before long, and he'd be wet if he didn't leave while he could. But still he sat there, waiting for someone to stir. He could feel the eyes watching for him, wondering where he might turn up next, and whether or not he was doing his own work or Hill's.
And then Mr. Allen stepped out of his door. Rutledge could hear him coughing, the sound captured and bounced up the hill to where he sat. Allen puttered a little in his front garden, casting wary eyes toward his neighbors.
Cabin fever, Rutledge thought, watching him. And a small defiance in the face of death. I'm alive, you haven't gathered me in yet…
Or was it because they all knew that Rutledge was sitting here, watching, that they felt free to move about.
Quincy opened his door and set a bowl of water down for Dublin, and looked up at the building clouds.
Mrs. Cathcart timidly crept out, and moved a flower pot to where it better caught the waning sun.
Miller was next, putting something in the dust bin by the corner of his house, and then looking fixedly at Rutledge. As if to ask why he was still here, when it was clear that Partridge wasn't coming back.
Rutledge hadn't met the man, but it wouldn't do any good to hurry down to the lane. Miller would be inside long before that.
They were all accounted for, except for Brady. But he was the watcher, accustomed to peering between his curtains and not showing his face. Rutledge found it interesting that Brady was still here, when Deloran knew perfectly well that Partridge was never coming back. Just as Gerald Parkinson would never return.
It was, Rutledge thought, a fanciful public fa?ade, Deloran keeping his watcher there to report to him and to make it appear that he himself believed Partridge was coming back. Or perhaps Brady had already been put out to pasture, and lived on here because it was his home. Rutledge expected the man would claim that, if he were questioned.
Rutledge sat there, listening to Hamish in his head, for another quarter of an hour. He hadn't seen so much as the corner of a curtain twitch in Brady's cottage. No sign of life that would attract Rutledge's attention and bring him down the hill to knock again.
A crow came to perch on Brady's chimneytop, scolding Dublin as she made her rounds. Mrs. Cathcart, seeing it, went quickly back inside. Quincy called to the cat, then shut his own door. Allen, still in the garden in front of his house, looked up at the sound of Quincy's door closing. And after a few minutes, his defiance turning practical as the first drops of rain danced on the flagstones that made up his garden path, he disappeared as well.
Rutledge came down the hill, feeling the heavy drops strike his shoulders with some force. They were only the forerunners of the storm, but the clouds had thickened to the west and rain would come in earnest in the next ten minutes or so.
Rutledge went up the lane between the cottages and knocked again on Brady's door, calling to him when it remained shut.
There was no answer.
Feeling a stirring of his intuition, Rutledge put his hand on the latch and lifted it.
The door wasn't locked.
He pushed it open, calling, 'Brady, I know you're in there. I want to talk to you.'
The crow flew away, cawing as he went, shattering the silence that sometimes foretells a storm.
Rutledge stood there, waiting. But there was no response from Brady.
He stepped inside, Hamish loud in his ears, and looked at the untidy room, dishes left on a table, books and papers scattered about, a pair of field glasses standing on the shelf under the window. From his vantage point Brady had a sweeping view toward the hill of the White Horse, and also of Partridge's cottage.
For an instant Rutledge wondered if Deloran was mad enough to send Brady to do his dirty work for him at Partridge Fields, then laughed at the thought. A man who drank as Brady was said to do couldn't be trusted with murder…
And then as his eyes adjusted to the storm-induced gloom of the sitting room, he saw Brady staring back at him, as if accusing him of trespassing.
But Brady was not accusing anyone of anything.
A knife protruded from his chest, and both his hands were wrapped around the hilt, frozen there by death.
19
It appeared to Rutledge, looking down at the body, as if Brady had stabbed himself, his grip on the blade almost like iron. Sitting in his chair, forcing the blade into the soft flesh under his rib cage, he appeared to have sliced through an artery.
And on the table beside him there was a sheet of paper. Rutledge could see the writing on it from where he stood, but couldn't manage to read the words.
His guess was that Brady had died sometime in the night, and the letter would express his fear of hanging, or a full confession.
Rutledge looked at the man's narrow face, unshaven chin, thin graying hair. There was depression in the circles under his eyes, indicating sleepless nights and watchful days, and nothing to show for it but a shabby cottage and a reputation for the bottle.
At his back, the rain had begun in earnest, and Rutledge turned to look at the ground behind him. Whatever tracks were there, the rain would quickly obliterate. Yet all he could see from where he stood were his own, and the mixed prints of Hill's men, trampling about as they came to interview Brady.
If the murderer had come up the garden path, he knew he would be safe.
If, that is, murder had been done…
He looked about the room, staying where he was in the open door. A gust of wind came up and whisked the sheet of paper from the table, sending it into the ash-strewn hearth behind it.
What would Hill make of this death? An easy solution to Willing- ham's murder? Whatever path the inspector took, it would give Rut- ledge insight into the man.
He closed the door against the rising wind and walked away. He would have to send the smith again to summon the police.
Slater was reluctant to go.
'Why me? He'll think I've had something to do with it, as sure as the dawn follows the dark.'
'Because I must stay here to keep an eye on the cottage-'
'But no one would go in there. And I could as easily keep watch.'
'Slater. Go on. I don't have my motorcar here, it's at The Smith's Arms. You'll find it there. And hurry.'
'There's no need to hurry. Brady will still be there when Inspector Hill comes.' Slater collected rain gear from the cupboard where he kept his clothes and then paused at the door. 'You're safe enough, getting yourself involved in this. You're a policeman. Who is willing to believe me?'
And he was gone, out into the storm.
Rutledge turned so that he could watch the Brady cottage. The smith's house reeked of wood smoke. He'd never noticed it before, but the dampness outside somehow brought it to the fore.
Slater used fire and hammer for his work. It was evident everywhere Rutledge looked. The hinges of doors and cabinets, the bolts that held them closed, the tongs on the hearth, the scoop of the shovel used to take out the ashes. So many details he'd never had time to notice.
Even the latches of the windows had been replaced by wrought iron, and the candlestick holders on the windowsill were attractively turned. There was a boot scraper by the door, made in the shape of a hedgehog, the bristles of broom on his back looking like the bristles on the hedgehog's back.
Overhead a wrought-iron lamp dropped down out of the ceiling on a finely made chain, the sconces shaped like tulips, the candle in the fold of the petals.
Alone here, he realized how the smith's presence, tall and vibrant, filled the room. Now it seemed larger, outsized, because he wasn't there.
