A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [113]
“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