A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [83]
It was the same way Parkinson himself had died. To follow her? But then how did he come to be in Yorkshire?
“I’m surprised the London papers saw anything newsworthy in the story.”
She sighed. “It’s because of what he did in the war, of course. And here at the bottom of the garden as well, with that workshop of his. Mrs. Parkinson told me herself she was heartsick over it.”
Rutledge tried another tack. “I’m not sure I understand. London didn’t inform me what Parkinson had done in the war.”
“He worked at Porton Down, he was one of the scientists there. Gassed the Kaiser’s men in return for our boys. Got our own back, didn’t he? Mrs. Parkinson was squeamish, but not I.”
He was startled by her vehemence, even as his mind registered Porton Down.
It was a military facility on the eastern border of Wiltshire, across the county from here. A place where absolute secrecy was the order of the day.
And for the first time Rutledge understood why Martin Deloran was interested in the whereabouts of one Gerald Parkinson. The army didn’t care to lose track of someone like that, someone whose knowledge was more valuable than his person. Eccentricity was one thing, disliked but oftentimes tolerated. Even madness could be overlooked. Parkinson, however, had walked away from a comfortable family home, lived elsewhere under a different name, and disappeared with unsettling regularity. The War Office could do very little about it, but that didn’t mean they didn’t watch his every move.
Very likely Deloran had put the change in Parkinson down to excessive grief after his wife’s death—give him time and he’d recover, be himself again. The war’s nearly over, we can afford to be patient…But two years had passed, and Parkinson still went his own way. And Deloran was still watching him.
Small wonder Deloran jumped at the chance to bury Parkinson under a pauper’s stone in rural Yorkshire! What sort of secrets had safely died with him?
“Guilt, ye said,” Hamish reminded him, and Rutledge remembered.
That would explain Parkinson’s choice to live in the Tomlin Cottages.
It still wouldn’t explain where he’d died.
“He worked on the development of poison gases?” Rutledge asked to clarify what Parkinson had done for a living. It would explain too the choice of reading material he had taken with him to the cottage.
“Well, of course he did,” she said with pride. “Where else, and him fascinated by chemistry ever since he was a young man at Cambridge? Mrs. Parkinson was at her wits’ end with fear for the children.”
“Children?”
“Indeed, the light of her life, they was. I daresay Mr. Parkinson found them a nuisance when he had his laboratory at the bottom of the garden. Always looking in the windows, trying to see what he was up to. It was when he killed the cows by accident that Mrs. Parkinson put her foot down.” She rested her back against the doorframe, a tired woman with no one to talk with as she worked. “But that caught the army’s attention, didn’t it? So he took himself off to a new laboratory there. Posh, he said it was, everything to hand. ‘Martha, they value me. They know I’m right about this new direction. Germany hasn’t got there yet. But we shall, wait and see. You’ll be reading about it in the newspapers, because it’s likely to stop the war and the dying.’ My nephew, the one gassed at Ypres, my sister’s only boy, was going to be avenged, he said. Germany was the first to use the poisonous gases, but we’d be the last. We’ll show ’em, he said, wait and see.”
“You’ve worked for the family for some time, have you?”
“I was maid to Mr. Parkinson’s mother, and came here as housekeeper to Partridge Fields when he bought the place, Mrs. Miggs having just died.”
“And Mrs. Parkinson didn’t care for the work he was doing.”
“She worried that they were testing these gases on the animals. She couldn’t bear to think about it. She saw my nephew when he was sent home, lungs burned right out. He didn’t last long and died hard. I told her the Hun had brought it all on themselves, whatever Mr. Parkinson devised, but it didn’t matter.