A Pale Horse

14

Rutledge put in a call to Bowles when he stopped for the night in Lincoln.

Chief Superintendent Bowles wasn’t there, he was told. But Sergeant Gibson had a message for Inspector Rutledge.

There was a delay while the sergeant was located and brought to the telephone.

He was gruff. “You’re to come directly to London, sir.”

“What’s happened?”

“I’m not to say, sir. It’s a family matter. Your sister will be waiting for you at your flat.”

If she was waiting there, she must be all right. But she wouldn’t have had the Yard pass on a message if it were only another snag in her relationship with Simon Barrington. He could feel his mind searching for a solution, and finding none.

“Very well. Thank you, Gibson. I’ll be at the Yard in the afternoon.”

“Yes, sir.” He sounded doubtful, but then Gibson was not known for his cheerfulness.

Rutledge put up the receiver and turned around, on his way out of the small room where the hotel telephone had been installed. As he opened the door, he was surprised to see Simon Barrington walking into the hotel dining room, a woman on his arm. Rutledge could see only the back of her head, dark hair and a slim figure.

He decided on the spot to find somewhere else to dine. He had no wish to come face-to-face with the pair.

But what was Barrington doing here in Lincoln?

Hamish said, “Ye’re too weary to go on to London. It would be foolish.”

He had read Rutledge’s mind.

The policeman, however, walked briskly to Reception and turned the book toward him to see who had registered with Barrington.

There were two names. Separate rooms. S. Barrington and J. Fellowes. Barrington had given his address as London, but Fellowes had listed Boston.

The clerk saw what Rutledge was doing and came out of the office. “Here—”

“Police business,” Rutledge said curtly, and went out to find his dinner.

He reached London in the late afternoon, stopping twice on the road for a brief respite.

Hamish had rumbled through the night, as he’d often done in the trenches, and the soft Scots voice had brought tension with it.

Rutledge went straight to his flat, and he found Frances waiting as promised, her face filled with concern. He knew at once that someone was dead.

“Who is it?” he asked, bracing himself. “Not Melinda—”

Melinda Trent, the intriguing elderly woman who’d lived through the Great Indian Mutiny of 1857, had been a friend of his family for as long as he could remember, and cared for him as well. He returned that love in full measure, leavened by a strong suspicion that she saw through him more often than not. If she’d found Hamish in his shadows, she had spoken of that only obliquely. Her home was in Kent, and he promised himself he would find a way to go on there tonight, taking Frances with him.

“No.” She crossed the room to greet him, hands on his shoulders, and said, “Oh, my dear, I don’t know how to tell you.”

“Quickly would be best,” he replied tightly.

“It’s Jean,” she told him then. “She’s dead.”

“Jean—”

The woman he should—would—have married, if there had been no war.

He had got over her, he had told himself that often enough through a long dark year. Now it struck him that he had never said good-bye. That day in the clinic when he’d broken off their engagement so that she wouldn’t have to ask him to set her free, letting her go because it was what she desperately wanted and didn’t know how to tell him, she had walked out of his room promising to come again as soon as she could. But she never had. He had known she wouldn’t be able to brace herself for another visit.

Dead—

He could feel Frances’s hands on his shoulders, hear her voice, and knew that she was there.

“Who told you?” he asked hoarsely. “How did you find out?”

“Melinda telephoned to me. A friend of hers had sent her a cable from Canada. It was in the papers in Toronto.”

That too was a blow. That Jean had died and he had felt nothing.

“How did it happen?”

“Complications of pregnancy. She lost her child—a miscarriage—and infection set in afterward. They did all that was possible to save her.”

Women died in childbirth every day. Only he hadn’t expected one of them to be Jean.

“Is she coming back to England?”

“The obituary says she’ll be buried in Canada. Her husband is still serving there.”

And so he would never say good-bye. Not now.

The last time he’d seen her, she was coming out of St. Margaret’s Church, where she was soon to be married. A cluster of her friends surrounded her, their voices traveling to him where he stood. Her face was shining with happiness and excitement as she discussed flowers and candles and ribbons. It had broken his heart—and yet he had never hated her for leaving him. He had known what sort of husband he would have made. She was better off without him.

Still, he felt a surge of guilt for letting her go.

If she had stayed in England—

But that was pointless.

Rutledge set Frances aside and went to the window to look out on the street, not seeing it.

She went away, and came back presently with a cup of tea.

Rutledge drank it, the hot strong liquid cutting through the shock of Frances’s news.

There was nothing he could do. No word of comfort for the bereaved husband—who probably had never known Rutledge existed—and no flowers for the raw earth of the grave.

He finished his tea and said, “I need to walk. Will you wait?”

“Of course.”

He had never taken off his coat. He just went out the door.

An hour later, he saw that there was a church on the next corner, smoke-stained stone, with a spire that gleamed in the sun.

The door was unlocked and he went inside into the silent dimness. His footsteps echoed against the stone walls, and he got as far as the first row of chairs. There he sat down. It wasn’t the comfort of God he sought so much as the need to be alone. And Hamish, mercifully, was quiet.

He hadn’t expected it. That was the problem. The loss was emotional, sharp.

Their engagement had not been spent growing closer to each other, settling into a warm and responsive companionship that would carry them into old age, as it should have been. Four years of war had seen to that and changed them both. She was another man’s wife, now. Not his, never his. And while he grieved for the girl he had asked to marry him in 1914, she had left a long time ago.

He rose after a while and walked back the way he’d come.

Hamish, at his shoulder, said only, “It was verra’ different with my Fiona. I should ha’ come home to her, and left you dead in France. Your Jean wouldna’ have missed you…”

The voice was sad, as if half convincing himself that this was true.

Together the two men, one of whom didn’t exist, went back to the flat.