Legacy of the Dead

by Charles Todd

  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 s
aid 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?

  A frail strand of hope—

  Hamish must have written to her about his commanding officer and what Rutledge had done in civilian life. And Rutledge had written to her, too, giving her the news of Hamish’s death, offering empty platitudes of sympathy and concern: “He spoke of you often. You were his bulwark and shield throughout the fighting, and he would have wanted you to know how bravely he died for his country—”

  She had believed the comforting lies. She had cherished them—

  He added quickly, “No one told me—the Yard, you see, didn’t know who you were. My superior was concerned with the Gray family.”

  “Would you have come—if you’d known?”

  He didn’t answer that directly. He said, “It wouldn’t have been my choice—to come or not. It has to do with protocol, not personal decisions.”

  “I still have your letter,” she told him. “Did he write, before the end?”

  Hamish had written a letter that last night, but afterward it had been stained with his blood and with Rutledge’s. The Army had not seen fit to send it. Someone had told Rutledge as much a month or more later.

  Heavy censorship kept the people at home ignorant of the suffering and despair in France. The expectation was that loved ones would offer encouragement and hope to the brave men they’d sent off to battle, and bolster their courage—if they didn’t know the truth. The men themselves wrote home what they thought their families could bear to hear. It was a vicious circle of lies that was classified as military necessity: “Good for morale.”

  In that last letter, had Hamish told the woman he loved so deeply the truth about his death? Or had he told her sweet lies that would prepare her for the news that would be brought to her? A condemned man was not always circumspect. He wrote what he felt and believed in in those last dark hours. And Hamish had been torn apart—he had wanted to die, before he was forced to lead more men back into the face of certain death.

  Rutledge said, “Our sector was heavily shelled. Letters and the like are hard to find in the mud, afterward.” He didn’t add that buried men disappeared in the stinking black depths as well, eaten by rats, used as lumber underfoot until someone could retrieve the decaying corpses.

  Rains that last autumn had brought to light a private from Skye, listed as missing for weeks. Even the dogs hadn’t found him. As the water sloshed thickly about the trench, something had tripped up a sergeant, sending him cursing and sprawling. As he got dripping to his feet, he reached out for what he thought was a piece of shell and realized too late that it was a shoulder blade. The rest of the rotting corpse had come up bit by bit, like an overdone chicken falling off the bone. The smell had been unbearable. But they had had to stand there in the snaking line of the trenches for another thirty-six hours before they were relieved.

  Rutledge could hardly tell Fiona MacDonald the truth. His letter to her, as Hamish’s commanding officer—like so many others—had been a tissue of lies devised to comfort and to heal and to offer pride of sacrifice in the place of loss. A tissue of lies . . . They had come back now to shame him.

  He could feel Hamish’s anger, could feel the torment he carried within himself, like a second soul.

  “My son is named for you,” she said into the silence. “Have they told you? Ian Hamish MacLeod. Hamish would have liked that. He spoke so warmly of you—he admired you.”

  Rutledge, his mind reeling, heard Hamish cry out. The words were lost, but he thought for an instant that she had surely heard the voice and recognized it. The strength of it was echoing off the walls around them.

  “What’s wrong?” She stepped forward, reaching out to touch him. “Are you ill again? Yesterday, I thought—”

  “No.” It was curt, an effort of will without embellishment. In the silence he could hear her quick breathing and the chunk of the cleaning woman’s brush scrubbing outside the door. His heart pounded in his ears. With fierce determination, he got a grip on himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I try not to remember the war.”

  And Hamish said quite clearly, “You remember it every hour of every day. You always will. It’s the cost of surviving.”

  And it was true.

  “I CAME TO talk to you about the child’s mother.”

  Rutledge picked up the thread of what he’d come to say, forcing himself to shut out everything else. Neither Fiona nor he could afford to lose track of the police inquiry again. “You must surely see that you are condemning yourself by refusing to give the authorities any information about her. If she’s dead, explaining why and how she died can save your life.”

  “The police said that to me. How can they know? What if I tell them I choked the life out of her? Or pushed her out a window? Or gave her a drink that muddled her wits and left her to die in the cold?”

  “Did you do these things?”

  “No!” she cried. “If I had, how could I have loved the child so deeply? Every time I look into his eyes, I see his mother’s face. How could I hold him and remember her dying by my hand? She trusted me with the most precious thing in the world to her. You went to war,” she went on, tears filling her eyes, “and you suffered horribly. But do you ever think about what it must be like for us to love a man who will never come back, never give us the children we might have borne, never hold us in the night, never watch our sons and our daughters marry? Never carry a grandchild in our arms or
grow old together? Do you know what it is like to want someone so terribly that you ache, and dream, and wake up to find that it’s over?” The tears fell and she brushed them away angrily. “I have given this country my future too. And all that was left to me, another woman’s child, you’ve taken as well.”

  It seemed to be an admission that the woman was dead. But as he looked into the dark eyes and saw the anguish there, he read something else too—fear. Not for herself, he was sure it wasn’t that. Nor was it guilt.

  He struggled to concentrate, called on his intuition to bridge the gap between what he had seen—and what it meant.

  Silence came back to him. Nothing but silence. And then—

  The woman, he realized suddenly, must still be alive. The child’s mother. And for some reason, even to save her own life, Fiona MacDonald dared not name her.

  11

  LOCKING THE CELL BEHIND HIM, RUTLEDGE STRODE past the woman collecting her brushes in the emptied pail and went out into the main room, where Constable Pringle sat reading through a stack of reports. He looked up as Rutledge handed him the key ring.

  “All settled, then?” he asked.

  “For the time being,” Rutledge answered.

  He thanked the man and went out into the street. The day was fine, and there were people everywhere, attending to whatever business brought them out on a fair morning. Carts and wagons and lorries vied with motorcars for space on the roadway, and he heard a vendor shouting as a passing horse snatched at an apple from the baskets piled high on a trundle. Rutledge felt alone.

  Hamish railed on in wild fury, begging, cajoling, pleading for Fiona, obsessed with what had been done to her. And helpless to change it.

  As the warmth of the sun touched his face, Rutledge took a deep breath, willing the tension to subside, willing Hamish into silence, closing his mind to the harshly sharp image of the woman he’d left in the comparative darkness of the small room at the back of the police station. Walking helped, each stride seeming to keep pace with the rhythm of Hamish’s voice, forcing it to remain just out of sight behind him.