by Charles Todd
“No, let him finish his business. I’ll be at the hotel-The Ballantyne. Tell him he can find me there.” He left, wondering to himself if Constable McKinstry could put a name to the arsonist.
The hotel offered an old-fashioned but comfortable elegance that breathed Victorian respectability. The young woman behind the desk looked up as he came dripping in and smiled. “Good morning, sir! In a manner of speaking!”
He took off his hat and looked ruefully at the wet brim. “Indeed. I think I could use a drink. Then I’d like a room.”
“I’ll be glad to see to that for you, sir.” She indicated the door to his left. “The bar parlor is through there.”
“Thanks.”
He went through the door and found the room filled with other refugees from the rain. The atmosphere was muggy, as if the dampness each had brought with him had settled in a cloud around them, like fog. The smell of wet wool mingled with wood smoke. Someone had lit the fire on one side of the paneled room, and it struggled to assert itself, adding measurably to the gloom. But no one paid any heed, lively conversations holding their attention instead.
Rutledge found a table by the windows that overlooked the street. He could hear the laughter from the bar, rough and male, workmen who had taken advantage of the rain to stop in for a pint.
He wondered how many of them had once patronized The Reivers.
A man with a fierce mustache came in, looked around him, and saw Rutledge. He came striding across to the table, nodded, and said, “I’m Oliver.”
Rutledge got to his feet and offered his hand. Oliver’s grip was strong but brief. He took the other chair at the table and beckoned to one of the barmaids. She came over, took their orders, and was gone.
Oliver stretched his feet out, looked ruefully at his wet shoes, and sighed. Then he turned to Rutledge and said, “I won’t beat about the bush. It’s not my way. I don’t like London sending someone up here to mind my business. But it’s done. I’ll cooperate in any way I can.”
“I’m afraid this is not my doing either. But there we are. I’d like to discuss the evidence with you when you have the time.”
The barmaid brought their orders, and Oliver drank his ale, savoring it. Then he said, “The evidence isn’t the problem. It’s the bones. Did you learn anything at all from that termagant in Menton? I’ve need of it, if you have.”
“Lady Maude refused to acknowledge that she’d quarreled with her daughter,” Rutledge answered, “but if I were a betting man, I’d give you good odds she did. The question is, where is Eleanor Gray now? And no one seems to know. Lady Maude swears her daughter had no interest in or enthusiasm for walking in the Highlands, that there’s no explanation that might put Eleanor in Glencoe or anywhere else in Scotland during 1916.”
“Yes, well, mothers are like that, they shut their eyes to a good deal that they find it unpleasant to take notice of. Look at it this way-if a handsome young soldier told the daughter he’d like to spend his leave walking about in the Scottish hills, do you think she’d refuse to go? War does strange things to women-put a man in uniform, and they trust him with their virtue and their lives!”
“She’d hardly go walking in the mountains when she was nine months pregnant. Or, for that matter, find a soldier willing to take her there.”
Oliver grunted. “I’m just saying that mothers don’t always know their daughters. Lady Maude may think what she pleases. The fact is, it’s not proof of anything.”
“Why were you and the authorities prepared to arrest this local woman? London gave me the outline of the case, little more.”
Oliver thought it over, then said, “It was this way. The anonymous letters started in June, as far as we can tell. And what I found curious about the dozen or so brought to my attention is that people believed them. At any rate, her neighbors began to shun Mrs. MacLeod, as she called herself then. A few of them finally stepped forward, taking the letters to the minister, Mr. Elliot, but not to ask if the accusations were true or not. They were more concerned about their own souls. And after some thought and prayer, Mr. Elliot came to the police.”
“The letters fell on fertile ground, then. Why? Was this woman not liked or accepted in Duncarrick?”
“If you’d asked me just a few months ago, I’d have said she was well liked. I never heard of any problems-moral or otherwise. And I hear most things. The general feeling seems to be that the young woman must have lied to her aunt, because Ealasaid MacCallum was an upright woman who would never have countenanced a falsehood told to her acquaintance. She’d have been the first to say ‘My niece has gotten herself into trouble, but I’ve brought her here to give her a chance to repent and atone. It’s my Christian duty.’ And people would have respected that, you see.”
Hamish said, “Aye, that’s the way it would ha’ been done.”
But without compassion, Rutledge responded. A cold and judging second chance.
Oliver went on. “Mr. Elliot then told me privately that a number of people had spoken to him about the young woman. Before the letters started. One man found himself tempted by her and was afraid for his soul. A young woman saw in her an instrument of the devil because she had turned the head of a young man who frequented the inn. Another woman found her far too warm to the child, saying that it was no way to bring up a lad. ‘Spare the rod’ was the message. And Mr. Elliot had already tried to speak to Miss MacDonald about her attendance at services. She’d told him that her duties at the inn sometimes kept her up late and she’d found it hard to be prompt on those Sunday mornings. He had thought at the time that it was not a proper excuse.”
“I see,” Rutledge commented into the silence that expected a response. But what he saw was a judgment, a sense that the accused had not lived up to the high standards others had set for themselves and, by extension, for her.
Oliver looked across the room at another table, something else on his mind, then picked up the thread of his narrative. “On the heels of the anonymous letters came another correspondence, and that damned more than it exonerated. I thought, as did the Chief Constable, that it bore looking into. Where there is a pattern-”
Where there was smoke…
“And that’s when I sent my constable-who knew her well enough to question her gently-to ask for her marriage lines. She as much as told him there weren’t any, and when he asked if she’d submit to an examination by a physician in regard to the birth of the child in question, she adamantly refused. McKinstry had no choice but to conduct a search of the premises but failed to carry it out to my satisfaction, and I came back. Instead of a buried woman, I came across a man a hundred years dead, and it made me a laughingstock, I can tell you. Dr. Murchison had more to say than I cared to hear on the subject.”
“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.”
