A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [36]
And that didn’t appear to be a simple matter.
But he could see, he thought, what the army was about—searching out unidentified bodies in the expectation that one of them might be Gaylord Partridge. Because the man still hadn’t returned to the cottages in Berkshire, or London would have recalled the Yard’s emissary by now.
Why did they think Partridge might be dead?
Did he have other enemies? Or was it that the army didn’t want to step forward and publicly claim the man’s body? If Rutledge identified him in the course of a murder investigation, there would be no connection with officialdom.
It was possible that Partridge’s earlier forays had been made to prepare an escape route, so to speak, away from his watchers. And this time, unlike before, he had no intention of coming back.
And instead of going missing and causing an uproar, he’d died and inconvenienced everyone.
Rutledge was tempted to take the sketch to show at the Tomlin Cottages, to see what Quincy and Slater and the others might say about it.
But early days for that, now.
He found he’d driven back to Dilby, where the schoolmaster lived.
Hamish said, “It willna’ be useful.”
And yet Rutledge left his car by the church and walked through the village, getting a sense of it.
He’d seen much of England over the years, both as a policeman and as an ordinary visitor. Wherever he had traveled, he’d found a sense of place—a shared history, a shared background. But this little spot on the map seemed to have none of that. No sense of the past in the square buildings with their slate roofs, gray in the cloudy light. No sense of history, no armies marching through the churchyard, no Roman ruin under the baker’s shop, no medieval tithe barn on the fringe of the village. The abbey must have wielded some influence here—if not Fountains, then one of the others. Ripon, perhaps. What had the monks run here? Sheep, or even cattle? Or was this tilled land? Beyond the village, where he could see green and heavily grassed pastures, there must have been good grazing from the earliest days. Surely the inhabitants of Dilby had been tenants of the abbeys, not monks. Laymen or even lay brothers, earning their keep and owning nothing until the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII had left them masterless and destitute, scraping out a living where they could or falling under the sway of whatever lordling had coveted these acres.
He had come to the end of the village now, and turned to walk back.
Hamish said, “It’s no’ a place of comfort.”
Rutledge was about to answer him when he saw a face in an upper-story window staring down at him.
A young boy’s face, so terrified that he seemed to be on the verge of crying. Glimpsed for only a moment, then gone, as if Rutledge had imagined it.
It wasn’t Hugh or his friend Johnnie. He was certain of that.
What did these children know? What were they so frightened of?
Rutledge walked on, an unhurried pace that took him back to his motorcar, nodding to men he passed on the street, touching his hat to the women. No one stopped him to ask his business.
They already knew. The blankness in their eyes as they acknowledged his greeting covered something else, an unwillingness to be a part of what was happening.
How long could the schoolmaster go on living here, if the cloud of suspicion wasn’t lifted, and soon? He would be sent packing, no longer the proper person to form young minds. Miss Norton was right about that.
Rutledge drove back to Elthorpe in a bleak mood, as if the village had left its mark on him.
On the outskirts lines from the poetry of O. A. Manning seemed to express what he felt about Dilby. It had been written about a shell-gutted village in France, empty of people, empty of beauty, empty of hope.
There is something cold and lost
Here, as if the people died long ago,
No one left to mourn them or tell me why.
My footsteps echo on what was the street,
A rose blooms in a corner where no one sees
The beauty that it offers to the dead.
I thought to pluck it and take it away,
But it belongs here, a memorial to them.