by Charles Todd
It was a heartfelt appeal, and very near to insubordination. The constable stood there, young and determined, knowing that he’d placed his job in jeopardy by questioning the decisions of his superiors in Duncarrick, but believing strongly enough in what he saw as duty to put his trust in a stranger. There were a number of people at the Yard who would have had McKinstry up on charges. A constable was not allowed opinions.
But his appeal was wasted on Rutledge, who knew only the English side of the investigation. “I haven’t any idea what you’re talking about,” he said flatly. “So far London hasn’t told me anything. I came north to speak to Lady Maude Gray, and I have had no orders to continue to Duncarrick.” As Morag set a plate of eggs before him, he went on, “For God’s sake, man, sit down and eat some breakfast, so that I can enjoy mine!”
McKinstry said, flushing, “I’ve had mine, sir, if it’s all the same to you!”
“Then sit down and drink a cup of tea. And start at the beginning.”
The constable pulled out a chair and glanced at Morag. She brought him a fresh cup and set it before him without a word. She didn’t need words to convey the message that he had overstepped his bounds. He could read it clearly in her face.
Hamish, moved to comment, said, “He believes what he’s come to say.”
McKinstry poured himself a cup of tea, added milk and sugar like a condemned man determined to show courage eating his last meal, and then, without tasting it, began rather stiffly. “There’s a woman in my district. A good woman—but she’s been the subject of anonymous letters. Not mailed, you understand, just stuck in the corner of a door or left pinned to a clothesline, wherever they’d be noticed first thing in the morning.”
“All right, anonymous. What did they say? There’s usually a theme.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, sir, they called her a whore. And as word spread, the rumors followed. No one confronted her with the accusations. That’s what I find hardest to accept. No one gave her a chance to explain. Instead they turned their backs on her. It appeared she’d lied to people, you see, and they saw it as a betrayal of trust.” He stopped, frowning. “At least that’s what they must have told themselves to excuse what they were doing. I can’t see any other explanation. Then, to make matters worse, it came to light just after the letters began that she might have murdered the mother of a child she’d claimed was her own. She was taken up on that charge. Inspector Oliver will tell you the case against her, and about the bones. My concern is that the jury will hang her if they can, because it’s human nature to want to believe you can’t be fooled for long.”
McKinstry recollected his tea, sipped it, and scalded his tongue. Then he said, desperate to make himself understood, “It reminds me of the days when people believed in witches. They sent innocent men and women to the stake or drowned them, in a mad effort to prove that witchcraft existed. A kind of hysteria that took the place of reason. Is that what’s happening here? I don’t know why I’m not infected by it myself—” But he did know, and couldn’t bring himself to say it: he was in love with Fiona and saw her as a victim, not a killer. It was, perhaps, his own hysteria. . . . The thought frightened him suddenly.
“You were one of the investigating officers? Then you should know how sound the case is against her,” Rutledge answered. “Does she have a good barrister? From what you’re telling me, she needs one.”
“Yes, she does—though I don’t care for him myself. I’ve tried again and again to get to the bottom of this business, because I don’t think anyone else has. We may have evidence that points in her direction, but is there more that points away from her? And I don’t know how to go about searching for that properly. I don’t even know where to begin. We don’t have much in the way of crime in Duncarrick.”
Rutledge said, “But that’s what you’re trained to do. What’s difficult about it?”
McKinstry ran a finger through sugar that in his nervousness he’d spilled beside his teacup. “I can find a man wanted for robbery, I can stop a man from beating his wife, I can tell you who’s the likely culprit when the MacGregors’ house is broken into, and I can look at the old man out in the bothy by the stream and judge if he’s killed himself somebody else’s fat lamb and cooked it. That’s work I know. This isn’t. It’s whispers and gossip spread in passing, and nobody knows by whom. That’s what sits ill with me, the way it began. It’s a word dropped here, a look there, a shrug—and I can’t find out who’s behind it. Inspector Oliver claims it doesn’t matter, that we’ve done our work, and proved the fact of murder well enough for it to come to trial now. But to me it seems to be important to find out how and where the whole business began. The truth is, it appears to be having a life of its own! Like a ghost running about and whispering in people’s ears. That’s fanciful, too, but I can’t explain it any better.”
Fanciful or not, it evoked a clear image in Rutledge’s mind.
“Rumor,” Rutledge agreed, “can be deadly. Especially if people are prepared to believe it. But surely if there was no more to it than gossip, the fiscal and the Chief Constable would never have allowed the matter to come to trial!”
McKinstry shook his head mournfully. “I’ve lain awake nights asking myself that. I can’t see the Chief Constable being taken in, he’s not a gullible man. What does he know that makes him so certain there’s a case?”
McKinstry gave the matter some thought. “Anonymous letters are a coward’s tool. Keep that in mind. And find out who bears a secret grudge against this young woman. It might not be the kind of thing you or I would think to hold against her. It will be something petty. Personal, certainly. And it needn’t be a sin of commission. Omission will do just as well.”
“The worst complainer in Duncarrick is a neighbor of hers. An ill-tempered man, but he’s not likely to go about writing anonymous letters. He’s more the sort to use his fists than hide what he feels.”
“Could he have taken a fancy to her—and been rebuffed? It may be that he believed she was giving favors to others and refusing him.”
There was a comical expression on McKinstry’s face. “Hugh Oliphant in the role of rejected lover? He’s over seventy! His wife watches him like a cat at a mousehole, but he’d choose a pint over a pretty face any day!”
“Well, then, his wife. Or any other woman who might have suspected her husband of taking too great a personal interest in the accused.”
“There’s Molly Braddock. Well, Molly Sinclair, that was. Tommy Braddock’s good with his hands, he’d done the odd job for the accused. Fixed a window sash when the weight rope broke, and cleaned the chimney when birds nested in it last spring. He’s a happy-go-lucky man, the world’s his best friend. But Molly is possessive.” McKinstry shook his head. “I can give you names, that’s easy enough. What I can’t do is picture in my mind any of these people sitting down, day after day, to write such wicked nonsense.”
Hamish said, “He’s a conscientious policeman, aye, and a good man who doesna’ ken hate.”
Rutledge agreed. He buttered the last of the scones. “Let’s take another direction, then,” he said aloud. “Were the letters Biblical in tone?”
“Yes, sir! How did you guess?”
“It isn’t uncommon for anonymous letter writers to clothe their acts in Scripture. ‘It’s God chastising you, not me! His judgment of you, not mine.’ ”
McKinstry sighed. “That would fit half the town. We’re a dour lot eager to spy sin around any corner. Aye, and find it as well.”
“You do realize,” Rutledge said, studying the young man, “that these letters may have had nothing to do with the crime she’s accused of. It may simply be that the letters drew attention to facts no one had considered until then. And once the police took notice, the truth came out.”
“No, sir,” McKinstry said, torn between defending his own beliefs and possibly alienating the man from London he’d pinned his hopes on.“I can’t accept that without better evidence. Sometimes”—he hesitated
, glancing at Morag—“sometimes there’s such a fever pitch of belief in guilt that nobody looks for the fallacies in the evidence. I’m saying that because of the letters, Duncarrick was eager to see her blamed. That the letters set the stage for all that followed.”
It was easy to shape evidence to fit a theory. . . .
“Yes, I understand,” Rutledge answered patiently. “And that’s the purpose of a trial—to weigh the evidence openly and fairly.”
Hamish grunted, as if challenging Rutledge’s words.
“If the jury listens,” McKinstry argued. “Then it works. But what if the jury doesn’t want to hear anything to the contrary because they’ve made up their minds? That’s what I fear, sir, because I do know my people. And I’m ashamed to say I have no faith in a jury when the mind’s shut.” He took a deep breath. “And what’s to become of the child? There’s the other worry. As far as I know, it has no father.” He looked out the window, not at Rutledge. “She’s a good woman. She’s a good mother. If she says the babe is hers, I want to believe it. But the police have said the contrary, that she killed the mother and took it, then told her aunt and the rest of the world that it was hers.”
“The child isn’t the law’s responsibility,” Rutledge replied, thinking of Lady Maude Gray. Would she claim it if there was any possibility that the child was her daughter’s? Even though she refused to believe her daughter was dead? Stranger things had happened. He felt Morag’s eyes on him and turned. The old woman shook her head, as if denying that she hadn’t cared for his answer, but he knew she had been disappointed in it. So had Hamish.
His mind busy with Lady Maude, Rutledge said, “How did Oliver connect this young woman living in Duncarrick with a corpse found up in Glencoe? There’s the problem of distance, if nothing else!”
McKinstry, much more comfortable with a straightforward report than his own feelings, lost some of his intensity. “Once it was clear the boy couldn’t be hers, we went looking for the child’s mother. We sent queries as far as Glasgow and Edinburgh, and across the border into England. The lad’s going on three, we didn’t expect it to be easy. It was Inspector Oliver’s belief that we ought to search where the accused had come from, before coming to live in Duncarrick. That eventually led us to the glen. Human remains had been found there just last year, a woman’s bones. And they hadn’t been identified.” He stopped, looked at his teacup, then met Rutledge’s eyes. “The Glencoe police were nearly certain that she hadn’t been there in March of 1916, when they’d scoured the glen searching for an old shepherd who’d gone off his head and disappeared. And the locals claim it must have been late summer or early autumn, as anybody moving sheep in the spring would have noticed the corbies collecting there. We sent around a description, adding what we suspected in Duncarrick to what little the Glencoe police had in their files. The next thing we knew, an inspector in Menton contacted us for more information. Duncarrick has eaten up the news, taking it as fact. And Inspector Oliver was not disposed to question the connection—” He stopped, suddenly uncomfortable.
Rutledge didn’t press. After a moment, McKinstry went on.
“At any rate, the three jurisdictions accepted the possibility that the missing Eleanor Gray was the mother of the boy in Duncarrick and had died in suspicious circumstances in Glencoe. There’s similarity in height, for one thing, and the timing fits. If she’d quarreled with her mother in the spring, and then carried a child to term, she’d have been delivered in late summer. And that’s when the lad was born. What’s more, none of the other inquiries Inspector Oliver received matched nearly as well.” He drew a deep breath. Even he, convinced as he was that Fiona was innocent, saw that there was a logic about the evidence that was inescapable.
Rutledge said, “Even if I’m assigned to the case, I can’t see what I could accomplish that you haven’t.” And it was clear that McKinstry himself was not objective. Rutledge found himself wondering what his relationship was—had been—with the accused.
“Show me,” McKinstry pleaded, “how to prove she’s harmed no one. How to stop the whispers before this case comes to a trial. I’d not like to think my failure has sent her to the gallows. But it’s going to happen. I’m helpless to prevent it.”
WHEN MCKINSTRY HAD gone, Rutledge turned to Morag. “He shouldn’t have come. It was wrong.”
He could hear Trevor running lightly down the stairs, opening the door, whistling for the dogs. The weekend had given his godfather a new energy.
“What harm did it do?” She reached for the frying pan. “Alistair’s an honest lad with a wish to do what’s right. Should I have sent him away without a hearing? As if I couldn’t trust you to be just?”
“No. But it isn’t my case, you see. It’s Inspector Oliver’s. And McKinstry doesn’t know me. I could have made trouble for him, reported him for going over the head of his superior. Or put him in jeopardy for trying to influence my actions.” Bowles would have done so, for one. Another thought occurred to him. “Could the child be his?”
“He was in France. And he does know you. He met you at an aid station behind the front lines. He’d been shot in the leg. He said you were one of the bravest men he’d ever met. You’d just brought in three men who’d been gassed and left for dead near a German outpost. Somehow you found them and got them out. Alistair was glad to shake your hand.”
Trevor was striding down the passage, speaking to his dogs. The big kitchen suddenly seemed small, close, and overheated. Hamish, alive in his mind, was as loud as a voice in the room. Rutledge could barely remember that day at the aid station, and certainly not the face of the soldier lying on a stretcher close by who had shaken his hand. As the doctors cleaned a cut on his wrist, he’d stood there grimly, unaware of pain. It had happened not too long after Hamish’s death, and Rutledge had purposely taken risks, wanting to die. It hadn’t been courage, it had been desperation—anything to silence the voice in his head. Even death.
Morag was talking, but her words failed to register. Trevor was greeting him, and the dogs frisked noisily about his feet.
Trevor said, “Ian, are you all right?”
Rutledge shook his head to clear it. “Yes, I’m fine. Morag was telling me about a relation of hers. It brought back some memories, that’s all.” To Morag he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t seem to place him.”
But afterward, as he walked down to a stream with Trevor, talking about his work, he found himself thinking again about McKinstry. What the young policeman had wanted from him was some semblance of hope. The promise that if he took over the case, he’d be objective, not swept up in the conclusions already drawn.
It didn’t matter. There was no reason for him to be involved. He’d finished his business with Lady Maude, and the rest of the case would be in the hands of the courts. He didn’t want to stay in Scotland.
ON MONDAY MORNING, Rutledge put in a telephone call to London from David Trevor’s study.
Bowles, summoned to the telephone, answered brusquely, “Rutledge, is that you?”
“Yes.” He quickly summarized his conversation with Lady Maude and ended with his own view. “It’s hard to say. In my opinion, she doesn’t know where her daughter is presently, and it’s quite possible that she’s at one of the teaching hospitals—”
“I’ve already had the report on that. There’s no Eleanor Gray wanting to become a doctor.”
“She might have used another name—”
“Yes, yes, I’m aware of that, but there’s no one who matches the physical description you gave Sergeant Owens. I’d say at a guess that whatever the quarrel was about, it was not medicine that the young woman left home for. She might not have told her mother the truth.” There was a pause. “One thing we did learn. She was a suffragette. Independent young miss, arrested a number of times for chaining herself to fences and making herself a public nuisance in whatever fashion got her the most notice. A young woman likely to find herself in trouble of one kind or another, I’d say. Sergeant Gibson remembere
d her from before the war, and he says she hasn’t been in trouble with the police for some years now. Could mean she’d learned her lesson. Or that she is dead.”
Bowles took a long breath, indicating a change of subject.
“We’ve had a call from Lady Maude. You’re to go to Scotland and find out what you can about this corpse. She’s insisting that you take over the case, and her family’s not to be dragged into it, no speculation about her daughter, public or private, until you are absolutely certain that the corpse is Eleanor Gray’s. What the hell did you say to her?”
7
BY TEN O’CLOCK THAT MORNING, RUTLEDGE HAD ASKED directions from Trevor, accepted the generous packet of sandwiches that Morag had put up for him, and turned south and west toward Jedburgh and Tweedesdale. It was a day of mixed sun and clouds, with a brief shower or two that raised the damp smell of earth. Long shadows were cast across the countryside when the sun came out, vanishing and reappearing like magic as the clouds shifted across the sky. There always seemed to be more sky in Scotland than in England, a different sky. Vast and empty, as if God weren’t at home.
He had come to Scotland for a weekend owed to his godfather, and now duty was keeping him here. He felt misgivings, his mind unsettled, the peace he’d found at Hadrian’s Wall worn off. And Hamish, in his accustomed place behind the driver’s shoulder, was as disturbed by the turn of events as Rutledge himself. He could hear the voice as clearly as if there were a passenger. Blaming—stubbornly refusing to accept the change in plans.
“And I’ll no’ go to the glen again—”
Rutledge tried to shut him out and then fell prey to another kind of haunting, awakened grief.
For the motorcar also carried the “ghost” of Ross Trevor. Rutledge had felt the dead man’s presence so strongly at The Lodge. In France he had arrived at an acceptance of Ross’s death, but in the house where Ross had spent every summer for twenty-five years or more, it seemed that he must surely be somewhere just out of sight—down the passage—upstairs in his room—out riding and expected soon—talking to Morag in the kitchen. His laughter preceding him, his swift, energetic footsteps approaching the door. Ross Trevor had been a powerful presence, and Rutledge had found himself watching the doorways, listening over the ticking of the grandfather’s clock or the wind in the eaves, for some sign of it. It seemed impossible that such a man had vanished so completely, swallowed by the sea—
