A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [97]
He knew who his prisoner was. A woman. Rebecca Parkinson. And yet what he found almost incomprehensible was the pain he’d sensed in someone who had clearly hated her father and reveled in his death.
“What do you want?” The voice was husky in the darkness. “Who are you?” And there was fear in that question as well.
“My name is Rutledge, Miss Parkinson. You know me. We talked at your home.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, truly, I was at Pockets—”
She threw her head back, and said, “I don’t live at Pockets.”
So the housekeeper was right about children. Here was the sister to Rebecca.
“I’m sorry. If you aren’t Rebecca, what’s your given name, Miss Parkinson.”
“It’s Sarah.” Grudgingly spoken, he noted.
“Where do you live?”
“Near Porton Down. In one of the old cottages. What possessed you to attack me in that outrageous way?”
“I’m from Scotland Yard. I’ve been trying to speak to your sister, and she’s done her best to avoid me. It’s about your father.”
She was still for an instant, and then she said, “My father’s dead. At least to me he is, as he has been for the past two years.”
“Yet you come here, to where he lived.” He hazarded a guess. “And someone saw you here once before, knocking at his door. Then sometime later, sitting in what must have been this motorcar, alone and crying.”
She appeared to be shaken by his knowledge of her movements. “Have you been watching me?” she demanded. “What is this? I don’t understand why the Yard would take any interest in my father.”
“He hasn’t been seen for some time. We think he’s dead, and that he may have been murdered.”
He could hear the quick drawn breath, as the shock of his words hit her.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Nevertheless. His body has been found in Yorkshire.”
She broke down then, turning away from him and burying her face in her hands. He let her cry, standing patiently behind her until she was calmer.
“I hated him,” she said after a time.
“I think you must have loved him as well.”
“How could I, after what he’d done to my mother? She killed herself, no matter how hard they tried to put a better face on it. She killed herself! Do you know what it is to come home from a party and find the police in your house, and everything at sixes and sevens, and then you’re asked to look at your mother’s dead face and tell the police that you recognize her? Rebecca and I said good-bye to her, and she was smiling, she was smiling, and she insisted on kissing us, for luck she said. And we went blithely away, waving to her, looking forward to the party, and it never struck us, either of us, that she was different somehow. That perhaps she was saying good-bye in a very different way.”
He said, “Where was your father when she died? At the house?”
“No, no, he was at the laboratory. He was always in the laboratory, looking for a way to stabilize a gas so that it could be used in a shell or trying to make it more potent, longer lasting, more dependable in delivery. Everyone thought he was the cleverest man, a practical scientist. He not only could devise gases, he could take them to the battlefield. I heard them say so once, when they didn’t know I was there in the cottage he sometimes used, and they were waiting for him to arrive. Practical, as if this horrid way of maiming and killing soldiers was something to be studied for the most economical or useful way of doing murder.”
“The Germans used it first.”
“What does it matter? It was inhumane. Oh, I’m sick of this business. If you have nothing more to say to me, I’m going home.”
“You haven’t told me why you came here to see your father. Why you were standing there on the hill tonight. If you hate him so much, why do you torment yourself like this?”
“I don’t know,” she said wearily. “I remember sometimes the man who set me on his shoulders to see the Queen’s carriage pass during Victoria’s Jubilee. Or held me on my first pony, until I stopped being afraid of falling off and could take the reins myself. Or bringing me chocolates on my birthday when I was twelve,