A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [22]
The remainder of the afternoon he spent prowling about the chalk horse, while keeping a surreptitious eye on the cottages below him.
Rutledge had the strongest feeling, supported by the uneasiness of Hamish, that he was being watched in his turn.
But if Partridge had come home, learned of Rutledge’s presence, and then questioned Mrs. Smith at the inn, there was no sign of him here at the cottages.
Rutledge drove some twenty miles for his dinner, lingering over the meal far longer than its quality justified, and it was nearly dark by the time he drove back to the inn. He left the motorcar in the yard, went up to his room, and stretched himself on the bed.
When he heard the clock in the downstairs dining room strike one, he got up, dressed in dark clothing, and quietly left the inn. In his pocket he carried his torch. From the companionable snores coming from the room where the Smiths slept as he went down the stairs, Rutledge was certain they hadn’t heard him go. As far as he could tell, he was the only guest this night.
Rutledge walked back to the cottages, standing under a tree for some time to let his eyes adjust to the ambient light and listening to the sounds around him.
There were steps coming his way, and he faded into the shadows where he was fairly certain he couldn’t be seen.
Andrew Slater appeared farther up the road, heading for his own cottage. He carried something in his hands, Rutledge couldn’t see what, and disappeared through his door without any indication that he knew someone was about.
But as Hamish was busy pointing out, a man like Slater often knew more than ordinary people, as if to make up for his simplicity. Not so much a sixth sense, but a knowledge that often came to such people. Not animal, either, that wariness of a fox or even a deer, but something generated by the need to protect himself from those who would trick him, take advantage of him, or cheat him.
Rutledge gave the smith another hour to fall asleep and then walked softly across the dew-wet grass to the house with the white gate.
He didn’t pass through it, but went over the wall on the side that couldn’t be seen from the other cottages.
The door was unlocked, as Quincy had told him it would be.
He opened it cautiously, listening for sounds inside that indicated someone was there. Silence came back to him.
He went inside and began his search. But there was nothing of interest in the cottage. Shielding his torch, he looked around at the furnishings—mainly castoffs, he thought, though there was a chest under a window that appeared to have come from a different life. It was locked. He glanced at the books on the low shelf by the hearth, and found that most of them were scientific, although there was an odd mixture of historical materials as well. Renaissance Italian history, African exploration, South American botany, and a Chinese herbal. Heavy reading for one’s spare time. Sections marked were often macabre, descriptions of the way everyone from Socrates to victims of curses died.
The bedroom was tidy, the kitchen cleared, and dishes set as if by habit to drain by the sink. Nothing out of place, an empty valise under the bed, clothes still hanging in the armoire.
Wherever Partridge had taken himself, he clearly intended to come back.
Rutledge returned to the sitting room and looked at the desk there. He found nothing of interest, as if it were seldom used.
There was a single framed photograph on the desktop, grainy and yellowed, showing a man and a small boy standing together in what appeared to be the marketplace of a Georgian town. There was nothing in the shop windows to indicate which town or where in England it might be. Rutledge lifted the frame, slid open the back, and looked to see if there was any inscription on the other side of the photograph. And indeed there was. A schoolboy hand had scribbled, “the day we climbed the white horse.”
Had Partridge come here as a boy? Was that what brought him back as a man?
Rutledge reassembled the glass and the frame,