A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [84]
The housekeeper turned and looked over her shoulder as if a ghost could give her the answer to her question. But it was the kitchen floors that concerned her, and she said, “It’s dry in there, must be by now. And I’ve a good bit more to do before I close up for the day.”
“And you’re sure you have no way of knowing where Mr. Parkinson went?”
“His daughter Becky might know. But I doubt it. He left me instructions not to say anything, and I never have. It’s not my place to decide such things.”
“Where will I find Miss Parkinson?”
“No, I won’t tell you. She’ll know who did, and I’ll hear about it soon enough. No one stays in the house of a night anymore. Myself, I’m away before dark, I can tell you that. But she comes from time to time to tend the gardens.”
And sometimes to knock at her father’s door?
“You spoke of children—” Rutledge began, but the housekeeper shook her head firmly and disappeared inside without answering him, shutting the kitchen door in Rutledge’s face.
He had no choice but to move on, rounding the house and coming again to the drive. He could almost feel the housekeeper watching him from the windows, making certain he was not sneaking about, as she would call it, but leaving the premises.
As he closed the gate behind him, he thought, This house has seen tragedy…
Rutledge found a small pub for his noon meal, and sat there over his pudding, thinking about Parkinson and the cottage in Berkshire. So much made sense now. The fact that the cottage had no touches of personal warmth—it was not Parkinson’s home, this house in Wiltshire was. And his disappearances.
Hamish said, “To his wife’s grave? You ken, ye thought of that before.”
“Deloran probably had the churchyard watched for all we know. And going there would have bolstered Deloran’s theory that Parkinson was still grieving. Wherever Parkinson went, Deloran couldn’t find him, and that was the trouble.”
Hamish said, “It’s verra’ likely that he went away to torment Deloran.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me that he was just being bloody-minded, rebelling against being watched, showing the War Office that he was clever enough to outfox them all. A cat-and-mouse game, to worry Deloran.”
Rutledge considered another possibility—that when Parkinson couldn’t stand his own company any longer, when the walls of the cottage were closing in, he might well have needed to be around people. A crowded train station, a Wednesday market, a theater. Somewhere safe to remind himself he wasn’t going mad.
It was dark when he reached The Smith’s Arms. Rutledge left the motorcar in the yard, then walked down to Wayland’s Smithy. It was a far better place to leave an unwanted body than an abbey cloister in Yorkshire.
Who had decided that it was time Parkinson should die? That’s what it all came down to. Not where the body was left, but who had chosen to end one man’s life now. It was useless to speculate, but who had become the bedrock of the case.
The heavy stone slabs that had created this ancient tomb caught his attention, and he thought about the numbers of men it would have taken to build this place for a dead chieftain or priest.
We spend our energies in different ways, he thought, standing there. How many aeroplanes and tanks and artillery caissons had it taken to end the Great War? Not to count the rifles and helmets, respirators and machine guns, the number of boots, the tunics and greatcoats and the tins in which we had brewed our tea or the casings of the shells fired. A nation’s fortune surely, greater than any man possessed in the centuries since this tomb was new and raw and the dead shut into it was still honored by those