“Anither watcher?” Hamish said.
Rutledge wouldn’t have been surprised. Someone who knew that Rutledge would be coming and while having no intention of working with him, at least wanted it to be known that he was present as well.
The government kept an eye on certain people. Quietly and unobtrusively as a rule.
What had Partridge done to excite interest? Knowing that might make a difference in deciding where to look for him.
His only choice now was to wait for dark and then search Partridge’s cottage. He could come to it by a roundabout way, passing unseen. He’d been told this was merely a watching brief. But if Hamish was right and Partridge wasn’t coming back, there could be an advantage in knowing what the man was up to.
Rutledge left the hill of the White Horse half an hour later and went back to The Smith’s Arms, where he had taken a room. He found he was in time for luncheon served both in the dining room and at a handful of tables that had been set up outside with benches round them for the lorry drivers.
It was a rough crowd. Men who drove long distances for a living were often footloose by nature and had more in common with one another than with families left behind. They’d cast glances in Rutledge’s direction when he drove up and walked into the inn, curious and suspicious. Then conversation had picked up again when he disappeared from view.
The innkeeper’s wife—Mrs. Smith—greeted him with a harried nod and went on serving tables with quick efficiency and a laugh that kept the men jolly and at arm’s length. Rutledge glimpsed Mr. Smith; the swinging doors into the nether regions showed him briefly. He was the cook here, not his wife.
Rutledge wondered if their name was Smith or if they enjoyed the play on words as well as their anonymity. It would explain why they kept their inn for transient custom and showed no ambition to cater to a different clientele.
Mrs. Smith reappeared from the kitchen with a tray for Rutledge. “If you won’t mind eating it upstairs,” she said apologetically. “There’s not a table to spare for a single.”
He took the tray and thanked her. In his room he looked under the serviette that covered it and found generous sandwiches of beef and pork, a pickle, a small dish of tinned fruit, and a glass of beer.
Sitting by the window he ate with an appetite, listening to the voices rising from the tables below. Someone had started a political argument and found himself shouted down by his comrades good-naturedly calling him a fool. But he stuck to his guns, clearly possessed of a grievance against a proposed tax on goods shipped to France or the Low Countries.
“It’ul put me out of business, I tell you, and you as well,” he said gruffly. “Wait and see.”
“Rumor,” another voice replied. “It’ul never happen, see if I’m not right.”
They moved away, still talking, and then it was quiet for a moment before lorry engines roared into life and began to roll out of the yard.
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.