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?”