“How should I know? I’m not his keeper.”
“Would any of his other neighbors be able to tell me?”
“I feed the cat, not them.”
“What happens if you aren’t here by the time your neighbor returns from his walkabout? Surely the woman up the way would take pity on Dublin.”
“Why?” Quincy shrugged. “I’m not likely to be going anywhere. I leave the walkabouts to Partridge.”
“Partridge? An odd name. What part of the country did he say he came from?”
“He didn’t. And it’s no odder than Quincy,” he retorted. “Why is it you’re really here? Not the horse yonder.”
“Does it matter?”
“It does. Because every one of us in these cottages is afraid of something. And Partridge was always afraid of strangers.”
“What frightens you?” Rutledge asked, curious.
“My dreams,” Quincy retorted, and went back inside his cottage.
Later in the day, Rutledge drove to London. His mood was mixed, frustration warring with duty.
Hamish said, “Have ye no’ thought? Ye’re a red herring.”
Rutledge was beginning to believe that might be true.
He found Chief Superintendent Bowles in his office, finishing a report.
Bowles looked up as he entered, frowned, and said, “What brings you back so soon?”
“There’s nothing to be gained by staying where I was. I was beginning to arouse suspicion. And if I’m not mistaken, there’s a watcher there already. Partridge’s motor is in the shed, his bicycle as well. He’s not in the house ill or dead. And with lorries passing through at all hours of the day and night, he has ample opportunity to disappear wherever he pleases. Unless I’m given more resources, there’s nothing more to be done.”
“They won’t like it at the War Office.” Bowles’s voice was thoughtful. “But I’ll tell them, all the same.”
That same morning, as Rutledge was questioning Mrs. Smith about the man he’d heard from his window, Alice Crowell sat down to write a letter to her father.
He hadn’t approved of her husband’s declining to fight in the war, but felt that Albert Crowell’s duty driving an ambulance had in some measure made up for it. It took considerable courage to pull men out of shell holes under fire and dress the wounds of men lying helpless in No Man’s Land. The Germans had no compunction about shooting ambulance men, and Crowell had distinguished himself several times, even shooting at a diving plane with a borrowed rifle and hitting it before it could fire on his vehicle.
And so she began her letter with “Dearest Papa…”
She went on to tell him that her husband was being persecuted by the police inspector in Elthorpe, and unfairly so since he had had nothing to do with the dead man in the Fountains Abbey ruins.
But she wisely omitted any reference to the book found at the man’s feet.
Ending the letter with a plea for her father’s help, she added, “What disturbs me is that the intense scrutiny he’s given Albert may have its roots in Inspector Madsen’s previous relationship with me, and I daren’t remind him of that for fear it will only make matters worse.”
She sealed the letter, posted it, and told no one.
Her father, colonel of an East Anglian regiment, went directly to London and presented the letter to a friend at the War Office. He didn’t know the Chief Constable of Yorkshire well enough to approach him, but he rather thought that Martin Deloran might.
The matter might have languished in limbo but for the fact that Colonel Ingle and the man he met with had both been at Sandhurst. He had come prepared to argue. It wasn’t necessary.
For one sentence in the letter seemed to leap off the page, startling Deloran.
…the poor man was wearing a respirator, which causes the police to think his death might have something to do with the war, but if Albert couldn’t shoot the Hun, how could he kill a man he swears he has never seen before?
The man behind the desk fingered the sheet of paper for a moment, and then, choosing his words with care, said, “Interesting story. Yes, well. Consider it done. But I’d rather you didn’t tell your daughter that you’ve brought the letter to me. Better to let her believe help arrived before you could act in the matter. Sensibilities of the local police, and all that. This needs to be sorted quietly—if she’s to continue living in Yorkshire, that is. And I know just the man to look into matters.”
Colonel Ingle was no fool.
“Thanks very much, Martin.” He waited to see if more information might be forthcoming. “I’ll be on my way then.”
“Anything for an old friend,” Deloran assured him.
But Colonel Ingle knew that friendship had nothing to do with Martin Deloran taking on this matter with such speed. He was jumping in for reasons of his own.
Deloran got to his feet. “What do you say to a spot of lunch, while you’re in London?”
Sometime later, Rutledge was summoned to Bowles’s office, and he found his superintendent in a dark mood.
“Bloody army, they think we have nothing better to do than run their errands for them. You’re wanted in Yorkshire now. I asked if it was the same business, and they declined to tell me. Bloody Cook’s Tour, if you want my view of the matter. Give me what’s on your desk, and I’ll see that it’s dealt with.”
“What is it in Yorkshire that I’m supposed to be investigating?”
“There’s a dead man found in Fountains Abbey, of all places. The police are harassing a local schoolmaster over it. You’re to deal with it. The Chief Constable has requested you by name. But he let it be known the request came from higher-ups.”
“Little enough to go on—a dead man in an abbey.”
Bowles considered him. “Getting a reputation for yourself, are you?”
Rutledge laughed without humor. “My sergeant used to tell me that once the army gets you in its clutches, you’re never free again.”
“That’s as may be,” Bowles answered. “But see that you do better with this matter than you did in Berkshire. It was tricky, telling the War Office you’d failed to find their precious lost sheep.”
Walking out of the building, Rutledge found himself already tying the two cases together. He wasn’t sure why, except that each request had come from the army, and if Gaylord Partridge was still missing, someone was scouring the countryside for bodies.
6
It was a long drive to Yorkshire, and Rutledge broke the journey in Lincoln, staying in the shadow of the great cathedral there. After a late dinner at the hotel, he walked through the gate into the precincts to view the magnificent west front. It was quiet, shadows giving the carvings depth and reality, and he stayed for some time, letting the peace wash over him.
It was rare that he had time to dwell on something other than murder. Just as in the war, death pursued him as a policeman as well. It was his chosen profession, but he found himself thinking that the men who had built such splendor had left a greater legacy than most. Names long since forgotten, they lived on in what their hands had wrought. Not guns or tanks or deadly gas, but in stone, defining the human spirit’s capacity to create rather than destroy.
Hamish, good Covenanter that he was, preferred unadorned simplicity.
Rutledge said to him, his voice echoing against the towering west front, “Ah, but is man better off without something to stir him and lift him and carry him through the darkness?”
Hamish responded, the deep Scots voice trapped in the narrow space between Rutledge and the massive gate, “It didna’ serve you well in the trenches, no more than plainness served me. Where was your God or mine then?”