sheets. I never had to work this hard when Mr. Quarles was alive. There was only his rooms and the gatehouse. And he wasn't here all that much. Now I'm told to help out generally. Earn my keep. He'd promised me the gatehouse. But they won't let me have it. I know they won't. And I'm at my wits' end for knowing what I'm to do.'
Indeed, she looked tired and ill.
'If Mr. Quarles promised to look after you, he will have done. And there is no one who can change what he decided to give you.'
She laughed, a dry, hard sound that seemed to carry all her pain with it.
'I'll believe it when I see it.'
'Do you fear this family so much?'
She looked surprised. 'Fear them? No, of course not. It's just that I have come to trust Mr. Quarles, and he was young-I thought the years ahead would be safe, and I've never been truly safe before, not in my whole life. You don't know what that's like. And there's nothing left now.'
He did understand. Whatever she'd suffered before coming to Hallowfields, she'd been given a taste of a different life. Now she believed that it was being stripped from her, and she couldn't find the strength to cope alone.
Quarles had used her to keep his secrets, and she still did. The bequest would serve to seal her lips for the remainder of her life. It was a large sum, unexpectedly large for a servant. But it would buy silence. That was what it had been designed to do.
There was nothing more Rutledge could learn from her. Not now, when her worries went beyond catching a murderer. But he asked one last question.
'You knew Mr. Quarles better than most of the staff. People tell me he's vicious, he's kind, he's callous, he's cruel, he's respected in London and hated in Cambury-'
'He came from a hard world. He'd had to make his way where he was treated like the working-class man he was, expected to touch his cap to his betters, step out of their way, and do what he was told. Until you've known that, you don't know what it's like. He knew what they thought about him, what was said behind his back. But he was blessed with a good mind, and he prospered, in spite of the past. And he was proud of that. To keep it, he told me he'd had to fight from the day he left Yorkshire, and he'd had to use whatever tools came to hand, not being born with them to start with. Not six months ago, he said to me, 'There's no one to save the likes of you and me, Betty. Except ourselves. You remember that, and you'll do fine.' '
But she hadn't gained strength from the man; she'd used his instead.
Rutledge thanked her and left her to the folding of the heavy sheets, her back bent to the labor, her eyes concentrating on keeping the folds sharp and smooth. Sprinkling lavender among the folds, her rough hands gentle, she looked into a stark future and found it frightening.
R
utledge went back to the gatehouse and walked through the wood to the tithe barn, nodding to the constable on duty as he opened the door and went inside.
It was different in the daylight. Empty, a smoky light spilling in from the door, the rafters ghostly shapes over his head. The barn was as long and as tall as he remembered, and he could almost see Harold Quarles above him, the outspread arms, the white-feathered wings.
'It's no' something you forget,' Hamish said quietly, but his voice seemed to echo in the vastness.
Rutledge walked the length of the barn and back again.
Why go to the trouble to put Quarles in that abominable harness and lift him to the rafters? To hide the body until someone thought to look for him here, not in Cambury, where he'd gone to dine? To make a mockery of the man who seemed to care so little for the feelings of others? Or to show the world that even Harold Quarles was vulnerable?
If Mrs. Quarles had killed her husband, would she have done this? Not, he thought, if she cared for her son. Murder Quarles, yes, ridding herself of him without the shame of a divorce. Or the truth coming out in a courtroom. But making a spectacle of his death? Rutledge had come to understand her pride, and now he could see that she had nothing to gain by such a step.
Hamish said, 'Yon organist might have wanted to make a spectacle o' him.'
Rutledge could readily believe that.
Would Inspector Padgett try to cover up Brunswick's guilt? Because the man seemed to know more about the inspector than was good for him. An interesting possibility. Padgett hadn't been eager to interview the man.
Rutledge walked the length of the barn again, trying to feel something here, to sense an angry mood or a cold hatred. But the barn had nothing to say to him. The silence of the past lay heavily around him, smothering the present. Harold Quarles was only a fragment of this great barn's history, and although his end here was appalling, it would be forgotten long before the roof fell in here and the rafters that had held the angel up cracked with age.
A sound behind him made him whirl, but there was nothing to be seen. He stood there, without moving, listening with such intensity that he heard the sound again.
A mouse moved out of the shelter of one of the columns that supported the roof, whiskers twitching as his dark, unfathomable eyes examined the two-legged intruder. He sat up on his hind legs and waited for Rutledge to make the first move. But when the man from London stood his ground without a threatening sound or motion, the mouse ran lightly to the wall of the barn and disappeared into the shadows.
Had he been here when a murderer had brought Harold Quarles into the barn and went to take the apparatus out of its box? What had he seen?
Hamish said, 'It was no' a stranger.'
And that was the key to this barn. In the mist that night a stranger would have had trouble seeing it at all, if he hadn't known it was here. Rutledge himself hadn't until he was almost on it. And even if the killer had wanted to make certain the body wasn't found straightaway, the cottage was closer than the barn. In here, in the darkness- even with a torch-it would have taken time to pull the ropes and pulleys out of their chest and lay them out, when Quarles could just as well have been stowed behind one of the trestle tables or a section of the stable roof. No matter how much had been written about the Christmas pageant, understanding the mechanism-even if someone knew it was there-was another matter.
Hamish said, 'Better to put the body in yon chest.'
'Exactly.' He'd spoke aloud, and the constable at the door peered in. Rutledge said, 'Sorry. Bad habit, talking to myself.'
The man grinned and shut the door again.
Whatever Padgett might want him to believe, Rutledge now had evidence of a sort that the murderer must be here, in Cambury.
The journey to London to spike Mickelson's guns had probably been an act of vanity, nothing more.
15
Rutledge found Padgett in the police station completing his report on the housebreaking. Even before he reached the office, he could hear the ragged tap of typewriter keys and an occasional grunt as something went wrong.
Padgett looked up, his ill temper aggravated by the interruption.
Rutledge said, not waiting for Padgett's good humor to return, 'You wouldn't accompany me when I went to see Brunswick. It would have been wise if you had. He believes you had something to do with Harold Quarles's death. He told me to ask you why you hated the man.'
Padgett's reaction was explosive. He swore roundly, his face red with anger.
'While you were exchanging confidences, did he tell you that at the time I suspected him of drowning his wife? And I've yet to be satisfied that her death was a suicide. There's no love lost between us.'
'He believes she was Quarles's lover, and that the child she might have been carrying at the time of her death wasn't her husband's. Reason enough for murder.'
