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."
"What will happen to the house?"
"I don't know. I can't sell it-not after what I did. I can't live there. I can't let it go to wrack and ruin. I can't have brambles and weeds on my mother's grave. He ruined all our lives, and I don't really care what's become of him."
She turned her back to him, and he heard the catch in her voice when she added, "There's nothing I want in that wretched cottage where he went to live. As far as I'm concerned, you can burn it to the ground."
And then she was inside, on the point of shutting her door.
He said, "The motorcar as well?"
Her voice was weary when she finally answered. "Let them sell it. I have no need for it."
"Miss Parkinson. I shall have to speak to your sister. There's no way around it."
"Did she tell you where she lived? At Road's End, a house not very different from mine. It's not far from Porton Down. Ironic, isn't it? A friend offered it to her for a small rent, and she was upset with me, about the ashes. I can't blame her for not wanting to live with me." Rebecca Parkinson laughed harshly. "That house at Partridge Fields is worth a great deal of money. But the two of us have almost nothing to our names. A small inheritance from Mother, that's it. And I wouldn't touch my father's money if he offered it. If I thought it would solve anything I'd shoot myself. But it won't. Don't come back here again."
And she was gone.
He stood there for a moment longer, staring at the closed door. If one of the sisters killed Gerald Parkinson, which was it?
He thought that Rebecca had the stronger sense of abandonment and might in a fit of anger try to assuage it by killing her father. But surely in the heat of the moment, not two years later. Unless there was something he didn't know, some factor in their relationship that went so deep it had taken time to face. When she had, the only solution might have been murder.
And yet, Sarah, the weaker of the two, might have found she couldn't live with her own pain and grief any longer and made the choice between killing herself, as her mother had done, or killing her father.
Rutledge turned and went back to the motorcar, driving on to the house at Partridge Fields.
He walked through the grounds to the small garden with the horse fountain. It was dappled in shade, this early, a mysterious and inviting place to sit.
But he'd come not to sit but to look at the grass that surrounded the fountain, squatting to see if there was any sign that someone had stood here two nights ago. The grass was still dew-wet, and it was difficult to judge. No one had trampled the green blades, no one had left a tidy footprint in the moist soil of the shrubbery beds. Still, he'd have given odds that walking here in the dark would lead to a misstep at some point.
It took patience and careful, almost inch-by-inch inspection, but he found something that might have been the half print of a heel just where an edge of the grass walk met the soil.
Hamish said disparagingly, "A bird scratching. A beetle trying to right itself. An owl after a mouse."
Rutledge got to his feet. "Possibly. But why haven't they scratched over here-or there?"
"It's no' solid proof."
"No."
He left the shrubbery and stood where he could see the windows of the master bedroom above the garden.
Here, at this house-in that room, for all he knew-lay the heart of a family's collapse.
It was as if each of the Parkinsons gave more energy to hurting than to healing.
For one thing, why had Mrs. Parkinson wanted her ashes buried here, if she'd been wretched at Partridge Fields? The answer to that was, she intended them to be a constant reminder to her husband of everything she'd suffered.
He had no idea what she'd had in mind-an urn set on a marble square by the horse fountain, or ashes scattered in the central circle of the French-style beds where the roses grew. It had been Rebecca's decision in the first anguished days after finding her mother dead to spread them throughout the gardens.
Neither mother nor daughter, set on their acts of revenge, had considered how difficult it might ultimately be for Sarah or Rebecca to live here. Punishing Gerald Parkinson was paramount, shutting out every other consideration, and Rebecca was left to reap the whirlwind she had sown.
Where had all this passionate need to hurt started?
There was Parkinson's obsession with his work, putting it before his family. And his wife's morbid fascination with the destructive nature of what he did. These must have led to violent arguments, to turn her thoughts to suicide. Or had she been unstable most of her married life?
In that case, why hadn't her daughters spared a moment's sympathy for what their father must have had to endure?
There must have been something else, to send a sensitive mind into a downward spiral of depression and finally despair.
Had Parkinson lashed out physically, when he'd felt his back was to the wall? Striking his wife would have erased any sympathy Rebecca and her sister might have felt.
Then why hadn't Rebecca mentioned it in defense of her anger? Or Sarah dwell on that as she remembered a kinder father?
Rutledge thought, It's time to ask Sarah what she remembers about her parents' relationship, not just her own with her father.
But he spared five minutes to walk to the kitchen garden and knock at the door. No one came to open it, and he finally gave it up and went back to his motorcar.
He had some difficulty finding the small house where Sarah Parkinson lived. It stood at the end of a country lane and was no larger than Pockets and far more isolated.
Over a slight rise, he could just see the roof of a barn and tall chimneys.
Why couldn't the sisters live together? It would have made sense. Especially if money was a problem. Rebecca was protective of Sarah, but there wasn't the closeness one might expect under the circumstances of their mother's death and their father's desertion. Had the ashes been the only problem?
Sarah Parkinson was surprised to see him. She had come to the door at the sound of the motorcar and now stood on the threshold trying to decide whether to tell him to go away or invite him in.
"Good morning," Rutledge began. "I've come to see if you're all right."
"Don't worry, crying over the past won't lead me to do anything rash."
"I expect not. Still. May I come in? I'd like to talk to you."
He could watch the internal debate as she frowned, then said, "I don't expect I have much choice about it."
"We can stand here, if you'd rather."
"No. Come in. But I won't take your hat. You won't be staying long."
Rutledge smiled. "I want to ask you about your parents. If I come in, are you prepared to answer my questions? Otherwise this will be a waste of time for both of us."
She was disconcerted by his bluntness. "If I don't like the questions, I'll tell you."
"Fair enough."
The house was old and had seen hard use. But Sarah Parkinson had tried to make it comfortable and pretty, adding paint to the walls and curtains to the bare windows. A fine French carpet lay on the floor, and some furnishings were a little out of date, as if she'd scavenged them from her parents' attics. They were far better quality than the walls that enclosed them.
"Yes, I've come down in the world," she said, following his gaze. "I only have this house through the courtesy of a friend. It was the best she or I could do."
"I can understand that you don't want to live at Partridge Fields again. But what will you do with it?"
"It's the tomb of my mother. When Becky and I are gone, it can be torn down by people who don't know why we deserted it. Better that way."
"The housekeeper still comes to see to it. Who pays her to clean and sweep?"
"My father, I expect. I can't afford to keep her there."
"May I ask why you and your sister don't choose to live together? It would make sense."
"I think we both prefer the silence. If we were together, we'd talk too much about the past. We wouldn't be able to help it."
"Whose motorcar do you drive? Your own? Or Rebecca's?"
"It belongs to a friend of hers who went to France and came back without his legs. He didn't want to look at it any more, and told her she could drive it."
"But you borrow it from time to time?"
"When I can." She looked away from him, her gaze following a bee at the window. "It's a long walk for both of us to go anywhere. We trade days. It's not the life I'd have chosen."
"You're young. You'll marry in time and the past will seem less vivid."
"After what I've seen of marriage," she retorted, "I want no part of it. It leaves you terribly vulnerable. And in the end you hate each other. My father killed my mother as surely as if he'd held her head under the gas and made her breathe it in. I've never understood why he couldn't love her enough to stop what he was doing. She was so softhearted she couldn't bear to see a bird suffer. He knew that, but it didn't matter. He turned his back on her feelings and did what he wanted to do anyway, and in the end she died. When he saw what he had done, it was too late."
"Was it always that way? You remember your father being kind to you, but was he kind to your mother as well? When you were five, for instance, did you think they were happy?"
"I thought they were. More fool I. It must have been a pretense, for our sakes. I realize that now."
"They couldn't have pretended so perfectly that you didn't see the strain of their trying. Children are very perceptive. Think about when you were six-twelve. Think about birthday parties and holidays and long winter evenings together." He tried to suggest images that she could explore, and watched her face closely as she frowned, sorting through her memories.
"When I was four, we went to Cornwall for our holiday. I remember it well, it was the first time I'd seen the sea. And we watched moor ponies one afternoon, and in one of the harbors, there was a fishmonger with a tray of fish, silvery in the sun. We took our breakfast out to the rocks and watched the fishing boats coming in."
"Did your parents laugh? Hold hands with each other? Seem comfortable with each other? Or was there tension, sometimes raised voices?"
"I-yes, I think everything was all right. I rode on my father's shoulders when my legs were tired, and Becky held on to his coat- tails. Mama laughed, calling us a dragon, three heads, six arms, six legs. And we made up stories about the dragon, how he could run faster than anyone else, and lift twice as much and see before him and behind him at the same time, and my father made silly noises, while Becky laughed so hard she fell down and the dragon came apart."
She looked away, seeing a day she had buried in the past. "I loved my father more than anything, then. I had forgotten."
"And later?"
"We went to Kent when I was six, to visit an aunt. She told us there was a ghost in her house, but it was only mice behind the walls. The next summer, Mama was very ill and kept to her bed. I remember we had to be quiet, and there were nurses coming in to look after her. My father was worried, he sat in his study and I think he cried. His face was wet when I came in to kiss him good night."
Her gaze came back to Rutledge, startled and confused. "I had forgotten. It frightened me to see Mama like that, pale and helpless, and I didn't want to think about it. I don't remember her laughing for a long time even after the nurses had left and she was well again. That was after my father had begun to use the laboratory in the garden. He said he had more freedom there than at Cambridge. She railed at him once, calling him a murderer. She was so distressed, and she threatened to burn down the laboratory. And he told her that if she did, he would leave her."
Sarah Parkinson put her hands to her face, reliving that scene. "It was never the same after that. Never. There were no more holidays. Mama told me that it was because my father refused to leave his precious laboratory long enough to take us anywhere. That it meant more to him than we did, and because he spent so much of his time there, I knew it to be true. Sometimes he had his meals brought to him there. And I'd hear him come up the stairs at night long after we were in bed. I always waited for him to come in and say good night, but he didn't. I thought perhaps he'd stopped loving Becky and me."
"Why was your mother ill? Do you know?"
"I was never told. I have no idea."
"But it changed her-and her feelings toward your father."
Sarah Parkinson bit her lip. "I can't answer that. Although she must have been happy when we were in Kent. She and my father took long walks together, and I watched them from the windows. I was a little jealous, I expect. I know I felt left out. Why are you asking me these things? I've worked hard to forget most of it."
Rutledge didn't want to tell her that he'd come to find out if her father had struck her mother in arguments over the laboratory. Sarah at least had no memory of that. Or had suppressed any she did have. "I never had the opportunity to meet your father. The man who died in Yorkshire is a mystery to all of us."
"Why do you keep telling me that my father died in Yorkshire?" There was an element of defensiveness in her question. "How do you know where he died?"
"All right. The man who was found dead in Yorkshire. He's your father, whether you wish to acknowledge him or not." He rose to leave. "No one wants to claim his body. He'll be buried in a pauper's grave, without a marker."
"You can put the name he used in those cottages on his stone. It was the one he chose, and it shut us out completely. Why should I care about him now?"
"You came back to the cottages," Rutledge said as he walked to the door. "Why?"
Her eyes were bright with tears. "I'm looking for something I lost. But I can live without it. I learned the hard way to do that."
She didn't see him out. He closed the door as he went.
Hamish said, as the motorcar turned toward the cottages at Uffington, "She willna' change her mind. But when she's old, she'll have regrets to overcome."
"Unlike her sister."
"Aye, the elder. She learned to hate at her mother's knee."
"Her mother's child. As Sarah might well have been her father's favorite."
"Looking into the past hasna' given you a solution."
"Not yet."
Rutledge arrived at the cottages and walked down the lane separating them, turning in at Mrs. Cathcart's door.
She was reluctant to open to him, but in the end, her innate politeness won. She said, "That other policeman has been here, asking me what I've seen, what I know, how Mr. Brady struck me. I don't spy on my neighbors and I didn't know Mr. Brady well enough to answer him."
"Do you think Mr. Brady spied on his neighbors? I'm told he spent most of his time sitting at his windows, looking out."
"I expect he was lonely. Most of us are, you know. He did seem more interested in Mr. Partridge than he was in the rest of us, but then it was Mr. Partridge's cottage he could see best. Of course Mr. Willingham was always accusing Mr. Brady of staring at him. I can't believe either of them is dead. Do you think Mr. Partridge is as well? If I had anywhere else to go, I'd leave this place. I don't feel safe here, I'm terrified of being murdered in my bed."
He wished he could tell her that she had little chance of that. "Keep your door locked. Don't open it at night to anyone, no matter what he may say to you."
"I'd ask Mr. Slater to be sure my locks couldn't be tampered with. But he's hurt his hand, and it must be very painful. Will you look at my door and windows?"
He agreed and followed her through the rooms of her cottage testing the latches on windows and the main door. "If you're afraid, keep a light on. It will be a comfort."
"Do you think Inspector Hill is capable of doing anything about these frightening events? I've not been impressed by him. He's a local man, after all. And he doesn't know anything about us."
"He's making every effort."
"I'm not sure that's good enough." She tugged at her earlobe, clearly upset. "For a very long time, now, I've been afraid of dying," she confessed. "I always believed my husband would see to it that I was quietly disposed of. Now it may be a complete stranger who makes him the happiest man in England."
Rutledge said, "Would you prefer to stay at The Smith's Arms for several nights, until this business is finished? You're the only woman here. You might be more comfortable."
She said, the strain apparent in her voice, "I've considered that. I'd do it, if I could afford it."
"Let me have a word with Mrs. Smith. I think it might be possible to arrange."
Mrs. Cathcart said, "Please? Let me go with you? I've only to put a few things into my overnight case. When the sun begins to set, I can hardly breathe for fear."
Rutledge took pity on her and said, "Yes, of course. I'll wait."
It took her less time than he'd expected. She came out of her bedroom with a worn leather valise and handed it to him. "I'm so grateful. You can't imagine. There's no one I can turn to. I could smell the smoke at Mr. Quincy's cottage in the night, and at first I thought it was mine. Even so, I sat here, wondering what would be worse, burning to death or walking outside into the arms of someone with a knife. They say he prefers a knife. I thought Mr. Brady confessed."
She paused on the threshold, stricken by a thought. "It isn't Mr. Partridge, is it? Coming back here and attacking us? I've heard people can be struck down by a brainstorm, and not know what they're doing."
"You don't have to fear Mr. Partridge. I don't think he'll be coming back to the cottages."
She locked her door behind her but didn't look back as he helped her into the motorcar. He could feel her worry drain away until she was light-headed from relief.
It took him five minutes to convince Mrs. Smith that he had no ulterior motive in paying for Mrs. Cathcart's room. He also made her promise to say nothing about who was taking care of the account.
Then, as Mrs. Cathcart stepped into the inn, Mrs. Smith smiled at her and welcomed her, saying, "I'll bring up a cup of tea after I've shown you your room."
Mrs. Cathcart cast a grateful glance at Rutledge and followed Mrs. Smith up the stairs, answering questions about the two deaths as they climbed.
He went into the pub, sat down in the window seat, and tried to shut out Hamish's voice. The large room was empty of custom, and in the quietness Rutledge considered a possibility that had nagged at the edges of his consciousness for several hours.
Which of his daughters had Parkinson started a letter to, only to crumple it up and toss it aside as if the words he wanted wouldn't come?
My dear…
If it was Sarah, then he must have held out hope of some sort of reconciliation.
If it was Rebecca, he might well be trying to make amends for what she felt he'd done to her mother.
Hamish said, "But he didna' send it. Which brings up the question of whether he'd ha' gone with ither one o' them, if they'd come to his door late at night. And it must ha' been late-no one saw what happened."
"Interesting about the cars," Rutledge said. "The body was transported in Partridge's. Which suggests that the daughter without the car that night was the one who killed him."
"It's a long way on foot for ither o' them."
"A friend could have driven them to Uffington. It's an easy walk from there."
But what if the unfinished letter was simply a first draft, and Parkinson had after all sent what he'd written?
What if he had intended to sell Partridge Fields? Would that threat be the last straw for Rebecca?
My dear Rebecca, I am writing to tell you that I've decided that the time has come to sell the house and grounds. If there's anything in the house that you wish to have, please make arrangements to remove the item before I put the property on the market…
And that would have brought Rebecca storming to his door in the middle of the night after struggling for hours to find a way to stop him.
Or look at it another way round.
The letter might have been very different. My dear Rebecca, I'm writing to tell you that I've decided to move back to Partridge Fields now. I've made arrangements for the house to be refurbished and the gardens cleared and replanted…
All that was necessary was to persuade their father to spend one night in the house while they argued over his plan. The rest would have been simple. Drug him, turn on the gas, and let him die while he slept.
But why then remove Parkinson from the house and carry his body to Yorkshire? Why not leave him there for the housekeeper to find, and let him be buried in the churchyard with his ancestors?
Perhaps they had left Parkinson where he died-and it was Deloran who had ordered the body moved, so that both Parkinson and Partridge were disposed of in one neat solution.