Legacy of the Dead

3

1919 LONDON

HE WAS STANDING ON THE ROAD, LOOKING BEYOND THE low stone wall and down into the churchyard, where the slope of the land evened out. There had been rain in the night; the stones were drenched with it and stood out blackly in the pale morning light.

His heart was pounding. The stones drew him like a magnet drawing iron, and he found himself trying to make out the name on each, searching for one he knew must be there. Then, with an effort of will, he turned to stare at the church tower, still swathed in low rain clouds, and at the tall windows above the door. He wanted to believe it was the church in Buncombe—Cornwall—but he knew it couldn’t be. He told himself it was a churchyard in France, but that, too, was a lie.

A flicker of movement distracted him, and then he saw the girl in the shadows of the church door. She was carrying flowers, her arms full of blossoms and long spears of greenery, and as she stepped into the light, he saw that she was looking at him. As if she’d expected him to be standing there. As if she knew he would come, in the end.

He couldn’t see her face clearly, but he instantly recognized her. And the grief in her eyes shamed him, cutting through his defenses.

Terrified, he tried to turn away, and couldn’t. His feet were rooted to the spot, his body paralyzed by her eyes.

She was coming toward him now, up the church walk. She was saying something to him, then she pointed to the side of the churchyard and the grave there. Only there wasn’t a body lying beneath the bare brown earth. He knew that at once.

There were tears on her face, but no hatred. He thought he could have borne the hatred, but not the pity in her eyes.

He began to walk toward her, not of his own volition but of hers, drawn to her, drawn to the drift of flowers she held, drawn to the grave they were destined for. She had brought enough flowers for the two of them to spread over the earth, to cover its ugliness. He could see it now, raw, without beauty or grace or the mercy of time, and he couldn’t face it—one more step and he would read the name on the stone, and that would be intolerable—

IAN RUTLEDGE WOKE with a start, breathing harshly from shock.

He was sitting upright, knees raised, head flung back, drenched with sweat and with horror, terrified of the heavy, suffocating blackness that surrounded him, that made him blind.

Frantic, he put his hands to his face to claw the viscous mask away and touched—not the thick mud of the trenches but his own flesh.

Surprised, confused, he tried to think. If he wasn’t in France, where was he? His hands floundered, found sheets—a pillow. The clinic?

As his eyes grew accustomed to the impenetrable darkness, he was able to pick out the ghostly shape of his surroundings. A door—a mirror—a bedpost—

Rutledge swore. I’ve been asleep—I’m in my bed—I was dreaming—

But it was several minutes before the vivid dream faded enough for him to shake off the overwhelming sense of doom it had left behind. In the back of his mind he could feel Hamish rumbling like heavy thunder—or the guns— trying to tell him something he didn’t want to hear—over and over again.

Fumbling for a match, he lit the candle on the table by his bed, then got up and switched on the light. It blared down at him from the high ceiling, garish and stark after the darkness, but he was grateful for the reality it provided, pushing back the last remnants of sleep and of his nightmare.

He pinched out the candle flame, looked at the watch lying beside the brass candlestick, and saw that the time was close to three o’clock. In France he’d often slept with a stub of candle clenched in his hand. Unlit—it would have been madness to light it—but a symbol of light all the same. He still kept one beside his bed, a talisman.

This was London, not the trenches, and there was no mud— He repeated the words, listening to their sanity.

Around him were his own belongings: the carved armoire by the door to the sitting room, the mirror where he put on his tie every morning, the chair that had been his father’s, the tall posts of the bed he had slept in as a boy, the dark burgundy draperies his sister had helped him hang. All of them familiar, and in their own way, unexpectedly comforting. They had been his before the war, just as this flat had been, and returning here had been a bulwark against the intervening hell of the trenches. A promise that one day he would be the same man again.

I’ve been working too hard, he thought, moving between the bed and the tall chest and coming to a halt by the table set beneath the window. He pushed aside the draperies. Outside, rain clouds were hanging heavily over the city. Gray and depressing. He turned away, letting the heavy fabric fall again. Frances is right, I need rest. It will stop when I can rest.

His sister Frances had put it in no uncertain terms. “You look terrible, Ian! Tired and thin and still very unlike yourself. Tell Old Bowels to give you leave, you’ve worked as hard as ten men since you came back to the Yard, and the doctors told you quite clearly—”

Yes, they’d told him. But in work was—sometimes—forgetfulness.

Hamish, tireless at the back of Rutledge’s mind, said, “It’s no’ true, you canna’ forget. There’s only emptiness, sometimes.”

“I’ll settle for that. When I’m weary enough to sleep, there’s peace—was peace,” Rutledge corrected himself. From long habit he answered the voice only he could hear, the voice of a dead man. It was as clear as his own in the silent room, with a Highlander’s soft accent, and so real it seemed to come from just behind him. As if the speaker might be standing there if Rutledge turned his head. But there was no one behind him—although the dread of being wrong about that was nearly as real as the voice.

He tried to shove the dream back into the far reaches of despair, refusing to remember any shred of it, refusing to believe any part of it. Then realized that he was standing in the middle of the floor, frowning, remembering.

He shook himself and went back to the window to look out again. Hamish said behind him, “It’s no’ so gloomy in the Highlands—the rain’s clean, sweet.”

Rutledge, grateful for the distraction, nodded.

What we call shell shock for lack of a better term, said the doctor at the clinic—Frances’s friend, the one who’d brought him back from the edge of insanity—is not fully understood. “I can’t tell you how it will progress. Whether one day you’ll find it gone—or whether it will stay with you for the rest of your life. Whether it will get a little better with time or a good deal worse. We don’t know, you see. A few of the men like you I’ve treated have managed to find a way to live with it. You must do the same. Don’t worry yourself about the medical aspects of it, just get on with your life and make the best of the fact that you can reason and think and act quite normally.”

Rutledge was no longer certain what “normal” was. He hadn’t been since early 1916.

His war had not ended in triumph and rejoicing.

By the time guns stopped firing in 1918 at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day, he’d been locked in such desolation that he hardly knew where he was.

A month later he’d been found dazed and incoherent, wandering the roads of northern France. Wearing a German greatcoat, unable to give his name or even his nationality, he’d eventually been sent back to the British command: a major in the French army had recognized him as a liaison officer he’d met in 1915.

The British had promptly clapped him in hospital. Shell shock, the diagnosis was. Outlook: uncertain.

And it had been. Nothing had brought him out of the bleak and accusing silence in which he’d been found. He had begun to remember who and what he was—Ian Rutledge, British officer, former Inspector at Scotland Yard. He had recognized his sister Frances, and been allowed, briefly, a meeting with his fiancée.

It had not been a success. When he reached numbly for Jean’s hand, she’d snatched it away. She had been carefully coached by the doctors, but her eyes had been filled with fright as she made inane conversation in a trembling voice. He’d seen her only a few times after that, before she’d broken off their engagement.

It had been his sister who had got him out of the hellhole that was a hospital for shell-shock victims and into a private clinic.

And the doctor there, Fleming by name, had mercilessly broken him.

Rutledge had fought him every step of the way. But bone-weary and ill, he’d been no match for the tall, raw-boned doctor who had seen in the shambles a man worth saving and so refused to admit defeat.

The truth about Corporal Hamish MacLeod had come out, raggedly at first and then relived so vividly that Rutledge had believed he was in the trenches again.

Afterward, Rutledge had nearly killed Fleming, a last desperate defense of an inner self so unacceptable to a conscious mind that he’d hated the doctor, blamed him for bringing him out of his silence and back into awareness. . . .

THE SOMME OFFENSIVE of 1916, a disaster from its inception, had begun in July and dragged on through the summer. So many men had died that the bodies corrupted and rotted where they lay and the survivors lived with the stench. Weeks into the battle, they were none of them quite sane, but when Corporal Hamish MacLeod cracked, the shock of it left Rutledge and his men staring.

There had been no sign, no warning. Taking over from a gut-shot and dying sergeant, MacLeod had led his men with extraordinary skill and bravery, an example to them all. When he abruptly refused to make another assault on the machine-gun nest that was their objective, there was stunned disbelief.

Orders had come down that the gun had to be silenced before the entire line went over the top at dawn. Artillery fire, laid down in earnest during the night, had deafened them, battered them until they were all on the ragged edge of despair. And still the machine gunners survived, because they were well dug in and no one could reach them through the hail of bullets.

As the weary, white-faced corporal shook his head, refusing a direct order, saying only “I willna’ kill any more of our own. I willna’ go back again. It’s madness,” the eyes of the men at his back were grim, disheartened.

Rutledge didn’t know how he and Hamish had come through each assault unscathed. He didn’t know where he himself would find the strength to go back through the wire a sixth time. But there was no choice. One machine gun had the firepower of forty men. It could take down an entire line. It had to be put out of action.

Rutledge reasoned with Hamish, threatened him, called on his patriotism, and the silent Highlander had merely shaken his head. But his face pleaded for understanding even as it reflected the grief and torment in Rutledge’s.

In war there is no time for compassion. No time for mercy. To save a thousand lives, one had to be sacrificed. Rutledge gave Hamish an ultimatum. Be ready in an hour’s time for the next attempt, or be shot for cowardice.

Hardly cowardice. But that was the name the Army gave it when men broke under fire.

In the end, Rutledge had had to carry out his threat. In the darkness before dawn, a hastily drawn-up firing squad had shot Corporal Hamish MacLeod. And as Rutledge had delivered the coup de grâce 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.