A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [104]
It was, Rutledge thought, a fanciful public façade, Deloran keeping his watcher there to report to him and to make it appear that he himself believed Partridge was coming back. Or perhaps Brady had already been put out to pasture, and lived on here because it was his home. Rutledge expected the man would claim that, if he were questioned.
Rutledge sat there, listening to Hamish in his head, for another quarter of an hour. He hadn’t seen so much as the corner of a curtain twitch in Brady’s cottage. No sign of life that would attract Rutledge’s attention and bring him down the hill to knock again.
A crow came to perch on Brady’s chimneytop, scolding Dublin as she made her rounds. Mrs. Cathcart, seeing it, went quickly back inside. Quincy called to the cat, then shut his own door. Allen, still in the garden in front of his house, looked up at the sound of Quincy’s door closing. And after a few minutes, his defiance turning practical as the first drops of rain danced on the flagstones that made up his garden path, he disappeared as well.
Rutledge came down the hill, feeling the heavy drops strike his shoulders with some force. They were only the forerunners of the storm, but the clouds had thickened to the west and rain would come in earnest in the next ten minutes or so.
Rutledge went up the lane between the cottages and knocked again on Brady’s door, calling to him when it remained shut.
There was no answer.
Feeling a stirring of his intuition, Rutledge put his hand on the latch and lifted it.
The door wasn’t locked.
He pushed it open, calling, “Brady, I know you’re in there. I want to talk to you.”
The crow flew away, cawing as he went, shattering the silence that sometimes foretells a storm.
Rutledge stood there, waiting. But there was no response from Brady.
He stepped inside, Hamish loud in his ears, and looked at the untidy room, dishes left on a table, books and papers scattered about, a pair of field glasses standing on the shelf under the window. From his vantage point Brady had a sweeping view toward the hill of the White Horse, and also of Partridge’s cottage.
For an instant Rutledge wondered if Deloran was mad enough to send Brady to do his dirty work for him at Partridge Fields, then laughed at the thought. A man who drank as Brady was said to do couldn’t be trusted with murder…
And then as his eyes adjusted to the storm-induced gloom of the sitting room, he saw Brady staring back at him, as if accusing him of trespassing.
But Brady was not accusing anyone of anything.
A knife protruded from his chest, and both his hands were wrapped around the hilt, frozen there by death.
19
It appeared to Rutledge, looking down at the body, as if Brady had stabbed himself, his grip on the blade almost like iron. Sitting in his chair, forcing the blade into the soft flesh under his rib cage, he appeared to have sliced through an artery.
And on the table beside him there was a sheet of paper. Rutledge could see the writing on it from where he stood, but couldn’t manage to read the words.
His guess was that Brady had died sometime in the night, and the letter would express his fear of hanging, or a full confession.
Rutledge looked at the man’s narrow face, unshaven chin, thin graying hair. There was depression in the circles under his eyes, indicating sleepless nights and watchful days, and nothing to show for it but a shabby cottage and a reputation for the bottle.
At his back, the rain had begun in earnest, and Rutledge turned to look at the ground behind him. Whatever tracks were there, the rain would quickly obliterate. Yet all he could see from where he stood were his own, and the mixed prints of Hill’s men, trampling about as they came to interview Brady.
If the murderer had come up the garden path, he knew he