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.
What had appeared to be a search for Eleanor Gray had become a complex confrontation with the past and a young woman who might be cleared-or damned-by what Scotland Yard found out about both women.
It was a grave responsibility. It was also a professional conflict.
Rutledge turned toward the hotel, seeking sanctuary without realizing it, seeking the peace and quiet to think. Everything he’d learned here had changed its shape, throwing evidence and emotion and belief into a maelstrom of doubt. And then something Hamish was saying caught at his attention. He found himself listening now.
“It began as a moral issue,” Hamish told him. “That’s what you told yon constable. And who better to ask
