A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [136]
Hamish said, “They had money, the Parkinsons. They would ha’ seen a London doctor.”
“Not for measles or a fall or a sore tooth. There would have been someone closer who could be called.”
“No’ for the lost child. For the despair that followed.”
Rutledge considered that possibility. But he’d got the impression that for many years Mrs. Parkinson had withdrawn into herself, shutting out her husband, and would never have been persuaded to see a London doctor of his choosing. It would have been an admission that they shared a grief. Mrs. Parkinson had hugged it to herself instead, and in the end, used her death as the ultimate punishment.
He gave up after another two hours. He was too far afield.
He was halfway back to Partridge Fields when he saw a house well off the road, sheltered by a small copse. Its lights were burning in the dark and a drive wandered in their direction. It was just outside the first village he’d tried.
What had caught his eye, in a flash of his headlamps, was not a doctor’s board but a small, elegant stone pillar at the end of the drive. He’d almost passed by it a second time when he realized that the scrolled name inset into the pillar was THE BUTLERS. He backed up and turned into the drive, pulling up by the door.
The knocker was a worn brass caduceus, and he felt his hopes soar.
A woman answered, her face framed in soft waves of reddish-brown hair, and behind her, peering around an inner door, was a girl of about twelve.
“Betsy, dear—”
She stopped when she saw a stranger standing on her threshold.
“Oh, I do beg your pardon. I was expecting a friend, and she’s late. Are you lost?”
“My name is Rutledge,” he said, offering her his identification. She peered shortsightedly at it.
“Scotland Yard? Oh, dear. Perhaps I ought to call my husband.” She turned to the girl. “Will you fetch Papa, darling? There’s someone here to see him.” She sounded uncertain.
The girl disappeared, and in a moment or two a man came to the entry. He was dressed in rough work clothes and there was paint on his hands and across his face.
“Sorry, we’re doing up my mother’s room. How can I help you, Mr.—er—Rutledge, is it?”
“Yes, from London. I’m looking for a Dr. Butler, who once practiced in these parts. Are you by chance related to him?”
“Good God, how did you ever find us? Yes, he was my father. Dead now, I’m afraid. I don’t think he practiced after 1910.”
“One of his patients was a woman named Parkinson. I’m trying to learn more about her, and the illness he treated. You don’t, by any chance, have his records?”
Butler brushed a hand across his forehead, pushing his light brown hair out of his eyes and leaving another streak of paint there. “I doubt they’d do you much good. But yes, we do. Somewhere. In the attic, at a guess. Well, not his records, actually, those went to the man who took over his practice. And he’s dead, as well, killed in the war, worst luck. I don’t know who might have taken over from him. But my father kept a series of diaries, and they’re boxed up just as he left them. Would that be of help?”
“If I’m lucky,” Rutledge said.
“Do you need them now?” It was clear Mr. Butler would have preferred another time. “We’ll be up all night with our painting. My mother arrives in the morning. This morning.”
“It would be best.”
“Let me clean up a bit first, then. Come in, man!”
Rutledge followed Butler into a sitting room and waited there for nearly three-quarters of an hour before Butler came back with a wooden box in his hand. Inside were rows of small leather-bound diaries, each with a year printed in gold on its spine.
Rutledge had been trying to calculate which year he was after, based on what Sarah Parkinson had told him about her holidays as a child. He pulled out a likely diary, but there was no mention of the Parkinsons at all save for a reference to a cough that had kept Sarah in bed for three weeks and a burn that the housekeeper, Martha Ingram, had sustained