Legacy of the Dead (10 page)

“Aye,” Hamish remarked, “it touched his pride.” Rutledge thought that that was possible and might account for Oliver’s unflagging determination to find answers to the questions raised about the woman.

“I sent out a request for information on any missing persons, and that’s when I heard about the corpse found up the glen. I’d just come back from viewing it, when Menton contacted me with the information they had on the Gray woman. And fool that I was, I set off to England with the feeling that I was bringing the loose ends tidily together, and got my head bitten off instead!”

He regarded Rutledge for several seconds, as if weighing how his view of the situation had been received. Apparently satisfied, he asked, “Can you tell me what you’re considering as the next step?”

“I don’t know,” Rutledge replied with honesty. “You’ve most certainly done all that was required of you, and more. What has the accused told you?”

“Precious little. Only that she’s committed no crime, and she’s worried for the child. I’m not surprised she feels an attachment there. Women have a natural mothering instinct whether they’ve borne a child of their own or not. It’s to her credit that she’s raised him to the best of her ability. Mr. Elliot has closely questioned the lad, and he appears to know his Bible stories. The boy’s particularly fond of Moses and the bulrushes, it seems. And Joseph’s coat of many colors.” He smiled. “Ealasaid MacCallum, the accused’s aunt, made the lad a bathrobe in multicolored stripes, and he’s very fond of it. We let him keep it. And the little stuffed dog the accused made out of one of her greatuncle’s wool socks. There was no harm in that either. It seems to comfort him. He’s cried more than a lad going on three should. But then, he believes the woman to be his mother. It will take some time to convince him otherwise.”

Rutledge found himself thinking of Morag and the expression on her face when he’d said that the child was not the concern of the law. The words had been spoken in another context, that of dealing with a woman charged with murder. But Morag had taken them to heart and let him know it. She’d always had a warm feeling for young things, children and puppies and kittens—even an orphaned lamb that Ross Trevor, age seven, had insisted on hand-rearing. Rutledge wondered what she would have to say about Oliver’s remarks.
It will take some time to convince him otherwise.
Left unsaid was the corollary: By the time she’s hanged, he’ll not be mourning for her.

Would anyone?

“Why do you think she took on the responsibility of this child in the first place? A single young woman? Surely it would have been simpler to carry him directly to the nearest hospital for foundlings.”

“Who can say? She might have known the father. I’m told that when she wanted to represent herself as a married woman, she took the name of a soldier of her acquaintance, one dead on the Somme. Easy enough to do if he can’t come back and deny he wed her. She might have been jealous of him and wanted the child she couldn’t have by him.”

Changing the subject, Rutledge said, “Is it possible for me to speak to the accused?”

“To what end?” Warily.

“She might—without realizing it—have more to tell us. No one has brought up the name of Eleanor Gray in her hearing?”

“No.” Oliver drained his glass.

“It’s a place to start,” Rutledge told him, his voice reasonable.

“Then finish your pint. I’ll take you there.”

AS HE FOLLOWED
Oliver out to his motorcar, Rutledge had an odd sense of foreboding. It was something he couldn’t explain either logically or emotionally, just a sense of—foreboding. For no reason at all, he remembered the dream he’d had in London, and felt cold. Hamish, reacting to the tension in Rutledge’s mind, was there, a fierce presence that seemed to walk at his shoulder and condemn.

It wasn’t until the door of the cell swung open, and the scent of lavender reached him, that he turned his mind toward the woman he had come here to see. His thoughts in a turmoil, he had nearly forgotten about her as an individual.

“It’s remembering that poor devil in his cell in Dorset— Mowbray,” Hamish offered in explanation.

But was it?

The woman in the room had risen from its single chair and turned to face them. She was pale, circles beneath her eyes, her shoulders braced as if anticipating a blow. The dress she was wearing, a soft gray, enhanced the paleness and made her seem almost invisible against the grayer walls.

Even as Inspector Oliver made the introductions, Rutledge had lost the thread of everything. And Hamish in his mind was railing like the banshees of hell, a cry of grief and torment and repudiation that rent the soul.

Rutledge had seen her picture many times in France. She was the woman Corporal Hamish MacLeod had loved and expected to marry. The woman whose name Hamish had cried in the last instant before the rifles fired and he fell dying in the mud. Fiona. Fiona MacDonald. Who now called herself Fiona MacLeod.

Rutledge was unprepared, defenseless.

How could he have known? How could he have connected a Fiona MacLeod of Duncarrick with the face of a woman he’d thought lived far from here? It was a common enough name in the Highlands—

How could he have known—?

Fiona MacDonald. Who would in truth have been Fiona MacLeod if he hadn’t shot the man she loved.

The woman in the dream he’d had in London . . .

10

SHE WAS LOOKING AT RUTLEDGE, A SADNESS IN HER
face.

Hamish had told him so much about this woman during the war. It was hard to imagine her now as the girl haying on a hot August day in 1914. Or walking through a small Highland village beside a tall man dressed as a soldier, saying good-bye. Hamish had cried out her name over the roar of the guns as the firing squad shot him down. He had wanted to die—but not to lie in France, far from the ancient churchyard where his ancestors rested. He had not wanted to live—but he had wanted to come back to her.

Rutledge’s mind was whirling. Did Fiona MacDonald sometimes feel Hamish’s presence, just as Rutledge had felt Ross Trevor’s in The Lodge outside Edinburgh? It was odd how some people left their stamp so vividly on a time or a place. And she would know, better than most, how profoundly Hamish had loved the Highlands. Had she wept into her pillow because there was no marker where she could take her grief? Or had she walked the hills and felt closer to Hamish than she could have in any churchyard?

This brief, silent, strained confrontation affected Rutledge’s perception of Fiona MacDonald. Of the crime she’d committed—was alleged to have committed. Of the debt he owed to Hamish MacLeod for being the instrument of his corporal’s death. It magnified the burden he’d carried back from the war in the dark reaches of his mind.

He turned around and walked out of the room without a word, and Oliver, startled, was left standing in the doorway, staring uncertainly at the woman Rutledge had come to see.

Rutledge, breathing hard, his heart pounding, his mind a blank, blundered into the corner of a desk and then somehow found his way to the outside door. He flung it open and stepped out into the rain, oblivious.

It was some minutes before he realized that Oliver stood just behind him, sheltered by the doorway, saying something to him—

“I’m sorry—” He kept his back to Oliver, afraid of what could be read in his face. He added lamely, realizing it was expected, “Suddenly I needed air—” He could feel the rain wetting the shoulders of his overcoat, and his hair felt heavy with it, matted flat to his skull. How long had he been standing there—for God’s sake, how long—! He couldn’t remember; he couldn’t think; he couldn’t clear the horror out of his mind.

And Hamish, after that first cry, had gone silent, a black weight on his spirit, like the weight of the dead.

Rutledge forced himself to swallow the sour taste in his throat, and after another minute turned to Oliver. “I’m sorry,” he said again. And then, slowly taking a grip on his emotions, “I—It must have been something I ate—”

“I’ve never seen a man turn so white. I thought you’d seen a ghost.”

“No . . .” Fiona MacDonald was no ghost.

What am I going to do?
he asked himself silently
. I must
call Bowles, tell him I want to be relieved—

But that was addressing his own needs. What of hers?

What, in God’s name, of hers?

What if he failed her and she hanged? He’d have no choice but to kill himself: he couldn’t add that burden to the other guilt he carried. It would be a bitter defeat, after all he’d striven to recover of his own past, to fall prey to Hamish’s . . .

It wouldn’t be a German pistol. It would be his own.

Oliver was asking him something. About going back to the hotel? A glass of water? He couldn’t remember.

“No, I’ll be fine—”

“Then come in out of this rain, man! I’m getting wet through, standing here!” The door slammed shut.

Rutledge turned, opened it again, and walked back into the front room of the police station. He said, “I’m all right.”

“You don’t look it. Here, sit down.”

Rutledge took the chair shoved his way and tried to sit, but his muscles seemed taut and stiff, and he had to force them to obey his command. Oliver thrust a glass of water into his hand. Rutledge made a pretense of swallowing it, afraid he’d choke, making a worse fool of himself, his throat too tight to get it down.

And slowly his wits seemed to come back to him. The room took shape, the four walls painted an ugly brown, the desks and chairs older than he was, the single lamp in the ceiling casting glaring shadows over everything. Oliver’s face, expectant and watchful, waited for him to make a decision.

Rutledge took a breath. “All right. Let’s return to the cell.” In the back of his head, Hamish was a thunderous roar, and the ache that was swelling in its wake was nearly blinding.

“You’re sure? Frankly, I’ve no wish to have you casting up accounts all over my floors!”

Rutledge came close to laughing, a wild reaction to his own tension. Nausea was the least of his troubles. “I won’t do that.”

He followed Oliver down the passage that led to what Rutledge saw now must have been a kitchen in its day: a large room with no furnishings except for a narrow cot, a chair, and four bare walls. The chimney that once stood against one of them was closed off, the iron plate that had lain on the floor before the hearth now turned up and bolted over the opening. Behind a screen were the chamber pot and a table for water and towels. The room was cold, and Fiona MacDonald had pulled a shawl around her shoulders.

Her own face was white as Oliver made some apology for their abrupt departure some ten minutes earlier. Rutledge realized that she must be expecting some news of her trial. Or—of her child. The tenseness in her shoulders betrayed her as she waited for Rutledge to speak.

“Inspector Rutledge has come from London to look into the identity of bones discovered up the mountainside in Glencoe. He has questions he wishes to put to you.”

“Yes, very well,” she said, her voice soft, hardly more than a whisper.

Rutledge had no idea what he had expected to learn. His mind was a blank wall of nothing. He found himself looking away from her, not wanting to meet her eyes. But he managed to speak to her, feeling his way. “You’ve been asked before, Miss MacDonald—but can you give us any information that might help us find the child’s real mother? Or failing that, if she’s dead, her family? Surely you must be concerned for his well-being, and he’d be far happier with a grandmother or an aunt than in a foster home.”

“Will he?” she asked. “I’ve killed no one. I expect to return to my home and to my child.” Her voice was resolute, but there was fear in her eyes.

“If he’s not your child,” Rutledge said gently, “I doubt you’ll be allowed to keep him, even if you’re found not guilty. A young woman having to make her own way, with no husband or family of her own, could be considered unfit to make a suitable home.”

“Then I’ll marry,” she said with resignation. “I’ll make a home, give him a father!”

“You have no claim upon the boy. The law has its own views on the care of orphans.” He tried to keep his voice quiet, without condemnation.

Fiona bit her lip. “I don’t believe you!”

“Everything has changed, you see. When you first came to Duncarrick, you were thought to be a married woman, a widow. No one had any reason to question your right to the child. Now there is every reason.”

“No, I’m the only mother he’s
known—
!”

Changing his approach, Rutledge asked, “Did you write that letter to Mr. Elliot? The anonymous one mailed from Glasgow?”

Oliver stirred behind him. He hadn’t thought to ask that.

But the shock in Fiona MacDonald’s face answered any doubts Rutledge might have had.

“No!” There was passion in her voice, not mere certainty. Why? Then she added, as if to cover it, “The letter damned me.”

“You might have realized that those notes were bearing fruit. You might have wanted to protect yourself.”

“Then surely I’d have gone about it with more wisdom! I—I can’t—this letter is something I dream about in the night. It frightens me. I have been shown it and cannot recognize the handwriting. I have asked Mr. Elliot if he knew who had sent it, and he claims he doesn’t. But he tells me to throw myself on the mercy of the courts and save my immortal soul. I’ve asked the police if they’ve discovered the sender, and they tell me they don’t need to know who it is. But surely the author matters to them as much as it matters to
me
!”

“Do you suppose Eleanor Gray might have written it? With the best of intentions, unaware of the use to which it might be put?”

The name failed to register. “Why should a stranger defend me? I don’t know any Grays. Certainly not an Eleanor Gray. Ask her, not me.”

He hesitated. His head was aching so severely, he could hardly breathe, much less think clearly. “There’s very good reason for us to believe that Eleanor Gray gave birth to the child you have been raising and called your son.”

There was a flicker of something across her face, gone so quickly that Rutledge wasn’t sure he’d seen it. Humor? No, it was something else.

“What do you want from me? Lies? I don’t
know
this woman.”

“Perhaps you didn’t know her name. Was her death an accident? Or an illness—the result of childbirth?”

She smiled sadly. “If this Eleanor Gray is dead, how could she have written to Mr. Elliot or anyone else?”

Touché! “The Grays have money. They are able to give the boy far more than you ever can. It would be possible, I think, for arrangements to be made to visit him. You’d not lose touch entirely. In a crowded asylum for orphans he won’t receive the love and attention he needs. Surely that weighs with you?”

“It weighs with me, Inspector,” she said tiredly, “but not enough to lie to you. I don’t know Eleanor Gray. I know nothing about when or how she might have died, and I can’t tell you if she gave birth to a child. There is nothing I can do for her family except to tell the truth. And I have.” There was disappointment in her tone. “Is that what you wanted—what brought you here? The need of a comforting story to take to a grieving woman? I also grieve, and no one will tell me about my son. Whether he’s well or ill, whether he remembers me or has been made to forget me.” Her face nearly crumpled, but she fought for and won composure. He could see the tears in her eyes.

“He’s well,” he answered, ignoring the smothered protest behind him. She had a right to know. She might be a murderess—

The thought stopped him cold.

RUTLEDGE COULDN’T REMEMBER
returning to the hotel and picking up the key to his room.

The woman at the desk, true to her word, had chosen well. Cream walls and white lace curtains were set off by the sea blue of the bedding, the patterned carpet, and the chintz-covered chairs. Stiff silk flowers stood in a blue-and-cream bowl, and there was a blue-trimmed cream shade over the single lamp on the corner table. He hardly noticed. But there was a pair of windows looking down on the square, where rain-wet pavement glistened and shop lights cast gaily colored splotches across the puddles.

He lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to remember what he had said to Fiona MacDonald—and how she had answered him. His mind refused to give him what he wanted, and in the background, Hamish was such a force that the voice in his head seemed to scream louder than the sounds of people or vehicles outside or the nearby church clock sounding the hours one by one.

THE NEXT MORNING,
when Rutledge arrived at the police station, Constable Pringle was there alone. A ruddy man with sandy hair and the freckles that matched. He stood and formally introduced himself as Rutledge gave his name.

“Inspector Oliver isn’t in—”

“I’ve only come for five minutes. Oliver and I interviewed the prisoner yesterday. I have a question or two that arose while I was reading over my notes.”

“I shouldn’t leave my desk,” the constable said, uncertain.

“No, that’s all right. I can find my own way.”

Pringle went to a cupboard and took down a ring of keys. “This one.” He handed Rutledge the lot, singling out a heavy one in the middle.

“Thank you.”

With Hamish ominously silent, like a dark cloud foretelling a storm, Rutledge walked down the passage to the room where Fiona MacDonald was kept. A plump woman in a blue uniform was scrubbing the last few feet of the passage, her face red with effort. She moved aside as Rutledge passed and went back to her task as he set the key in the lock.

He found that his hands were shaking.

Opening the door, he saw that Fiona had risen to meet him, the wary expression on her face changing to surprise. “Inspector,” she said carefully.

He closed the door to give them some privacy.

“Last evening—” he began, and then dropped the pretense that he had been going over his notes. He said instead, “I’ve come to clarify a point or two. Do you wish to have your barrister summoned?”

“I’m more afraid of Mr. Armstrong than of you,” she answered. “The way he stares at me, I feel . . . unclean. He despises women, I think. We are weak vessels in his sight, better left uncreated.” She tried to smile and failed.

There was a brief silence. She studied him, and he wondered what she saw in his face. But he didn’t want to know.

“Did you ask for this case?” The words seemed drawn from her against her will.

“No. I was summoned to deal with the missing Gray woman. Until I came through that door—” He stopped. Something had altered in her face. A tightness, as if to protect herself from hurt. Had she expected, when he arrived with Oliver the previous night and she recognized his name, that he had come to help her? That somehow he had learned she was charged with murder and felt a duty to look into the matter?