If he hadn’t known Gibson better, Rutledge would have imagined him grinning ear to ear. It was there in the voice. But Gibson seldom smiled. He was also seldom wrong in his findings or his conclusions. He was the kind of man who took pride in himself and in his work, and was bulldog tenacious when he wanted to be. Only his eyes warned that inside the beefy, middle-aged body was a brain sharp as a razor. Rutledge had always suspected that Old Bowels and Gibson were enemies from years back.
That didn’t put Gibson in Rutledge’s column at the Yard. But it meant that an opportunity to blacken Chief Superintendent Bowles’s eye was savored by the man, and often produced information that Rutledge found valuable.
As in this case.
Rutledge thanked him and put up the receiver, standing there for all of a minute, thinking.
Here was the first tie between Eleanor Gray and Scotland. Secondhand it might be, but it was better than none.
Why would a man bring a woman some months pregnant from London to Scotland-unless he was the father of her child?
Hamish said, “Unless there wasna’ anyone else she could turn to, and he felt sorry for her.”
There was also that possibility, Rutledge acknowledged, opening the door of the little room and taking a deep breath of fresher air. But he thought it was more likely that the officer must have known the father, if indeed he wasn’t the father himself. He himself would have done as much for a friend at the Front.
He closed the door again and was on the point of asking for the number Gibson had given him, when he realized that he ought to go to Winchester himself.
It would mean a long, fast drive there and back, but it had to be done. A telephone was a device that allowed people to hide behind distance. Nothing said into the telephone could match the nuances of expression and tone of voice that he used so often to judge information and people.
Hamish said, “It’s been close to three years. It’s likely true they canna’ remember the officer’s name now.”
On the way to his room to pack what he needed, Rutledge answered, “Very likely. But you never can tell what other information they still have.”
16
Rutledge spent the night in the Midlands. HE had tried to persuade himself that he was good for another hour or more of driving. But heavy rain caught up with him, nearly blinding him. When he narrowly missed an unlit wagon going in the same direction, he pulled over, waiting for the worst of the downpour to pass. Only then did he recognize just how tired he was. There was an inn on the High Street of the next village, and rousing the owner from his bed, Rutledge asked for a room and was brought a tray of tea and dry sandwiches as well. He was on the road again as soon as it was light. By the time he arrived in Winchester, the stiffness in his back and legs was turning to cramp.
Hamish had spent most of Rutledge’s hours behind the wheel earnestly pulling apart the evidence against Fiona MacDonald and quarreling over the role Eleanor Gray might or might not have played.
It had been exceedingly difficult for Rutledge to explain Hamish’s existence, the reality of his voice, to the doctor at the clinic. He was not a ghost-ghosts could be exorcised. Nor was he a disembodied voice repeating Rutledge’s thoughts like a parrot. What was there was vivid-the nuances of thought and tone demanded answers. And Rutledge in 1916, broken in spirit and mind and nearly in body, had found it easier to answer the voice than to challenge it. He had known Hamish through two years of war- his memory was filled with conversations that had shaped new conversations-new thoughts-new fears.
In the five months since returning to the Yard, Rutledge had slowly found the courage to argue, to refute-to take on the voice in verbal battle. A painful step toward sanity, he told himself again and again-not away from it. But challenging it went beyond his courage still.
Hamish was saying, “It’s those bones in Glencoe that gave Oliver an excuse to bring a charge of murder against Fiona. He wouldna’ care about them, else. It’s no’ even his jurisdiction! It doesna’ matter to him whose they are.”
“True enough, but until we know how that woman died, we’re bound to take them into account,” Rutledge argued. “As long as her shadow-whoever she may be-falls over the evidence, it will obscure everything else.”
Hamish still disagreed. And said so. Rutledge shook his head.
“Eleanor Gray’s disappearance gave the police in Duncarrick a name to put to those bones. Identify the corpse- that’s the first rule of a murder inquiry. And Oliver is convinced that he has. Once that’s established, he has to find a clear connection between the two women. If Eleanor Gray was pregnant and came to Scotland to wait out her term, then the link begins to take shape. If that’s not true, then there has to be another explanation for her presence in Glencoe. And if it can be proved that the bones aren’t Eleanor Gray’s after all, Oliver is simply going to search for another identity to give them. Named or nameless, the woman is a stumbling block.”
“Aye, I grant you. But can you no’ see that named or nameless, it’s happenstance that connects these bones with Fiona in the first place. What if Oliver proves they belong to the Gray woman? What if he proves she was pregnant when she disappeared? It’s still a giant leap to prove Fiona killed her!”
“Or any other woman. I agree. But finding Eleanor Gray alive will eliminate her from the list. If she’s dead, and Oliver does have her body, then we’re back to the problem of how she died where she did. Murder-natural causes-even suicide. Whether the answer will clear Fiona or damn her isn’t the issue. We have to look for it. By the same token, if it turns out that Eleanor Gray was murdered, then we have to prove that Fiona was the only person who might have had a reason and opportunity to kill her. Oliver may be content to jump to conclusions, but the truth is, Lady Maude won’t be as easily satisfied.”
“Who’s to say that in the end those bones are no’ their own mystery-and no’ ours?” Hamish countered stubbornly.
“Then you’d better pray that Eleanor Gray left the child with Fiona while she secretly went off to finish her studies. It’s the only way to convince Inspector Oliver that he’s got no case. Which brings me back to what I’ve been saying all along. Right now Eleanor Gray is the key to the investigation.”
“I canna’ say I like it!”
It was odd, Rutledge found himself thinking at one point, how Hamish had coped with the unexpected and sudden confrontation with Fiona MacDonald. He was vigorous in her defense, and he had never questioned her innocence. But far deeper than that ran the knowledge that her life now was separating from his. Not as Jean had left him, wanting to be free of what she feared, but in the very fact that living had drawn Fiona into new directions and new feelings and new places that Hamish would never share. He had not known about Duncarrick; he had not known about the child. The silences that followed his meeting Fiona again had been a painful reminder that time did not wait, that there was no holding on to it. That there was an emptiness in death. And yet in some sense, it was as if she was the one who had died, for Hamish mourned her loss with a heavy sorrow, with yearning and despair. And the burden Rutledge carried grew daily heavier with it.
It was Rutledge who struggled with the reality, the fact that Fiona could be found guilty of murder and hanged. He was the one who dealt with the tired face and dark-circled eyes of the woman in the cell. It was Rutledge who bore the brunt of fear and uncertainty about his own views of the evidence and the case building so tightly. Uncertainty, too, about his personal feelings.
He had seen Fiona through Hamish’s eyes for so long that until now she had seemed rather like the Dresden figurines on Frances’s bookshelf-gentle and uncomplicated, frozen in time and place, mourning her dead soldier. A woman wronged by what he, Rutledge, had been forced to do on the battlefield. The martyr, as it were, to his own guilt. Even in the dream in London she had been connected to the death of Hamish, with no existence all her own.
He had, he realized suddenly, seen her through Hamish’s memories.
Now he had his own.
A flesh-and-blood woman, somehow attractive and, right or wrong, displaying remarkable strength in her lonely defiance of the law. Mourning Hamish still and giving that pent-up love to a child… The courage of
