Legacy of the Dead

13

DODGING A LORRY, THEN A DOG SNIFFING THE PAVEMENT with intent interest, Rutledge walked back to the hotel. He encountered Oliver just coming out the door.

“Found McKinstry, did you?”

“Yes, thanks.” He was on the point of walking on, and realized all at once that Oliver had something he wanted to say. Rutledge stopped and waited.

Oliver looked over Rutledge’s shoulder at the square beyond, as if surveying his domain. “I’ve thought a good deal about our Eleanor Gray and what might have brought her to Scotland. The father of the child might have been a Scot. Women can be sentimental about such things as their time draws near, and she might have decided the child ought to be born here. Or perhaps it was the father’s last wish in his last letter. Who’s to say? But there’s our reason for coming north! Lady Maude’s daughter or not, she’s still a woman, and apt to go mawkish. Do you agree with me so far?”

Rutledge thought of Eleanor Gray, the suffragette chaining herself to fences and letting herself be dragged off to prison. “Mawkish” wasn’t a word he’d have chosen to describe her. Still, Oliver had a point to make. Rutledge nodded.

“Next question, then. What happened between crossing the border and meeting Fiona MacDonald, as she must have called herself then? Did our Miss Gray, for sake of argument, leave too late and never make it to her original destination? Women have been known to be wrong about their time!”

That was true. But Eleanor Gray had wanted to be a doctor. Would she have got it wrong?

“Yes, I can see the possibilities. That she felt ill and stopped for help. Or that something else had gone wrong with her plans.” He looked down at Oliver. “Glencoe isn’t necessarily where she died. If she is dead.”

“Oh, she’s dead, right enough. And those are her bones out there in the glen. Who would know better where to hide a victim than someone who’d grown up in the district? If I had a corpse on my hands, I’d take it to such a godforsaken place no one was likely to stumble over it until it was clean bones. And that’s just what the MacDonald woman did. The local police didn’t have any luck at all identifying the remains last year when they were discovered. If we hadn’t come along, she’d be without a name still.”

Hamish, angry, described Oliver’s ancestry and future destination in some detail. Highlanders were, as a general rule, creative in their cursing.

“A dangerous choice, wouldn’t you say?” Rutledge found himself defending Fiona MacDonald. “I’d have taken the body miles from where I lived.”

“How far could the accused go, burdened with a newborn child and a dead woman?” Oliver said thoughtfully. “Or turn it upside down—she might have felt a little safer with each passing year, when the body didn’t come to light and there was no hue and cry for a missing child. Knowing it was there, if she ever had to devise an account of finding the mother dead. But herself safely out of the picture here in Duncarrick, otherwise.”

Words that would come back to him later—but Rutledge said now, “No, I don’t see that. Why didn’t she tell you those clever lies when you first became suspicious of her?”

“Because she misjudged me. She thought we’d be satisfied tearing the inn apart and coming away empty-handed.” Oliver smiled. “She failed to see, didn’t she, that making a fool of me was a blunder! I’d stake my hope of promotion on that. And now all that’s left is to put a name to that corpse. Which is why you are here.” It was a friendly warning not to cross the lines into Oliver’s own patch. The smile faded. “If I were a vengeful man, now, I’d look forward to presenting the haughty Lady Maude with proof that her daughter is not only dead but bore a child out of wedlock to some unknown soldier. First time that’s happened in her family tree, I’ve no doubt.”

RUTLEDGE ATE A hurried lunch, then informed the woman at the hotel desk that he might be away for several nights but wished to keep his room.

Morag had seen to his laundry for him, but he had written a brief note to Frances in London asking her to send a larger case north. He handed that to the clerk to be mailed. It appeared that he was going to be in Scotland for some time. Like it or not. But he was damned if he’d go any farther north than the borders!

Heading west from Duncarrick and then bearing north, Rutledge made first for Lanark. There was no direct road to Brae. It was only a small village on the way to somewhere else. The browns and golds of September already colored the landscape. The open land, with few of the hedgerows that the English used to set off fields, had been made suitable for sheep rather than agriculture. The cramped and compact towns, so different from the picturesque villages farther south, seemed to be locked into a harder past. The people here, independent and far less class-conscious, shared a different history from the English, and it had marked them. Set me down on either side of the border, he told himself, and I would know instantly on what ground I stood, English or Scottish.

As Rutledge settled into the long drive, Hamish turned from his annoyance at Inspector Oliver’s obtuseness to his memories of Fiona MacDonald before the war. Rutledge tried not to heed them, but the words kept pushing aside his own thoughts.

They had known each other from childhood, Fiona and Hamish. She had been lively and intelligent even then, accustomed to games with her brothers and their friends, running barefoot in the summers, her long, dark hair and her skirts tangled with briars and straw. Her grandfather’s favorite, she had learned to read at an early age and to form her own opinions freely. As she grew into a woman of humor and warmth in the summer of 1914, Hamish MacLeod had asked her to marry him. Only he’d marched off to war within a matter of weeks, and in 1916 died in France, far away from Fiona and the Highlands, from everything he held dear.

Small wonder she’d been tempted to take a motherless child and love him as her own, to bring him up as she and Hamish might have brought up their brood. A legacy of the dead, a child with his name if not his blood.

In the trenches, where men talked of home and a lost, safer world, Hamish had drawn a picture of a caring woman, of laughter and trust and abiding affection, that a soldier had carried with him to war.

But Rutledge had seen something else in her—through his eyes, not Hamish’s.

He had seen strength in her, and the ability to look directly at the world. He had seen courage—and fear. He had seen a fierce longing for something to come out of the ashes of her heart. And now even that had been taken away.

She was everything, he realized suddenly, that Jean—whom he’d wanted to marry, who he’d believed cared for him—had never been. And for the first time since Jean had broken off their engagement, he was entirely free of her spell. As if scales had fallen from his eyes, he saw clearly how very different Jean’s conception of marriage had been from his. She had wanted a future that was protected and secure, accepted by society, applauded by her friends. A man in turmoil, his mind shattered, his future uncertain, was a terrifying prospect.

Fiona MacDonald knew what love meant, and what it cost, and what the war had taken from her. She would have loved Hamish if he’d come home scarred with burns, without his legs or his arms. She would have loved the man he’d become as well as the man he was.

She would even have loved him shell-shocked and consumed by nightmares—

Rutledge refused to follow that line of thought.

But his mind brought back other images, the women like Jean who came to the clinics and stared with horror at the ruins of husband or lover—he had once encountered one of them running out the door, face buried in her handkerchief, moaning in shock. And in the room behind her, a man with bandages where his face had been lay mute with clenched fists, unable to cry. There had been others who had accepted the living shell gratefully, with an intense sense of wonder that they had been among the lucky ones to have their soldier home again.

Fiona would have been among those. . . .

That was the kind of courage she possessed. Was she also a murderess?

Rutledge felt the betrayal even as his mind framed the question. A betrayal of Hamish and of Fiona MacDonald.

HE SHUT THE war out of his mind and tried to concentrate instead on what lay ahead.

Fiona had left her grandfather’s home and moved south to Brae.

But why Brae?

“Because it was different from the glen,” Hamish answered unexpectedly. “It held no memories. Of her grandfather, of me. Of her brothers who had died.”

Rutledge recalled the statement McKinstry had read to him. When she’d been asked if Fiona could have been pregnant when she left Brae, Mrs. Davison had answered unequivocally. “No. I would have known,” she’d said. “I kept a strict eye on Fiona—not because she was likely to find herself in trouble, but because she was a young girl, alone and in my care. Come to that, it wasn’t hard to do—she seldom took her day off, and even in the evenings, when the children were in bed, she’d sit with me and do the mending or read aloud.”

Oliver’s comment on Mrs. Davison’s character was “I’d take my oath that she’s telling the truth. Forthright to a fault, as my sergeant put it.”

Mrs. Davison might well have told the exact truth. People often did.

The whole truth was another matter. And how an investigating officer probed for it determined how much of it came out. Objectivity . . .

Oliver was convinced that Fiona MacDonald was a murderess.

If she wasn’t, how did she come by the child? That was the stumbling block, and her life depended on the answer. And Rutledge was going to have to find it.

BRAE WAS SOUTH and east of Glasgow, on the outskirts of an area that had suffered from fast expansion and then depression in the previous century. The basin of the Clyde had become a forest of steelworks, factories, and mines, but it had never been a scenic wonderland. All the same, what little beauty there was had been swallowed up long since. Lanark, on the other hand, was a pleasant town with associations with the Scottish hero William Wallace, and it was there that Rutledge ate a late dinner before continuing to Brae.

But there was no place in Brae to spend the night, and he was forced to return to Lanark.

It was early in the morning when he came back, and even Hamish could find nothing attractive in the plain houses, the dull landscape, or the feeling that time had dealt harshly with the little village. Even its few streets seemed tired.

Mrs. Davison lived in a brick house that had been well kept, one large enough to have been a manager’s home when industry had mushroomed in the region. The windows were clean, with pretty curtains behind them; there were flowers still in bloom in the sheltered garden to one side, and behind the house vegetables had been grown in long rows that were now brown and untidy except for the dark green of beets and cabbages at the far end. The house stood at the edge of the village, set back from the street behind a low brick wall. A ball, a doll with a china face and no clothes on its white kid body, and a small bucket full of stones littered the walk in front of the door.

She answered his knock herself, a woman with a kind face but very perceptive hazel eyes. She looked him up and down as he introduced himself and then said, “Yes, I’m Penelope Davison. I’ve talked to the policemen in Duncarrick. Why should London have any interest in going over the same ground? I know nothing about Fiona that can help you in any way.” In her own fashion, she reminded him of Lady Maude. The same independent spirit and refusal to be overawed by the law.

“All the same, there are some questions I must ask.”

She sighed and opened the door wider, inviting him in to the parlor, on the left side of the entry. It was small with dark furniture, a goodly number of green-leafed plants, and very little frivolity. There was a charcoal portrait of a man with fine mustaches and an air of importance, framed in oak and gilt; a small reproduction from a newspaper of Queen Victoria’s jubilee procession, framed in dark wood; and a bookcase with glass doors holding rows of calf-bound volumes, scuffed from much use, just under the window. The books had been tidily sorted by height, not content. But there was an air of calm and comfort in the room that impressed Rutledge as he took the chair she indicated.

From the back of the house he could hear the high voices of children, and realized suddenly that it was a Saturday and they were not in school. Hamish said, “You must speak to them—you gave Fiona your promise!”

Mrs. Davison was saying, “Well, then, you’ve come all this way. What is it you would like to know?”

“When Fiona MacDonald first came to live with you, did she have references? A letter of introduction?”

“She answered an advertisement I’d placed in the Glasgow paper in 1915. Her letter impressed me and I asked her to come for an interview. I liked her immediately, but I’m not a foolish woman, and I made inquiries before taking her on. Her grandfather was a respected man, and there were a number of people around Glencoe who spoke well of her. She came to me and I never had a moment’s regret over hiring her. I can’t bring myself to believe that she has killed anyone. But that police inspector claims she has.”

“There is evidence pointing in that direction, yes. It isn’t necessarily proven. That’s why I’m here. Did she have any friends in Brae? Young women she might have grown to know well?”

“No. She was grieving most of the time, you see, and she went out very little. Her brothers died one after the other, and then, in 1916, her young man. There was another woman here who used to walk with her when the weather was fine. But I wouldn’t have described Mrs. Cook as a friend. They were more—I don’t know—fellow sufferers. The newspapers pretended the war was going well, but too many people were dying. It’s a terrible weight when you worry day and night about someone. And when the news came, and Fiona knew the worst, it was hard for her to speak of it. She didn’t tell me for weeks. I think most of us pressed her to cry but she wouldn’t. Mrs. Cook didn’t press. She seemed to understand what it was like.”

“Tell me about Mrs. Cook, if you will.”

“She was ill—her lungs. As I understood it, her doctor had hoped that better air would help. The smoke of Glasgow most certainly had not. At any rate, early in 1916 she took rooms in that white house you must have passed coming into Brae. On your left. Mrs. Kerr’s sons were off to France, and her husband was away building ships. She didn’t want to live alone and advertised for lodgers. It seemed to suit both of them—Mrs. Cook was quiet and no trouble. Mrs. Kerr preferred it that way.”

“Do you know anything about Mrs. Cook’s background, where she’d come from?”

“Before Glasgow? I have no idea. Her husband was at sea, and Fiona’s young man was in France. They seemed to have very little in common other than that. I thought perhaps Mrs. Cook had come from a wealthy home and had been given advantages that Fiona hadn’t. Which is not to say that Fiona was common. She was a most unusual girl, and I found her a very pleasant companion. Her grandfather had reared her extraordinarily well!”

“How long was Mrs. Cook here?”

“Seven months, I’d say. Then her husband was invalided home, and she went to London to be with him.”

“Fiona had been living here for some time before Mrs. Cook came?”

“Of course. Over a year. And if you’re asking me if they might have known each other before moving to Brae, I seriously doubt it. Fiona left only after she’d had word that her aunt was taken ill and couldn’t manage the inn on her own any longer. She cried when she left, and my children cried with her. I was not above crying myself! That’s why I didn’t ask her to work out her time.”

Not to work out her time—but Fiona had told her aunt that she must!

“How long after Mrs. Cook’s departure was that?”

“Three or four months, I’d say.”

Hamish pointed out that if Mrs. Cook had been expecting a child when she came to Brae, then she had had it alone and without Fiona’s help. Seven months and four months added up to eleven.

Nevertheless, Rutledge made a note of it. He said, “Did Mrs. Cook leave a forwarding address, do you know?”

“If she did, Fiona never said anything about it. Mary Kerr found a pair of gloves in the bedroom after her lodger had gone—they’d fallen under the bed. Mary wanted to send them along to her but didn’t have her direction.”

“Forgive me, but why do you think a woman of Mrs. Cook’s apparent position should wish to spend over half a year in Brae?”

Mrs. Davison smoothed the white tatted cover on the arm of her chair. “I wondered about that myself. Brae left her to herself. And I think that’s what she needed most. I wondered, once or twice, if she might be a married woman who’d had an affair and the man died. Time to heal, you see. Away from everyone who didn’t know and couldn’t understand.” She shrugged. “Perhaps that’s an overly romantic view of her. There could be any number of other reasons. Fiona gave no sign of missing her other than the occasional remark that anyone might make. When the cat had kittens, she said something like ‘Mrs. Cook told me once that she’d never had a cat or a dog of her own. It’s too bad she couldn’t have one of these.’ ”

Hamish said, “I canna’ see a child romping with a dog in Lady Maude’s house.” It was true. . . .

Rutledge said, “Do you recall her first name? Her husband’s name?”

“I don’t think I ever heard her speak of him by name. It was usually ‘my husband.’ But her name was Maude. I thought it was rather pretty.”

A coincidence . . . it was a common English name.

“Did you say anything to Inspector Oliver about Mrs. Cook?”

“I saw no reason to. I told you, it wasn’t actually a friendship, it was simple loneliness. I don’t suppose they’d have spoken a dozen words to each other ordinarily! But the young women here in Brae had gone away to do war work, and the ones with children, like me, spent a rather dreary war. Fiona and Mrs. Cook, the outsiders, naturally were drawn together.”

“I’ve been trying to locate an Eleanor Gray in the hope that she might throw some light on Miss MacDonald’s situation. Has she visited Brae?”

Mrs. Davison shook her head. “We aren’t a crossroads here, though it may seem as if we are. There was never an Eleanor Gray here. I’d have known if there was.”

WITH MRS. DAVISON’S permission, Rutledge sat at the rough kitchen table with the three children Fiona had cared for: a girl and two boys. The girl was shy, but the boys were eager to talk.

The picture they drew was of a young woman who could sit on the floor and play games with them, who read to them in the evening if they went to bed without fuss, and who knew the most fearsome tales of Highland feuds and battles.

“She spent a night once in a haunted house, and there was a man there who carried his head in his hands. Fiona saw him, plain as day!” the eldest boy told Rutledge with great relish. “He was a Campbell, killed by a MacLaren, and seeking revenge.” He launched into the details of the feud, but his mother, smiling, said, “Yes, that’s all very well, but I don’t think Mr. Rutledge has time for the whole story.”

He spent a quarter of an hour with the children and Mrs. Davison but came away with nothing more. He needed no further reminder from Hamish to pass on Fiona’s message to the children. The shy little girl smiled and said “Fiona” in a soft voice. “Is she coming back?”

Her mother looked over her head at Rutledge and replied, “Not for a while, dear.”

MRS. KERR, OVER sixty and showing her years, told him what she knew of Mrs. Cook, but there was nothing new in what she had to say.

As he got up to leave, Rutledge asked, “Did Mrs. Cook and Miss MacDonald seem to be close?”

“Not close, no. They’d walk in the evenings sometimes. That was all.”

“Where did they walk most often, do you know?”

“Mrs. Cook wasn’t country bred, so they didn’t go far. About the town, mostly, or in the churchyard. It’s protected from the wind, I suppose that’s why. I had the feeling that they both felt comfortable among the graves. Odd thing to say, I know, but there you are. As if they drew strength or peace or the like from the quiet there . . . Fiona, now, I knew she’d lost the man she was to marry—she told me once that he was buried in France. Mrs. Cook’s husband was at sea. But she never spoke much about herself. At first I put it down to being too good for the likes of us in Brae, then I saw that she was not one to talk. Some folks aren’t, are they? It’s what makes the world go ’round, differences.”

RUTLEDGE CROSSED THE street from Mrs. Kerr’s and walked as far as the small, ugly church. The early Victorian brick and stone mixture had not been successful, but it stood apart, among great old trees planted generations before for an older church. There were paths among the graves, white graveled ribbons through the green, hum-mocked grass. A number of bare plots spoke of recent burials, and he shivered, remembering his own dream.

He went through the gate and spent some time moving through the wilderness of stone, reading the inscription on first this one and then another.

Not far from the rear wall one headstone caught his eye. It was old, the dates smudged and barely discernible, but the name carved deeply into the gray face was quite legible.

Hamish MacLeod.

Not the man he’d killed—the dates were much older, a century or more older. But Rutledge found himself wondering as he stood there and looked down at it, if Fiona MacDonald had also known about it and in some way had taken comfort from it. A gravestone for a man who had none.

A place to sit on the weedy grass while she remembered a past that had no future. It must have offered consolation as well as privacy to mourn.

He had the oddest feeling that he was right.

But what name had Mrs. Cook found here if her husband was still alive? What memories had comforted her?

He walked through the stones again, searching. There were Campbells and Lindsays, MacBrays and MacDougals, a long list of Highland and Lowland names that had no special meaning to him. He found a Trevor, and thought of Ross, then moved on. Little and Elliot, Davison and Robson, Pringle and Taylor, Henderson and one Gray. Evelyn Gray. He had died as an infant.

It was Eleanor Gray’s father’s name—the man she had called father all her life.

Had she been closer to him than to her mother in spite of the fact that he wasn’t her natural father?

Girls were often attached to their fathers, and if Evelyn Gray had accepted her publicly as his daughter, he would have brought her up to the best of his ability. Even if he had not loved her for her own sake, he would have treated her well for King Edward’s sake. The men had been close friends.

And he might have been the only warmth in Eleanor’s life. Rutledge could not envision Lady Maude holding a squirming child in her lap to read it a story, as Fiona had done with her charges in the Davison household.

But then, he might be doing Lady Maude an injustice. He had met her after the quarrel with Eleanor. Her daughter’s refusal to acknowledge her duty to her blood and heritage had hurt deeply. There might have been a very different relationship between mother and child before that.

Otherwise, why had Lady Maude insisted that he, Rutledge, take charge of this question of identifying the bones?

“She might,” Hamish said, “be wanting to protect her family’s honor—”