by Charles Todd
Would it have made a difference if she’d known that in 1916? Aloud, Rutledge said, “Have you kept any of his letters?”
“Regrettably, no. I needn’t tell you how it was in the trenches. Paper was the first to rot in the rain and the mud—nothing lasted very long, not even boots. And what the weather didn’t get, the rats did. Stinking bastards!” It was said unemotionally. The rats had become so fierce and so common that not even a heavy shelling rid the trenches of them. You got used to them.
Rutledge nodded. “If you can tell me how to find the house, I’ll be on my way.”
“I’ll do that if you’ll come and have lunch with me. My wife’s in Edinburgh for the week, and I’m damned tired of my own company!”
THE HOUSE STOOD in a street of houses that had well-kept gardens and a remarkable view of the hills. Two nursemaids with prams passed him as he stepped out of the car, deep in earnest conversation while their charges slept. Rutledge studied number fourteen for a time, then went to the door of number fifteen. But no one appeared to be at home. He tried number thirteen, and an elderly woman opened the door, peering at him over the top of her spectacles, the silver chain attached to them almost the same color as her hair.
“Yes?” She looked him up and down. “If you’re here to see Barbara, I’m afraid she’s out.”
“Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard,” he told her. “Can you give me a few minutes of your time? I’m interested in the Burns house. At number fourteen.”
“Inspector, are you? Why should anyone in London care about the Burns house? It hasn’t been lived in since poor Robbie’s death.”
“Yes, that’s what I’m told. He died in France. Do you remember when?”
“In the spring of 1916!” she retorted as if he had doubted her mental alertness. “It’s my legs that are giving out, young man, not my brain!”
“I meant no offense, Mrs.—”
“The auld biddy—” Hamish interjected.
“Raeburn. Robbie used to tease me about that. Burns and Raeburn, he said. A better name for a law firm than Burns, Grant, Grant, and Fraser.” She stepped back. “Do come in! I can’t stand here the morning long.”
He followed her into a sitting room cluttered with glass bells covering specimens of dead animals. Giant fish and heads of deer decorated the walls. She caught his eye and said, “My late husband liked to kill things. Birds, red deer, fish—never understood it myself, but there you are. That chair, over there, if you please. I can hear you better. Barbara—my niece—calls it barbaric. But I suppose I’ve grown used to seeing them. That’s a particularly fine fox, you know. I’m told several of the birds are nice as well.”
Hamish said, “I wonder who killed her husband?”
Catching the eye of a snarling lynx, Rutledge took the chair Mrs. Raeburn indicated. After a moment, he said, “I’ve just come from speaking with Mr. Fraser. He tells me Captain Burns had given you a key before he went away to France.”
“Mr. Fraser is wrong. Captain Burns gave me the key in 1912, when he joined the practice. I was to let in the painters and carpenters. After they’d finished, he told me to keep it in the event more work had to be done.”
“Did he have guests often?”
“At first he did. His fiancée and her family came to dinner any number of times. After the war started, there was less entertaining. But he came home when he could and sometimes brought friends.”
“Do you recall hearing the name Eleanor Gray?”
“He was in mourning. His fiancée died unexpectedly in late 1915. There was never any other young lady. The Captain never said anything to me about another young lady!”
“Fellow officers, then,” Rutledge amended hastily.
“Oh, yes, he sometimes offered them the house. There was a blind officer who stayed for a month. And a flier with severe burns on the face and hands. Better off dead, if you ask me. And one or two others on leave, with no place of their own.”
“Was there an officer here—just about the time word came that Captain Burns was a casualty? I believe he might have brought a woman with him.”
“There was an officer about that time. From London. I can’t tell you his name. But he came alone, arriving quite late. That’s why I remember him.”
“Because he came later than expected?”
“No, no. He woke me out of a sound sleep, all but knocking the door down. It was raining, and he was wet through. I handed him the key, then slammed the door shut against the wind. But I watched from the window to see he got in all right. The lock is sometimes stiff in bad weather. I’d have known if he’d had a woman with him, wouldn’t I? I’d have seen her go in with him!”
“How long did he stay at the Burns house?”
“He was to stay a week, and left after two days.”
“Did he tell you why he was leaving?”
“I didn’t ask. He brought back the key and thanked me. But it had rained every day. I suppose he found that depressing.”
“How was he wounded? Shoulder? Leg?”
“Sometimes it isn’t possible to tell, and I never care to ask. He was very brown. I did ask about that. He’d served in Palestine, he said.”
“Was he Scots?”
“Yes. He told me he was English, but he was Scots.”
“Would you recognize him if you were to see him again?”
She shook her head. “I expect I wouldn’t. He didn’t have a remarkable face.” She studied Rutledge, pushing her spectacles up on her nose. “You do. I’d remember meeting you.”
Rutledge said, “If you still have the key, would you allow me to go in and look through the house?”
She stared at him suspiciously. “Why should you wish to do that?”
“I’m sorry. I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Oh, very well. Come along. But I warn you, I can’t stand on my feet while you take your time about it!”
She went off to fetch the key, and led him to a gate in the middle of the low hedge between the two properties. He looked at the house carefully as they made their way around back. If the bedrooms were on this side, Mrs. Raeburn might well know who had come to stay here. But if they were on the other side—
Mrs. Raeburn unlocked the garden door and bade him wipe his feet before he came into the house. He did as he was told, then followed her down a short passage to the kitchen.
As they walked in, Hamish objected, “There’s nithing to find here—”
He was right, the house would have been cleaned many times since Eleanor Gray had come here—if indeed she’d come at all. But Rutledge thought now he could guess the reason why she might have wished to. With news of Robbie Burns’s death, she had wanted to see the house where he lived. Where she might have lived as his wife. But where would she have gone from here?
Rutledge and Mrs. Raeburn walked from room to room. The dining room, the parlor, a small study. The furnishings were comfortable, with a number of lovely old pieces that Burns must have inherited, and a wonderful mantelpiece in the parlor. Upstairs there were two bedrooms, one on Mrs. Raeburn’s side of the house, and one on the other, with a sitting room in between. The far bedroom appeared to be the master bedroom, and Rutledge studied it with particular interest.
It held a large spindle bed, a wardrobe of carved mahogany, a maple desk under the window, several comfortable chairs, and a tall bureau that matched the wardrobe. He went to that and was about to open one of the drawers, but Mrs. Raeburn stopped him.
She didn’t hold with police prying into people’s lives, and told him so. “Not without a warrant!”
He turned to the bookcase. Law books for the most part. He touched the spines of several novels, a three-volume history of Scotland, and a collection of six works recounting travels to Europe. He pulled one out at random, expecting to hear Mrs. Raeburn scold him. But apparently books were not as intimate as the contents of a drawer.
It was the volume on traveling in Italy, many of the pages still uncut. He put that back and
took out one of the law books. Robert Edward Burns was inscribed in handsome copperplate on the flyleaf. The novels held nothing of interest, and he moved on to the volume of travels in France. These pages had been cut, and from the way the spine fell open to “Paris,” the chapter had been read a number of times. He flicked through the pages, admiring the line drawings of cathedrals, châteaux, and statues, found nothing of interest, and was on the point of closing the book, when something in the margin of one page caught his attention. The chapter heading was for the north of France. What had become, in fact, the battlefields of the war.
There were brief notations here, in a woman’s handwriting. He took the book to the window, his back to Mrs. Raeburn, and read one after the other.
Here he was wounded. Ypres had been underlined on the page. Here he met one of the pipers we found to play for us. The name of a small village had been marked. It had become an aid station, Rutledge remembered, and finally abandoned because the smell of death had soaked the ground.
Rutledge moved through the chapter. There were a number of other notes here and there, each relating to some personal event the reader had connected with a place in the guide. Small landmarks in the life of a dead man. A retracing of his journey to death.
On the last page of that chapter was another note, in a hand that was shaking. Here he died. And then below that, a last, touching line. I wish I could die too. E.G.
Eleanor Gray had been here.
Rutledge closed the book with triumph.
She had reached Scotland. The question was, had she ever left it?
23
MRS. RAEBURN WAS BECOMING IMPATIENT. RUTLEDGE opened the wardrobe door before she could protest but saw that it was empty. He moved on to the other bedroom, and then the sitting room.
There was no longer anything in the house of a personal nature. A new occupant could move in that afternoon and never have an inkling of the previous owner. His interests or tastes—loves or disappointments—childhood or death. Except for the books, it appeared that the dead man’s belongings had long since been removed for storage or a missionary barrel.
Had Eleanor Gray left other small tokens of her presence here that had been swept away unnoticed in the general cleaning?
“It wasna’ what she intended,” Hamish said softly.
“No,” Rutledge answered silently. “And that’s very sad.”
He added aloud, “Does the fiscal—Mr. Burns—come to stay often?”
“He did when he went through his son’s clothes and such, after. I think the house holds too many memories now, and business doesn’t often bring him this way. I’ve a mind to make an offer for it if my niece settles down. I’m not as young as I used to be, and it will be a comfort to have her next door.”
“But not in the same house,” Hamish said, interpreting the tone of voice.
“I’d hoped she might marry the Captain. But then he went and got himself engaged to someone else. A pity. Still, she died of appendicitis, Julia did. If he’d come home from the war fancy-free, I’d have tried my hand at matchmaking.”
They went out the way they’d come in, and while Mrs. Raeburn locked the garden door, Rutledge walked toward the garden.
“It was once quite lovely,” Mrs. Raeburn told him, following down the path among the beds. “Now the gardener keeps it up but doesn’t go out of his way. But then, who’s to see it, I ask you!”
She turned around, a broad hint that it was time for him to accompany her back through the gate.
He went on, ignoring her. It was in fact a lovely garden— peaceful and secluded. A high wall marked the end.
It was Hamish who noticed the bench.
It had been dragged from its low stone dais by the wall and set in the midst of a bed of annuals. It looked out of place here, like a whale stranded on a foreign beach. The dimensions were somehow wrong, and the plants set in around it lacked the symmetry of other beds, as if having to compensate for the awkwardness of the bench.
The gardener’s doing—or someone else’s?
Mrs. Raeburn, complaining of her legs, had stopped by the sundial. Rutledge called to her, “How long has this bench been set here? It appears to belong over there by the wall.”
“How should I know? I never come that far—my legs, you know.”
Rutledge squatted on the grass and looked at the soil of the bed. It was loose, friable. As if it had been dug up each spring and restocked with plants that would grow contentedly in this corner shaded by the wall. There were forget-me-nots and pansies and a pair of small ferns set in a half-moon around the bench. But nothing was planted under the bench.
You wouldn’t plant under the bench. . . .
He went to the shed to find a trowel, and Mrs. Raeburn called plaintively, “Have you finished, young man?”
“I’m sorry to be a nuisance,” he replied. “If you wish to go back through the hedge, I’ll come across in five minutes.”
She was mumbling something about taking advantage; he could hear her voice retreating even as she did.
It wouldn’t take considerable strength to move the bench. It was heavy and cumbersome, but a person could shift it if he or she knew how to “walk” it off the dais and into the bed. And it had rained both days. . . .
The feet were deep into the soil of the bed now, as if the bench had stood there for several seasons. Rutledge used the side of the trowel to scrape away the layer of compost mulch that kept down the weeds. Then he put the tip deep into the ground and lifted the first clump of soil.
It was thick with what he took at first to be roots. And then he saw that he had uncovered a piece of cloth. Clothing, he amended, looking at it closely. No, it was a corner of blanket. No more than two inches by three.
Blankets weren’t put in with compost—they didn’t decay at the rate of garden clippings and hedge trimmings. An old blanket went into the dustbin.
He dug about under the bench for some time, but the ground yielded nothing more.
Hamish said, “Someone buried a pet here, a cat or a small dog, and moved the bench so that the grave wouldna’ be disturbed.”
Rutledge, rocking back on his haunches, reluctantly agreed. A pet wrapped in an old blanket . . .
After all, he hadn’t wanted to find Eleanor Gray here, buried in a back garden. It would finish his investigation in Scotland.
He hadn’t wanted to come to Scotland. Now he didn’t want to leave. There was too much still to be done.
RUTLEDGE KEPT HIS promise and met Hugh Fraser for luncheon. It was a small restaurant that was popular with the noonday throng of marketgoers, and Fraser apologized for that. “But if we go to the hotel, a dozen people will stop by the table, their minds on business.”
“My father followed the law. He found it a fascinating mistress.”
Fraser grimaced. “The law is all right. And I’ve made a good living. My clients come from all corners of the district, from Loch Lomond to Callander. I just don’t have the same taste for it I once had. I never got used to watching men die. France was bad enough, but there we were firing back. The influenza epidemic was very different. There was a nurse bending over me, changing the dressing on my arm, and she collapsed across the bed. The orderlies carried her away like a sack of onions. Before dawn she was dead. It was like some damned medieval plague. The men on either side of me died of it, and seven men in another ward. I remember priests coming in the night, and not enough orderlies to bring us water. My father saw two people drop dead in the street before they could reach home.” He laughed without humor. “You’re a damned good listener, did you know that?”
“A professional requirement,” Rutledge said lightly.
“I’ve never talked about it before. The truth is, I couldn’t. I’d survived, you see—even come to terms with losing my arm. I was ready to go on living. And then this nightmare came out of nowhere. And I was terribly afraid of dying from it. It shook my nerve rather badly. I’m only beginning to understand that.”
“
We all have our nightmares,” Rutledge said with more feeling than he’d intended. “Even when they last into the daylight.”
“Yes, but most people don’t wake up in a cold sweat, on the verge of screaming. I’ve done that a time or two—frightened the hell out of my wife, I can tell you.” But his face said it had happened far more often than he cared to admit.
The woman serving tables came to take their order. Fraser leaned back, sipping his wine. Some of the lines in his face smoothed out as he relaxed.
“Find what you were looking for at Robbie’s house?” he asked with frank curiosity.
“I may have. It appears—there’s no proof, mind you!— that Eleanor Gray came here in 1916, shortly after she heard the news of Captain Burns’s death. And she stayed at the house for two nights.”
Fraser stared at him. “Old Raeburn—I’m sorry, she’s the neighbor, Mrs. Raeburn—never told me that!”
“She didn’t know. Eleanor came to Scotland with someone who’d been told which door to knock on to find the key. Therefore a friend of Burns’s. Or so we assume. He could have been a friend of Eleanor’s, acting on her instructions. Mrs. Raeburn remembers him.” Rutledge gave Fraser a brief description of the man, pieced together from what Mrs. Raeburn had told him and a description of the friend who’d come to the Atwood house with Robbie Burns. “Recognize him?”
“Lord, no.” After a moment, he added, “Robbie must have met him in London while he was convalescing. Palestine, you say?” He shook his head. “Afraid I never had much to do with that lot. And the first time I was invalided home, I came here, I didn’t stay in London. I wonder why Robbie stayed.”
“He’d met Eleanor.”
“Yes. That probably explains it.” Their meal arrived. Rutledge saw that someone in the kitchen had already sliced Fraser’s chicken for him, the pieces tidily rearranged so that a left-handed man could spear them with his fork. “He was in hospital for well over a month, you know, then spent another two getting his strength back. It might be possible to discover the names of other patients there at the same time. The house was somewhere in Sussex. Saxhall—Saxwold—some such name.”