him?'
'Only that he's from London and unlucky in love.' Her voice was light, deflecting his questions.
Rutledge set his plate aside and stood up, hoping to see who had come to the inn. But the man was just out of sight.
'I need to know, Betty,' he went on urgently. 'Are you sure he's from London?'
'I don't think he said,' she answered him. 'I just assumed…'
'I don't like it. Is he staying?'
'He's taken a room for tonight.' It was a reluctant admission. 'You're building castles in quicksand,' she added. 'What would he want with the likes ofyou?'
The man's answer was lost in the clatter of feet on the stairs and someone calling, 'Good-bye, love, I'm off to make my fortune-oh, there you are! Thought you were in the kitchen. Well, then,' the voice went on, 'I've left what I owe on the table. And you can count on me again in a fortnight. Anything you'd like from Wales?'
'Wales, is it? I'll take one of those wool shawls, in a paisley pattern. Like the red one you brought Ma.'
'Right you are!' And a young man who looked enough like Mrs. Smith to be her brother dashed into sight heading for the last lorry, standing by a plane tree.
When he'd gone, there was no further conversation. Rutledge could hear Mrs. Smith moving about below, humming to herself. The man who had questioned her had gone.
Hamish said, startling Rutledge, 'Ye canna' ask her who it was.'
'No. But it wasn't Quincy or Slater. Someone else. I didn't recognize the voice. And there's no certainty he came from the cottages.'
He sat down again, finished his meal, and then carried the tray back to the dining room.
It was interesting, Rutledge thought, walking out the inn door, that Mrs. Smith asked no questions of him. Her pleasant nod as he passed indicated no curiosity about where he might be going or why. And she had answered the man at her door with circumspection, as if she were accustomed to keeping secrets.
He drove back toward the Tomlin Cottages, but passed no one walking in that direction.
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, Rut- ledge 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, and set it where he'd found it.
In the basket to one side of the desk, however, was a crumpled sheet of paper. He reached for it, spread it out, and in the shaded light of his torch found that there was only one line on it.
My dear
The start of a letter? To a friend, a lover, a relative? There was no way of knowing.
He crumpled it again and dropped it back into the basket.
Nothing here to tell him who Partridge was, where he might have gone, or when he intended to return.
Certainly nothing mysterious enough to make London worry about where he was.
When Rutledge stepped out of the cottage, he nearly leapt out of his skin as something warm and sinuous wrapped itself around his legs.
''Ware!' Hamish warned in the same instant.
It was all he could do to stifle a yelp even as his brain absorbed the sound of a soft purr.
Dublin the cat.
He bent down to pet her, and she accepted the salute but was more intent on finding her way into the house. He managed to get the door shut first, and as if displeased, the cat stopped purring and trotted off.
Rutledge stood there for a moment as his heart rate steadied and then made his way to the shed where Partridge kept his motorcar. It was still there, and a bicycle stood in the deeper shadows beyond the bonnet.
The only unusual thing was a small length of carpet that lay crumpled by the boot, a trap for unwary feet. The oil stains down its length, dark as blood in the little light there was, explained its use.
Wherever Gaylord Partridge had gone, he had left on shank's mare, not his bicycle or his motorcar.
But then he needn't have gone far to find someone to take him away. For a price, the lorry drivers at The Smith's Arms would have been willing to let him ride with them as far as he liked. From there he might have gone anywhere by train or bus.
And come back just as inconspicuously.
Gaylord Partridge's walkabouts, as Quincy had called them.
