Legacy of the Dead

by Charles Todd

“No, that’s true. But I did ask about any other place the accused might have visited about the time the boy was born. For I can tell you this much—a woman with the Gray name and money would never have chosen backwaters like Brae or Glencoe to live in. The two must have met in Glasgow— or Edinburgh. And there’s your needle in the haystack again!”

  Rutledge said thoughtfully, “If you were the daughter of Lady Maude Gray and expecting a child out of wedlock, a backwater might offer obscurity as well as seclusion. The larger the town, the greater the risk of being recognized.”

  Oliver took a deep breath. “You may be right, of course. It’s possible. But not likely. Still, talk to Constable McKinstry. Tell him to let you read my notes.” Then, echoing a remark Rutledge had already heard that day, he added, “Too bad, in my view, that her aunt is dead. Or convenient—who’s to say?”

  He walked on.

  CONSTABLE MCKINSTRY WAS on duty at the station, his chair back on two legs and a book in his hands. It was on Scottish law.

  McKinstry, closing the book and lowering the feet of the chair to the floor, looked wretchedly at Rutledge as he listened to his request. “Fiona never confided in me. I’ll tell you what I can, sir, and what Inspector Oliver wrote in his report.” He put the book on a shelf behind him and added, “Did he send you? Aye, I thought so.” Wryly, he confessed, “It’s my punishment to be made to talk about her! The Inspector hasn’t forgiven me for the fiasco with the first skeleton. If I’d been thorough, it would have been my embarrassment, not his.”

  “I need dependable facts. You’re most likely the only inhabitant of Duncarrick who isn’t afraid to admit you knew her. Man or woman.”

  “That’s true enough.” McKinstry sighed. Considering how to begin, he looked at the ceiling, smudged with smoke from the stove, and arranged his thoughts.

  “I was in France when Fiona arrived in Duncarrick. I remember my mother writing that Ealasaid MacCallum was having trouble with her right arm shaking and had sent for her niece to come and help out at the inn. Later she told me that in her view Mrs. MacLeod was a respectable young widow with a baby to care for, but strong and capable for all that. She’d lived in Brae, and if I should hear any news of men from there, my mother would be glad to pass it on.”

  He stopped, squaring the blotter and moving the ink pot to the other side of the desk. Then, absently, he moved it back again.

  “To be honest, I never asked Fiona about her life before she came to Duncarrick. I was jealous, if you want the truth, of her husband. Only he wasn’t, was he?” He sighed. “Fiona left her grandfather’s croft in the spring of 1915, I do know that. She couldn’t run the farm on her own. It’s inhospitable country at best, but the old man had made it pay.”

  “Aye,” Hamish said unexpectedly. “He knew the land better than anyone I ever saw.” There was a wistfulness in the voice at Rutledge’s shoulder. “Fra’ him I learned how to handle a team and to find water, when we needed to dig a well. I took a forked willow stick, skinned and dried. He said I had the gift—I could feel the stick stir and bend in my hands. And it was sweet water I found!”

  McKinstry had gone on, unaware of the interruption. “Some cousins were willing to take it over—they were too old for the war, but still able-bodied. She said once that she wished the lad’s father could have been buried there in the glen, because he loved it so. At any rate, Fiona was glad of the position she found in Brae. It took her mind off the war. A Mrs. Davison was looking to hire a nanny for her children.” He paused. “Brae’s south of Glasgow. Just above Lanark.”

  “Yes, I have a general idea where it is. Go on!”

  “When her aunt wrote asking Fiona to come to Duncarrick, she was sad to leave Brae. But she promised to come as soon as Mrs. Davison found a replacement for her. She and the boy.”

  “Miss MacCallum said nothing to your mother about the boy’s—history?”

  “Her only worry was that Ian was so young and might distract Fiona from her duties at The Reivers. I thought it was a selfish view, but then, no one knew just how ill Miss MacCallum was.”

  Rutledge made a note of Mrs. Davison’s name and asked, “What did the people in Brae tell Inspector Oliver?”

  “Not much. That Fiona minded her own business, was friendly enough, and worked hard. No one was aware that she was expecting a child when she left there. And we’ve traced all the children born to residents in 1916. A woman named Singleton had a child in Glasgow that spring, but it’s accounted for, and the three born in Brae are accounted for as well. I never knew Fiona to mention any particular friend there—though she spoke often of Mrs. Davison and her children.”

  “I’m considering driving on to Brae. To see if there’s any connection to Eleanor Gray to be found there.”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, it’s a waste of time. I’ve seen Brae. A woman like Eleanor Gray would stand out like a sore thumb. It’s not the kind of place she’d be hiding herself away in.”

  “Still, we must begin somewhere,” Rutledge answered. “All right, is there any other name you can give me?”

  McKinstry took out a folder and opened it. When Rutledge had finished taking down two or three other names, he closed his notebook and said, “I’d like to speak to the accused again before I leave.”

  “I don’t know—” McKinstry began doubtfully.

  “It will take less than five minutes.”

  And McKinstry, capitulating, took out the keys and handed them to Rutledge.

  He unlocked the door for a second time and walked into the cell. Fiona MacDonald was sitting in the chair, her hands folded in her lap. But her eyes flew to his as he entered.

  “I’m driving to Brae today,” he said, watching her face. There was a very slight tightening of the skin, as if she was not happy with the news.

  “You will be seeing Mrs. Davison. Please tell her—” She stopped and shook her head. “No, I don’t suppose she’d want a message from me now.” Her fingers folded and smoothed a pleat in her skirt. “I forget, sometimes, that a murderess has no past. But if the children should ask about me—please, will you tell them that I’m well and think of them often?”

  “I will.”

  She managed a smile. “They’re too young to know about murder. They’ll be glad to be remembered. And I do think about them. It takes my mind off other—other things.”

  He said without stopping to think, “I wish you could trust me and tell me the truth.”

  “It isn’t a matter of trust,” she answered quietly. “It’s a question of love.”

  “Love?”

  “Yes.” She looked away. “I can’t explain it, except to say that there are many faces of love, and sometimes they can be cruel. My mother loved my father so deeply that she grieved herself to death for him. And left me with only a grandfather and an aunt to care for me. I was the child of that love, but it didn’t matter enough to her to want to live. I never understood that. I still don’t. I didn’t want to die when Hamish did. I wonder, sometimes, if that meant I didn’t love him enough.” Her eyes searched Rutledge’s face, begging for reassurance.

  “It isn’t a question of loving him enough. The man I knew in France wanted with all his heart to come home to you—”

  He caught himself in time, before he’d destroyed the comforting lie of a hero’s death for King and Country. Clearing his throat, he said instead, “—and he’d have wanted you to live. Above all, he’d have wanted that.” For once he knew beyond question that he spoke for Hamish. “And if you lost your own mother when you were very young, you must see that it’s wrong to leave the boy unprotected, as you have.”

  “You’ve told me yourself that I’d not be allowed to keep him!”

  It was true. But he said, “You were wrong to allow yourself to be taken up on a charge of murder—wrong to allow the evidence to go on pointing to your guilt. Wrong to accept the fact that you will surely hang! There may come a time when the boy will need you and you won’t be there.”

  Hamish cri
ed out that it was wrong to use her own words to force her to surrender whatever truth she had hidden so long, so well.

  She seemed fragile and alone in this ugly cell, but Rutledge did not make the mistake of underestimating her strength. She squared her shoulders with a courage he deeply admired and replied, “It must be a painful way to die. I’ve made myself try to imagine what it’s like—”

  Harshly, caught up in his need to bring her to her senses while there was still time, while they were alone in this cell and there was no one to stop him, ignoring his own conscience hammering at him over the anguish of the voice at his shoulder, he said, “I’ve watched men hang. What happens to the body as you die is not something a woman would wish for herself.”

  She had flinched as he spoke, and he instantly regretted the words, cursing himself. Wanting to recall them. But they seemed suspended like a wall of coldness in the air between them.

  He took a single step forward, then stopped short, forbidden by who he was—and who she was—from offering any measure of comfort. “I’m sorry—”

  She said only, “I won’t be alive to know, will I?”

  But as he left the room, he could see the tears filling her eyes.

  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 protecte
d 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.”