“I’m surprised the London papers saw anything newsworthy in the story.”
She sighed. “It’s because of what he did in the war, of course. And here at the bottom of the garden as well, with that workshop of his. Mrs. Parkinson told me herself she was heartsick over it.”
Rutledge tried another tack. “I’m not sure I understand. London didn’t inform me what Parkinson had done in the war.”
“He worked at Porton Down, he was one of the scientists there. Gassed the Kaiser’s men in return for our boys. Got our own back, didn’t he? Mrs. Parkinson was squeamish, but not I.”
He was startled by her vehemence, even as his mind registered Porton Down.
It was a military facility on the eastern border of Wiltshire, across the county from here. A place where absolute secrecy was the order of the day.
And for the first time Rutledge understood why Martin Deloran was interested in the whereabouts of one Gerald Parkinson. The army didn’t care to lose track of someone like that, someone whose knowledge was more valuable than his person. Eccentricity was one thing, disliked but oftentimes tolerated. Even madness could be overlooked. Parkinson, however, had walked away from a comfortable family home, lived elsewhere under a different name, and disappeared with unsettling regularity. The War Office could do very little about it, but that didn’t mean they didn’t watch his every move.
Very likely Deloran had put the change in Parkinson down to excessive grief after his wife’s death—give him time and he’d recover, be himself again. The war’s nearly over, we can afford to be patient…But two years had passed, and Parkinson still went his own way. And Deloran was still watching him.
Small wonder Deloran jumped at the chance to bury Parkinson under a pauper’s stone in rural Yorkshire! What sort of secrets had safely died with him?
“Guilt, ye said,” Hamish reminded him, and Rutledge remembered.
That would explain Parkinson’s choice to live in the Tomlin Cottages.
It still wouldn’t explain where he’d died.
“He worked on the development of poison gases?” Rutledge asked to clarify what Parkinson had done for a living. It would explain too the choice of reading material he had taken with him to the cottage.
“Well, of course he did,” she said with pride. “Where else, and him fascinated by chemistry ever since he was a young man at Cambridge? Mrs. Parkinson was at her wits’ end with fear for the children.”
“Children?”
“Indeed, the light of her life, they was. I daresay Mr. Parkinson found them a nuisance when he had his laboratory at the bottom of the garden. Always looking in the windows, trying to see what he was up to. It was when he killed the cows by accident that Mrs. Parkinson put her foot down.” She rested her back against the doorframe, a tired woman with no one to talk with as she worked. “But that caught the army’s attention, didn’t it? So he took himself off to a new laboratory there. Posh, he said it was, everything to hand. ‘Martha, they value me. They know I’m right about this new direction. Germany hasn’t got there yet. But we shall, wait and see. You’ll be reading about it in the newspapers, because it’s likely to stop the war and the dying.’ My nephew, the one gassed at Ypres, my sister’s only boy, was going to be avenged, he said. Germany was the first to use the poisonous gases, but we’d be the last. We’ll show ’em, he said, wait and see.”
“You’ve worked for the family for some time, have you?”
“I was maid to Mr. Parkinson’s mother, and came here as housekeeper to Partridge Fields when he bought the place, Mrs. Miggs having just died.”
“And Mrs. Parkinson didn’t care for the work he was doing.”
“She worried that they were testing these gases on the animals. She couldn’t bear to think about it. She saw my nephew when he was sent home, lungs burned right out. He didn’t last long and died hard. I told her the Hun had brought it all on themselves, whatever Mr. Parkinson devised, but it didn’t matter. She stopped sleeping well, wandering about the house at all hours. Like her own ghost. Small wonder she forgot and left the gas on. She couldn’t even kill a spider that crept in at the window, she was that troubled about hurting anything. Which is why I refuse to believe she killed herself. But Mr. Parkinson thought she’d done it out of spite, using the gas. I’m told it’s as peaceful a way as any to go, falling asleep and not waking up.”
The housekeeper turned and looked over her shoulder as if a ghost could give her the answer to her question. But it was the kitchen floors that concerned her, and she said, “It’s dry in there, must be by now. And I’ve a good bit more to do before I close up for the day.”
“And you’re sure you have no way of knowing where Mr. Parkinson went?”
“His daughter Becky might know. But I doubt it. He left me instructions not to say anything, and I never have. It’s not my place to decide such things.”
“Where will I find Miss Parkinson?”
“No, I won’t tell you. She’ll know who did, and I’ll hear about it soon enough. No one stays in the house of a night anymore. Myself, I’m away before dark, I can tell you that. But she comes from time to time to tend the gardens.”
And sometimes to knock at her father’s door?
“You spoke of children—” Rutledge began, but the housekeeper shook her head firmly and disappeared inside without answering him, shutting the kitchen door in Rutledge’s face.
He had no choice but to move on, rounding the house and coming again to the drive. He could almost feel the housekeeper watching him from the windows, making certain he was not sneaking about, as she would call it, but leaving the premises.
As he closed the gate behind him, he thought, This house has seen tragedy…
Rutledge found a small pub for his noon meal, and sat there over his pudding, thinking about Parkinson and the cottage in Berkshire. So much made sense now. The fact that the cottage had no touches of personal warmth—it was not Parkinson’s home, this house in Wiltshire was. And his disappearances.
Hamish said, “To his wife’s grave? You ken, ye thought of that before.”
“Deloran probably had the churchyard watched for all we know. And going there would have bolstered Deloran’s theory that Parkinson was still grieving. Wherever Parkinson went, Deloran couldn’t find him, and that was the trouble.”
Hamish said, “It’s verra’ likely that he went away to torment Deloran.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me that he was just being bloody-minded, rebelling against being watched, showing the War Office that he was clever enough to outfox them all. A cat-and-mouse game, to worry Deloran.”
Rutledge considered another possibility—that when Parkinson couldn’t stand his own company any longer, when the walls of the cottage were closing in, he might well have needed to be around people. A crowded train station, a Wednesday market, a theater. Somewhere safe to remind himself he wasn’t going mad.
It was dark when he reached The Smith’s Arms. Rutledge left the motorcar in the yard, then walked down to Wayland’s Smithy. It was a far better place to leave an unwanted body than an abbey cloister in Yorkshire.
Who had decided that it was time Parkinson should die? That’s what it all came down to. Not where the body was left, but who had chosen to end one man’s life now. It was useless to speculate, but who had become the bedrock of the case.
The heavy stone slabs that had created this ancient tomb caught his attention, and he thought about the numbers of men it would have taken to build this place for a dead chieftain or priest.
We spend our energies in different ways, he thought, standing there. How many aeroplanes and tanks and artillery caissons had it taken to end the Great War? Not to count the rifles and helmets, respirators and machine guns, the number of boots, the tunics and greatcoats and the tins in which we had brewed our tea or the casings of the shells fired. A nation’s fortune surely, greater than any man possessed in the centuries since this tomb was new and raw and the dead shut into it was still honored by those who had carried him here.