20
As soon as it was first light, Quincy had been busy, as he told Rutledge with grim satisfaction. He had gone to Mrs. Cathcart’s cottage and called through the door, “There’s no harm done, no one killed. You’re safe for what’s left of the night.”
Inside he had heard her crying, but he said bracingly, “You’ll make yourself ill in there. Go to bed, sleep while you can. There’s nothing to worry about in the light of day.”
It was two hours later that he’d sent Slater for Hill and Rutledge.
“I’d be dead if it weren’t for the cat. She smelled the smoke and was howling frantically to get out. And when I came down, I could hear whoever it was trying to stuff more rags against the door.”
“Do you think you hit him?”
“I don’t know, and could care even less. But I want to go on record that out the back window I saw a shape running toward the shadows of Singleton’s cottage. He may be dead as well. Or he may have tried to kill me. And I’ll swear to that in any fashion you like. I had a good look, it wasn’t my eyes playing tricks.”
“No feeling for size, shape?”
“None. But if Brady killed Willingham and then himself, who tried to burn me out, I ask you.”
He was incensed about his door, and demanded that a constable take him directly into Uffington to find lumber that would cover the damage.
“That door is going to be bolted again by nightfall, or you’ll be assigning a constable to sit on my threshold all night.”
Hill said to Rutledge as Quincy and the constable left, “What do you think?”
“It could well be true.” But then Quincy could have set the fire himself and then fired his shotgun through the panels of the door. And both policemen knew it.
Another constable came to report that Singleton was in his cottage and safe. “I had to knock three or four times,” he added. “He was asleep.”
“We’ll attend to him later. See if he heard anything. But for now, Rutledge, I’ve cleared paperwork for the search of Partridge’s cottage. If you’re ready? We might as well get on with it.”
They crossed the lane to the cottage and went in.
Nothing had changed since Rutledge had been there alone. But this time he kept an eye open for the papers that Miss Chandler had typed, while Hill was poking about looking for a body.
Neither of them had any success.
“Ye’ve been here before,” Hamish reminded Rutledge. “And you found nothing then.”
“I didn’t know about the papers.”
“Aye, that’s true. But if ye’d seen them, ye’d ha’ taken note. They werena’ here.”
Hill sat down by the desk and said with some heat, “I’d have felt better if he’d been here, dead. Nothing against Mr. Partridge, but it would have solved my problem for me. Now that note of Brady’s looks damned suspicious.”
Rutledge debated telling him about the body in Yorkshire, but held off. Hamish, looking ahead, told him in no uncertain terms that it was unwise.
All the same, he decided to wait until he was sure how the crimes were related.
“I don’t know that Partridge is connected to this business. On the other hand, my presence here might have set off something we haven’t got to the bottom of yet. The killings began after I identified myself as a policeman. Not before.”
“Nonsense. A Scotland Yard inspector doesn’t go about triggering murders. I haven’t time for foolishness.” He paused. “The doctor tells me that Brady could have killed himself, right enough. The way the old Romans used to fall on their swords. The chair was directly behind him, and the force of the blow drove him into it. Why would Quincy want to put that in doubt?”
Hill got up from the desk and moved restlessly about the sitting room. Rutledge remembered the crumpled beginning of a letter in the basket by the desk and went to look at it again.
But it wasn’t there now. Of small importance—yet it told him that someone else had been through the house since he had been here.
Rutledge said, “I spoke to Quincy for an hour, more or less, last night. Coincidence? Or fear?”
They moved on to the shed where the motorcar was kept and Hill did a cursory search of the vehicle. But Rutledge, with a little better light now, looked at the tires and the boot, then thoroughly inspected the interior.
It gave up no more secrets to him than it had to Inspector Hill, but as he ran his hand over the rear seat, something was brushed to the floor of the motorcar. It was so small he had trouble finding where it had got to, but after a moment, his fingers finally retrieved it.
The tab from a 1917 small box respirator.
He could see, vividly, the slit in the mask that Parkinson had been wearing when he was found in the cloisters of Fountains Abbey. Just where this tab should have been.
It had caught on something and torn off.
Rutledge straightened up. Parkinson had been in this motorcar, along with the mask. And no one noticed the tab was missing as it was slipped over a dead man’s face.
He would have given any odds that Parkinson had traveled to his death in this motorcar, and someone had seen to it that it was quietly returned to the shed where it belonged, when the journey was finished. In some ways, a motorcar was harder to hide than a body. It could be traced. Better to leave the impression that Parkinson had set out without it.
And that confirmed that Parkinson’s death was deliberate, carefully planned and executed.
Leaving Hill to cope with his own case, Rutledge drove to Wiltshire, to the house called Pockets where Rebecca Parkinson lived.
She was there, and he had to bang on the door for nearly ten minutes before she finally opened it to him.
Something in his face must have alerted her, for the first words out of her mouth were, “I’ve told you. I’ve had nothing to do with my father for the past two years or more. It’s useless, coming here. He put his work before his family, and now his family no longer cares. His sacrifice was in vain. The army didn’t want him either.”
“How do you know that?”
“For weeks before my mother died, he was obsessed, secretive, doing much of his work at night, making endless calculations. He hardly ate or slept. It was as if he were trying to convince himself of something—as if he’d lost his way but couldn’t bring himself to admit it. In any other man I’d have said he was on the verge of a breakdown. In his case, I think it was pride crashing. He wasn’t as clever as he thought he was, and he was about to be found out.”
“That’s a rather harsh judgment.”
“Is it? He resigned, didn’t he? If he’d made a brilliant success of his work, do you think he’d have done that? Even in contrition over my mother’s death? And the man in charge of the laboratory let him go. They’d have offered him a leave of absence, if he was so indispensable to them. The war wasn’t over in the spring of 1918, and we weren’t certain of winning.”
“You don’t know what it was he was working on?”
“I wasn’t interested in his work. It had brought nothing but grief to us, and I hated it as much as I came to hate him. It took me a long time to reach indifference. But I have now.”
He thought she hadn’t. She was still passionate about her father and anything to do with him. The hate showed in her anger at the man.
Rutledge stood there, letting her feel the silence, willing her to betray herself.
As if to fill it before she couldn’t stand it any longer, she said, “When my mother died, I hated him so much all I could think of was making him feel pain in a way he couldn’t ignore. If he’d still been using his laboratory, I’d have burned it to the ground, and wouldn’t have cared if he was there inside. When she asked that her ashes be scattered in the gardens she loved so much, I strewed them myself. I was half mad too, I think. I wanted to hurt him and I wound up hurting myself. Do you know what someone’s ashes feel like? Do you know how they blow on the wind, and sometimes into your face or cling to your fingers in spite of everything? A gray powder, that was all that was left of my mother. And I diminished it by letting it soak into the damp ground, so that the house was uninhabitable. And now I’m afraid to go there because I’m afraid I’ll see her ghost. I think, at the end, he did see her. That’s why he couldn’t stay there.”