“In a way,” Rutledge answered him. Dublin got up from a pillow by the fire and stretched before eyeing Rutledge with suspicion. “I see you’re still feeding Partridge’s cat.”
“She doesn’t bother me, nor I her.”
Rutledge opened the folder. “Is this Partridge?”
Quincy looked at the sketch. “Yes. Yes, it is. You’ve found him then. If that’s what you came for before.”
“We think we might have, yes. He’s dead. His body was lying in an old ruin, left for the caretaker to stumble over. There’s a possibility that he was murdered.”
“Good God!” He seemed genuinely shocked.
“Did he have enemies, that you knew of? I gather you knew him better than most.”
“First of all, I’d like to know why you’re here asking so many questions,” Quincy said, drawing back and letting Rutledge close the folder.
“I’m with the police, you see. Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard.”
“So your interest in the White Horse was all a ruse.”
“No, I am interested in it. I always have been. But in other things as well.”
“I see. This is now an official inquiry. My neighbors won’t care for that, I can tell you!”
“Why not?”
“You know very well why not. We all have something to hide. Perhaps not murder, but something that to us is just as powerful.”
Lepers all, indeed. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me what it is you must hide.”
Quincy laughed. “I didn’t kill Partridge. That’s what I can tell you. The rest is none of your business.”
“Besides the care of the cat, what did you talk to Partridge about?”
“My birds, if you must know. Oh, you’ve seen them in the other room. I’m no fool. But he was curious about them, and wanted to know where they had come from.”
“I’d like to see them.”
“Oh, yes?” He crossed to the inner door and flung it open.
Rutledge stood there, stunned.
Hamish, in the back of his mind, was speechless.
Rutledge had never seen such an array of birds—all of them dead, yet perched on twigs or railings or stones, like so many toys that with a turn of the key would dance and twitter and sing, to please a child.
Every shape and size, blazing with color and their eyes sparkling like shoe buttons in the light from the windows, they seemed to watch Rutledge.
“I have every right to them, you know. I brought them back to England under a license.”
“Were they alive then?”
“No, of course not. I spent years collecting them. I think I was slightly mad at the time, certainly I wasn’t fully in my right mind. It had become an obsession, you see. To find them and capture them and mount them. It gave me something to do, a reason for living. That’s a keel-billed toucan over there. Next to him is a fiery-billed trogon. You should see them flying about the trees. And that’s a rufous motmot. The chestnut one just there, with yellow in his tail, is a Montezuma oropendola. The little green one is a red-headed barbet. That’s a resplendent quetzal, with the long tail, and the bigger blue one is a white-throated magpie-jay. The Jabiru stork is just behind it. And the very small ones are hummingbirds. Marvelous little creatures. My favorite is the little snowcap, the purple one with the white head. We don’t have them in this hemisphere. A shame. You see them dart about flowers like tiny fairies, wings beating so quickly you glimpse only a blur, and when the sun catches them, they’re like tiny jewels. I’m told that the Inca kings wore cloaks made from their feathers.”
“Where do they come from? South America, I should think.”
“Most of these are from Central America. The one with what looks like a worm in his beak is a three-wattled bellbird. Over there is the crimson-collared tanager. He was one of my first successes. The odd one with the large eyes isn’t an owl, it’s the common potoo.” He seemed to enjoy naming his prizes. Dublin had slipped in behind the two men and was staring at the array of color. Indeed, it reminded Rutledge himself of a feathered rainbow.
Hamish said, “My granny would say he’s bewitched.”
“What took you there? An interest in these birds?”
“Good God, no. I hardly knew one species from another. I went there to hire myself out as an engineer on the construction of the Panama Canal. The first try, the one that didn’t succeed. In the end most of us came down with malaria or yellow fever, and we hardly knew what we were about.”
“But you stayed.”
“I stayed because there was nowhere else to go. I trekked through jungle looking for ruins and gold. I climbed volcanoes and dragged myself through caves. I reasoned that the Spanish couldn’t have found it all. But they must have done. All the gold I saw was on the high altars of churches, great mountains of it, ceiling to floor. Nothing like it in England. I just stood and stared at the first one I came across. I worked for a time translating invoices and bills of lading for a coffee plantation outside a place called Antigua, then moved on to manage a banana company’s plantation on the Caribbean coast. It wasn’t a life I’d recommend.”
Rutledge said as Quincy reached out to smooth the wing of one of his specimens, “With that background, you must have been in demand.”
“Oh, it wasn’t as exciting as it may sound,” he went on dryly. “Sometimes I guided people coming out to look at land. I learned to use a foot loom in a village on the side of a volcanic lake. Atitlán, it was. Whatever came to hand. By that time I was drunk most of the day and all of the night, and finally I went to see a shaman, to find a way to sober up. Saint Maximón, they called him. Only it wasn’t a man, it was a lump of wood draped in shawls and wearing a black hat. They’d told me he was wise. I brought cigars and wine and a watch I’d stolen, as gifts. The room was dark, filled with incense and smoke, and I thought I’d suffocate before my turn came. The man who interpreted for him—it—told me that my salvation was in the colors of the rainbow. I thought him as mad as I was.”
Satisfied that all was well with the bird, he added, “Then I remembered the birds, and the more I thought about them, the more the obsession grew. I went back into the jungle for them, and up and down the coast, and climbed into rain forests and sailed down rivers, looking for them.”
“What did you intend to do with them? Bring them back to a museum?”
Quincy laughed. “Hardly that. No, I tell you it was an obsession. I just wanted them. And then one day I realized that they were all dead. Not flying about, not mating, not bringing up their young or foraging for food. They were dead. And I never touched another drop of whisky. I was stone-cold sober, and I had this enormous collection of dead things in my house, and I realized I wanted to go home. I sold most of them, kept these to remind me, and came back to England against all the odds.”
“And so the wise man’s prediction that your salvation lay in a rainbow was right. After a fashion.”
“I don’t know if it was his prediction or my liver. But I kept these to remember where I’d come from. And I’ve never killed anything since.”
It was a remarkable story. How much of it had actually happened?
“Did you know Partridge before you came here to live?”
“Never clapped eyes on him.”
It rang true, but Rutledge wasn’t sure whether he believed Quincy or not. He thought, he’s very likely a remittance man. Someone the family pays well to stay out of the country, where his behavior won’t embarrass them. It would behoove him to lie if it meant trouble for the family.
And therefore the question might be, what had Quincy done before he left England that had to be hushed up?
But Rutledge said nothing of this, listening as Quincy rattled off the names of his precious birds, interspersing that with the story of his years in Central America.