A Pale Horse Part 9

Rutledge considered them. "If you're sure?"

"Yes, sir." It was a fervent chorus.

He turned to leave, then stopped. "What do you know of this business the police have been speaking to your schoolmaster about?"

Children heard their elders talk and were sometimes better at putting two and two together than adults.

But Hugh's reaction was unexpected. Like a cornered animal, he backed against the stone wall of the chapel and seemed to have lost his tongue.

Johnnie was sick again, dry heaves jerking his body.

Rutledge waited until the worst had pa.s.sed, then handed him a handkerchief.

Hamish said, "Ye can see he's in no case to answer ye."

Johnnie, looking as if he wanted nothing more than his bed at home, leaned against the nearest tombstone.

Rutledge persisted, speaking mainly to Hugh but keeping his eye on Johnnie. "Did you see something the night when someone was killed near Elthorpe? Did you see Mr. Crowell leave the school where he was working that evening, and go to meet someone?"

Hugh took a deep breath. "We were home in bed, weren't we, Johnnie? There was nothing for us to see."

It was the truth. Even Hamish could read that in the boy's fervent manner.

And yet it wasn't the whole truth.

"Who did you see leave the village?" Rutledge persisted.

"n.o.body!" they exclaimed loudly, in unison.

"You needn't be afraid. If there's something you want to tell me, I'll see that no harm comes to you."

The boys stood there, hangdog but refusing to budge.

Hamish said, "Ye havena' found the key."

Rutledge changed direction. "Do you like Mr. Crowell? Is he a good master?"

They nodded vigorously. Rea.s.suring him, proving that they had no reason to step forward, no reason to be afraid.

"Is there anyone else at the school, other than the Crowells?" He'd seen no one, but that might be the rub. If not Mr. Crowell...

"There's Old Fred. He cleans," Hugh said, as if offering up a sacrifice to hungry G.o.ds. "We had two other masters, but they were killed in the war. Mr. Crowell has had to manage on his own since he came back."

"And Mrs. Crowell. Does she walk at night? Without her husband?"

"I never saw her," Hugh maintained. And the ring of truth this time was clear, unequivocal. "What would she be going about at night, alone, for?"

"Johnnie?"

"No, sir. Never. You can ask anybody."

Rutledge gave it up. "You're sure I can't see you home? Johnnie? Do you have far to walk?"

"Not far." He gripped his stomach with both arms wrapped around his body. "Please, can we go now?"

"Yes, be on your way."

Rutledge watched them scurry away, like mice frantic to escape the claws of a cat.

Mary Norton was looking after them also as he reached the motorcar and stopped to turn the crank.

"I think you've put the fear of G.o.d into those two. Was it really necessary?"

"I think they've put the fear of G.o.d into themselves, and I'd like to know why."

"Then you're still hara.s.sing Albert Crowell," she said, making it a statement and not a question.

"I'm trying to get at the truth," he answered her as he closed the door on his side of the motorcar and let in the gear. "I'm not here to badger anyone."

"That's what people always say, but the police have made a good job of upsetting Albert and his wife."

He wanted to tell her that she herself had caused Alice Crowell anxiety in her earnest and misguided effort to prove that the dead man wasn't Sh.o.r.eham. "The problem is that the only piece of evidence we have points to Crowell. And once I find out why it does, it may serve instead to clear his name."

"The sooner the better, then, before he's lost his job and his reputation. Have you policemen thought of that? No, I expect not. He's the fox and you're the hounds, and there won't be any peace for him until you lot have caught him."

She sighed, and said nothing more for the rest of the journey.

After dropping Mary Norton at the hotel, Rutledge went back to the police station, intending to report to Madsen.

But the inspector had left, he was told by an elderly constable. "He'd missed his luncheon. Not knowing when you'd return."

Rutledge thanked the constable and walked back to the hotel.

Hamish said as Rutledge closed the door to his room, "Was it a lie, that the man in the sketch wasna' the one who scarred the schoolmaster's wife?"

"I don't think she lied. But I think she's tried to forget his face and has partly succeeded. I'll ask Gibson at the Yard to track down Sh.o.r.eham. But if that's who the dead man is, why meet him at the ruins, take him away and kill him, then bring him back? And what does a book of alchemy have to do with revenge?"

"A lure?"

Rutledge put the sketch in his valise and then, on second thought, pulled it out again to keep with him. After a brief half hour given over to his lunch, he left almost at once, intending to visit the abbey.

He approached the abbey through a quiet parkland that led him to a stream crossed by stepping stones. And soon he was there, in front of the great arched ruin soaring into the gray sky.

Hamish said, "There are abbey ruins in Scotland. Burned by the Borderers who came for revenge."

"I'm not sure these weren't destroyed for revenge," Rutledge said, looking up at the elegance of simplicity in design. The abbeys were wealthy, and wealth Henry VIII envied.

The monks had built well here. Something of what they'd done had survived Henry VIII by three centuries and more. The King had destroyed the abbey and what it stood for, but not the memory of its beauty. Or its greatness.

A strange place, Rutledge thought, to leave a dead man. Why here?

He went through into the nave, his footsteps alternately echoing on stone and whispering on the gra.s.s. The cloister was open to the sky, constructed for contemplation and peace, where monks could walk or sit in the noonday sun or pray in private.

He found the wax drippings from a candle, then the crushed gra.s.s where the victim had lain, but too many other feet had come and gone here, there was nothing to tell him about the dead man or who had been here with him.

He turned to look at the stone surrounding him, at the curve of an arch and the delicacy of a wall. Why here? Why meet here? Why here? Why meet here?

This was private property, the chance of being discovered at any moment was a risk that had had to be considered. Or did it appear safe, because it was was private and therefore there was nothing to fear? private and therefore there was nothing to fear?

He heard a dog bark outside the church, and a voice call, "Is anyone there?"

Rutledge turned to walk back the way he'd come, stepping out of the nave to be greeted by a sleek Irish setter sniffing suspiciously at his heels.

The man standing some fifty feet away stared at him.

"Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard," he said easily, ignoring the dog. "Were you the man who found the body?"

"I was."

"And you are?"

"The undergardener. Hadley."

"Did you notice anything the police might have missed, Mr. Hadley?"

"No."

"Did you look at the man's face, under the respirator?"

"I could see he was dead. There were flies about. I went directly for the police."

"You didn't look at the book lying beside the body?"

"It wasn't beside it. It lay at his feet."

"Open or closed?"

"Open, like a tent."

"Not where the man might have been holding it?"

"No."

"Could you or your dog tell how the man had come this far? Or how the killer might have left?"

"By the time I'd thought of that, the police had come and gone. There was a muddle of scents."

"If you think of anything that might be useful, however insignificant it might seem to you, will you contact Inspector Madsen at once?"

"I'm not likely to remember anything more. The dog stood here barking, as he did at you, and when no one came out of the ruin, I went to see what he was on about. I wondered, just now, if there might be another dead man in there."

It was a grudging admission.

"There's a sketch of the dead man in my motorcar. Will you come and look at it?"

"I needn't see it. I was here when they first took off the mask."

"Did you recognize him? Or had you seen him before?"

"He was a stranger."

"But the family might have known him."

"It's not likely they'd know a murdered man."

Murder didn't happen in nice circles...

Hamish said, "He's no' concerned with the dead, now. It's no' a part of his duties."

It was true.

Rutledge thanked the man, waited until he'd called off the still sniffing dog, and then walked back the way he'd come.

Rutledge realized, driving back to Elthorpe, that what he'd been sent north to do was to put a name to the victim.

And that didn't appear to be a simple matter.

But he could see, he thought, what the army was about-searching out unidentified bodies in the expectation that one of them might be g.a.y.l.o.r.d Partridge. Because the man still hadn't returned to the cottages in Berks.h.i.+re, or London would have recalled the Yard's emissary by now.

Why did they think Partridge might be dead?

Did he have other enemies? Or was it that the army didn't want to step forward and publicly claim the man's body? If Rutledge identified him in the course of a murder investigation, there would be no connection with officialdom.

It was possible that Partridge's earlier forays had been made to prepare an escape route, so to speak, away from his watchers. And this time, unlike before, he had no intention of coming back.

And instead of going missing and causing an uproar, he'd died and inconvenienced everyone.

Rutledge was tempted to take the sketch to show at the Tomlin Cottages, to see what Quincy and Slater and the others might say about it.

But early days for that, now.

He found he'd driven back to Dilby, where the schoolmaster lived.

Hamish said, "It willna' be useful."

And yet Rutledge left his car by the church and walked through the village, getting a sense of it.

He'd seen much of England over the years, both as a policeman and as an ordinary visitor. Wherever he had traveled, he'd found a sense of place-a shared history, a shared background. But this little spot on the map seemed to have none of that. No sense of the past in the square buildings with their slate roofs, gray in the cloudy light. No sense of history, no armies marching through the churchyard, no Roman ruin under the baker's shop, no medieval t.i.the barn on the fringe of the village. The abbey must have wielded some influence here-if not Fountains, then one of the others. Ripon, perhaps. What had the monks run here? Sheep, or even cattle? Or was this tilled land? Beyond the village, where he could see green and heavily gra.s.sed pastures, there must have been good grazing from the earliest days. Surely the inhabitants of Dilby had been tenants of the abbeys, not monks. Laymen or even lay brothers, earning their keep and owning nothing until the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII had left them masterless and dest.i.tute, sc.r.a.ping out a living where they could or falling under the sway of whatever lordling had coveted these acres.