A Fearsome Doubt

20

Rutledge secured the night porter’s bicycle where he had found it, and wearily made his way to the back door of the hotel. It was still unlocked, just as he had left it hours earlier. So much for the night porter’s rounds. The man would most likely be asleep somewhere warm and quiet.

Rutledge was thinking too that somewhere warm and quiet would be inviting, as he moved through the empty kitchens and service quarters to the door that led into the lobby. Letting it shut silently behind him, he strode swiftly down the passage and rounded the stairs with one hand on the newel post.

“’Ware!” Hamish spoke sharply in his mind.

A woman coming down the steps toward Rutledge, her coat open in the warmth of the hotel, gasped in startled disbelief at what seemed to be a dark and sinister figure hurrying toward her.

In the same instant Rutledge recognized Elizabeth Mayhew and stopped stock-still in surprise at finding her here of all places, and at this hour.

“Ian?” she said uncertainly. “Is that you?”

“Elizabeth?”

“Ian, you must come-for the love of God, you must come! I don’t know what else to do-!” she said with breathless intensity. “Oh, please-!”

She reached him where he stood at the bottom of the stairs, her fingers clutching the thick, dew-wet knit of his sweater, pleading with him. Her face was streaked with tears and tight with fear.

“I didn’t know what to do-I knocked and knocked-you weren’t there -I didn’t know where to turn! ”

He took her hands in his, holding them firmly. His were cold from the night air, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Elizabeth. Take a deep breath and tell me what’s wrong.”

“There isn’t time-could we go in your motorcar? I ran all the way from the house. I don’t think I have the strength to walk back!”

Indeed, she looked to be at the end of her tether. Rutledge led her to one of the lobby chairs but she refused to sit. “No, we must go! He’s bleeding! ” The last words came out with a sob.

Rutledge said, “The motorcar is in the hotel yard. This way.” He took her through the kitchen passages, where he himself had just walked moments before, and out through the small flagstoned entry that led to the back gardens and sheds.

She sat huddled in the car as he drove fast down the High Street, and he glanced at her once or twice to see if she was all right. As they pulled up in the drive beside her house, she was out and running before he could stop the engine. Swearing under his breath, he followed her.

She came to a halt at the main door, bending over something on the front steps. Rutledge was beside her in time to see a man’s face lift up from the cradle of his arms, the features twisted with pain. Even in the faint light of the stars, the face seemed unnaturally pale. The man’s hair was dark with sweat, and it was hard to judge its normal color.

“Who is he?” Rutledge asked Elizabeth. “How did he get here?”

“I had gone to Lydia Hamilton’s for a women’s committee meeting, and when Lawrence brought me home-he was here! Oh, please, do something!”

“Did Lawrence see him?”

“No! No, I told him I could find my own way-”

Rutledge knelt down beside the figure. “Are you hurt? Tell me where.”

Elizabeth said, “His shoulder. His chest. I don’t know. When I tried to help him to his feet, there was blood everywhere. It was horrible!”

“Knife,” the man managed to say. One hand groped toward his left side.

Rutledge pulled away the heavy cloth of the man’s coat and felt the hot warmth on the sweater under it. His hand came away black with blood.

“We’ve got to get him inside, and send for a doctor,” he said.

“No-” The injured man’s voice was firm as he spoke the single word, echoed almost immediately by Elizabeth’s breathless “No!”

“Nonsense,” Rutledge responded briskly, and held out his hand. “Your key, Elizabeth.”

She hesitated. Then she gave it to him, torn between worry and what seemed to be a fear of bringing the stranger inside.

Rutledge was already heaving the man to his feet, noting with relief that he seemed to have both arms and both legs. And there was no wine on his breath There was a small lamp burning in the entrance hall, left for Elizabeth’s return. Beyond that table was an ornate Jacobean chair, and Rutledge got his burden lowered into it just as Henrietta, the spaniel, began to bark ferociously from behind the closed door of the sitting room. Distractedly Elizabeth called to the dog to hush.

“Go to her, or you’ll have every servant in the house down here to see what’s happening,” Rutledge commanded. And Elizabeth hurried off, calling the dog’s name and shushing her.

The man slumped in the chair seemed to be slipping in and out of consciousness, his head rolling on his shoulders. Rutledge, working swiftly, managed to get the coat off and was just lifting the sweater to rip it and clear the wound when his eyes met those of his patient. He froze, staring.

Gentle God! It was the face from the bonfire-it was the German!

In the poor light of the stars, with the grimace of pain distorting the man’s features, Rutledge had failed to notice any resemblance.

And even as he stepped back in alarm, the pain-filled blue eyes stared back at him, recognition-and resignation-in them.

The man started to say something, shook his head, and then found the words in English.

“A long way from France.” His voice was quiet, pitched so that Elizabeth couldn’t hear him. Her soothing words to the spaniel had roused the puppies, and they were whimpering.

Rutledge, with Hamish hammering at the back of his mind, asked harshly, “Who the hell are you?” A dozen images pressed and overlapped and faded with such speed that he was unable to sort through them or comprehend their significance. He was on a road-a road filled with figures, men he didn’t know-there were caissons and lorries, abandoned where they stood-voices he couldn’t understand-confusion, and a blank, impenetrable haze…

“Don’t you know? I’ve come-” The man winced, caught his breath, and went on, “-I’ve come back from the dead.”

“You don’t belong here-”

“True. Yes. I know that.”

Rutledge’s mind was reeling, fighting shock and disbelief.

And then relief surfaced, the realization that what he’d seen on Guy Fawkes Day two weeks before had been no hallucination, no slippage of the mind into madness. The man was real. He was real.

Rutledge had no idea who he was-or where he had come from-except out of the darkness of war.

And Hamish was saying, “But he’s deid. You said yoursel’ he’s deid.”

“I thought you were dead,” Rutledge found himself repeating aloud. “I watched you die!”

“Yes. Well. I am hard to kill.” The man shivered, and Rutledge came back to the present, staring at the warm blood on his fingers, at the sweater thick with it. He reached out and fumbled for an instant, lifting the heavy wet wool, then found his pocket knife and began to cut it away. With his hands busy, his mind seemed to anchor itself, as if rejecting anything but the work that needed to be done.

He could hear Elizabeth walking back down the passage, her feet hurrying.

The man cautioned hastily, “We will talk about the war another time. Not now.”

She came into the hall, moving quickly to help Rutledge pull away the last of the ripped yarn, gasping at the dark wet blood all over the man’s shirt.

Rutledge cut the shirt in its turn, saying to Elizabeth, “Water. Hot if you can manage it, and cloths. Bandages. Then send someone for the doctor.” His voice sounded different in his ears, strained and brutal.

She went away quickly to do his bidding, but not before he’d seen the glance exchanged between the German and Elizabeth.

“Leave her out of this,” the German was saying. “She has nothing to do with this. I will go with you to the doctor. You must not bring him to this house. It would cause-” He stopped and caught his breath again. “-It will cause comment. Talk. What do you call it?”

“Gossip. You should have thought of that before passing out on her doorstep.”

“I had very little choice. I was nearer this house than where-where I am living now.”

“You’re a German national.” Rutledge was still trying to sort through it.

The man managed a smile. “Even German nationals need a-need a roof when they travel. This hurts like the very devil!”

The knife blade had slashed down from the shoulder across another, older wound that had scarred over on the man’s chest. Deep, but not dangerously so. Rutledge, working carefully, explored the wound.

“Someone didn’t very much care whether they killed you or not,” he told the German. “What had you done to him, to deserve this?”

“I had done nothing. I was walking along the road, my coat over my-over my arm. There was a man at the side of the road. As I came closer, he hobbled out and struck. Then he was-he was gone.”

Sweat was running down the man’s face. His jaw, set now against another wave of pain, quivered with the effort to keep himself alert.

Elizabeth came back with the water in a kettle, and cloths with which to bathe the wound lying across a basin. She handed them to Rutledge and stood back, looking close to fainting herself.

“Go find the doctor,” Rutledge told her, pouring the water into the basin and dipping a cloth into it. Almost too warm, he thought; the stove must have just been banked for the night.

But she stood there, mesmerized, unable to move.

Rutledge cleaned up the wound as best he could, unable to staunch the bleeding even with the water and pads of cloths. In the end, he simply packed it and wound strips of linen around it. It reminded him, more than he cared to admit, of his own wound, hardly a month healed.

“The cook,” Hamish was saying, “willna’ know where her tea towels have got to.”

And Rutledge saw the embroidered initials on one of the strips. An absurdity in the nightmare. Like all nightmares, he thought to himself…

“Give him something to drink. Whisky, with a little of the hot water to dilute it,” he said to Elizabeth, and like a sleepwalker, she turned away to do as he asked.

The German drank it down gratefully, when she handed him the crystal glass, and he gave it back to her with a wry smile. “However will you explain this to the servants tomorrow?” he asked, glancing at the bloodied cloths and the basin full of dark red water.

It was as if he were trying to tell her to get rid of the evidence of his presence. Elizabeth, starting awake from her shock, said, “I’ll-I’ll deal with it.” She bent down to lift the basin of water at Rutledge’s feet and nearly dropped it as she looked into the bloody depths.

As she walked away to pour it out, forgetting the kettle sitting on the floor by the chair, the German said, “You have a motorcar? I thought I heard one before you came.”

“Yes. It’s in the drive.”

“Then if you will get me out of here, I will tell you whatever you want to know.”

“I’m taking you to the local doctor, and then to the police station.”

“No, I think you will not do eith-either of these things once you-once you have heard what I have to tell you.” He tried to stand, to pull his coat over his bare shoulders. But the effort was too much. He sank back in the chair, saying ruefully, “I think you must help me again. I don’t quite seem to know-to know where my feet are!”

Elizabeth came back, picked up the bloody towels and strips of clothing with distaste, and carried them away with the kettle.

She said, returning, “I put the cloths in the stove. It’s an awful smell! But they’ll burn.” She looked up at Rutledge expectantly, as if waiting for him to solve all their problems.

Hamish said, “She wants him to go. But she isna’ happy with his going.”

Indeed, she seemed to be torn, her hands gripping each other tightly, the knuckles white as the silence in the hall lengthened.

Rutledge said peremptorily, “Elizabeth, go to bed. I’ll see to him. You look as if you’ll fall down any minute. He’s not dying. There’s nothing more you can do. He needs better medical care than this-” He gestured to the rough bandaging.

Rousing herself with an effort, she said angrily, “Just because you’re a policeman-” And then she stopped, thoroughly ashamed.

“It’s because I’m a policeman that I’m telling you to go to bed,” he answered without heat. “Leave this to me. He will live, and I’ll see to him.”

She stared at him for an instant longer and then, without looking at the German, walked to the staircase.