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 offer 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-”
“Not if they don’t bear on a pregnancy or other reproductive problem.” He was impatient now.
“Can you give me the names of women who came here in 1916? I can’t tell you with any certainty what the date was. But the woman I’m seeking was delivered of a healthy son.”
“No, I can’t.” It was short and curt.
“Then can you tell me if a Mrs. Cook was your patient in that time period? Mrs. Maude Cook. We are investigating a murder that might have a connection with her.”
“My patients don’t commit murder!” the doctor said indignantly.
Rutledge had heard many people express the same certainty. It was a common reaction, a natural one. No one I know could do such a thing! But murderers came in all shapes and sizes, all denominations and races, all social strata. And more often than not, they had friends who were appalled…
“I’m sure they don’t, Doctor. In this case, we’re speaking of a victim. And of a three-year-old child who may have been orphaned. We need to contact the parents of the woman, or her husband.”
“A victim.” Wilson regarded him differently. “I don’t recall anyone by the name of Maude Cook. But let me check my files.”
He went to an oak cabinet against the side wall and pulled out a drawer. It was stuffed with folders and papers. He thumbed through some dozen of them, and did it again, then finally shook his head.
“I don’t find a Maude Cook at all. Are you quite sure you have the right name? There’s a Mary Cook here. And she gave birth to a male child.”
“In 1916? What was the date?”
Wilson gave it to him. It was a month too early. Still “Can you tell me where she lives? Or give me the direction of any family?”
Wilson turned back to the files. “She gave London as her home. There’s no other information. The father was dead. In the war. She cried when I told her she had a son. She said he would have been proud. A good many women tell me that. I have tried to grow accustomed to it, and failed. Children need fathers. Too damned many of them in these last years had none to go home to.” He rubbed his eyes. “Is that all you want of me?”
“Did Mrs. Cook have lung disease of any kind?”
“No. She was young and healthy. There was a complication, however. It was a difficult birth. Long and tiring, and there was a good deal of trouble. Breech birth, you see. Touch and go, but I saved her and the baby. Infection set in. She was quite lucky she was here-she’d have died otherwise. The fact remains, she’ll not be able to conceive again. Well, she has her child and I doubt she’ll marry again. So many men died…”
It was cold comfort, but all the doctor had.
“Why did she come to Scotland to have this child if she lived in London?”
“She was traveling. Foolishness on her part at that late stage, but she was on her way to London when the bag of waters broke.”
But Wilson had no idea what had brought Mary Cook north from London or how long she might have lived in Lanark before consulting him. “I don’t have time to question my patients about their private lives. Still, there’re any number of Cooks in the neighborhood of Loch Lomond. She might well have been visiting one of them.”
If Maude Cook was the mother of Fiona’s child, she had had the boy in a clinic, not on some windswept mountainside. And left there well enough to travel.
Was she in fact Eleanor Gray? And had she given Fiona a child she did not want to keep? In exchange for a sworn promise never to reveal the boy’s parentage?
It was possible-but not very likely. As for Mary Where had they met? Why had the mother so readily given up her son to a comparative stranger?
There was absolutely no certainty that Maude Cook and Mary Cook were the same person-Cook was a common name, as the doctor had pointed out.
Rutledge drove back to Duncarrick feeling the long hours at the wheel of the motorcar and in no mood to confess he’d found only the most tenuous threads to account for the number of miles covered. Or endure the constant hammering of Hamish’s questions.
The woman at the desk of The Ballantyne smiled at him as he came into the lobby and then turned to a
