A Pale Horse Part 35

"Is Partridge dead, as Brady claimed?"

"Yes, I'm afraid he is. But under rather different circ.u.mstances than Willingham's murder. It will take some time to learn what Brady's role was in his death. If any."

"I must say, I'd have not thought it of Brady. He was a weak man, in my view, troubled by his drinking and whatever it was that brought him here to live."

Rutledge prepared to take his leave, watching Allen's face sag with fatigue, one hand clutching the arm of a chair with white-knuckled fingers.

Allen was saying, "I'll tell you something about Partridge. For what it's worth. I wouldn't have, if there was a chance he was still alive."

Rutledge waited.

"I don't think that was his real name. I'd seen him at a party in Winchester several years ago, and although we weren't introduced, he was pointed out to me as one of the people doing some sort of hush-hush work for the government. There were a number of important guests at the dinner, and he seemed to know most of them. I never asked him about this, partly respecting his privacy and partly because I heard later that he'd fallen from grace and was in bad odor with the government. You can imagine my surprise when I looked out my door one morning and saw him walking down the lane. He was calling himself Partridge then, but for the life of me I can't remember how he was called at the party. Something similar, but I'd have remembered Partridge if it had been that. It's not a common name."

"And you said nothing about this to anyone else?"

Allen responded with irritation. "I told you. I respected his privacy."

"Later on, did you tell the friend who'd first pointed this man out to you that you'd seen him here in Berks.h.i.+re?"

Allen's face flushed. "Only because I thought it might rea.s.sure him that all was well. I was in Winchester to see my doctor when I ran into him."

"How long after that did Mr. Brady come here to live?"

"A month, possibly less. There can't be a connection. I'd have sworn they didn't know each other." But Allen was no fool. "You aren't trying to say there's a connection, are you? That word spread, and that's why Brady came here? I refuse to believe it." But the dawning realization was shattering. "If your charge is true, why did the man wait so long to kill Partridge? Answer me that?"

"Brady's dead, and there's no way we can ask him."

Allen said again, "I refuse to believe my casual comments had anything to do with Brady or the murder of Partridge." He stepped forward, forcing Rutledge to move back outside the door, and shut it with firmness.

"That was how Martin Deloran found his missing scientist," he said to Hamish as he walked back the way he'd come.

A chance encounter, a remembered name and face, a chatty reference in a conversation, and somehow the news had reached Deloran's ears.

Hamish said, "Ye ken, Parkinson knew as soon as the watcher came, but didna' understand how it was that he'd been found."

"I'm sure of it."

He stopped to tap at Miller's door in Number 7.

This time to his surprise it opened. "The police have been and gone. I've nothing to say to you."

Rutledge said, "I happened to call on Miss Chandler, and she asked to be remembered to you and to Mr. Allen."

"Kind of you. Good day."

But Rutledge had his hand on the door to prevent it from closing. "I've also come to ask if you knew Mr. Partridge well."

"No one here knows anyone well. I thought you'd have learned that by now."

Rutledge studied the man. A thin face, hair graying early, a st.u.r.dy build. He could have been the conductor on a streetcar or a clerk in a shop. Middle-cla.s.s with an accent that didn't betray his roots, one cultivated to win him a better position in the marketplace, but not completely natural to him. It was his eyes that were interesting. They were what many would call hazel, but the dominant color was a golden green and oddly feral. And they were guarded, as if someone else stood behind them, a very different man from the one the world saw at first glance.

Inmates of prisons sometimes had that shuttered look, surviving as best they could in a place where they were afraid.

Rutledge said, "Every cottage has windows. And there's nothing to see except the horse on the hill and the comings and goings of your neighbors."

"I don't watch from my windows."

But he had, like the others, and now he denied it, as the others had done. What was his his secret? secret?

Had he embezzled funds at his place of business? Or been pa.s.sed over for promotion and lost his temper? Allen had called him a timid man, and Slater had said he was evil.

There was something here, something that Rutledge, an experienced police officer, could feel in the air.

"You saw nothing the night that Willingham was killed? Or on the night when Brady must have disposed of Partridge's body?"

"I didn't see anything when Willingham was killed. Thank G.o.d I was asleep. As for Partridge, I don't even know what night that was. But I can tell you that it was about three days since I'd seen him-he used to walk over to where the trees start and stand there looking up at the horse-when I heard the motorcar come back. It was close on three in the morning, and I was having trouble sleeping. I got up, thinking I might have a cigarette, and I stood there at the window watching someone open the shed door and then drive the motorcar inside. As a rule, Partridge shuts it straightaway, but this time I didn't see him walk around to the door as he usually did. The shed door stayed open."

"And in the morning?"

"The shed door was shut and all was quiet. I thought perhaps he'd slept in, after a long drive. I never saw him again."

When Rutledge didn't comment, Miller hesitated and then added, "The next night Brady went there to Partridge's door, knocked, and went inside. He stayed nearly an hour, and then hurried back to his own cottage. My guess at the time was that Partridge had been taken ill, but nothing came of Brady's visit."

Rutledge said, "No one else has given me this information."

Miller laughed harshly. "Even Quincy must sleep sometimes. I seldom sleep the night through. It's become a habit with me now."

Hamish said, "The truth? Or what ye want to hear?"

Rutledge considered his answer, both to Hamish and to Miller.

Miller added to the silence, hurrying to fill it again, "As far as I know, Mr. Brady didn't have anything with him when he left the cottage."

"And you'd be willing to swear to this under oath at the inquest, Mr. Miller? I wish I'd been told earlier, while Brady was alive."

A flicker of emotion pa.s.sed across Miller's face. "You never came to ask."

"I was here several times. You failed to answer your door."

"Yes, well, these things happen." He waited with expectancy, as if he thought this time the man from London might leave.

Rutledge thanked him and went back to his motorcar.

To Hamish he said, "It's hard to say what Mr. Miller's motive was in telling me what he just did. Unless it was to speed the police in finis.h.i.+ng their business here sooner than later. Offering us lies we want to hear."

He had caught that slight movement when he'd asked Miller about appearing at the inquest for Brady's death.

Miller hadn't expected his admission to be taken any further than a statement. Certainly not to be sworn to under oath and in public. And that rather reinforced the possibility that he hadn't told the truth.

Rutledge thought he understood now why Slater had called Miller an evil man. Those arresting eyes, coupled with an unfriendly nature and impatience or outright antagonism toward a man with a simple view of the world, must make the smith very uncomfortable in Miller's presence.

Hamish said, "It's no' likely that he showed you the same face he showed the ithers."

Rutledge had just reached his motorcar when Hill came down the road toward him and waved him to wait.

He got out of his motorcar and came across to Rutledge, his face sober. He said without preamble, "We managed to get our hands on something Brady wrote before he moved to the cottage. It was a list of what he wanted to bring with him. Somehow it had fallen behind the desk and out of sight. But it was enough for us to compare handwriting. If Brady wrote that list-and there's every reason to believe he did-then he didn't write the suicide note we found, confessing to the murder of Willingham and Partridge."

He held out a sheet of paper, and Rutledge took it.

The list wasn't long. But there were references to "my green folder," and later "my black coat" as well as clothing, books, and personal items. It ended with "the file MD gave me."

Martin Deloran...

"I wasn't completely convinced-" Rutledge began, but Hill interrupted him.

"That's as may be. The question is, what are we going to do about this? And I've brought two constables with me. They'll take turn about, watching the cottages day and night. Until we get to the bottom of it."

Two middle-aged men in uniform had stepped out of the motorcar behind him and were walking up the lane. They went into Brady's cottage and shut the door behind them.

"The list of suspects isn't long," Rutledge said, thinking about what Allen had said to him. "Quincy. Allen. Slater. Miller. Singleton."

"You've left out the woman."

"Do you really believe she could have wielded that knife?"

"I doubt it very much. But I'm not taking any chances." He marched off after his men, head down and mouth a tight line.

Rutledge turned the motorcar in the middle of the road and drove back to Partridge Fields.

It had represented many things in Gerald Parkinson's life.

A happy childhood for two young girls. A mother's illness. A father's obsession with his work. A death by suicide, and then a house left to stand empty.

But not abandoned. Rebecca Parkinson may have seen to the flower beds, but it was her father who made certain that the lawns were well kept, and someone was paid to clean and polish and see that the rooms stayed fresh.

Parkinson had even used the name Partridge, after the name of his house. g.a.y.l.o.r.d Partridge.

The gate was always closed and today was no exception. But he let himself in and walked around to the kitchen. He was in luck. The housekeeper was there-a dust pan and brush stood beside a mop and a pail of old cloths just outside the door. And from the kitchen he could hear a woman humming to herself as she worked.

He called to her, but she didn't immediately answer. He stood there, his back to the house, looking past the kitchen garden to the small orchard on the left and the outbuildings just beyond. Shrubbery, tall with age, partly blocked his view, but there appeared to be a small stable for horses, a coop for chickens, and a longer building where everything from carriages to scythes, barrows, and other tools could be stored. Leading to the buildings was a cobbled walk, to keep boots out of the mud when it rained, and someone had put a tub of flowers to either side.

He walked to the orchard, where plum and apple and pear grew cheek by jowl, and beyond there was another outbuilding, this one low, foursquare, and without grace. Apparently built for utility not beauty, it was one story so as not to be visible at the house over the tops of the orchard trees. A pair of windows was set either side of the door.

Someone had tried to make it prettier, for it had been painted green and there was a lilac avenue leading up the walk to it, three to either side. A silk purse and a sow's ear, Rutledge thought.

Hamish, regarding it with dislike, said, "The laboratory."

Rutledge went up to the windows and looked inside.

The workbenches in the center of the floor were too heavy to be overturned, but someone had taken an axe to them, and the rest of the room was littered with gla.s.s and twisted metal, broken chairs, and a scattering of tools and equipment. Someone had come in here and destroyed everything that could be destroyed, with a wild anger that hadn't been satisfied by mere destruction. It had wanted to smash and hurt and torment.

Who had done this?

Gerald Parkinson's late wife?

Or his daughters, hungry for a revenge they couldn't exact on their father?

Hamish said, "The elder one."

It was true. Rebecca Parkinson was riven by an anger that went bone deep, unsatisfied and uncontrolled.

But Sarah might have been jealous enough of her father's pa.s.sion to hate the laboratory just as much.

He heard someone calling from the direction of the house and retraced his steps, coming out of the orchard to see the housekeeper standing in the doorway, a hand shading her eyes as she called.

"I saw your motorcar from the windows. Where have you got to? There's n.o.body here but me-" She broke off as she heard him approaching and turned his way.

"You mustn't wander about like this, it isn't right," she scolded him. "Policeman or no."

"I called to you. I could hear you humming in the kitchen," he said lightly, s.h.i.+fting the blame for his walk squarely onto her for not answering him.

"I was arranging fresh flowers for Mrs. Parkinson's bedroom and taking them up. I do sometimes. It cheers me."

"A nice touch," he said. "You must have been very fond of her."

"I was that, a lovely lady with gentle manners." She sighed. "It seems to me sometimes that I can still hear her voice calling to me." At his look of surprise she smiled wryly. "No, not her ghost, of course not. But her voice all the same, in my head, just as it used to be. 'Martha, do come and see what I've done with the flowers.' Or 'Martha, I think I'll take my luncheon in the gardens, if you don't mind making up a tray.' Little things I'd do for her and knew she'd appreciate. But that time's long gone, and I don't have anyone to spoil, not even Miss Rebecca or Miss Sarah."

"Do you recall when Mrs. Parkinson was ill-some years ago when her daughters were young?"

"I've told you, it isn't my place to gossip about the family."

"It isn't gossip I'm looking for," he said, "but something to explain what makes Gerald Parkinson's daughters hate their father. It might be traced back to her illness, for all I know."

"I don't think they hate him, exactly-"

"What else would you call it? I've spoken to both of them, and I'd be deaf not to hear the way they felt about him."

"Yes, well, I expect there's some hard feeling over poor Mrs. Parkinson's sudden death."

"On the contrary, I think it went back longer than that. Sarah Parkinson remembers how happy she was before that illness. But she was too young to understand what the illness was. Or why it changed her parents."

"Come in, then, I was just about to put the kettle on. You might as well have a cup with me."

She led the way into the kitchen and set the kettle on the stove. He could see that it was already hot, and she said, "I like to cook sometimes when I'm working. Nothing but a bit of warmed-over soup and some tea, once in a while my bread baking for the week. This is a better oven than the one I have in my little house."

"No one objects, surely?"

"No. At least they've never said anything. Once when I'd done some baking I came back and found half my lemon cake gone. It wasn't all that long ago either. I expect Miss Rebecca was sharpish after working in the gardens."