squad had shot Corporal Hamish MacLeod. And as Rutledge had delivered the coup de grace to the badly wounded Highlander, the salient had been blasted out of existence by a German shell. Buried alive, blinded, and deaf, Rutledge had lived only because Hamish’s body had protected him. A bitter irony…
And the machine gunners had died as well, for which Rutledge, disbelieving, had been given a medal and sent back into the fighting as a bloody example. Without rest or respite: the war needed men.
As the hellish summer of 1916 dragged into agonizing stalemate for two more years, Rutledge had carried out his duties barely aware of anything except the incessant voice of Hamish in his head. He had wanted to die, had tried to die, and in spite of war and pestilence, he had lived. To come home a hero. To come home a man hardly able to speak. Bringing a dead man with him.
The doctor, Fleming, had done his work well. In June 1919, Rutledge had returned to the Yard, declared fit for duty. His secret went with him. Not even Frances knew how much it had cost Rutledge to struggle back to his former skills. A murderer standing in judgment of murderers. Nor had Hamish made it easy, standing constantly at his shoulder and condemning him. They had worked out, in time, a relationship that was more a stalemate than anything else. It was only that when he, Rutledge, was most vulnerable, Hamish was the first to sense it. As if, Rutledge sometimes thought, the dead man had taken his revenge.
Not even Fleming, with all his medical skills, could wipe out memory. Or guilt.
Cold comfort on a dark, rainy night of bad dreams and a haunting voice from the trenches.
After a time, Rutledge made himself go back to his bed, draw the sheets over his shoulders again, and close his eyes.
But when the September dawn broke grayly over London, he hadn’t slept.
In the light of day, Rutledge could pin down with some certainty what had precipitated the dream. It was the letter that had arrived in the previous morning’s post. He hadn’t opened it for several hours, knowing who it was from and what it demanded of him. Finally, after it had seemed to burn a hole in his coat pocket as well as his conscience, he had taken the letter out and broken the ornate seal.
His godfather, David Trevor, had written from Edinburgh, saying,
You’ve made a dozen excuses. Don’t make another one. Come to see me. I miss you, Ian, I want to see for myself that you’re alive and well. If that grim devil Bowles won’t give you leave, come anyway. My doctor will tell him you need a rest. And for that matter, so do I. Loneliness is the very devil!
But Scotland was the last place Rutledge intended to go. The love and duty he owed his godfather were very real, but so was his reluctance to go north of the border, which seemed in the clear light of day an almost superstitious dread, but in the dark seemed an unbearable, unspeakable burden. Not because he hated the Scots but because so many of them had been under his command in France-and he’d led so many of them to their death. He could name every one of them, even the raw recruits he’d known for less than a day.
And leave was the last thing he wanted. Tired as he was, idleness was worse. When a man was idle, his demons marched like ghostly armies in the forefront of his mind.
Chief Superintendent Bowles would have been glad to grant Rutledge leave if he had asked for it. The less he saw of the Inspector, the happier Bowles was. The closed door of his empty office was like a benediction when Bowles passed it each day that Rutledge was away from London. Rutledge underfoot was a constant reminder of things best forgotten. Clever men always disturbed Bowles’s peace of mind, and clever men with good accents, men who’d been to university or moved comfortably in circles where Bowles, for all his authority, felt stiff and clumsy, were intolerable. Bowles made it a point to rid himself of such men as fast as he could. There were subtle ways to convince a clever man that it was in his best interests to ask for a transfer.
But Rutledge, damn and blast him, seemed to lead a charmed life. He had survived the bloodbath of the Somme, he’d survived wounds, he’d survived months in hospital. And if Bowles’s informant was telling the truth, Rutledge had been half out of his head, broken and silent, hardly a promising future. Yet for four months now he’d survived Bowles’s concerted attempts to show him up as inept and lacking his pre-war skills.
To Bowles’s way of thinking, England would have been better served if Rutledge had died with the rest of what the writers were now calling The Flower of English Youth. Dead “flowers” could be swept up with the rubbish and forgotten. Live challengers to his ambition were fair targets.
Bowles had climbed the ladder as far as his ability allowed, buoyed by some small success hunting German spies during the Great War. But it appeared he was destined to retire as a Chief Superintendent. Climbing higher was out of the question for a man of his station. And that knowledge was a constant goad to his anger and frustration.
He found himself this gloomy morning walking into Rutledge’s office and dragging the other chair from where it was usually kept near the wall, out of the way of the door. Sitting down heavily, he slapped a file on the desk.
“There’s a spot of trouble in the north, close by Durham, and it seems you’re wanted to handle it.” He opened the file, reached for a sheet of paper with a dozen paragraphs scrawled across it in heavy ink, and scowled at it. “Here’s the long and short of it. And the reports to confirm it.”
The Scottish police-with permission from their counterparts in England-had come to a village some miles west of Durham to tell a woman that it was possible her daughter’s remains had been discovered on a Scottish mountainside in a place called Glencoe. Lady Maude Gray took exception to the Scottish Inspector’s manner and insinuations, and she had her butler throw him out. This didn’t sit well with his Chief Constable, who complained to the Chief Constable across the border. Neither of them could persuade her ladyship to give them so much as the time of day.
“You’re being sent to smooth troubled waters, in a manner of speaking, and to find out whatever you can about this missing girl. The Scottish police will be grateful. As far as I can tell, reading between the lines, her ladyship is highly thought of in certain circles and she’s strong-minded enough to do as she pleases. You’ll need every ounce of diplomacy you possess to get through the door, much less into her presence. But failure is unacceptable. Do you understand me?”
Rutledge understood very well. If he annoyed her further, Lady Maude could crucify all of them. If he left without seeing her, it would be viewed as his incompetence.
He took the papers Bowles thrust at him and, when the Chief Superintendent had gone, read them over. The facts of the case itself appeared to be simple enough. The problem lay in Lady Maude Gray’s refusal to discuss her daughter with anyone. The local police had noted: “She has never reported her daughter missing, but it is understood in the neighborhood that there was a rift between them that resulted in the daughter leaving early in 1916. When the young woman came into a large inheritance in 1918, the family solicitor advertised throughout the country for her to contact him directly, and the girl failed to do so.” Further discreet inquiries by the solicitor discovered that none of her acquaintance had had word of or from her either. The solicitor reported his concern and asked for police help in locating her. That search was inconclusive as well. “It may well be that the remains found in Scotland are those of Eleanor Victoria Maude Gray-height and age appear to be a close match, and the time of death (thought to be autumn 1916) appears to be consistent with the last time anyone saw her. Her mother refuses all comment.”
The Scottish police were convinced that the mother’s refusal had to do with the fact that the daughter had been pregnant. The English police were reluctant to conclude that that was the cause of the quarrel between the two women. Some stiffness between the two jurisdictions had developed-the Scottish police believed they had already identified Eleanor’s murderer, while the English police were unsure that the girl was in fact dead.
Rutledge looked out the window at the rain streaking the grimy panes and the wet pigeons huddled in whatever shelter they could find. He’d hated the rain in the trenches, it was a torment of body and spirit. Wet wool, the stench of urine or vomit, the heavy sweetness of rotting flesh, the stink of dirty bodies, the slick, black, filthy mud that weighed down boots and caked faces and hands and matted hair under the helmets. The low clouds that hid the gas The drive north ought to be pleasanter than the weather here, he mused. And Hamish, a countryman at heart, found that thought agreeable as well. Rutledge took out his watch, realized that he might reach York before nightfall. He stood and stretched, set his current files in order, then walked out of his office and closed the door behind him.
Down the passage, walking toward the stairs, Bowles heard the faint sound and smiled with contentment.
