He finished his tea and prepared to go. “I’m off.”
“Ever see anything strange here at the White Horse? On nights you or your mates were driving through?”
Will grinned. “Like seeing it come down to be shod?”
“No, more human agency than spectral.”
He shook his head. “It’s quiet through here, which is why some of us choose this way. Better time, with the roads so empty.” He walked to the door, then paused. “I was told not long ago that a fair woman in a motorcar was stopped at the side of the road, and she was crying. Close by Wayland’s Smithy. The driver drew up alongside her motorcar and asked if there was aught wrong. And she said no, she was fine. He drove on, but he told me later he’d seen that motorcar before, and it wasn’t a woman driving then.”
“Where had he seen it?”
“Here. Outside the inn.”
“How long ago did this happen?”
The driver shrugged. “A fortnight? More or less.”
“Interesting story.”
“I think it must be true. He’s not the sort given to lying. He said she didn’t look like a whore. Who knows? Since the war, they’re bolder, aren’t they? Not enough men to go around, like.”
And he was gone, his lorry roaring into life and rolling down the road, spray from the tires throwing up mud and muck like a brown bow wave.
Rutledge watched him out of sight.
Now he had a second report of a fair-haired woman in the vicinity of the Tomlin Cottages. Difficult to connect this one with the woman who had knocked at Parkinson’s door. Still—it could mean that she’d come back to try again and encountered him along the road, where no one else saw the meeting. And the interview hadn’t gone well.
Any query through Sergeant Gibson at the Yard about Parkinson’s family would surely jangle tins on the wires that directly or indirectly reached Deloran. And then Deloran would have Rutledge back in London and on the carpet.
It was one thing to pursue a man who didn’t exist. Quite another to look into the past of one who not only existed but was also safely dead.
What, then, were his choices?
Hamish said, “Return to London.”
That made sense. He hadn’t been able to contact Sergeant Gibson to see what had turned up about Henry Shoreham. And there was still the nameless victim on Inspector Madsen’s hands to be officially identified. Not to mention the mystery of why Partridge or Parkinson had died in Yorkshire. The best place to draw these threads together was in London.
Hamish said, “A man could bribe a lorry driver to take away a body. It wouldna’ be the first time sich a thing was done.”
“If Partridge had been found by the road, I’d agree. But what lorry driver would risk carrying a dead man deep into Fountains Abbey’s ruins, and setting him down by a cloister wall?”
“Ye ken, it would depend on how much the man was offered to take sich a risk.”
And if that was the case, the driver had long since vanished into a new life.
“There has to be some trace. Somewhere.”
He hadn’t been aware he’d spoken aloud. Mrs. Smith stuck her head around the door and said, “More toast, sir?”
“Thanks, no. I’ll be leaving in two hours. But first there’s something I must do.”
“I’ll have the accounting ready for you when you come back.”
“Thank you.” He folded his serviette and set it beside his plate. Where to begin? That was always the policeman’s dilemma. It could spoil chances as well as open doors.
He went up to his room, packed his valise, and then left it on the bed.
The rain was heavier now, and he could feel it across his shoulders, through the wool of his coat. He thought of the old cliché about April showers. Last April he had hardly known who he was or where he was. Had he come this far in only a year? If it had rained at all last April, he couldn’t remember it. At the clinic the days ran into one another, and the nights were torments.
The cries of other disturbed patients in the darkness, nothing to distract his churning mind, no routine to force him to shut down his memories, nothing between him and a fear so great he couldn’t close his eyes. That was before he learned that Hamish couldn’t follow him into sleep. And so he had fought sleep, he had paced the floor of his room until his feet were numb and his legs ached, and still he walked. Anything to stave off sleep. He’d even pinched his arms until they bled, to keep himself awake. And then, at dawn, he would fall into a stupor and sit in his chair staring at the wall, a sleep of sorts, but never deep enough to dream.
Night after night. And in the rooms around his, other men suffered as well, banging on their walls, crying out for something to stop the anguish—a true madhouse of fear that was worse than anything found in an asylum.
The doctors had had to keep him drugged to let him sleep, and if he could have found the powders the sisters brought him, he would have swallowed them all, to end it. Not a bad way to die, a way where dreams couldn’t follow him.
He cranked the motorcar and got in, sitting there shaking. It had nothing to do with the rain.
Hamish said roughly, “Aye, that was the heart of it. You wanted to die. I wanted to live. And we neither of us got our wish.”
“And so we’re damned, both of us, because God got it wrong. I wish you had lived and I had died. I would have come to haunt you, and when you married your Fiona, I would have been the skeleton at the feast.”
“No,” Hamish said, his voice cold. “I would ha’ forgotten you, and left you rotting in France.”
12
Rutledge wasn’t sure how he had driven to the Tomlin Cottages. When his mind cleared, he was there, the motor still ticking over quietly and the White Horse washed clean in the rain.
He got out and walked to one cottage he hadn’t called on yet. He knocked on the door and waited.
It was opened finally by a broad-shouldered man whose prematurely white hair was brushed back from a young face. It was hard to judge his age, but when he spoke, it was clear that he was of a class that possessed Victorian manners.
“Good morning. Are you lost?”
Rutledge introduced himself. “I’d like to ask you a few questions,” he went on. “Mainly about one of your neighbors, Mr. Partridge.”
“Silly name,” the man said. “I should think he dreamed it up. We’re not a friendly community, you see. I’ve often wondered how many of us use the name we were born with. Come in out of the rain, man.”
He stepped aside and allowed Rutledge to enter the main room of the cottage. It was a parlor, with a Georgian desk in one corner and a tall shelf of books along the inner wall.
“Singleton is the name,” he continued. “Tell me why you’ve been looking for Partridge.”
“You know he was away, then?” Rutledge asked, taking the chair offered him. “His friends have been anxious about him.”
“Were they indeed? I shouldn’t have thought he had many friends. No one ever comes to call.” He smiled, the austerity of his face relaxing. “I can see the horse from my desk, and his cottage as well. We have very little to occupy us, you see, and while none of us is anxious to have his own business bruited about, we are curious about our neighbors to the point of nosiness.”
“There was, I understand, a young woman who came to his door.”
“Yes, I remember. But she wasn’t admitted, and I found myself thinking that she had stopped to ask directions. She never came again, you see.”
It was a possibility that Rutledge hadn’t considered.