They crossed the lane to the cottage and went in.
Nothing had changed since Rutledge had been there alone. But this time he kept an eye open for the papers that Miss Chandler had typed, while Hill was poking about looking for a body.
Neither of them had any success.
'Ye've been here before,' Hamish reminded Rutledge. 'And you found nothing then.'
'I didn't know about the papers.'
'Aye, that's true. But if ye'd seen them, ye'd ha' taken note. They werena' here.'
Hill sat down by the desk and said with some heat, 'I'd have felt better if he'd been here, dead. Nothing against Mr. Partridge, but it would have solved my problem for me. Now that note of Brady's looks damned suspicious.'
Rutledge debated telling him about the body in Yorkshire, but held off. Hamish, looking ahead, told him in no uncertain terms that it was unwise.
All the same, he decided to wait until he was sure how the crimes were related.
'I don't know that Partridge is connected to this business. On the other hand, my presence here might have set off something we haven't got to the bottom of yet. The killings began after I identified myself as a policeman. Not before.'
'Nonsense. A Scotland Yard inspector doesn't go about triggering murders. I haven't time for foolishness.' He paused. 'The doctor tells me that Brady could have killed himself, right enough. The way the old Romans used to fall on their swords. The chair was directly behind him, and the force of the blow drove him into it. Why would Quincy want to put that in doubt?'
Hill got up from the desk and moved restlessly about the sitting room. Rutledge remembered the crumpled beginning of a letter in the basket by the desk and went to look at it again.
But it wasn't there now. Of small importance-yet it told him that someone else had been through the house since he had been here.
Rutledge said, 'I spoke to Quincy for an hour, more or less, last night. Coincidence? Or fear?'
They moved on to the shed where the motorcar was kept and Hill did a cursory search of the vehicle. But Rutledge, with a little better light now, looked at the tires and the boot, then thoroughly inspected the interior.
It gave up no more secrets to him than it had to Inspector Hill, but as he ran his hand over the rear seat, something was brushed to the floor of the motorcar. It was so small he had trouble finding where it had got to, but after a moment, his fingers finally retrieved it.
The tab from a 1917 small box respirator.
He could see, vividly, the slit in the mask that Parkinson had been wearing when he was found in the cloisters of Fountains Abbey. Just where this tab should have been.
It had caught on something and torn off.
Rutledge straightened up. Parkinson had been in this motorcar, along with the mask. And no one noticed the tab was missing as it was slipped over a dead man's face.
He would have given any odds that Parkinson had traveled to his death in this motorcar, and someone had seen to it that it was quietly returned to the shed where it belonged, when the journey was finished. In some ways, a motorcar was harder to hide than a body. It could be traced. Better to leave the impression that Parkinson had set out without it.
And that confirmed that Parkinson's death was deliberate, carefully planned and executed.
Leaving Hill to cope with his own case, Rutledge drove to Wiltshire, to the house called Pockets where Rebecca Parkinson lived.
She was there, and he had to bang on the door for nearly ten minutes before she finally opened it to him.
Something in his face must have alerted her, for the first words out of her mouth were, 'I've told you. I've had nothing to do with my father for the past two years or more. It's useless, coming here. He put his work before his family, and now his family no longer cares. His sacrifice was in vain. The army didn't want him either.'
'How do you know that? '
'For weeks before my mother died, he was obsessed, secretive, doing much of his work at night, making endless calculations. He hardly ate or slept. It was as if he were trying to convince himself of something-as if he'd lost his way but couldn't bring himself to admit it. In any other man I'd have said he was on the verge of a breakdown. In his case, I think it was pride crashing. He wasn't as clever as he thought he was, and he was about to be found out.'
'That's a rather harsh judgment.'
'Is it? He resigned, didn't he? If he'd made a brilliant success of his work, do you think he'd have done that? Even in contrition over my mother's death? And the man in charge of the laboratory let him go. They'd have offered him a leave of absence, if he was so indispensable to them. The war wasn't over in the spring of 1918, and we weren't certain of winning.'
'You don't know what it was he was working on?'
'I wasn't interested in his work. It had brought nothing but grief to us, and I hated it as much as I came to hate him. It took me a long time to reach indifference. But I have now.'
He thought she hadn't. She was still passionate about her father and anything to do with him. The hate showed in her anger at the man.
Rutledge stood there, letting her feel the silence, willing her to betray herself.
As if to fill it before she couldn't stand it any longer, she said, 'When my mother died, I hated him so much all I could think of was making him feel pain in a way he couldn't ignore. If he'd still been using his laboratory, I'd have burned it to the ground, and wouldn't have cared if he was there inside. When she asked that her ashes be scattered in the gardens she loved so much, I strewed them myself. I was half mad too, I think. I wanted to hurt him and I wound up hurting myself. Do you know what someone's ashes feel like? Do you know how they blow on the wind, and sometimes into your face or cling to your fingers in spite of everything? A gray powder, that was all that was left of my mother. And I diminished it by letting it soak into the damp ground, so that the house was uninhabitable. And now I'm afraid to go there because I'm afraid I'll see her ghost. I think, at the end, he did see her. That's why he couldn't stay there.'
'What will happen to the house?'
'I don't know. I can't sell it-not after what I did. I can't live there. I can't let it go to wrack and ruin. I can't have brambles and weeds on my mother's grave. He ruined all our lives, and I don't really care what's become of him.'
She turned her back to him, and he heard the catch in her voice when she added, 'There's nothing I want in that wretched cottage where he went to live. As far as I'm concerned, you can burn it to the ground.'
And then she was inside, on the point of shutting her door.
He said, 'The motorcar as well?'
Her voice was weary when she finally answered. 'Let them sell it. I have no need for it.'
'Miss Parkinson. I shall have to speak to your sister. There's no way around it.'
'Did she tell you where she lived? At Road's End, a house not very different from mine. It's not far from Porton Down. Ironic, isn't it? A friend offered it to her for a small rent, and she was upset with me, about the ashes. I can't blame her for not wanting to live with me.' Rebecca Parkinson laughed harshly. 'That house at Partridge Fields is worth a great deal of money. But the two of us have almost nothing to our names. A small inheritance from Mother, that's it. And I wouldn't touch my father's money if he offered it. If I thought it would solve anything I'd shoot myself. But it won't. Don't come back here again.'
And she was gone.
He stood there for a moment longer, staring at the closed door. If one of the sisters killed Gerald Parkinson, which was it?
He thought that Rebecca had the stronger sense of abandonment and might in a fit of anger try to assuage it by killing her father. But surely in the heat of the moment, not two years later. Unless there was something he didn't know, some factor in their relationship that went so deep it had taken time to face. When she had, the only solution might have been murder.
And yet, Sarah, the weaker of the two, might have found she couldn't live with her own pain and grief any longer and made the choice between killing herself, as her mother had done, or killing her father.
