushed it nearer. He flinched, then gripped the cold metal, turning toward the cottage.

The windows were dark, the door closed, nothing to mark forced entry, but the question was, did Willingham lock his doors of a night or leave them off the latch?

Rutledge started toward it, and Slater made to follow him. Rutledge held up a hand. "No. Wait until I call you."

Slater argued, "You may need help. I'm stronger than you."

Rutledge said, "Then better to be outside than in."

The door was indeed unlocked. Inside, Rutledge's torch seemed to pierce the darkness like a spear. He moved it without moving himself, until he had a feeling for the furnis.h.i.+ngs and the shape of the room. It was very similar to other cottages he'd been in, but the placement of chairs and tables was different.

The sitting room just beyond the door showed no signs of disturbance. A rug before the hearth, a chair to one side, a shelf of books on the other. A small table by the window, with two smaller chairs, and a footstool by the winged chair under the lamp. An empty gla.s.s rested on the stand next to it, with a book open beside it.

The kitchen, tiny even by cottage standards, was tidy, but a stack of plates and cups stood waiting to be washed, while pans soaked in the sink. Guests for dinner, or was Willingham in the habit of was.h.i.+ng up once a day?

The bedroom lay above the kitchen, and on the threshold Rutledge found splotches of blood, black in his torch's beam.

He stopped, flicking his light around the room.

Beyond, between the tall chest and the bed, Willingham lay on his side on the bare wood of the floor. His eyes were wide and empty, reflecting the light. Rutledge didn't need to cross the room to know that he was dead.

The bedroom still held a presence, malice and fear, as if the strength of the emotions that had ended in death still lingered. But there was no one else there.

Rutledge, used to scenes of violent death, quickly surveyed the bedroom, digesting what there was to see.

There had been a struggle-bedclothes pulled free and left trailing across the floor, the lamp broken and the oil spilling into a chair, soaking darkly into the green brocade upholstery. The nightstand was overturned as well.

Angered to find an intruder beside his bed, Willingham had apparently been galvanized to put up an energetic defense.