A Pale Horse

by Charles Todd

  A bird was singing now, a chat, the song filling the air with brightness.

  Then a male voice called, “Betty?”

  And Mrs. Smith answered from the doorway almost at Rutledge’s feet, her voice was so clear. “If you’re hungry, you’re out of luck. That lot ate everything but the rats in the barn and the straw in the mangers.”

  “That man—the one who owns the motorcar in the yard. Is he staying here? What do you know about him?”

  “Only that he’s from London and unlucky in love.” Her voice was light, deflecting his questions.

  Rutledge set his plate aside and stood up, hoping to see who had come to the inn. But the man was just out of sight.

  “I need to know, Betty,” he went on urgently. “Are you sure he’s from London?”

  “I don’t think he said,” she answered him. “I just assumed…”

  “I don’t like it. Is he staying?”

  “He’s taken a room for tonight.” It was a reluctant admission. “You’re building castles in quicksand,” she added. “What would he want with the likes of you?”

  The man’s answer was lost in the clatter of feet on the stairs and someone calling, “Good-bye, love, I’m off to make my fortune—oh, there you are! Thought you were in the kitchen. Well, then,” the voice went on, “I’ve left what I owe on the table. And you can count on me again in a fortnight. Anything you’d like from Wales?”

  “Wales, is it? I’ll take one of those wool shawls, in a paisley pattern. Like the red one you brought Ma.”

  “Right you are!” And a young man who looked enough like Mrs. Smith to be her brother dashed into sight heading for the last lorry, standing by a plane tree.

  When he’d gone, there was no further conversation. Rutledge could hear Mrs. Smith moving about below, humming to herself. The man who had questioned her had gone.

  Hamish said, startling Rutledge, “Ye canna’ ask her who it was.”

  “No. But it wasn’t Quincy or Slater. Someone else. I didn’t recognize the voice. And there’s no certainty he came from the cottages.”

  He sat down again, finished his meal, and then carried the tray back to the dining room.

  It was interesting, Rutledge thought, walking out the inn door, that Mrs. Smith asked no questions of him. Her pleasant nod as he passed indicated no curiosity about where he might be going or why. And she had answered the man at her door with circumspection, as if she were accustomed to keeping secrets.

  He drove back toward the Tomlin Cottages, but passed no one walking in that direction.

  The remainder of the afternoon he spent prowling about the chalk horse, while keeping a surreptitious eye on the cottages below him.

  Rutledge had the strongest feeling, supported by the uneasiness of Hamish, that he was being watched in his turn.

  But if Partridge had come home, learned of Rutledge’s presence, and then questioned Mrs. Smith at the inn, there was no sign of him here at the cottages.

  Rutledge drove some twenty miles for his dinner, lingering over the meal far longer than its quality justified, and it was nearly dark by the time he drove back to the inn. He left the motorcar in the yard, went up to his room, and stretched himself on the bed.

  When he heard the clock in the downstairs dining room strike one, he got up, dressed in dark clothing, and quietly left the inn. In his pocket he carried his torch. From the companionable snores coming from the room where the Smiths slept as he went down the stairs, Rutledge was certain they hadn’t heard him go. As far as he could tell, he was the only guest this night.

  Rutledge walked back to the cottages, standing under a tree for some time to let his eyes adjust to the ambient light and listening to the sounds around him.

  There were steps coming his way, and he faded into the shadows where he was fairly certain he couldn’t be seen.

  Andrew Slater appeared farther up the road, heading for his own cottage. He carried something in his hands, Rutledge couldn’t see what, and disappeared through his door without any indication that he knew someone was about.

  But as Hamish was busy pointing out, a man like Slater often knew more than ordinary people, as if to make up for his simplicity. Not so much a sixth sense, but a knowledge that often came to such people. Not animal, either, that wariness of a fox or even a deer, but something generated by the need to protect himself from those who would trick him, take advantage of him, or cheat him.

  Rutledge gave the smith another hour to fall asleep and then walked softly across the dew-wet grass to the house with the white gate.

  He didn’t pass through it, but went over the wall on the side that couldn’t be seen from the other cottages.

  The door was unlocked, as Quincy had told him it would be.

  He opened it cautiously, listening for sounds inside that indicated someone was there. Silence came back to him.

  He went inside and began his search. But there was nothing of interest in the cottage. Shielding his torch, he looked around at the furnishings—mainly castoffs, he thought, though there was a chest under a window that appeared to have come from a different life. It was locked. He glanced at the books on the low shelf by the hearth, and found that most of them were scientific, although there was an odd mixture of historical materials as well. Renaissance Italian history, African exploration, South American botany, and a Chinese herbal. Heavy reading for one’s spare time. Sections marked were often macabre, descriptions of the way everyone from Socrates to victims of curses died.

  The bedroom was tidy, the kitchen cleared, and dishes set as if by habit to drain by the sink. Nothing out of place, an empty valise under the bed, clothes still hanging in the armoire.

  Wherever Partridge had taken himself, he clearly intended to come back.

  Rutledge returned to the sitting room and looked at the desk there. He found nothing of interest, as if it were seldom used.

  There was a single framed photograph on the desktop, grainy and yellowed, showing a man and a small boy standing together in what appeared to be the marketplace of a Georgian town. There was nothing in the shop windows to indicate which town or where in England it might be. Rutledge lifted the frame, slid open the back, and looked to see if there was any inscription on the other side of the photograph. And indeed there was. A schoolboy hand had scribbled, “the day we climbed the white horse.”

  Had Partridge come here as a boy? Was that what brought him back as a man?

  Rutledge reassembled the glass and the frame, and set it where he’d found it.

  In the basket to one side of the desk, however, was a crumpled sheet of paper. He reached for it, spread it out, and in the shaded light of his torch found that there was only one line on it.

  My dear

  The start of a letter? To a friend, a lover, a relative? There was no way of knowing.

  He crumpled it again and dropped it back into the basket.

  Nothing here to tell him who Partridge was, where he might have gone, or when he intended to return.

  Certainly nothing mysterious enough to make London worry about where he was.

  When Rutledge stepped out of the cottage, he nearly leapt out of his skin as something warm and sinuous wrapped itself around his legs.

  “’Ware!” Hamish warned in the same instant.

  It was all he could do to stifle a yelp even as his brain absorbed the sound of a soft purr.

  Dublin the cat.

  He bent down to pet her, and she accepted the salute but was more intent on finding her way into the house. He managed to get the door shut first, and as if displeased, the cat stopped purring and trotted off.

  Rutledge stood there for a moment as his heart rate steadied and then made his way to the shed where Partridge kept his motorcar. It was still there, and a bicycle stood in the deeper shadows beyond the bonnet.

  The only unusual thing was a small length of carpet that lay crumpled by the boot, a trap for unwary feet. The oil stains down its length, dark as blood in the little light there
was, explained its use.

  Wherever Gaylord Partridge had gone, he had left on shank’s mare, not his bicycle or his motorcar.

  But then he needn’t have gone far to find someone to take him away. For a price, the lorry drivers at The Smith’s Arms would have been willing to let him ride with them as far as he liked. From there he might have gone anywhere by train or bus.

  And come back just as inconspicuously.

  Gaylord Partridge’s walkabouts, as Quincy had called them.

  Rutledge slipped out of the shed and made his way through the darkness in the deepest shadow he could find, until he was well past Wayland’s Smithy.

  Where did Partridge go, and why? he asked himself as he walked without haste, listening to the night around him.

  Hamish said, “If he was in the war, it’s possible he doesna’ remember where he goes, or why.”

  At the clinic where Frances had taken Rutledge to learn how to deal with his own shell shock, there was an officer who went away for days at a time. Physically present, but his mind lost in some other world where his body couldn’t follow, Lieutenant Albany would sit by his window staring inward, and simply not hear or see or feel anything. As if the empty shell of himself waited for him there knowing that in the end he would come back to it. And then, quietly, he did just that, moving and speaking and acting as if nothing had happened, incurious about the hours or days that had passed meanwhile.

  Rutledge had no way of knowing if Partridge was a victim of the war. Nothing in his cottage indicated military service, not the way he’d made his bed or the clothing in his armoire. But then that might have been deliberate.

  The letter beginning “My dear” could mean there was someone he regularly went to see. And if the Government had no knowledge of that someone, it could well be a woman he preferred to keep secret.

  A rendezvous far from the War Office’s prying eyes, a brief escape from whatever it was he’d done to have people watching his every move?

  It was distasteful to spy on a man, entering his house without his knowledge, looking at his personal correspondence. The fact that the search hadn’t yielded any useful information made matters worse. No body in the bedroom to explain away Partridge’s absence, no souvenirs of Brighton to point to his whereabouts, no letters giving Rutledge the direction of the man’s family. Was the young woman who’d knocked on Partridge’s door a daughter—or a lover?

  Which brought him back to the unseen man who had been questioning Betty Smith at the inn door. If that was Partridge himself, back again and worried about the stranger hanging about in his absence, he’d taken off.

  Rutledge reached the inn, and removing his shoes, went up the stairs as silently as he could. The snores from the Smith bedroom rumbled in counterpoint.

  Rutledge woke to the early arrival of three more lorries, and as he shaved, he considered his instructions from London.

  A watching brief. Waiting for Partridge to come home, and then reporting to the man’s masters, whoever they were, through Chief Superintendent Bowles.

  How long had the man been gone? Three days? A week?

  It was time to find that out.

  At breakfast he asked Mrs. Smith who it was she’d been talking with just after lunch the day before.

  “Just as your brother was leaving. I happened to hear the man mention my motorcar.” Rutledge added when she frowned, “He seemed to know you well. He called you by your first name.”

  “Lord have mercy, half the people in and out this door know me by my Christian name. It was a busy day from the time I opened my eyes until I shut them again, and with Larry underfoot as well, I was behind most of it.”

  “It wasn’t a man named Partridge, by any chance? I’d been hoping to see him.”

  “Partridge? No, that’s not likely. And if it was your motorcar whoever it was had an interest in, he’s not the first nor will he be the last. Most of my regulars want to know if the King is staying here.” She laughed and bustled back into the kitchen, leaving Rutledge to his meal.

  He drove back to the White Horse, and when Quincy appeared to feed Dublin the cat, Rutledge walked down to speak to him.

  Quincy saw him coming. He straightened and waited, while the cat ate its food without haste, unconcerned by the man from London coming to stand close by its dish.

  “You do your duty by your neighbor,” Rutledge began, looking down at the scraps minced for the cat.

  “It’s a dumb animal, it doesn’t know when to expect its owner. When there’s no one about to feed it, at least it knows it won’t starve.”

  “Which is far from being a dumb animal,” Rutledge observed. “How long has Dublin’s owner been away this time?”

  “How should I know? I’m not his keeper.”

  “Would any of his other neighbors be able to tell me?”

  “I feed the cat, not them.”

  “What happens if you aren’t here by the time your neighbor returns from his walkabout? Surely the woman up the way would take pity on Dublin.”

  “Why?” Quincy shrugged. “I’m not likely to be going anywhere. I leave the walkabouts to Partridge.”

  “Partridge? An odd name. What part of the country did he say he came from?”

  “He didn’t. And it’s no odder than Quincy,” he retorted. “Why is it you’re really here? Not the horse yonder.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It does. Because every one of us in these cottages is afraid of something. And Partridge was always afraid of strangers.”

  “What frightens you?” Rutledge asked, curious.

  “My dreams,” Quincy retorted, and went back inside his cottage.

  Later in the day, Rutledge drove to London. His mood was mixed, frustration warring with duty.

  Hamish said, “Have ye no’ thought? Ye’re a red herring.”

  Rutledge was beginning to believe that might be true.

  He found Chief Superintendent Bowles in his office, finishing a report.

  Bowles looked up as he entered, frowned, and said, “What brings you back so soon?”

  “There’s nothing to be gained by staying where I was. I was beginning to arouse suspicion. And if I’m not mistaken, there’s a watcher there already. Partridge’s motor is in the shed, his bicycle as well. He’s not in the house ill or dead. And with lorries passing through at all hours of the day and night, he has ample opportunity to disappear wherever he pleases. Unless I’m given more resources, there’s nothing more to be done.”

  “They won’t like it at the War Office.” Bowles’s voice was thoughtful. “But I’ll tell them, all the same.”

  That same morning, as Rutledge was questioning Mrs. Smith about the man he’d heard from his window, Alice Crowell sat down to write a letter to her father.

  He hadn’t approved of her husband’s declining to fight in the war, but felt that Albert Crowell’s duty driving an ambulance had in some measure made up for it. It took considerable courage to pull men out of shell holes under fire and dress the wounds of men lying helpless in No Man’s Land. The Germans had no compunction about shooting ambulance men, and Crowell had distinguished himself several times, even shooting at a diving plane with a borrowed rifle and hitting it before it could fire on his vehicle.

  And so she began her letter with “Dearest Papa…”

  She went on to tell him that her husband was being persecuted by the police inspector in Elthorpe, and unfairly so since he had had nothing to do with the dead man in the Fountains Abbey ruins.

  But she wisely omitted any reference to the book found at the man’s feet.

  Ending the letter with a plea for her father’s help, she added, “What disturbs me is that the intense scrutiny he’s given Albert may have its roots in Inspector Madsen’s previous relationship with me, and I daren’t remind him of that for fear it will only make matters worse.”

  She sealed the letter, posted it, and told no one.

  Her father, colonel of an East Anglian regiment, went directly
to London and presented the letter to a friend at the War Office. He didn’t know the Chief Constable of Yorkshire well enough to approach him, but he rather thought that Martin Deloran might.

  The matter might have languished in limbo but for the fact that Colonel Ingle and the man he met with had both been at Sandhurst. He had come prepared to argue. It wasn’t necessary.

  For one sentence in the letter seemed to leap off the page, startling Deloran.

  …the poor man was wearing a respirator, which causes the police to think his death might have something to do with the war, but if Albert couldn’t shoot the Hun, how could he kill a man he swears he has never seen before?

  The man behind the desk fingered the sheet of paper for a moment, and then, choosing his words with care, said, “Interesting story. Yes, well. Consider it done. But I’d rather you didn’t tell your daughter that you’ve brought the letter to me. Better to let her believe help arrived before you could act in the matter. Sensibilities of the local police, and all that. This needs to be sorted quietly—if she’s to continue living in Yorkshire, that is. And I know just the man to look into matters.”

  Colonel Ingle was no fool.

  “Thanks very much, Martin.” He waited to see if more information might be forthcoming. “I’ll be on my way then.”

  “Anything for an old friend,” Deloran assured him.

  But Colonel Ingle knew that friendship had nothing to do with Martin Deloran taking on this matter with such speed. He was jumping in for reasons of his own.

  Deloran got to his feet. “What do you say to a spot of lunch, while you’re in London?”

  Sometime later, Rutledge was summoned to Bowles’s office, and he found his superintendent in a dark mood.

  “Bloody army, they think we have nothing better to do than run their errands for them. You’re wanted in Yorkshire now. I asked if it was the same business, and they declined to tell me. Bloody Cook’s Tour, if you want my view of the matter. Give me what’s on your desk, and I’ll see that it’s dealt with.”

  “What is it in Yorkshire that I’m supposed to be investigating?”