'Looking, I think, for Mr. Parkinson.'
'You're not one of them people from the newspaper, are you?' There was a challenge now in her tone. 'I've told you before and I'll tell you again, he's not here, nor will he be here any time soon, and you might as well march yourself back the way you've come and leave the premises. Close the gate behind you or I'll see the police have a word with you for trespassing.'
She was about to shut the door in his face, and he said quickly, 'I'm from the police. Scotland Yard.'
Her face altered, the hostility giving way to concern mixed with irritation. 'The police, is it? What are you here for? Is there bad news you're bringing?'
Rutledge was walking back toward her now, and she stood her ground with the ferocity of an old and trusted servant.
'Here, you're not coming in this house, policeman or no!'
'I'm trying to locate Mr. Parkinson,' he replied, his tone indicating a need for help rather than ulterior motive. 'It's a police inquiry, you see, and I should like to ask his assistance.' He'd left the sketch in his valise at the inn, and swore to himself. She would surely have recognized it.
'Well, you won't be finding it here-he's not in residence, and that's a fact.' She looked Rutledge up and down. 'You'd think a London policeman would know that.'
He said, drawing on his experience dealing with watchdog servants, 'My superiors don't always tell me everything they know. Much to my regret. How long has he been away? Surely he must have told you where to send along his mail.'
'He doesn't receive any. None, that is, I'm aware of. And he left just a week after his wife died in the spring of 1918. Here, are you certain you aren't from the London papers?'
Rutledge showed her his identity card, and she studied it with suspicion, as if certain it was counterfeit.
'I don't understand why the newspapers should be interested in Mr. Parkinson,' he went on in a conversational tone. 'Or disturb him. Perhaps the police ought to have been called sooner.'
'They were, and they did nothing.' Her sense of grievance went deeper than her circumspection. 'It was on account of his poor wife, of course. Like vultures they came here, battering the door, upsetting the household. It was shameful, that's what it was. No respect for the dead.'
'Was she well known in London circles? Was that their interest?'
'It was the way she died. She left the gas open by mistake, and they tried to say it was suicide, but of course it wasn't. She was a good and kind lady, she would never kill herself. But they told poor Mr. Parkinson it was on purpose, and he believed them.'
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. She stopped sleeping well, wandering about the house at all hours. Like her own ghost. Small wonder she forgot and left the gas on. She couldn't even kill a spider that crept in at the window, she was that troubled about hurting anything. Which is why I refuse to believe she killed herself. But Mr. Parkinson thought she'd done it out of spite, using the gas. I'm told it's as peaceful a way as any to go, falling asleep and not waking up.'
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…
