“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
