A pale horse ir-10

by Charles Todd

  There was nothing he could do. No word of comfort for the bereaved husband-who probably had never known Rutledge existed- and no flowers for the raw earth of the grave.

  He finished his tea and said, "I need to walk. Will you wait?"

  "Of course."

  He had never taken off his coat. He just went out the door.

  An hour later, he saw that there was a church on the next corner, smoke-stained stone, with a spire that gleamed in the sun.

  The door was unlocked and he went inside into the silent dimness. His footsteps echoed against the stone walls, and he got as far as the first row of chairs. There he sat down. It wasn't the comfort of God he sought so much as the need to be alone. And Hamish, mercifully, was quiet.

  He hadn't expected it. That was the problem. The loss was emotional, sharp.

  Their engagement had not been spent growing closer to each other, settling into a warm and responsive companionship that would carry them into old age, as it should have been. Four years of war had seen to that and changed them both. She was another man's wife, now. Not his, never his. And while he grieved for the girl he had asked to marry him in 1914, she had left a long time ago.

  He rose after a while and walked back the way he'd come.

  Hamish, at his shoulder, said only, "It was verra' different with my Fiona. I should ha' come home to her, and left you dead in France. Your Jean wouldna' have missed you…"

  The voice was sad, as if half convincing himself that this was true.

  Together the two men, one of whom didn't exist, went back to the flat.

  15

  Frances was waiting, as she'd promised.

  She said as he came through the door, "The Yard sent someone. You are to come at once."

  Rutledge swore silently. There was never any time…

  "Yes, I'll go. Shall I give you a lift home?"

  "As far as Trafalgar Square, if you don't mind. Ian-are you all right? Do you want me to call the Yard and ask them to give you an hour or two?"

  "Work," he said bitterly, "is its own panacea. But thanks."

  He stopped long enough to change clothes. And then he shut the flat door behind them as he led the way to his motorcar. He couldn't help but wonder how long it would be before he crossed his threshold again without remembering the news that had been waiting here today.

  Frances kept him busy with trivial gossip until he put her down in the square, and she leaned across to kiss him before she got out.

  He watched her walk briskly in the direction of St. Martin's in the Fields, and then turned toward the Yard. He hadn't mentioned seeing Simon Barrington. It hadn't seemed the right moment, and then too important to be a parting remark.

  It was Simon's business and none of his, after all. As long as Frances wasn't hurt. But he thought she was going to be.

  His eye was caught by a familiar figure walking toward him along the street. It was Meredith Channing, dressed in a becoming dark red coat and matching hat. She didn't look his way, but he could have sworn she had seen his motorcar and recognized it as quickly as he had recognized her.

  Bowles was waiting for him at the Yard and almost as he walked in the door asked abruptly for his report.

  "There's no time to write it out, but I want to know what's going on."

  Rutledge gave it orally, as Bowles stood fuming by the window.

  When he'd finished, Bowles grunted, and Rutledge couldn't tell whether he was satisfied or still irritated. It was often difficult to read the man's moods.

  "Stepping on toes is never prudent. I want you back in Berkshire tonight. I want to see the end of this business with Partridge or Parkinson or whatever his name is. Finish it as fast as you can, and report to me. Yorkshire is complaining we're playing merry hell with their inquiry, and giving them damn all in return. They still have that godforsaken body, and don't know what to do with it."

  Rutledge was as eager to leave London as Bowles was to send him away. But he said, "If I get too close to the truth, Deloran will be knocking at your door, complaining."

  "And that's when I'll know you're doing your job. Get on with it."

  Rutledge had been driving for three days, but he said only, "I'll be leaving within the hour."

  Somehow the road west seemed longer this time. But in the end Rutledge saw the familiar shape of the White Horse galloping silently across its grassy hillside. He drove on, passing it, then stopped in the darkness to look up at it.

  What had it seen, this chalk horse? Why had it brought Parkinson here, and why had he died in Yorkshire, and not in Berkshire?

  He got out and walked a little way up the hill. Somehow it seemed peaceful and comforting. The horse had been there since time out of mind. Rutledge squatted in the dew-wet grass and studied the dark, silent cottages.

  Hamish said, "No one wants this dead man."

  "Except to use him," Rutledge answered aloud. "A convenience. Sad, isn't it? The cottages are the end of the road for most of the people down there. A place to grow old and die without fuss. Did death come looking for Parkinson, or did he go out to find it?"

  "It's a long way to Yorkshire fra' here."

  There was movement below. Rutledge could just make out the smith coming home. He slowed for an instant, as if he sensed being watched, then walked on toward his door.

  A curtain twitched in Brady's cottage, a sliver of lamp light flashing briefly and then vanishing. The lane was quiet again.

  Rutledge was content to sit here on the hill and listen to sounds of the night. His mind was tired, and even the puzzle of Parkinson's life and death failed to interest him. It could wait until tomorrow.

  A cat-Dublin?-trotted across the open space between Quincy's cottage and Mrs. Cathcart's. A dog barked in a farmyard a long way off, the sound carrying without urgency.

  For a moment Rutledge wondered why he had ever chosen to become a policeman and deal so closely with death. And he knew the answer even as he posed the question. It was still the same as it had been at eighteen, when he'd told his father that he intended to join the metropolitan force when he came down from Oxford. Tired he might be of death, yet he was still here to speak for the dead. Only it was proving more difficult to speak for Parkinson. It was possible, he thought, that Parkinson didn't want anyone to learn the truth about him. That he would be glad to lie in an unmarked grave and be forgotten.

  Then, without warning, as if it had been busy this last quarter hour without his knowing it, his mind offered Rutledge a solution to the puzzle of Gerald Parkinson.

  He had been working on the theory that the man had had something to hide, like the other residents of the Tomlin Cottages. And perhaps it was true. But the overriding factor behind what had brought Parkinson here was guilt. A strong sense of guilt.

  And that was where to begin, if Rutledge expected to unravel the puzzle of this man's life and his death.

  Rutledge stood up and walked back down the hill, cranked the motorcar, and drove on to The Smith's Arms. It took him several minutes to wake Mr. Smith and bring him down to unlock the door.

  "Back again, are you? Your room's empty, if you want it. We'll settle on that tomorrow."

  "Fair enough." Rutledge thanked him and followed him up the stairs in the wake of his flickering lamp. As he opened his door, the room smelled of lavender and fresh air, as if the sheets had dried in the sun.

  He undressed in the dark and went to bed. fter breakfast, Rutledge drove on to Wiltshire, a good two hours

  Tomorrow he'd find out why guilt had changed Partridge's life. one way, then found again the turning for Partridge Fields, the house where Parkinson had lived.

  Once more there appeared to be no one about as he walked through the gate, leaving his motorcar in the lane.

  The sun was slanting through the trees beyond the house and long shafts of golden light barred the lawns and gardens. It was a tranquil scene, and he wondered again why Parkinson had preferred the cottages to this place.

  He went around the h
ouse, through the gardens and the shrubbery that shut off the kitchen yard, listening to a silence broken only by a bird calling from the miniature dovecote birdhouse in the kitchen garden. Was no one ever here?

  Moving on, he was just on the point of taking the stone path through to the far side of the house, when a shrill voice stopped him in his tracks.

  Hamish said, "'Ware!" in warning, and Rutledge turned slowly.

  "Here! What are you about?"

  A plump woman wearing an apron was standing in the door to the yard, arms akimbo and a frown on her face.

  "I didn't think anyone was at home," he said in apology, "or I would have knocked. My name is Rutledge, and I've come down from London-"

  "I couldn't care less where you're from. What are you doing here? "

  "Looking, I think, for Mr. Parkinson."

  "You're not one of them people from the newspaper, are you?" There was a challenge now in her tone. "I've told you before and I'll tell you again, he's not here, nor will he be here any time soon, and you might as well march yourself back the way you've come and leave the premises. Close the gate behind you or I'll see the police have a word with you for trespassing."

  She was about to shut the door in his face, and he said quickly, "I'm from the police. Scotland Yard."

  Her face altered, the hostility giving way to concern mixed with irritation. "The police, is it? What are you here for? Is there bad news you're bringing?"

  Rutledge was walking back toward her now, and she stood her ground with the ferocity of an old and trusted servant.

  "Here, you're not coming in this house, policeman or no!"

  "I'm trying to locate Mr. Parkinson," he replied, his tone indicating a need for help rather than ulterior motive. "It's a police inquiry, you see, and I should like to ask his assistance." He'd left the sketch in his valise at the inn, and swore to himself. She would surely have recognized it.

  "Well, you won't be finding it here-he's not in residence, and that's a fact." She looked Rutledge up and down. "You'd think a London policeman would know that."

  He said, drawing on his experience dealing with watchdog servants, "My superiors don't always tell me everything they know. Much to my regret. How long has he been away? Surely he must have told you where to send along his mail."

  "He doesn't receive any. None, that is, I'm aware of. And he left just a week after his wife died in the spring of 1918. Here, are you certain you aren't from the London papers?"

  Rutledge showed her his identity card, and she studied it with suspicion, as if certain it was counterfeit.

  "I don't understand why the newspapers should be interested in Mr. Parkinson," he went on in a conversational tone. "Or disturb him. Perhaps the police ought to have been called sooner."

  "They were, and they did nothing." Her sense of grievance went deeper than her circumspection. "It was on account of his poor wife, of course. Like vultures they came here, battering the door, upsetting the household. It was shameful, that's what it was. No respect for the dead."

  "Was she well known in London circles? Was that their interest?"

  "It was the way she died. She left the gas open by mistake, and they tried to say it was suicide, but of course it wasn't. She was a good and kind lady, she would never kill herself. But they told poor Mr. Parkinson it was on purpose, and he believed them."

  It was the same way Parkinson himself had died. To follow her? But then how did he come to be in Yorkshire?

  "I'm surprised the London papers saw anything newsworthy in the story."

  She sighed. "It's because of what he did in the war, of course. And here at the bottom of the garden as well, with that workshop of his. Mrs. Parkinson told me herself she was heartsick over it."

  Rutledge tried another tack. "I'm not sure I understand. London didn't inform me what Parkinson had done in the war."

  "He worked at Porton Down, he was one of the scientists there. Gassed the Kaiser's men in return for our boys. Got our own back, didn't he? Mrs. Parkinson was squeamish, but not I."

  He was startled by her vehemence, even as his mind registered Porton Down.

  It was a military facility on the eastern border of Wiltshire, across the county from here. A place where absolute secrecy was the order of the day.

  And for the first time Rutledge understood why Martin Deloran was interested in the whereabouts of one Gerald Parkinson. The army didn't care to lose track of someone like that, someone whose knowledge was more valuable than his person. Eccentricity was one thing, disliked but oftentimes tolerated. Even madness could be overlooked. Parkinson, however, had walked away from a comfortable family home, lived elsewhere under a different name, and disappeared with unsettling regularity. The War Office could do very little about it, but that didn't mean they didn't watch his every move.

  Very likely Deloran had put the change in Parkinson down to excessive grief after his wife's death-give him time and he'd recover, be himself again. The war's nearly over, we can afford to be patient… But two years had passed, and Parkinson still went his own way. And Deloran was still watching him.

  Small wonder Deloran jumped at the chance to bury Parkinson under a pauper's stone in rural Yorkshire! What sort of secrets had safely died with him?

  "Guilt, ye said," Hamish reminded him, and Rutledge remembered.

  That would explain Parkinson's choice to live in the Tomlin Cottages.

  It still wouldn't explain where he'd died.

  "He worked on the development of poison gases?" Rutledge asked to clarify what Parkinson had done for a living. It would explain too the choice of reading material he had taken with him to the cottage.

  "Well, of course he did," she said with pride. "Where else, and him fascinated by chemistry ever since he was a young man at Cambridge? Mrs. Parkinson was at her wits' end with fear for the children."

  "Children?"

  "Indeed, the light of her life, they was. I daresay Mr. Parkinson found them a nuisance when he had his laboratory at the bottom of the garden. Always looking in the windows, trying to see what he was up to. It was when he killed the cows by accident that Mrs. Parkinson put her foot down." She rested her back against the doorframe, a tired woman with no one to talk with as she worked. "But that caught the army's attention, didn't it? So he took himself off to a new laboratory there. Posh, he said it was, everything to hand. 'Martha, they value me. They know I'm right about this new direction. Germany hasn't got there yet. But we shall, wait and see. You'll be reading about it in the newspapers, because it's likely to stop the war and the dying.' My nephew, the one gassed at Ypres, my sister's only boy, was going to be avenged, he said. Germany was the first to use the poisonous gases, but we'd be the last. We'll show 'em, he said, wait and see."

  "You've worked for the family for some time, have you?"

  "I was maid to Mr. Parkinson's mother, and came here as housekeeper to Partridge Fields when he bought the place, Mrs. Miggs having just died."

  "And Mrs. Parkinson didn't care for the work he was doing."

  "She worried that they were testing these gases on the animals. She couldn't bear to think about it. She saw my nephew when he was sent home, lungs burned right out. He didn't last long and died hard. I told her the Hun had brought it all on themselves, whatever Mr. Parkinson devised, but it didn't matter. She stopped sleeping well, wandering about the house at all hours. Like her own ghost. Small wonder she forgot and left the gas on. She couldn't even kill a spider that crept in at the window, she was that troubled about hurting anything. Which is why I refuse to believe she killed herself. But Mr. Parkinson thought she'd done it out of spite, using the gas. I'm told it's as peaceful a way as any to go, falling asleep and not waking up."

  The housekeeper turned and looked over her shoulder as if a ghost could give her the answer to her question. But it was the kitchen floors that concerned her, and she said, "It's dry in there, must be by now. And I've a good bit more to do before I close up for the day."

  "And you're sure you h
ave no way of knowing where Mr. Parkinson went? "

  "His daughter Becky might know. But I doubt it. He left me instructions not to say anything, and I never have. It's not my place to decide such things. "

  "Where will I find Miss Parkinson?"

  "No, I won't tell you. She'll know who did, and I'll hear about it soon enough. No one stays in the house of a night anymore. Myself, I'm away before dark, I can tell you that. But she comes from time to time to tend the gardens."

  And sometimes to knock at her father's door?

  "You spoke of children-" Rutledge began, but the housekeeper shook her head firmly and disappeared inside without answering him, shutting the kitchen door in Rutledge's face.

  He had no choice but to move on, rounding the house and coming again to the drive. He could almost feel the housekeeper watching him from the windows, making certain he was not sneaking about, as she would call it, but leaving the premises.

  As he closed the gate behind him, he thought, This house has seen tragedy…

  Rutledge found a small pub for his noon meal, and sat there over his pudding, thinking about Parkinson and the cottage in Berkshire. So much made sense now. The fact that the cottage had no touches of personal warmth-it was not Parkinson's home, this house in Wiltshire was. And his disappearances.

  Hamish said, "To his wife's grave? You ken, ye thought of that before."

  "Deloran probably had the churchyard watched for all we know. And going there would have bolstered Deloran's theory that Parkinson was still grieving. Wherever Parkinson went, Deloran couldn't find him, and that was the trouble."

  Hamish said, "It's verra' likely that he went away to torment Delo- ran."

  "It wouldn't surprise me that he was just being bloody-minded, rebelling against being watched, showing the War Office that he was clever enough to outfox them all. A cat-and-mouse game, to worry De- loran."

  Rutledge considered another possibility-that when Parkinson couldn't stand his own company any longer, when the walls of the cottage were closing in, he might well have needed to be around people. A crowded train station, a Wednesday market, a theater. Somewhere safe to remind himself he wasn't going mad.