by Charles Todd
“Yes, and I’ve seen him with Oliver. Any number of times-”
“And Oliver wouldna’ see anything wrong in answering questions Holden might ask. He’s an upstanding citizen, concerned for the truth.”
“All right, it’s possible,” Rutledge agreed. “But if the bones in the glen couldn’t be traced to him-if no one knew whose remains they were-I don’t understand why he’d stir up the past by going after Fiona. The timing is wrong too. Well before those bones were connected with either Eleanor Gray or Fiona, someone was persecuting her. Was it Holden? If so, to what end?”
Hamish didn’t see it that way. “If he left Eleanor Gray in the glen, dead, he’s been afraid for three years that someone might put a name to her. One day.”
“No. If he’s been this clever, then he wouldn’t risk it…”
Rutledge stopped his pacing and swore. “Holden lost all his horses to the war. He’s having to start again. But if he could show that he was the father of the boy, and Eleanor Gray was the mother-true or not, it doesn’t matter!-Ian MacLeod would be the heir to the trust that should have come to Eleanor Gray. If Holden knew how that trust stood, if Eleanor had talked about it on their long drive north, through the boy he could find himself in possession of a bloody fortune -”
He began pacing again, the room seeming to shrink and close in around him. He swung a chair out of his way.
“It might not matter whose bones they are-or whose child Ian MacLeod might really be. What matters is what people are led to believe. And if Fiona MacDonald is hanged for the murder of Eleanor Gray, then the child she’d been raising has to be the child of Eleanor Gray. At least in the eyes of the law. And when there is no one left alive to name the boy’s true father, Holden has a very clear run! Very civic-minded of him to step reluctantly forward rather than let the child go to an orphanage.”
“Aye. He wouldna’ want his indiscretion to hurt his wife,” Hamish agreed sourly. “That’s the way half the town will see it.”
“There have always been two standards,” Rutledge answered. “People called Fiona a whore, but there’s no name for a man who has an illegitimate child.”
27
IT SOUNDED PLAUSIBLE.
But the police required proof, not speculations, to arrest a man.
And Rutledge had discovered in his first year at the Yard that what was logical about evidence was not always the truth it was pointing to.
“The first step is to find out all I can about Sandy Holden. And Gibson will have to do that from London. Starting with the Army and the Saxwold medical records. And in the meantime, I need a very good excuse to call on the fiscal again!”
Rutledge put in his call to London, setting in motion the search for the past movements of one Alexander Holden since the end of 1915. “I particularly need to know when and for what periods of time he was in England. And see if you can find any trace of a Major Alexander, also at Saxwold at the right time. But odds are they’re one and the same.”
Old Bowels, delighted to hear that Rutledge had found a possible solution to the mystery of Eleanor Gray, said expansively, “Well done!”
“We aren’t ready to say that Holden’s guilty of anything. We can’t find any trace of Miss Gray after the spring of 1916. He may have driven her to Scotland and left her anywhere from Berwick to John o’Groats. Alive. And if she’s the mother of the child, she didn’t die in the spring!”
“Well, bring him in and ask him what he knows. There’s enough evidence for that, at least?”
Rutledge thought: If this is a man who survived capture by the Turks, he’ll tell us what he wants to tell and nothing else.
The Fiscal was just leaving his office when Rutledge reached Jedburgh. They almost collided in the doorway, the fiscal surprised to see him and stepping back with courtesy. “Inspector. What brings you here?”
“Have you a moment, sir? It’s rather important.”
“Have you made progress with the list of names I gave you?” Burns reluctantly turned and led Rutledge back to his office. Passing through the reception room, he asked his clerk to bring them tea. “For I shall be missing my own, no doubt!”
Taking the chair behind his desk, he motioned Rutledge to the one across from it. Rutledge sat down. “Now, then. What’s this about?” the fiscal demanded.
“I’ve been trying to find the man who drove Eleanor Gray to Scotland. Connecting her to Fiona MacDonald has not been as successful.”
“There’s the brooch, man. I should have thought that was sufficient!”
“The brooch connects the accused to the bones found in Glencoe. I’m afraid it has done little to shed further light on whose bones these are.”
“We already have a match of height and age, we have the proper timing of the death. We have the fact that Eleanor Gray went missing in the spring of 1916. And you tell me there’s the strong possibility that in that spring of 1916 she came to Scotland. To wait out the birth of her child, I should think, where her circumstances did not embarrass her friends and her family.”
“Yes. At present I’m hoping to carry matters a step further by tracing Eleanor Gray’s movements closer to the time she was delivered.” He paused. “If this child is Lady Maude Gray’s grandson, it will have repercussions. For her. And for the solicitors who represent her daughter’s sizable estate. Lady Maude-” He hesitated. “Lady Maude is a woman of considerable influence and distinguished connections.”
“Indeed.” The fiscal’s clerk brought in the tea with a plate of sandwiches and a packet of biscuits. Rutledge accepted the cup and the sandwich offered him. Burns went on. “I’ve actually given some thought to the fact that a guilty verdict at the trial will most certainly establish the boy’s heritage. It is one of the reasons I’ve chosen to let him remain where he is for the time being.”
“I’ve been making my way through the list. Did your son have friends here in Jedburgh? I might add one or two names through them.”
“The first two names I gave you were local men. As I told you at the time, they’re dead and not likely to be involved.”
“Did your son have friends in Duncarrick?”
“Robbie went to Harrow, and until the war the majority of his friends were either from there or in the law. He visited Duncarrick a time or two, but I don’t recall anyone in particular he might have known there. Better to describe them as my friends. Certainly I’d have told you if I’d known of any connection!”
Hamish agreed with Rutledge: Unless the fiscal was lying, that meant Holden had never mentioned any meeting with Rob Burns in London.
He finished his sandwich and accepted the offer of another. They were small but very good. The fiscal had already eaten both of his and began to open the packet of biscuits. His appetite was about to be spoiled In his mind, Rutledge could hear Fiona’s voice saying, “ The father is an ordinary man. Just-an ordinary man…”
Hamish tried to stop him, but he said aloud, “I must tell you, I think that if Eleanor Gray bore a child, there is a very slim chance that the father of her son might be your own. It strikes me that for some leniency shown by the court at her trial, Fiona MacDonald might be persuaded to name the man. I have a strong feeling that she knows who he is. That Eleanor confided in her before she died.”
The fiscal frowned ferociously at him. “If my son had been seriously attached to a woman of Eleanor Gray’s background, there would not have been a clandestine affair. Robbie would have come directly to me and to Lady Maude and made his intentions clear! He would have done the honorable thing!”
“Forgive me, sir, for being direct. You weren’t fighting in the trenches. These were young men who did things out of need and fear that they would never have thought to do in 1914. They loved where they could and when they could, knowing they were going to die. If your son could have settled his affairs before returning to France, I’ve no doubt he would have. Eleanor wanted very much to study medicine. She may have asked him to wait-”
“Preposterous nons
ense!” the fiscal said, glaring at him. “I will hear no more about it! My son was still in mourning for his dead fiancee-”
“You’ve made an enemy!” Hamish was saying. “It’s no’ wise-”
“Another excellent reason to wait, I should think,” Rutledge said, ignoring Hamish, and then he backed off. “I can’t tell you that any of this is true. I do know that friends of your son believed he loved Eleanor Gray as much as she loved him. Young men who served with him, to whom he would never have lied about his feelings. Eleanor and her mother quarreled shortly before her disappearance. The timing indicates it was after your son had returned to the Front but before his death. Perhaps Eleanor told Lady Maude that she wanted to marry a country lawyer, not a title. Lady Maude, however, refuses to discuss the quarrel.”
“I will not hear another word! I will not believe that that child in Duncarrick is my son’s bastard! I don’t care who the mother was!”
Like so many bereaved fathers, Fiscal Burns had kept a holy image of his dead son in his heart-the dutiful, honorable young man who had died bravely for King and Country. Reared in another age, believing in other ideals, he could not contemplate the possibility that love had clouded duty in his son’s last days. It would be a betrayal of that pure image, born of the child the fiscal had watched grow up to manhood and march off to war. A Tennyson knight in khaki.
“There’s no dishonor here. He’d have married Eleanor Gray. But he died before she could tell him she was carrying their child. I cannot, in good conscience, believe otherwise.”
Rutledge stood as he finished saying it, then thanked the fiscal for tea before adding almost as an afterthought, “I don’t know what will become of that child in Duncarrick. But if he is abandoned by everyone, it will be sad. His bloodlines appear to be impeccable.”
As he walked out of Burns’s office, disregarding Hamish and the heavy silence he’d left behind him, Rutledge was well pleased with the seeds he’d sown. Turning his car around, he headed back to Duncarrick.
He told himself he’d spiked the guns of Alex Holden. If Lady Maude did come to accept her grandson at the end of Fiona’s trial, she’d find herself with two contenders for the boy’s father. And there was some safety in numbers.
In Duncarrick, Rutledge considered his next move.
If Alex Holden was as clever as it appeared he was, it would require more than an inspector of police arriving at his door to shake his nerve.
On the other hand… single-minded people often were victims of their own intense preoccupations. It was where they were most vulnerable.
It was late the next afternoon before his opportunity came.
Rutledge had lain in wait in the filthy, half-decayed stone pele tower, where he could watch the drive that led to the Holden farm.
When a motorcar came barreling down the drive and turned toward the town, Rutledge could see quite clearly that Holden was alone behind the wheel.
He gingerly climbed out of the tower, brushed himself off, and set out on the long walk in to the farmhouse.
Extensive and attractive gardens had been laid out around it, with trees forming a screen in front of the vast stables that ranged back to the pastures beyond. Jacobean in style, the house had a wide terrace leading to the door and handsome gables rising above the old glass in tall windows. The property had been made more fashionable a hundred years earlier, with lawns and beds and vistas, Rutledge thought, but the core was much older.
He crossed the terrace with long strides and rapped at the door. An elderly woman in a black dress came to answer his knock, and looked at him with a disparaging expression. He realized that there was still straw on his shoulders. Grinning, he said, “I’ve come to see Mr. Holden. Rutledge is the name.”
“Mr. Holden isn’t in, I’m afraid. We don’t expect him back for another two hours.”
“Ah. Then perhaps I might speak with Mrs. Holden.” The tone of his voice was pleasant but firm. This was not a request to be rejected.
“She isn’t feeling well today, sir.”
“Then I shan’t keep her long.”
The maid invited him into the cool, high-ceilinged hall, dim after the sunlight on the road. It was Scottish baronial, with banners hanging from the rafters and targes ringed with pistols and dirks and swords, like sunbursts on the stone between the high windows. The furnishings were more comfortable, a long table by the door and a grouping of chairs around the cold hearth that took up half the side wall. The maid asked him to wait there, and Rutledge walked around studying the array of weaponry. It was, he thought, real-not Victorian replicas of lost family heirlooms.
Many of the swords were claymores, the dreaded double-bladed weapon of the Highland Scots, capable of cleaving a fighting man in two. The blades were rough-edged in places, as if they’d met with bone. Battle swords, not dress swords. He moved on to look at the dirks. They were the famous skean dhu s, the black knife of the Highlander, worn in the cuff of the stocking.
He smiled, looking at them. Not the elegant ones with cairngorms in the hilt and stags carved in the sheath-these weapons were plain and deadly, with horn to fit a man’s hand in the handles and blades honed to razor sharpness.
The Scots under his command had taught him how to use them-a London policeman who could wield them now with the best of Mrs. Holden’s ancestors. It was, he thought, a commentary on war, that from farmers and sheepmen and workers in the whiskey distilleries a man dedicated to preserving law and order had learned how to kill silently. Not a skill to be proud of…
He was studying a collection of flintlocks when the maid returned and led him to a back sitting room, where Mrs. Holden was lying in a chair with her feet on a low stool. She smiled at him and offered her hand as the maid closed the door behind him. “I have to thank you again for rescuing me. Have you come to see how I’m faring?”
“Yes. You look much better.”
“I endured a very firm lecture from the doctor. I’m trying to mind his instructions. May I offer you something? Tea? A sherry?”
“Thank you, no. I’ve come to talk to you about your husband.”
Her face flushed with surprise and wariness. “I’m afraid I can’t speak for him. Would you care to come another day?”
He smiled reassuringly. “I shan’t ask anything he wouldn’t feel comfortable telling me himself. He was in the war, I think?”
“Yes. Nearly the entire four years. It was a very long war for him.” Something in her face told him it was very long for her as well.
“I’m trying to find anyone who might have served in France with Captain Burns. The fiscal’s son. Can you tell me if your husband knew him?”
She seemed relieved. It was a very simple question. “I’ve met the fiscal myself once or twice at the home of the Chief Constable. But I don’t believe I’ve ever met his son, nor have I ever heard my husband speak of the Captain as a friend. I believe, in fact, that he was killed in France.”
“Yes, that’s true. I expect my informant was wrong. I was told by a man in Durham that Captain Burns had been acquainted in London with someone from Duncarrick. Both men were recovering from their wounds and they had been out to dine on at least one occasion with friends of Eleanor Gray.”
This was a name she knew. “I’ve been told that she’s the woman Miss MacDonald is accused of killing. How sad!” But the words didn’t have the right ring to them, as if they were spoken because it was expected of her. Not because of any deep-rooted sympathy.
“How well do you know Miss MacDonald?” he asked.
“Not-I told you before, I hardly knew her. To nod to on the street. To speak to in a shop. That was all.” She gestured with her hand, as if inviting him to look at the difference between her home and The Reivers. “We moved in different circles.”
“A pity. I’ve interviewed her often, but I can’t seem to break through the wall of silence she’s erected around herself. Nor will anyone help me. She will likely hang.”
Mrs. Holden smothered a cry.
Hamish called him callous and cruel, but Rutledge had a message he wanted conveyed to Holden. And this was the only way to do it. If Fiona meant nothing to Mrs. Holden, it would not be a lasting hurt.
“Surely-” she began, then stopped.
“I wish I could tell you differently. I wish I could prevent it. There’s no hope now. She’ll go to trial before the year is out.”
She cleared her throat but her voice was still husky. “And the child? What’s to become of it?”
“We thought in the beginning that the boy belonged to Eleanor Gray. But new information has come to light. I’ve traced the mother now-”
She turned very white and he went swiftly to her side, kneeling to take her hand. “Let me call your maid-”
“No!” She raised herself a little in her chair, and stared at him. “What do you mean, you’ve traced the mother?” The urgency in her voice struck him like a blow.
He said slowly, “We have a name. We have located the doctor who delivered the child. We can prove beyond question that the mother survived the birth, and was released from the clinic, where she’d been treated for rather serious complications.”
“Gentle God-so much!”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Have you told the police? Have you told Miss MacDonald? ”
“I’ve told Miss MacDonald. She denies it. But I don’t need her confirmation. I have my own.” He was no longer interested in conveying messages to anyone. As Hamish rumbled in his head, he kept his eyes on Mrs. Holden. She had come to the end of her strength. But her spirit was undaunted.
Rutledge realized with sudden anger that this woman was not ill. She had been tortured as severely as any suffering her husband had endured at the hands of the Turks. It was there, in her voice, in her face, in the stiff, angular agony of her body. She had been made to choose Her hands were shaking, and she buried them in the folds of her sleeves, where he couldn’t reach them. “I don’t believe you!”
“It’s true,” he said softly. “Do you want to hear the name of the child’s mother? Shall I tell you the name of the clinic? Shall I give you the initials on his christening gown? MEMC. Are they yours?”