18
The next morning Rutledge received by private messenger permission to take Fiona MacDonald to Glencoe, as long as they were accompanied by a matron and a constable.
It was not how he had wanted to go there. He had thought of it as an expiation, sitting in the fiscal’s office. He had seen it, too, as an excuse for getting Fiona out of that small, dark cell and into the light. A muddle of reasons, none of them wise.
But the sooner he went, the better, before someone changed his mind.
He arranged for sandwiches in a basket to be packed for the journey, and then went out to his motorcar to drive around to the police station.
Oliver wasn’t there. Pringle thought he had gone out the Jedburgh road to look into a theft of a lorry’s contents. “It seems,” Pringle ended wryly, “that the driver fell asleep and ran off the road. When he went to find help dragging the lorry out of the ditch, someone helped himself to the contents instead.” Pringle shrugged. “The driver’s in a rage, but Inspector Oliver isn’t likely to be swayed by that. We had an incident once before where a driver sold off part of the contents and then claimed he’d been robbed. Inspector Oliver has a long memory. You don’t make a fool of him twice!”
Rutledge found himself thinking of the skeleton discovered in the stables at The Reivers. Oliver had gone on from that embarrassment to find the bones in Glencoe Rutledge thanked Pringle and decided to drive out the Jedburgh road himself. But he had hardly reached the outskirts of Duncarrick when his engine spluttered, caught, and then died.
Swearing, he got out to crank it again, but nothing happened. Taking a look at the engine-and attracting two young farm lads who came to peer over his shoulder at the mysteries under the bonnet-he could see nothing wrong. He asked one of the young men to hold the wire while he turned the crank and checked the spark. It was clearly not that. There was fresh petrol in the tank, filled in Jedburgh just the day before. And he could see no indication that anyone had meddled with the car.
In the end, Rutledge commandeered a horse and cart to tow the vehicle (with accompanying humor from the old farmer who didn’t hold with infernal combustion) back into Duncarrick, where it was left to the mercy of the mechanic at the smithy.
He wouldn’t be traveling anywhere with Fiona MacDonald this day. Or tomorrow “And who will be pleased to hear that?” Hamish asked, irony heavy in his voice. “The fiscal?”
“Burns gave permission. But grudgingly.”
Rutledge went back to the hotel and searched the space by the shed where he usually parked the motorcar. A precaution.
He walked around the space, examining the ground. The dust had been scuffed, but no clear footprints were visible except for his own. The rear of the car had been in the shadows cast by the shed standing no more than ten feet away. Easy to crouch unseen there in the darkness late at night and take an ax to a tire, if someone wanted to disable the car. But the tires hadn’t been touched. And as far as Rutledge could tell, the engine hadn’t been damaged either.
He’d just driven the car hard for four days Everyone in Duncarrick knew whose car sat in the hotel yard day after day. No one in his right mind would touch it.
“Unless,” Hamish pointed out, “you’ve tread on toes.”
Rutledge walked to the police station and from Constable Pringle borrowed the key to The Reivers again. The inn wasn’t likely to yield more information than it had, but he wanted to go there on his own and be sure.
Clarence, the cat, followed Rutledge soft-footed from room to room, a silent white ghost at his heels as he took his time in each. He couldn’t have said when he started what it was he wanted here.
Such a place as The Reivers, he thought, was not made for the morning. The echoes of the night would linger still in the air-laughter and voices-someone singing off-key-and the smell of spilled beer and ale, the reek of smoke would drift down the passages. There would be an emptiness, a loneliness, as if the inn stood waiting for the doors to swing open again and new patrons to stride through them, thirsty for a pint and the companionship that went with it.
Now there weren’t even the echoes of the previous night. The inn had stood empty long enough that the only smells stirred by his passage were of dust and old wood, and in the kitchen, the ashes of fires in the great stove.
Hamish, at his back, noted the smoke-darkened beams and the polished wood of the bar; the windows with their starched curtains and the small pewter pots on each table that must often have held flowers; the pretty handmade coverlets on the beds of each upstairs guest room-hardly a temptation to whoring; the tidy row of hooks that held gardening tools in the small stone-flagged room off the kitchen. The cupboard that held linens smelled faintly of lavender and rose petals. The pantry was empty, only a few tins of food standing like sentinels on the long shelves. In the kitchen, dishes were stored neatly in a huge wooden dresser, great iron pots hanging within reach, the sink dry where vegetables ought to be lying, waiting to be scrubbed and cooked.
“I could hae’ lived here,” Hamish said wistfully, “and been at peace. With her. I wouldna’ ache for the Highlands if she was here wi’ me… I could rest easy.”
Rutledge tried to shut out the soft voice at his shoulder and listen for other ghosts that should dwell here. Ealasaid MacCallum for one. Or the sounds of a small boy as he played with his cat or ran shouting from room to room with his three-legged stuffed horse. Or Fiona’s presence as she went about her daily tasks. But he couldn’t find them. Especially he could not find Fiona’s.
It was as if even the floors had been scrubbed clean of the imprint of her shoe, to remove the last sign of her. Fiona had lived here-and put down no roots that he could see. She had done her duty by her aunt, had kept the inn alive and busy, had nurtured a child there. And let no one inside her heart, not even the building that she called her home.
After a time, to break the heavy silence that seemed to pervade the very walls, he turned to the cat and knelt to pet her. She reared her head under his hand, her eyes mere slits, and began to purr. “What would you have to tell me if you could speak?” he asked softly. “Hmmm?”
A voice said, “She’s naught but a dumb animal, man!”
Drummond, Fiona’s neighbor and guardian now of the child, stepped into the room, his presence startling the cat. Rutledge got to his feet as she disappeared behind the bar.
Even Hamish had not heard Drummond coming.
“But she has eyes, doesn’t she? And no reason to lie. I think it’s time that someone told me the truth,” Rutledge invited.
“There’s no truth to tell. What brings you here again?”
“I’m looking into the past, to see what’s hidden there that frightens so many people.” And yet he realized now that he’d spent his time at The Reivers trying to find a measure of Fiona MacDonald. Looking not for evidence but for the character of a woman who was as elusive as a wraith with no substance…
Why, then, hadn’t she sold up and left? If she had not been happy.
Eleanor Gray’s words came back to him. “ I could die-”
“Hummph.” Drummond was regarding him with dislike. “You’re a stupid man, then. It’s not in the fiber of this building. The past. It never was.”
“Why are you so certain of that?”
“Do I have to tell the police their business, then? Because the child wasn’t born here, was he! That’s where a sensible man would look, wouldn’t he? Where the child was born. If he can discover it.” There was a glint of challenge in his eye. As if he’d offered Rutledge an enigma.
“I’ve already been there. Where he was born. It’s a very ordinary clinic with a doctor too busy with his patients to care who they are. I’m told it was a normal birth, but the mother was very ill afterward.”
Appalled, Drummond stared at him. “And how, by God, did you discover any such thing? It’s more than Oliver ever did-or wanted to do!”
“I’m a policeman. It’s my job.”
Digesting the news, Drummond asked suspiciously, “Where might this clinic be found?”
