A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [139]
It wasn’t hard to locate the sketches. They were in the desk drawer in a folder tied by string.
He unwound the string and brought out a dozen or more pen-and-ink drawings that were as vicious as any he’d ever seen. Each one showed one of the residents involved in a scene that was often crude and at the same time close to the mark. Singleton as a soldier, Miller in the dock and later standing by the hangman, Mrs. Cathcart drunk in public, Allen craftily using his illness for pity, Quincy paying ragged children to bring him his birds, Slater creating teapots without handles, offering them for sale at a market fair, the sign below them reading STOLEN FROM CHURCHES.
Partridge was there, wearing a mask that was what the artist must have seen as his true self. It was goatlike, the real man cringing behind it. Scapegoat? Only Brady was missing from the collection, presumably because he would have taken his sketch when he killed Willingham. Only he hadn’t killed anyone.
Rutledge stood there studying them. Hill was right, the draftsmanship was excellent, the content exceedingly vicious, and most certainly the work of a man who cared nothing for the feelings of others.
He was a recluse by habit and inclination. Charles Dickens might have used him for the model of half a dozen unsavory characters. Whatever had embittered him in his youth, he had slowly become a man to avoid. A nasty piece of work, indeed.
But had he created these sketches?
There was an imagination at work here that didn’t fit Willingham as Rutledge had seen him. These had taken time to draw in such detail, and from Willingham Rutledge would have expected more dash and less drama. His temper flared too easily. These were secretive, closet vengeance, a pleasure taken in private, so that no one knew he’d been savaged on paper.
“A coward’s work,” Hamish said.
Quincy, for instance, could have taken pleasure in skewering himself and his neighbors. But there would have been more dark humor, Rutledge thought, not such earthy attacks, if it had been his hand holding the pen. There was no whimsy here.
Rutledge went on searching the desk, but couldn’t find more of the paper that the artist had used nor the nibs that were necessary to carry out the design.
He went back through the drawings, remembering how Mark Benson had worked on the face of a dead man, the strokes, the intensity of concentration. Mrs. Cathcart was too emotional. Allen couldn’t have killed either Willingham or Brady, no match for them physically. Slater worked with his hands, but not with ink or charcoal. It was a very different skill, a very different brain.
That left Singleton or Miller.
He considered the two men, then went back to the portrayal on paper. Miller in the dock. Yes, that went along with what Rutledge himself had suspected. It could be proved. The portrayal of Singleton was more like the recruiting posters Rutledge had seen at the start of the war—the Hun bayoneting innocent Belgian women and children and committing other atrocities. It had made excellent propaganda, men had volunteered in droves. And like most propaganda, there was not much basis in fact to support it. The emotional impact was all.
Hamish said, “He was trained to kill.”
“So he was. But why should he attack Willingham or Brady, suddenly and without apparent warning?”
Rutledge put the drawings back in their folder and shoved them out of sight in the desk.
“We’ll start with Mrs. Cathcart. Her cottage is near enough to have heard any exchanges.”
She was reluctant to talk to him about Willingham. “He’s dead, we should respect the dead.”
“He was murdered, Mrs. Cathcart. There’s a difference.”
“There’s that.” She took a deep breath, then answered with a self-deprecating gesture. “He would say the cruelest things. I tried not to listen. He told me once that I was a self-centered woman with nothing to offer any man. That was when he was very angry because I’d had someone come and repair my roof. It was a noisy business,