my backside if she’s alive or dead.”
A worn woman in a faded dress came to stand at the door behind him. MacDougal took his hat off to her, but she said nothing.
Rutledge said, “What did you do to her, Mr. Lawlor? That made her run away?” He had a feeling that he already knew.
He thought the man was on the verge of apoplexy, he was so angry.
The woman said, “She wouldna’ tell him where she got the money for the shoes. He thought he had a right to know. He thought she might have more of it. So he beat her until she couldn’t cry. And that night she left.”
“I’ve got every right to that money! I feed and clothe these brats. I keep a roof over their heads. What they have is mine.”
“Beat your children again, Lawlor, and I’ll haul you in for drunk and disorderly, and keep you in prison until you rot, do you hear me!” MacDougal’s voice was cold. “Do you hear me, man!”
“It willna’ do any good,” his wife said in a tired voice. “When he’s like this, he doesna’ remember a word.”
Lawlor swung a fist in her direction, but she moved away with the ease of long practice.
Rutledge thought of that same fist beating the thin child he’d seen on the mountainside. Whatever Betty had done, she was better off out of here.
“I want her back!” Lawlor was saying now, his voice plaintive. “There’s nobody to tend the sheep.”
“You should have thought of that before you beat her,” MacDougal answered roughly. “Mrs. Lawlor, did your daughter tell you where she earned the money for her shoes?”
She shook her head. “But she’s out wi’ the sheep noon and night. Who’s to say?”
“Whore, that’s what she was. Slut. Selling herself, I’ll be bound.”
“No, she hadn’t sold herself, Lawlor. She provided the police with some information they badly needed.” Rutledge added, “Mrs. Lawlor, do you know if your daughter has had a piece of jewelry in her possession for some months now? It was a brooch with a cairngorm center.”
She laughed. “And how’d she keep something like that where he didna’ find it? In her boudoir? I never saw her with anything more than the bit of dyed yarn she’d twisted into a bracelet for her sister and herself. If you think my Betty had anything like a cairngorm brooch, you’re mad.”
MacDougal and Rutledge exchanged glances. Rutledge said to her, “My mistake. I must have misunderstood.”
MacDougal walked with Rutledge back to his car. The small boy had come outside now and was fingering the bonnet, then running his hand over the smooth leather of the seat. MacDougal was saying, “She had the brooch. Whether her mother saw it or not. It doesn’t make a difference to your case.”
“The brooch was seen in Glasgow several weeks ago. In the shop of an engraver. Can you believe that Betty Lawlor was the one who took it there?”
“Great God, no one told me that! When did Oliver find out?”
“He doesn’t know. I’d rather tell him myself. I just learned the news from my sergeant in London.” He smiled at the boy and lifted him into the driver’s seat, where the child instantly made motor noises and gripped the wheel like a racer. “But it means that most of Betty’s story is a lie. She didn’t have that brooch for a year or more-nor did she find it on the hillside. My belief is that the person who gave it to her and taught her a story meant to be told to the police also gave her the money to buy shoes. And there was enough extra to help her escape her father and this place. She would have bargained hard. She carried out her part very well indeed. It will be Oliver’s headache to track her down to testify at the trial. I’ve no doubt he’d do it.”
“I don’t believe it. You’re pulling at straws!”
The horn blew. Rutledge and MacDougal winced.
MacDougal went on. “It’s no more than speculation. You can’t be sure it’s the same brooch! No, until there’s proof to the contrary, I put my faith in young Betty.”
“I think there’s enough proof already to put some doubt into a jury’s mind.” Rutledge waited, then said, “Will you search for her?”
MacDougal gestured to the croft and the parents still standing in the doorway. “And bring her back to this?” He took a deep breath. “I suppose I shall have to. But it won’t be easy. Still, there aren’t many ways she could have gone from here. Even with her new walking shoes. Inveraray, most likely, where she could beg a lift in a wagon.” He turned away, settling his hat back on his head. “I’ll let Oliver know when she turns up.”
“Thanks.” Rutledge said to the boy, “Will you sit there while I turn the crank?”
The child nodded vigorously. Rutledge started the engine and then let him stay for a moment longer to feel the power of the car under him. MacDougal had already turned around in the yard and was heading back the way they’d come. Rutledge lifted the child down.
With a glowing face he said, “I’ll have mysel’ one of them!”
“I’m sure you will,” Rutledge answered.
And then, as if in payment for the special treat, the boy leaned toward him, standing on tiptoe. “There was a man with Betty-I saw him. Even though she claimed it was only the sun playing tricks.”
“What did he look like?” Rutledge asked quickly, suddenly intent.
The boy backed away, already regretting his confidence. “Fair,” he mumbled, and then ran back to the croft door, slipping between his mother’s skirts and his father’s legs. Disappearing into the house.
Rutledge nodded to the Lawlors, then turned the car around. He had lost his escort back through the glen. But it had been worth it.
25
Wary of being followed, Rutledge didn’t stay the night in Lanark as he’d intended. The last thing he wanted to do was lead someone to the small clinic and Dr. Wilson. Instead he drove some distance beyond the town, then decided to continue to Duncarrick through the night. With scones, pork pies, and tea he bought at a pub, and Hamish to keep him awake, he let the smooth sound of the engine form a backdrop to his thoughts. His headlamps picked out road signs and the dark fronts of towns and farms as he mentally went back through all his notes, looking at every word with a fresh eye.
Well, reasonably fresh, he told himself as he finished the last of the scones. He stopped several times to stretch his legs or clear his head, the night air cool on his face and the moonlight turning the landscape into stark shapes of deep shadows and brighter patches. It was a far cry from France, he thought, where the long line of the battlefield had no natural definition, the trees blasted into black fingers of ruined trunks and the gentle roll of the fields destroyed in the shelling, with man-made twists of wire and humps of shell-tortured earth the only landmarks. A bizarre black-and-gray world where only the scavengers lived.
Except for a lorry or two, a skittering of hares racing across his headlamps, and once a wagon filled with crates of chickens on their way to market, there was less and less traffic on the road as the hours passed.
Hamish said, “Any decent man is at home in his bed!”
But Rutledge was at peace with the night. It was, he thought, a sanctuary of sorts, where there was no one else to overhear the voice in his head or the long conversations that sometimes tricked him into answering aloud.
Nor did he fear that the sniper might try again. In the night even a marksman would find it impossible to shoot at a moving target, a tire or a radiator, to send Rutledge careering into a ditch. But it helped to keep him awake, thinking about that as well.
“It’s a foolish man-or a desperate one-shooting at a policeman.”
“It was a warning,” Rutledge answered. “I’ve come too close to something. Or to someone. I’ve breached the outer defenses of a wall of silence.”
Hamish said, “It wasna’ a woman, to climb that far with a rifle.”
“There’s no way to be sure of that. But I rather think you’re right. I would give much to know when the first cracks appeared in that wall.” Rutledge smiled to himself. “I’d take great pleasure in widening them!”
When he reached Duncarrick, he bathed and shaved, went to bed, and slept two hours. Then he went in
