by Charles Todd
“I signed an agreement, in front of witnesses. My brother might take it into his head to see that the letter and not the spirit of the law is carried out.”
“And your parents?”
“Dead for all I know. It hasn’t seemed worth my while to find out.”
The coffeepot was on the stove, and the aroma was building.
“What did you do that was so unforgivable?”
“I was born. Do you have any sisters or brothers, Rutledge?”
“A sister.”
“Close, are you?”
“Very.”
“Well, it wasn’t that way in my family. My brother hated me from the start. No, I swear it. He was a nasty piece of work in my eyes as well. We never got along, and just when he was rising in his firm, I was being sent down from Cambridge in disgrace. Too much drinking, too many women, my schoolwork suffering into the bargain. There was talk that I was the black sheep of a fine old name, and I wouldn’t amount to much. And then I did the unspeakable—I met the woman my brother was planning to marry, and she liked me well enough. Perhaps a little too well, for she broke off their engagement. I like to think the contrast with him pointed up just how great a bastard he was. My father offered me a sizable sum paid to my account anywhere in the world except England, and I was young enough not to fancy taking a position in my father’s firm. Going off to build the Panama Canal for the French seemed to be a fitting revenge, and off I went. Only the French died like flies, and the engineers died with them. So much for that.”
He went for the coffee and brought a cup of it back with him, handing it to Rutledge. “I take mine black. There’s not much choice, actually. I don’t have sugar or milk.” He fetched his own cup and sat down. “I don’t know why I talk to you. I don’t care for people as a rule. But before I know it, I’m telling my life story and thinking nothing of it. You’re a bad influence.”
Rutledge laughed. “So I’ve been told.”
“Did Brady kill Willingham, do you think?” Quincy asked abruptly, changing the subject.
“He confessed to it.”
“All right, for the sake of argument, what about Partridge?”
“I’m not as sure of that.”
“Nor am I. Which makes me wonder if Brady isn’t a scapegoat. And accordingly, I keep my door bolted at night now. I can protect myself. What’s loose amongst us here?”
It was an echo of the question Slater had asked.
“There’s no way of knowing.”
“Well, if it’s Slater, he won’t be using that hand to kill anybody for a while. Then we have Allen, who doesn’t have the strength left to overpower anyone, and Mrs. Cathcart, who is afraid of her own shadow. Which leaves in the suspect category Miller, Singleton, and me. Unless it’s Partridge coming back from the grave. We haven’t been shown his body, and that’s something to be taken into account.”
Rutledge couldn’t tell if this was a fishing expedition or not. But Hamish was warning him to take care.
“I think Hill is planning to dig up the floor of Partridge’s cottage tomorrow. To be certain he’s not under it.” It was a light answer, to avoid the truth.
It was Quincy’s turn to laugh, but it rang hollowly. “Yes, well, I wish him luck.” He drained his cup and held out his hand for Rutledge’s. “I’ll say good night. Thanks for coming by. I was in the mood for company.”
It was said with an edge to it, as if he weren’t particularly pleased to have been disturbed.
He let Rutledge out the door and bolted it behind him.
Rutledge went back to the inn and to bed. It was too late to see what Inspector Hill had to say about the murders.
In the night someone tried to burn Quincy alive in his cottage.
But he’d been telling the truth when he said he was armed. The shotgun blasted a hole through the door and peppered the front garden. Then he was outside, taking a broom to the rags someone had jammed under his door, pulling them apart in smoky masses. Those shoved through the broken windowpane in the bird room took longer to extinguish.
Damage was not as extensive as it might have been. Someone had counted on the door being unlocked, to make fire-starting easier. And when he found it wasn’t, he had tried to improvise, determined to set the house ablaze.
For the rest of the night Quincy sat in his dark sitting room, the shotgun across his knees and the coffeepot at his elbow.
When Rutledge came back the next morning, Quincy said with an edge to his voice, “I want to make a statement.”
20
As soon as it was first light, Quincy had been busy, as he told Rutledge with grim satisfaction. He had gone to Mrs. Cathcart’s cottage and called through the door, “There’s no harm done, no one killed. You’re safe for what’s left of the night.”
Inside he had heard her crying, but he said bracingly, “You’ll make yourself ill in there. Go to bed, sleep while you can. There’s nothing to worry about in the light of day.”
It was two hours later that he’d sent Slater for Hill and Rutledge.
“I’d be dead if it weren’t for the cat. She smelled the smoke and was howling frantically to get out. And when I came down, I could hear whoever it was trying to stuff more rags against the door.”
“Do you think you hit him?”
“I don’t know, and could care even less. But I want to go on record that out the back window I saw a shape running toward the shadows of Singleton’s cottage. He may be dead as well. Or he may have tried to kill me. And I’ll swear to that in any fashion you like. I had a good look, it wasn’t my eyes playing tricks.”
“No feeling for size, shape?”
“None. But if Brady killed Willingham and then himself, who tried to burn me out, I ask you.”
He was incensed about his door, and demanded that a constable take him directly into Uffington to find lumber that would cover the damage.
“That door is going to be bolted again by nightfall, or you’ll be assigning a constable to sit on my threshold all night.”
Hill said to Rutledge as Quincy and the constable left, “What do you think?”
“It could well be true.” But then Quincy could have set the fire himself and then fired his shotgun through the panels of the door. And both policemen knew it.
Another constable came to report that Singleton was in his cottage and safe. “I had to knock three or four times,” he added. “He was asleep.”
“We’ll attend to him later. See if he heard anything. But for now, Rutledge, I’ve cleared paperwork for the search of Partridge’s cottage. If you’re ready? We might as well get on with it.”
They crossed the lane to the cottage and went in.
Nothing had changed since Rutledge had been there alone. But this time he kept an eye open for the papers that Miss Chandler had typed, while Hill was poking about looking for a body.
Neither of them had any success.
“Ye’ve been here before,” Hamish reminded Rutledge. “And you found nothing then.”
“I didn’t know about the papers.”
“Aye, that’s true. But if ye’d seen them, ye’d ha’ taken note. They werena’ here.”
Hill sat down by the desk and said with some heat, “I’d have felt better if he’d been here, dead. Nothing against Mr. Partridge, but it would have solved my problem for me. Now that note of Brady’s looks damned suspicious.”
Rutledge debated telling him about the body in Yorkshire, but held off. Hamish, looking ahead, told him in no uncertain terms that it was unwise.
All the same, he decided to wait until he was sure how the crimes were related.
“I don’t know that Partridge is connected to this business. On the other hand, my presence here might have set off something we haven’t got to the bottom of yet. The killings began after I identified myself as a policeman. Not before.”
“Nonsense. A Scotland Yard inspector doesn’t go about triggering murders. I haven’t time for foolishness.” He paused. “The doctor tells
me that Brady could have killed himself, right enough. The way the old Romans used to fall on their swords. The chair was directly behind him, and the force of the blow drove him into it. Why would Quincy want to put that in doubt?”
Hill got up from the desk and moved restlessly about the sitting room. Rutledge remembered the crumpled beginning of a letter in the basket by the desk and went to look at it again.
But it wasn’t there now. Of small importance—yet it told him that someone else had been through the house since he had been here.
Rutledge said, “I spoke to Quincy for an hour, more or less, last night. Coincidence? Or fear?”
They moved on to the shed where the motorcar was kept and Hill did a cursory search of the vehicle. But Rutledge, with a little better light now, looked at the tires and the boot, then thoroughly inspected the interior.
It gave up no more secrets to him than it had to Inspector Hill, but as he ran his hand over the rear seat, something was brushed to the floor of the motorcar. It was so small he had trouble finding where it had got to, but after a moment, his fingers finally retrieved it.
The tab from a 1917 small box respirator.
He could see, vividly, the slit in the mask that Parkinson had been wearing when he was found in the cloisters of Fountains Abbey. Just where this tab should have been.
It had caught on something and torn off.
Rutledge straightened up. Parkinson had been in this motorcar, along with the mask. And no one noticed the tab was missing as it was slipped over a dead man’s face.
He would have given any odds that Parkinson had traveled to his death in this motorcar, and someone had seen to it that it was quietly returned to the shed where it belonged, when the journey was finished. In some ways, a motorcar was harder to hide than a body. It could be traced. Better to leave the impression that Parkinson had set out without it.
And that confirmed that Parkinson’s death was deliberate, carefully planned and executed.
Leaving Hill to cope with his own case, Rutledge drove to Wiltshire, to the house called Pockets where Rebecca Parkinson lived.
She was there, and he had to bang on the door for nearly ten minutes before she finally opened it to him.
Something in his face must have alerted her, for the first words out of her mouth were, “I’ve told you. I’ve had nothing to do with my father for the past two years or more. It’s useless, coming here. He put his work before his family, and now his family no longer cares. His sacrifice was in vain. The army didn’t want him either.”
“How do you know that?”
“For weeks before my mother died, he was obsessed, secretive, doing much of his work at night, making endless calculations. He hardly ate or slept. It was as if he were trying to convince himself of something—as if he’d lost his way but couldn’t bring himself to admit it. In any other man I’d have said he was on the verge of a breakdown. In his case, I think it was pride crashing. He wasn’t as clever as he thought he was, and he was about to be found out.”
“That’s a rather harsh judgment.”
“Is it? He resigned, didn’t he? If he’d made a brilliant success of his work, do you think he’d have done that? Even in contrition over my mother’s death? And the man in charge of the laboratory let him go. They’d have offered him a leave of absence, if he was so indispensable to them. The war wasn’t over in the spring of 1918, and we weren’t certain of winning.”
“You don’t know what it was he was working on?”
“I wasn’t interested in his work. It had brought nothing but grief to us, and I hated it as much as I came to hate him. It took me a long time to reach indifference. But I have now.”
He thought she hadn’t. She was still passionate about her father and anything to do with him. The hate showed in her anger at the man.
Rutledge stood there, letting her feel the silence, willing her to betray herself.
As if to fill it before she couldn’t stand it any longer, she said, “When my mother died, I hated him so much all I could think of was making him feel pain in a way he couldn’t ignore. If he’d still been using his laboratory, I’d have burned it to the ground, and wouldn’t have cared if he was there inside. When she asked that her ashes be scattered in the gardens she loved so much, I strewed them myself. I was half mad too, I think. I wanted to hurt him and I wound up hurting myself. Do you know what someone’s ashes feel like? Do you know how they blow on the wind, and sometimes into your face or cling to your fingers in spite of everything? A gray powder, that was all that was left of my mother. And I diminished it by letting it soak into the damp ground, so that the house was uninhabitable. And now I’m afraid to go there because I’m afraid I’ll see her ghost. I think, at the end, he did see her. That’s why he couldn’t stay there.”
“What will happen to the house?”
“I don’t know. I can’t sell it—not after what I did. I can’t live there. I can’t let it go to wrack and ruin. I can’t have brambles and weeds on my mother’s grave. He ruined all our lives, and I don’t really care what’s become of him.”
She turned her back to him, and he heard the catch in her voice when she added, “There’s nothing I want in that wretched cottage where he went to live. As far as I’m concerned, you can burn it to the ground.”
And then she was inside, on the point of shutting her door.
He said, “The motorcar as well?”
Her voice was weary when she finally answered. “Let them sell it. I have no need for it.”
“Miss Parkinson. I shall have to speak to your sister. There’s no way around it.”
“Did she tell you where she lived? At Road’s End, a house not very different from mine. It’s not far from Porton Down. Ironic, isn’t it? A friend offered it to her for a small rent, and she was upset with me, about the ashes. I can’t blame her for not wanting to live with me.” Rebecca Parkinson laughed harshly. “That house at Partridge Fields is worth a great deal of money. But the two of us have almost nothing to our names. A small inheritance from Mother, that’s it. And I wouldn’t touch my father’s money if he offered it. If I thought it would solve anything I’d shoot myself. But it won’t. Don’t come back here again.”
And she was gone.
He stood there for a moment longer, staring at the closed door. If one of the sisters killed Gerald Parkinson, which was it?
He thought that Rebecca had the stronger sense of abandonment and might in a fit of anger try to assuage it by killing her father. But surely in the heat of the moment, not two years later. Unless there was something he didn’t know, some factor in their relationship that went so deep it had taken time to face. When she had, the only solution might have been murder.
And yet, Sarah, the weaker of the two, might have found she couldn’t live with her own pain and grief any longer and made the choice between killing herself, as her mother had done, or killing her father.
Rutledge turned and went back to the motorcar, driving on to the house at Partridge Fields.
He walked through the grounds to the small garden with the horse fountain. It was dappled in shade, this early, a mysterious and inviting place to sit.
But he’d come not to sit but to look at the grass that surrounded the fountain, squatting to see if there was any sign that someone had stood here two nights ago. The grass was still dew-wet, and it was difficult to judge. No one had trampled the green blades, no one had left a tidy footprint in the moist soil of the shrubbery beds. Still, he’d have given odds that walking here in the dark would lead to a misstep at some point.
It took patience and careful, almost inch-by-inch inspection, but he found something that might have been the half print of a heel just where an edge of the grass walk met the soil.
Hamish said disparagingly, “A bird scratching. A beetle trying to right itself. An owl after a mouse.”
Rutledge got to his feet. “Possibly. But why haven’t they scratched over here—or there?”
“It’s no’ so
lid proof.”
“No.”
He left the shrubbery and stood where he could see the windows of the master bedroom above the garden.
Here, at this house—in that room, for all he knew—lay the heart of a family’s collapse.
It was as if each of the Parkinsons gave more energy to hurting than to healing.
For one thing, why had Mrs. Parkinson wanted her ashes buried here, if she’d been wretched at Partridge Fields? The answer to that was, she intended them to be a constant reminder to her husband of everything she’d suffered.
He had no idea what she’d had in mind—an urn set on a marble square by the horse fountain, or ashes scattered in the central circle of the French-style beds where the roses grew. It had been Rebecca’s decision in the first anguished days after finding her mother dead to spread them throughout the gardens.
Neither mother nor daughter, set on their acts of revenge, had considered how difficult it might ultimately be for Sarah or Rebecca to live here. Punishing Gerald Parkinson was paramount, shutting out every other consideration, and Rebecca was left to reap the whirlwind she had sown.
Where had all this passionate need to hurt started?
There was Parkinson’s obsession with his work, putting it before his family. And his wife’s morbid fascination with the destructive nature of what he did. These must have led to violent arguments, to turn her thoughts to suicide. Or had she been unstable most of her married life?
In that case, why hadn’t her daughters spared a moment’s sympathy for what their father must have had to endure?
There must have been something else, to send a sensitive mind into a downward spiral of depression and finally despair.
Had Parkinson lashed out physically, when he’d felt his back was to the wall? Striking his wife would have erased any sympathy Rebecca and her sister might have felt.
Then why hadn’t Rebecca mentioned it in defense of her anger? Or Sarah dwell on that as she remembered a kinder father?
Rutledge thought, It’s time to ask Sarah what she remembers about her parents’ relationship, not just her own with her father.
