A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [14]
Not even on official stationery, he thought, scanning it. A name, a direction. Nothing more. Spoken rather than written instructions. Sydney Riley, the infamous spy, could have done no better in the cloak-and-dagger world.
Rutledge left soon afterward, not happy about the long drive that lay ahead, but in other ways glad to be out of London. The daffodils would be rioting among the hedgerows, and the air was sweet in the countryside.
Hamish reminded him, “There’s yon Simon Barrington,” as Rutledge put the kettle on and then went to pack his valise.
“He’ll still be in London when I return. It can wait.” But Frances’s face when she’d come to ask him to take her to dinner with Maryanne Browning was before him, even as he answered Hamish aloud.
He could hardly pound Barrington into admitting he’d lied to Frances, or arrest him for cruelty to his sister. And there was always the possibility that perhaps it was Frances who lied about Scotland, to keep herself from blurting out the truth—that something had gone wrong between the two of them.
“It can wait,” he said again to Hamish as much as to himself. “It might work out better without my meddling.”
Hamish said derisively, “Aye, that’s a comfort.”
Rutledge filled his Thermos with tea, then turned out the lamps. He paused there in the darkness, wondering again if he should leave a message for his sister, then thought better of it. A letter was no way to deliver bad news, if she truly didn’t know where Simon was. And it was always possible that he had dined with the Douglases and then traveled north with them.
Cutting across London, Rutledge set out in the direction of Uffington, and drove through the darkness, stopping only to stretch his legs when he felt himself drowsing at the wheel and to drink from the Thermos.
It was a remarkably soft night, one of those April evenings when the world seemed pleased with itself. When he’d left the busy towns ringing London behind, he could sometimes smell plowed earth and, once or twice, the wafting fragrance of fruit trees in bloom. The road emptied as the night moved on toward the early hours of morning, a handful of lorries making their way to the east and the occasional motorcar passing him. At one point he smelled wood smoke, and wondered if gypsies were camping in a copse of trees in the middle of nowhere. The policeman’s instinct was to stop and investigate, but he drove on, ignoring it.
Around two in the morning, he pulled into a small clearing and slept, awaking to the dampness of an early dew. For several seconds he was disoriented, not sure where he was, in France or in England, but then his mind cleared and he got out to walk again and to finish his tea.
It was just getting light when he drove past his destination, a cluster of nine cottages that seemed to stand in the middle of nowhere, much of a sameness in design as if they were built to match. Stone and thatch, they seemed out of place here. He saw that one a little to itself boasted a white gate in a low stone wall.
On the hillside above him was the White Horse, pale in the morning light, an early mist hiding its feet, giving it the appearance of floating across the ground, silent and mysterious.
He stopped the motorcar in the middle of the road, swept by such an intense emotion that he could feel his heart thudding heavily in his chest.
The mist, moving gently, blotted out everything else until it was all he could see.
Gas. Floating across the battlefield, and the shout going up, Masks!
He was back in France, the tension and fear spreading around him as he and his men watched the slow-moving cloud, fumbling to put on their gas masks, hastily making sure not an inch of skin showed. He thrust his hands in his pockets, unable to find his gloves, digging them deep until he could feel his knuckles hard against the fabric. And Hamish saying in his ear