by Charles Todd
Oliver’s comment on Mrs. Davison’s character was “I’d take my oath that she’s telling the truth. Forthright to a fault, as my sergeant put it.”
Mrs. Davison might well have told the exact truth. People often did.
The whole truth was another matter. And how an investigating officer probed for it determined how much of it came out. Objectivity . . .
Oliver was convinced that Fiona MacDonald was a murderess.
If she wasn’t, how did she come by the child? That was the stumbling block, and her life depended on the answer. And Rutledge was going to have to find it.
BRAE WAS SOUTH and east of Glasgow, on the outskirts of an area that had suffered from fast expansion and then depression in the previous century. The basin of the Clyde had become a forest of steelworks, factories, and mines, but it had never been a scenic wonderland. All the same, what little beauty there was had been swallowed up long since. Lanark, on the other hand, was a pleasant town with associations with the Scottish hero William Wallace, and it was there that Rutledge ate a late dinner before continuing to Brae.
But there was no place in Brae to spend the night, and he was forced to return to Lanark.
It was early in the morning when he came back, and even Hamish could find nothing attractive in the plain houses, the dull landscape, or the feeling that time had dealt harshly with the little village. Even its few streets seemed tired.
Mrs. Davison lived in a brick house that had been well kept, one large enough to have been a manager’s home when industry had mushroomed in the region. The windows were clean, with pretty curtains behind them; there were flowers still in bloom in the sheltered garden to one side, and behind the house vegetables had been grown in long rows that were now brown and untidy except for the dark green of beets and cabbages at the far end. The house stood at the edge of the village, set back from the street behind a low brick wall. A ball, a doll with a china face and no clothes on its white kid body, and a small bucket full of stones littered the walk in front of the door.
She answered his knock herself, a woman with a kind face but very perceptive hazel eyes. She looked him up and down as he introduced himself and then said, “Yes, I’m Penelope Davison. I’ve talked to the policemen in Duncarrick. Why should London have any interest in going over the same ground? I know nothing about Fiona that can help you in any way.” In her own fashion, she reminded him of Lady Maude. The same independent spirit and refusal to be overawed by the law.
“All the same, there are some questions I must ask.”
She sighed and opened the door wider, inviting him in to the parlor, on the left side of the entry. It was small with dark furniture, a goodly number of green-leafed plants, and very little frivolity. There was a charcoal portrait of a man with fine mustaches and an air of importance, framed in oak and gilt; a small reproduction from a newspaper of Queen Victoria’s jubilee procession, framed in dark wood; and a bookcase with glass doors holding rows of calf-bound volumes, scuffed from much use, just under the window. The books had been tidily sorted by height, not content. But there was an air of calm and comfort in the room that impressed Rutledge as he took the chair she indicated.
From the back of the house he could hear the high voices of children, and realized suddenly that it was a Saturday and they were not in school. Hamish said, “You must speak to them—you gave Fiona your promise!”
Mrs. Davison was saying, “Well, then, you’ve come all this way. What is it you would like to know?”
“When Fiona MacDonald first came to live with you, did she have references? A letter of introduction?”
“She answered an advertisement I’d placed in the Glasgow paper in 1915. Her letter impressed me and I asked her to come for an interview. I liked her immediately, but I’m not a foolish woman, and I made inquiries before taking her on. Her grandfather was a respected man, and there were a number of people around Glencoe who spoke well of her. She came to me and I never had a moment’s regret over hiring her. I can’t bring myself to believe that she has killed anyone. But that police inspector claims she has.”
“There is evidence pointing in that direction, yes. It isn’t necessarily proven. That’s why I’m here. Did she have any friends in Brae? Young women she might have grown to know well?”
“No. She was grieving most of the time, you see, and she went out very little. Her brothers died one after the other, and then, in 1916, her young man. There was another woman here who used to walk with her when the weather was fine. But I wouldn’t have described Mrs. Cook as a friend. They were more—I don’t know—fellow sufferers. The newspapers pretended the war was going well, but too many people were dying. It’s a terrible weight when you worry day and night about someone. And when the news came, and Fiona knew the worst, it was hard for her to speak of it. She didn’t tell me for weeks. I think most of us pressed her to cry but she wouldn’t. Mrs. Cook didn’t press. She seemed to understand what it was like.”
“Tell me about Mrs. Cook, if you will.”
“She was ill—her lungs. As I understood it, her doctor had hoped that better air would help. The smoke of Glasgow most certainly had not. At any rate, early in 1916 she took rooms in that white house you must have passed coming into Brae. On your left. Mrs. Kerr’s sons were off to France, and her husband was away building ships. She didn’t want to live alone and advertised for lodgers. It seemed to suit both of them—Mrs. Cook was quiet and no trouble. Mrs. Kerr preferred it that way.”
“Do you know anything about Mrs. Cook’s background, where she’d come from?”
“Before Glasgow? I have no idea. Her husband was at sea, and Fiona’s young man was in France. They seemed to have very little in common other than that. I thought perhaps Mrs. Cook had come from a wealthy home and had been given advantages that Fiona hadn’t. Which is not to say that Fiona was common. She was a most unusual girl, and I found her a very pleasant companion. Her grandfather had reared her extraordinarily well!”
“How long was Mrs. Cook here?”
“Seven months, I’d say. Then her husband was invalided home, and she went to London to be with him.”
“Fiona had been living here for some time before Mrs. Cook came?”
“Of course. Over a year. And if you’re asking me if they might have known each other before moving to Brae, I seriously doubt it. Fiona left only after she’d had word that her aunt was taken ill and couldn’t manage the inn on her own any longer. She cried when she left, and my children cried with her. I was not above crying myself! That’s why I didn’t ask her to work out her time.”
Not to work out her time—but Fiona had told her aunt that she must!
“How long after Mrs. Cook’s departure was that?”
“Three or four months, I’d say.”
Hamish pointed out that if Mrs. Cook had been expecting a child when she came to Brae, then she had had it alone and without Fiona’s help. Seven months and four months added up to eleven.
Nevertheless, Rutledge made a note of it. He said, “Did Mrs. Cook leave a forwarding address, do you know?”
“If she did, Fiona never said anything about it. Mary Kerr found a pair of gloves in the bedroom after her lodger had gone—they’d fallen under the bed. Mary wanted to send them along to her but didn’t have her direction.”
“Forgive me, but why do you think a woman of Mrs. Cook’s apparent position should wish to spend over half a year in Brae?”
Mrs. Davison smoothed the white tatted cover on the arm of her chair. “I wondered about that myself. Brae left her to herself. And I think that’s what she needed most. I wondered, once or twice, if she might be a married woman who’d had an affair and the man died. Time to heal, you see. Away from everyone who didn’t know and couldn’t understand.” She shrugged. “Perhaps that’s an overly romantic view of her. There could be any number of other reasons. Fiona gave no sign of missing her other than the occasional remark that anyone might make. When the cat had kittens, she said something like ‘M
rs. Cook told me once that she’d never had a cat or a dog of her own. It’s too bad she couldn’t have one of these.’ ”
Hamish said, “I canna’ see a child romping with a dog in Lady Maude’s house.” It was true. . . .
Rutledge said, “Do you recall her first name? Her husband’s name?”
“I don’t think I ever heard her speak of him by name. It was usually ‘my husband.’ But her name was Maude. I thought it was rather pretty.”
A coincidence . . . it was a common English name.
“Did you say anything to Inspector Oliver about Mrs. Cook?”
“I saw no reason to. I told you, it wasn’t actually a friendship, it was simple loneliness. I don’t suppose they’d have spoken a dozen words to each other ordinarily! But the young women here in Brae had gone away to do war work, and the ones with children, like me, spent a rather dreary war. Fiona and Mrs. Cook, the outsiders, naturally were drawn together.”
“I’ve been trying to locate an Eleanor Gray in the hope that she might throw some light on Miss MacDonald’s situation. Has she visited Brae?”
Mrs. Davison shook her head. “We aren’t a crossroads here, though it may seem as if we are. There was never an Eleanor Gray here. I’d have known if there was.”
WITH MRS. DAVISON’S permission, Rutledge sat at the rough kitchen table with the three children Fiona had cared for: a girl and two boys. The girl was shy, but the boys were eager to talk.
The picture they drew was of a young woman who could sit on the floor and play games with them, who read to them in the evening if they went to bed without fuss, and who knew the most fearsome tales of Highland feuds and battles.
“She spent a night once in a haunted house, and there was a man there who carried his head in his hands. Fiona saw him, plain as day!” the eldest boy told Rutledge with great relish. “He was a Campbell, killed by a MacLaren, and seeking revenge.” He launched into the details of the feud, but his mother, smiling, said, “Yes, that’s all very well, but I don’t think Mr. Rutledge has time for the whole story.”
He spent a quarter of an hour with the children and Mrs. Davison but came away with nothing more. He needed no further reminder from Hamish to pass on Fiona’s message to the children. The shy little girl smiled and said “Fiona” in a soft voice. “Is she coming back?”
Her mother looked over her head at Rutledge and replied, “Not for a while, dear.”
MRS. KERR, OVER sixty and showing her years, told him what she knew of Mrs. Cook, but there was nothing new in what she had to say.
As he got up to leave, Rutledge asked, “Did Mrs. Cook and Miss MacDonald seem to be close?”
“Not close, no. They’d walk in the evenings sometimes. That was all.”
“Where did they walk most often, do you know?”
“Mrs. Cook wasn’t country bred, so they didn’t go far. About the town, mostly, or in the churchyard. It’s protected from the wind, I suppose that’s why. I had the feeling that they both felt comfortable among the graves. Odd thing to say, I know, but there you are. As if they drew strength or peace or the like from the quiet there . . . Fiona, now, I knew she’d lost the man she was to marry—she told me once that he was buried in France. Mrs. Cook’s husband was at sea. But she never spoke much about herself. At first I put it down to being too good for the likes of us in Brae, then I saw that she was not one to talk. Some folks aren’t, are they? It’s what makes the world go ’round, differences.”
RUTLEDGE CROSSED THE street from Mrs. Kerr’s and walked as far as the small, ugly church. The early Victorian brick and stone mixture had not been successful, but it stood apart, among great old trees planted generations before for an older church. There were paths among the graves, white graveled ribbons through the green, hum-mocked grass. A number of bare plots spoke of recent burials, and he shivered, remembering his own dream.
He went through the gate and spent some time moving through the wilderness of stone, reading the inscription on first this one and then another.
Not far from the rear wall one headstone caught his eye. It was old, the dates smudged and barely discernible, but the name carved deeply into the gray face was quite legible.
Hamish MacLeod.
Not the man he’d killed—the dates were much older, a century or more older. But Rutledge found himself wondering as he stood there and looked down at it, if Fiona MacDonald had also known about it and in some way had taken comfort from it. A gravestone for a man who had none.
A place to sit on the weedy grass while she remembered a past that had no future. It must have offered consolation as well as privacy to mourn.
He had the oddest feeling that he was right.
But what name had Mrs. Cook found here if her husband was still alive? What memories had comforted her?
He walked through the stones again, searching. There were Campbells and Lindsays, MacBrays and MacDougals, a long list of Highland and Lowland names that had no special meaning to him. He found a Trevor, and thought of Ross, then moved on. Little and Elliot, Davison and Robson, Pringle and Taylor, Henderson and one Gray. Evelyn Gray. He had died as an infant.
It was Eleanor Gray’s father’s name—the man she had called father all her life.
Had she been closer to him than to her mother in spite of the fact that he wasn’t her natural father?
Girls were often attached to their fathers, and if Evelyn Gray had accepted her publicly as his daughter, he would have brought her up to the best of his ability. Even if he had not loved her for her own sake, he would have treated her well for King Edward’s sake. The men had been close friends.
And he might have been the only warmth in Eleanor’s life. Rutledge could not envision Lady Maude holding a squirming child in her lap to read it a story, as Fiona had done with her charges in the Davison household.
But then, he might be doing Lady Maude an injustice. He had met her after the quarrel with Eleanor. Her daughter’s refusal to acknowledge her duty to her blood and heritage had hurt deeply. There might have been a very different relationship between mother and child before that.
Otherwise, why had Lady Maude insisted that he, Rutledge, take charge of this question of identifying the bones?
“She might,” Hamish said, “be wanting to protect her family’s honor—”
14
RUTLEDGE DROVE TOWARD GLASGOW WITH HIS MIND busy. Hamish was making comments on the evidence as well, but he tried to ignore them.
Such small things—the name on a grave—the Christian name of a woman—the fact that Fiona had told her aunt she was working out her time at Brae . . .
Where had she gone for that brief, unaccounted-for span of weeks?
And did it have anything to do with Maude Cook?
He spent Sunday in Glasgow, asking the police there for any information they might have had on anyone by the name of Cook, but the half-dozen families he was sent to see were unable to help him. They shook their heads when he asked them about a Maude Cook. As one middle-aged man put it, “It’s a pretty enough name, Maude, but not one of ours.” Nor had relations to their knowledge spent part of the war years in the village of Brae. “It’s not likely, is it?” a woman asked him. “So close by? Besides, I’d have sent any daughter or daughter-in-law of mine to our kin, not to live on the charity of strangers!”
But as Hamish pointed out, if Maude Cook’s connection with Glasgow was through her own family, Rutledge didn’t have her maiden name and would never find her in the welter of people in the city. It would require a door-to-door search. An enormous amount of manpower.
Driving back to Duncarrick on Monday morning, he reached the outskirts of Lanark and stopped the car, rubbing his face. Lanark—
He considered Lanark for a time. That it was close to Brae. That it was large enough that a woman using a false name might not be noticed and gossiped about. Especially if she was already certain there were no acquaintances living there who might see her in the street and recognize her. And it would offe
r adequate medical care to a woman on her own. . . .
Rutledge continued into the heart of the town, finding the local police station and then searching for a place to leave his motorcar. It was a busy morning; the town seemed to be full of people and lorries, carts and wagons. Men were setting up a pavilion near the church for a fete or exhibition. Others were carrying potted palms from the hotel, walking trees that wove their way along the pavement like Great Birnam wood come to Dunsinane and about to attack the waiting Macbeth.
When Rutledge made his way back through the crowds some fifteen minutes later, he had the information he needed.
The lying-in hospital was in a back street, a small but well-kept building that had potted geraniums in front of its door and a woman in a dark dress at the desk in the small reception hall.
Rutledge asked for the doctor in charge and was soon ushered into a chilly office at the back, where a tired elderly man turned from the window to greet him. On the desk were stacks of folders waiting to be sorted.
“I’m Dr. Wilson. I was up until five this morning with a difficult delivery. If you’ll make your call a brief one so that I can sleep, I’ll help in any way I can.”
“What kind of cases do you take here?”
Surprised, the doctor said, “Difficult ones that can’t be safely delivered at home. The well-to-do, who want more comfort than an upstairs bedchamber. And the rest are female complaints where surgery or other remedies are required. I deal with a goodly number of women who are ill. Tumors or excessive bleeding. Miscarriages. Stillbirths. I find that a number of husbands don’t heed me when I tell them a wife should bear no more children. I save the woman if I can. I also deal with botched abortions, where infection is rampant and the woman has waited too long to seek medical help. I don’t see how any of this is of use to the police!”
“You don’t handle lung complaints—”
