A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [124]
“No one here knows anyone well. I thought you’d have learned that by now.”
Rutledge studied the man. A thin face, hair graying early, a sturdy build. He could have been the conductor on a streetcar or a clerk in a shop. Middle-class with an accent that didn’t betray his roots, one cultivated to win him a better position in the marketplace, but not completely natural to him. It was his eyes that were interesting. They were what many would call hazel, but the dominant color was a golden green and oddly feral. And they were guarded, as if someone else stood behind them, a very different man from the one the world saw at first glance.
Inmates of prisons sometimes had that shuttered look, surviving as best they could in a place where they were afraid.
Rutledge said, “Every cottage has windows. And there’s nothing to see except the horse on the hill and the comings and goings of your neighbors.”
“I don’t watch from my windows.”
But he had, like the others, and now he denied it, as the others had done. What was his secret?
Had he embezzled funds at his place of business? Or been passed over for promotion and lost his temper? Allen had called him a timid man, and Slater had said he was evil.
There was something here, something that Rutledge, an experienced police officer, could feel in the air.
“You saw nothing the night that Willingham was killed? Or on the night when Brady must have disposed of Partridge’s body?”
“I didn’t see anything when Willingham was killed. Thank God I was asleep. As for Partridge, I don’t even know what night that was. But I can tell you that it was about three days since I’d seen him—he used to walk over to where the trees start and stand there looking up at the horse—when I heard the motorcar come back. It was close on three in the morning, and I was having trouble sleeping. I got up, thinking I might have a cigarette, and I stood there at the window watching someone open the shed door and then drive the motorcar inside. As a rule, Partridge shuts it straightaway, but this time I didn’t see him walk around to the door as he usually did. The shed door stayed open.”
“And in the morning?”
“The shed door was shut and all was quiet. I thought perhaps he’d slept in, after a long drive. I never saw him again.”
When Rutledge didn’t comment, Miller hesitated and then added, “The next night Brady went there to Partridge’s door, knocked, and went inside. He stayed nearly an hour, and then hurried back to his own cottage. My guess at the time was that Partridge had been taken ill, but nothing came of Brady’s visit.”
Rutledge said, “No one else has given me this information.”
Miller laughed harshly. “Even Quincy must sleep sometimes. I seldom sleep the night through. It’s become a habit with me now.”
Hamish said, “The truth? Or what ye want to hear?”
Rutledge considered his answer, both to Hamish and to Miller.
Miller added to the silence, hurrying to fill it again, “As far as I know, Mr. Brady didn’t have anything with him when he left the cottage.”
“And you’d be willing to swear to this under oath at the inquest, Mr. Miller? I wish I’d been told earlier, while Brady was alive.”
A flicker of emotion passed across Miller’s face. “You never came to ask.”
“I was here several times. You failed to answer your door.”
“Yes, well, these things happen.” He waited with expectancy, as if he thought this time the man from London might leave.
Rutledge thanked him and went back to his motorcar.
To Hamish he said, “It’s hard to say what Mr. Miller’s motive was in telling me what he just did. Unless it was to speed the police in finishing their business here sooner than later. Offering us lies we want to hear.”
He had caught that slight movement when he’d asked Miller about appearing at the inquest for Brady’s death.
Miller hadn’t expected his admission to be taken any further than a statement. Certainly not to be sworn to under oath and in public. And that rather reinforced the possibility that