A Pale Horse

by Charles Todd

  Rutledge turned to the desk and picked it up. “It’s ready. I wanted to put it on paper while my memory of events was still sharp.”

  Hill took it and scanned it. “Fair enough. Any thoughts on who might have done this murder?”

  “I leave that to you. But I will say, if I were in your shoes I’d be no closer to an answer.”

  “You were right, they’re a stubborn lot. Won’t come to the door, won’t say more than yes or no when they do, and no one has seen anything. Granted, it was in the middle of the night, but I have the feeling that not much happens in those cottages that the rest of them don’t know. I could feel the window curtains twitching like a palsy, eyes watching every move I make. Fairly gave me the willies, I can tell you. But if I had to pick one of that lot, it would either be the smith or the ex-soldier. Did you know he’d been cashiered from his regiment for dereliction of duty? Some years ago. That’s the story I was given, anyway.”

  “By whom?”

  “One of my men had seen him about and heard something of the sort. I’ll look into it, find out if there’s any truth in it. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing missing from the dead man’s cottage. So I have to rule out housebreaking. Although that might have been the original plan, come to think of it.”

  “Willingham’s wrist was slashed,” Rutledge said neutrally.

  “Yes, probably while fighting off his killer. You saw for yourself how the room was wrecked.”

  “You don’t think someone was trying to make the death appear to be a suicide?”

  “No, no. Too preposterous. I talked to the man who calls himself Quincy. Seems a levelheaded sort. He thinks this murder is connected with Partridge’s disappearance. He predicted they’d all be killed in their beds if I’m not quick.”

  “Willingham by all accounts was an unpleasant man who had probably made himself a pariah long before he came to the Tomlin Cottages. His murderer could have come from his past.”

  “I’d considered that too, and will be looking into it.” He’d been standing leaning against the doorframe, nonchalant as if Rutledge’s opinion carried no weight with him. He straightened, preparing to go.

  But Hamish believed his coming to the inn was a fishing expedition.

  Rutledge tended to agree with that summation.

  “You’ll be returning to the Yard?” Hill asked from the head of the stairs. “I’m of the opinion your man Partridge is dead. That’s Mr. Brady’s view as well.”

  “I expect he may be right,” Rutledge answered.

  “Well, at least I have a body to be going on with. That’s more than you can say—so far.”

  He turned and ran lightly down the stairs.

  Rutledge watched Hill leave the inn and walk briskly back the way he’d come.

  In the afternoon, he drove back to Pockets, to speak again to Rebecca Parkinson.

  She was there, in the house. He could sense it. But she refused to answer his knock.

  He tried to sense how she had responded to it—whether she was stock-still, waiting for him to go away, or hiding behind the stairs, where she couldn’t be seen. Or lying on her bed, looking at the ceiling, telling herself that she didn’t care.

  And he found himself wondering if Meredith Channing, if she were standing next to him under the overhang of thatch, would have been able to tell him if he was right.

  Unwilling to leave, Rutledge waited in his motorcar for over an hour outside the house. But it was a stalemate. He couldn’t go in, and she couldn’t come out.

  Finally he gave up and drove away. The house at Partridge Fields drew him, and he went there to sit in the gardens for a time. This time the house felt empty, and he knew there was no one inside. He was about to leave when a motorcar turned in the gates and followed the drive round to the kitchen yard.

  He realized it must be Rebecca Parkinson, and he walked swiftly toward the shrubbery, to catch her before she had gone inside.

  But she must have seen him, or perhaps glimpsed his vehicle where he’d left it, behind a shed. She gunned the engine, swung the vehicle in a circle to turn it, tires spewing gravel and earth as they bit for a grip, and then sped away down the drive before he could stop her.

  He stood there, winded from dashing after the motorcar, and swore.

  It was useless, following her back to Pockets. By the time he retrieved his own motorcar and started after her, she would have a head start, enough to be safely inside again before he could get there.

  But he was angry enough to try, and drove after her anyway, flying down the lane in her wake.

  When he got to Pockets, there was no sign of the car or of Rebecca.

  He realized that she must have expected him to follow her and instead of going directly home, as he’d anticipated, she had foxed him again and disappeared.

  Rutledge drove back to Berkshire, his mood dark, and found the inn full of drivers stopping for dinner or the night.

  Avoiding them, he went directly to his room. Tomorrow he would call Gibson again and see what, if any, information he’d come up with.

  In the event, it was very little. Although Hill had been right about Singleton. He’d been cashiered from his regiment but not for dereliction of duty. He had lost his temper once too often, and been asked to resign after he’d struck a fellow officer.

  The reason for the argument wasn’t clear, but Gibson believed it was the excuse Singleton’s commanding officer had been looking for.

  Mrs. Cathcart’s nasty divorce had been as bad or worse than she’d told Rutledge. Her husband, in Gibson’s view, had set out to make her life wretched, and succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. After the divorce, he’d cut her off without a penny, and she had had to scrape a living as best she could. The rent at the cottages was cheap enough, and she had inherited just enough from an aunt to live there frugally.

  Allen, who in fact was dying, had gone off like a wounded animal to spend his last days away from friends and family. The general belief was that he’d wanted nothing to do with surgery or cures, and expected to die within the first six months. He hadn’t been that fortunate.

  There was no information on the man who called himself Quincy, and none on Miller or Brady. Gibson suggested that Brady was using a name other than his own, and there were too many Millers to be sure which one was living in the shadow of the pale horse. And with only one name to go on, Quincy hadn’t turned up in the files or memories of the policemen Gibson had spoken to. Rutledge found himself thinking that perhaps Quincy had spoken the truth, that he was a remittance man back in England and careful to conceal that fact.

  Willingham had a rather sordid past, as it happened. He had been involved in dubious schemes designed to leave the investor poorer and himself richer. Skirting the law carefully, he had managed to avoid trouble, but in the end, bitter and running out of money, he’d come to a place where he felt safe from persecution as well as prosecution. Although a few of his former clients had threatened to sue him over the years, the general consensus had been that in doing so they would reveal their own avarice and their willingness to bend the rules to their own advantage. Still, more than one had voiced physical threats.

  “He’s been there for more than ten years, and the taste for revenge must have grown cold by now,” Gibson concluded. “But then you never know.”

  “This didn’t appear to be a case of revenge. As far as I can tell, the intent was to make his death appear to be a suicide. Not much satisfaction there.”

  “None,” Gibson agreed. “On the other hand, it would confuse the police.”

  Rutledge thanked Gibson and put up the receiver. On his way back to the inn from Uffington, he wondered at what point Willingham’s death would bring attention round to Parkinson’s empty cottage. Until it did, he would leave Hill to it.

  He stayed away from the cottages, but by nightfall he was restless. He could feel the tension building, and Hamish, in his mind, was a bleak shadow that threatened to break through his guard.

 
He walked to Wayland’s Smithy, back again to the inn, and from the road watched the moon rise. After a time he strolled on toward the White Horse, revealing itself as he neared it, and felt the tug of its spell. The graceful gallop was marvelous, and he thought about the hand that had created it, guiding the men who dug the sod from the chalk with antler spades until its dimensions were revealed. What must it have felt like to see it complete for the first time, shimmering in the moonlight, magic in its own way?

  He was suddenly distracted by something he could sense but not clearly see. Surely there was someone at the foot of the horse? And instead of looking up, whoever it was had his back to the horse.

  Rutledge stood very still, letting all his faculties tell him what was there.

  Hamish said, his voice soft in Rutledge’s ear, “Whoever it is, it isna’ stirring. Else I’d hear it.”

  Rutledge was thrown back to the trenches, and scanning No Man’s Land in the dark for any activity. Scanning until his eyes ached, and he had to rub them with his fingers before opening them again. His men’s lives had depended on his alertness, his ability to see a sniper crawling to a vantage point, or men changing the watch along the line of trenches opposite, sometimes even parties going out to look for their wounded. Once or twice he’d caught the faint sounds of fresh men settling at the machine gun far across the pitted landscape. Hamish had been better than any of them at the game, his ears attuned to sounds most couldn’t hear.

  The slightest movement caught Rutledge’s attention, dragging him back to the figure. No sound, just a minute change in position as if someone had been standing there too long and was beginning to feel stiff or chilled in the night air.

  He waited, slowly dropping until he was squatting and no longer a silhouette against the sky.

  There it was again. A figure in black. He couldn’t tell if it was male or female. Only that it was as quiet as a carving, its shape altered by arms wrapped around its body, giving it a bulkier outline.

  In the day of the White Horse, he’d have believed in ghosts or totems of a clan, he told himself. But this was human, this figure, and tiring.

  After a bit, it seemed to lengthen, as if it too had been squatting or bent over, peering toward the cottages.

  And then it began to move, away from Rutledge, back to the far side of the horse, and toward a clump of trees that grew across the road. He rose slowly to his feet, and followed in its wake.

  He was closer now, and he’d been right. The figure was bent over, as if in pain, and its arms were wrapped tightly around its body.

  Hamish said, “Yon motorcar.”

  Indeed there was one, left in the dark shadows cast by the trees.

  A sound drifted back to him, human and grieving. A sob, he thought, that rose in spite of intense self-control and for an instant broke free before being smothered again.

  He was closer still, the figure never turning to look back, never dreaming that someone followed it.

  It reached the motorcar and leaned against a wing, as if struggling with some emotion, then it went forward to the grill and reached for the crank.

  As the engine fired, Rutledge broke from the side of the hill and raced forward, catching the figure just as it turned toward the driver’s door.

  It fought, with tooth and nail and shoe, but he was stronger, saying over the sound of the engine, “I’m not going to harm you. I’ll let you go, if you don’t cry out. Neither one of us wants to be heard over there at the cottages.”

  There was a stillness, and then a nod. He stepped back, ready to move again if it was a trick.

  He knew who his prisoner was. A woman. Rebecca Parkinson. And yet what he found almost incomprehensible was the pain he’d sensed in someone who had clearly hated her father and reveled in his death.

  “What do you want?” The voice was husky in the darkness. “Who are you?” And there was fear in that question as well.

  “My name is Rutledge, Miss Parkinson. You know me. We talked at your home.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No, truly, I was at Pockets—”

  She threw her head back, and said, “I don’t live at Pockets.”

  So the housekeeper was right about children. Here was the sister to Rebecca.

  “I’m sorry. If you aren’t Rebecca, what’s your given name, Miss Parkinson.”

  “It’s Sarah.” Grudgingly spoken, he noted.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Near Porton Down. In one of the old cottages. What possessed you to attack me in that outrageous way?”

  “I’m from Scotland Yard. I’ve been trying to speak to your sister, and she’s done her best to avoid me. It’s about your father.”

  She was still for an instant, and then she said, “My father’s dead. At least to me he is, as he has been for the past two years.”

  “Yet you come here, to where he lived.” He hazarded a guess. “And someone saw you here once before, knocking at his door. Then sometime later, sitting in what must have been this motorcar, alone and crying.”

  She appeared to be shaken by his knowledge of her movements. “Have you been watching me?” she demanded. “What is this? I don’t understand why the Yard would take any interest in my father.”

  “He hasn’t been seen for some time. We think he’s dead, and that he may have been murdered.”

  He could hear the quick drawn breath, as the shock of his words hit her.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Nevertheless. His body has been found in Yorkshire.”

  She broke down then, turning away from him and burying her face in her hands. He let her cry, standing patiently behind her until she was calmer.

  “I hated him,” she said after a time.

  “I think you must have loved him as well.”

  “How could I, after what he’d done to my mother? She killed herself, no matter how hard they tried to put a better face on it. She killed herself! Do you know what it is to come home from a party and find the police in your house, and everything at sixes and sevens, and then you’re asked to look at your mother’s dead face and tell the police that you recognize her? Rebecca and I said good-bye to her, and she was smiling, she was smiling, and she insisted on kissing us, for luck she said. And we went blithely away, waving to her, looking forward to the party, and it never struck us, either of us, that she was different somehow. That perhaps she was saying good-bye in a very different way.”

  He said, “Where was your father when she died? At the house?”

  “No, no, he was at the laboratory. He was always in the laboratory, looking for a way to stabilize a gas so that it could be used in a shell or trying to make it more potent, longer lasting, more dependable in delivery. Everyone thought he was the cleverest man, a practical scientist. He not only could devise gases, he could take them to the battlefield. I heard them say so once, when they didn’t know I was there in the cottage he sometimes used, and they were waiting for him to arrive. Practical, as if this horrid way of maiming and killing soldiers was something to be studied for the most economical or useful way of doing murder.”

  “The Germans used it first.”

  “What does it matter? It was inhumane. Oh, I’m sick of this business. If you have nothing more to say to me, I’m going home.”

  “You haven’t told me why you came here to see your father. Why you were standing there on the hill tonight. If you hate him so much, why do you torment yourself like this?”

  “I don’t know,” she said wearily. “I remember sometimes the man who set me on his shoulders to see the Queen’s carriage pass during Victoria’s Jubilee. Or held me on my first pony, until I stopped being afraid of falling off and could take the reins myself. Or bringing me chocolates on my birthday when I was twelve, and telling me they had come all the way from Belgium. Little things that had nothing to do with gassing soldiers or killing the cows by accident, or spending more and more time in his laboratory, lost in the things he could create there.”

/>   She caught her breath on a sob, then cleared her throat.

  “There was something new he was working on, some terrible new possibility, that’s why he wasn’t there with us that night. Mother died, and he walked away from us and came to live here. Alone. I told myself it was recognizing what he’d done to her and to us. But later, I thought perhaps he was afraid to go back because in her will she’d asked that her ashes be scattered in the gardens under their bedroom windows.”

  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.”