Legacy of the Dead (19 page)

This was different.

And instinct told him it was not a friendly intrusion. Something below the level of conscious thought had pricked down his nerves. The war had taught him to heed instinct. . . .

He moved around the room, carefully searching with his eyes but touching nothing. Whoever it was had been very thorough, going through his belongings with painstaking attention to where each item had been before. But he—or she—had made certain that Rutledge would know his privacy had been invaded. His shirts in the drawer of the chest. His shoes on the rack in the wardrobe. The way his ties were folded . . . Each had been moved. Each had been put back very nearly where it had been. But with just enough change to catch the eye of a man
looking
for change—

Because the atmosphere had changed. It was alien. Hostile.

Drummond?

Rutledge hadn’t survived four years in the trenches without learning the skills of the hunter—and developing the sixth sense that kept the hunted alive.

Nothing had been taken. He was sure of that. The intent had been to show him his own vulnerability, not to steal.

It was, in a way, a gauntlet thrown down.

And not as a challenge.

More a very coldly calculated threat.

I can touch you—but you cannot touch me.

It was the first mistake that had been made in what had been—to this point—a very skillful game.

RUTLEDGE WAS JOINED
at lunch by Inspector Oliver.

He made a circuit of the dining room, greeting first this person and then another, once stopping to listen to a man by the window and then laughing quietly as if he appreciated the humor of what had been said.

Hamish said, “There’s a man wi’ something on his mind.”

Finally arriving at Rutledge’s table, Oliver pulled out the empty chair on the other side and signaled to the middle-aged woman who was serving this noon. She came over, smiling, and said, “Would you like the menu, then, Inspector?”

“Thanks, Mary.” He nodded as she handed it to him, then turned to Rutledge and said affably, “What’s that you’ve ordered? The roast ham?”

“Yes. It’s quite good. Who are the people over there—the table by the fireplace?” He had seen the man out by the pele tower. But his interest was in the woman—he had questioned her about Fiona.

Oliver peered in their direction. “That’s Sandy Holden. Landowner. Had a horse farm, now trying to get by with sheep. He’ll make it. A good man.”

“And the woman?”

“His wife, of course. Madelyn Holden.”

“She looks as if she might be ill. Lungs, at a guess.”

“Good God, no. She nearly died from the influenza last autumn. Hasn’t got her strength back yet. The doctor says it will come with time, but Sandy frets about her. It’s been almost a year, and she’s no better. Shame, really. She was one of the finest horsewomen I’ve ever seen.” He turned to the menu. “It’s the ham, then. Or—there’s stew. They put turnips in the stew here. I’m fond of turnips.” He set the menu aside and added, “I hear you drove to Winchester. On this business or another?”

“On this business. We found someone who remembered Eleanor Gray from her schooldays and had kept in touch. Until, that is, the spring of 1916, when Eleanor was expected to spend a weekend at Atwood House. But she called Mrs. Atwood at the last minute and said that she and a friend were driving to Scotland instead.”

“Ah!” Oliver looked keenly at Rutledge. “Friend. Male or female?”

“An officer she’d met some time before. At least we think it’s the same man. He had enough leave left to make the journey. She came with him. No one has seen or heard from her since, as far as I can discover.”

“Are you certain about the timing? Eleanor Gray couldn’t have borne the child in the
spring
!” He shook his head. “This Mrs. Atwood has got it wrong, I think.”

“I could die—
” Rutledge could hear Mrs. Atwood’s light voice repeating the words. No, she hadn’t got it wrong. Eleanor’s mood had aroused her jealousy. And later her guilt.

But he said aloud, “She needed a place of refuge for the next four or five months. Someone may have let her have the use of a house or flat.”

“I see what you’re getting at. If she’d stayed on in London, her little secret wouldn’t have been a secret very long.” Oliver gave the matter some thought. The people by the window got up to leave, distracting him. He said, “I had wondered, you know. How a woman like that could spend dreary months in some out-of-the-way Scottish village. Made no sense. Well, I saw the house she grew up in, it was a bloody
palace
! A flat now, in Edinburgh or Inverness, that’s more likely! But surely it would have been easier to find someone in London to rid her of the child.”

“She was too well known in London. She was too well known in medical circles particularly.”

“There are back streets where such things can be done discreetly.”

“At a price. She might have feared blackmail.”

“Then why not in Glasgow—Edinburgh—Carlisle? She’d not have given her right name or her direction. Easy enough if she’d had a mind for it. Such things went on in the war. She wouldn’t be the first—or the last.”

Rutledge thought of the clinic and Dr. Wilson but said, “Perhaps she wanted the child. Or, at the very least, wanted it to live. And as soon as that was accomplished, she walked away from it.”

“Then you’re saying that the accused had no need to kill the mother—the child was hers for the asking!” Mary came to take Oliver’s order, and he settled for the stew.

“Yes. It fits the timing.”

“Then why hasn’t she turned up since? You’re off the mark! Eleanor Gray is dead, and we’ve found her bones.” Oliver leaned back in his chair and scanned the room. Without looking at Rutledge, he asked, “What’s this I hear from the fiscal, that you want to take the accused to Glencoe?”

He had finally got to the subject that had brought him here.

“She knows the terrain far better than any of us do. I’d like to confront her with her crime. And watch what happens.” There were other reasons. He had not let himself think of them.

“Her lawyer will tell you it’s not on.”

“Then let him come as well.”

“A bloody circus!” Hamish put in.

“Then
I’m
telling you it’s not on! I see no purpose to be served,” Oliver said angrily.

McKinstry came through the door to the dining room and stood scanning the tables until he saw Oliver.

He crossed quickly to Oliver’s side, bent over, and said quietly, “You’d better come, sir. There’s a message from the police in Glencoe.”

“I’ll be there in a quarter of an hour. Damn it, can’t you see I’m in the middle of my
lunch
!”

“Yes, sir.” McKinstry straightened and started for the door.

Oliver threw his serviette in his plate and got up, swearing under his breath.

Rutledge was finishing his flan. He started to follow, but Oliver motioned him back into his chair.

“No, this is my end of things.”

Rutledge acknowledged his barely veiled order and stayed where he was. It never paid to argue jurisdiction with the local man, even when you were in the right.

Hamish said, “He’s no’ finished what was on his chest.”

“Just as well,” Rutledge retorted. For an instant he thought he had spoken the words aloud.

TEN MINUTES LATER
Oliver was back. His face was grim.

“They’ve found something up the glen. We’re on our way. Where’s your motorcar?”

Rutledge explained.

Oliver nodded. “Well, you’d better come along, then. You’ll want to hear what’s said.”

Torn between duty and dread, Rutledge slowly got to his feet.

GLENCOE HAD A
long and dark history. The bloody massacre there on 13 February 1692, had left its mark in the very ground. And the great bulge of mountains that overshadowed the valley below seemed to hold a long and bitter memory in their barren rock.

MacIan of Glencoe had failed to take his oath to the King, William of Orange, by 1 January of that year. It wasn’t his fault; he had reached Fort William in time, but there he had been sent on to Inveraray. Still, a punishment was held to be in order.

Campbell soldiers were quartered on the MacDonalds.

The Campbells had lived peacefully for twelve days in MacDonald homes and eaten their bread and salt. Then, without warning on that dark, cold February night, the soldiers had risen from their beds and slaughtered men, women, and children indiscriminately. Those who escaped died of cold and hunger and wounds in the bleak, unforgiving hills. And for the handful of survivors, the name of Campbell was ever after anathema.

As Oliver’s motorcar passed Loch Leven and took the road south of the river that led into the heart of the glen, Rutledge could feel the press of time and anguish, just as he felt Hamish’s unspoken grief. He wished fervently that he hadn’t come. He’d planned to drive here with Fiona; he’d seen her as his shield against the glen, but he knew now, beyond question, that it would have been wrong then just as it was wrong now.

Even Fiona couldn’t protect him from the images in his own mind.

Not far from here, Hamish had been born, grew to manhood, and went off to war. This was land he knew so well, he had described nearly every inch of it to Rutledge the night before he died. It wasn’t imagination that peopled the great empty glen with memories, it was the stored knowledge of a lifetime. And the lasting voice of a soldier who had spoken softly in the candlelight but tellingly, the noisy darkness around the small makeshift hut they sat in notwithstanding, until Rutledge could have recited each and every word in his dreams.

As the miles rolled behind them, Rutledge relived that night with such ferocity that he was back again in 1916, even as he saw every turn of the road.

After a fashion, Hamish had come home.

19

IT WAS A LONG DRIVE. BY THE TIME THEY HAD REACHED
the rendezvous point where an Inspector MacDougal was waiting for them, Oliver and McKinstry had fallen into weary silence, and Rutledge, sharing the rear seat with Hamish, was racked by the tension. It was not, by any token, an easy homecoming for either man. Rutledge had never expected to see and recognize landmarks that stood out now with such clarity. Nor had he expected to find here such a barrenness that in itself was beauty to someone who had seen it every day until the death of an obscure Austrian archduke had tumbled the world into war.

Glencoe was haunting—and haunted.

Ahead, where the unpaved road entered a narrow neck of the glen, they could see a motorcar pulled off to one side, under the frowning slopes. A man climbed down from the driver’s seat as they approached.

He was square, with flame-red hair and freckles so thick he seemed to be deeply tanned. Grinning at them, he raised a hand and called as Oliver slowed down, “Have ye brought the entire force from Duncarrick, then?”

Oliver pulled his vehicle off the road behind the other motorcar, raising a thick cloud of dust. The only traffic they had seen for miles was a flock of sheep and several carts piled with cabbages and sacks of potatoes. The road in either direction snaked yellow in the sun, like a dry river.

Solitary. But not empty. This place was never empty if you knew its history. Hamish, who did, was silent in the face of it. Rutledge thought, if ever there was a place for the pipes, it was here. Keening a lament on the wind and filling the valley with human sounds to shut out those no one could quite hear.

He forced himself to concentrate. Introductions out of the way, MacDougal went back to his own vehicle to open the door for the passenger he had brought with him.

She was no more than fourteen or fifteen, wrapped against the chilly wind that was blowing down from the heights in a faded plaid shawl that reached her hips. Her skirts whipped and snapped about her ankles. Her hair, in a bun, was a mousy brown, and youth was all that made her pretty.

But she faced the strangers as they were introduced in their turn and seemed to be collected for someone her age.

“And this is Betty Lawlor,” the Inspector ended. “Right, shall I begin, or will you, Inspector Oliver?”

Rutledge said before Oliver could speak, “Do you know the MacDonalds up the glen—” He dredged his memory for a name, and Hamish supplied it.

“—kin of Duncan MacDonald, who died in 1915?”

Betty gave him a sour look. “Aye. I ken who they are.”

“Are you friends, then?”

“Not friends, no.”

“Did you know Duncan’s granddaughter, Fiona?”

“I did. Not well. She was older. My sister’s age.”

Rutledge looked around him at the great expanse of emptiness. “I should think that neighbors here might look out for one another.”

Betty stared at him. “My ain grandfather was transported to Australia for sheep stealing. I havena’ any dealings with the MacDonalds. It was their sheep.”

Rutledge nodded. Oliver, impatient, said abruptly, “What did you find up there, Miss Lawlor?” He pointed to the mountainside above them, a great bulge of rock that seemed top-heavy.

“I was walking up there one day and saw something shining in the sunlight. I picked it up. It was this.”

She extended a work-worn hand and in the palm lay a small brooch. Rutledge and Oliver stepped forward to look at it more closely.

It was oval, with a single stone in the center and around it a circlet of smaller stones, set like the petals of a flower. On the back was a simple pin to hold it closed.

The color of the stones was a smoky brown. Smoky quartz.

“A cairngorm.” Hamish said it before Oliver did.

A stone found in Scotland and popular for jewelry. In the hilt of a
skean dhu,
in the froth of lace at the throat in eighteenth-century portraits, adorning the necks and fingers of ladies, it was a symbol in its way of the Highlands.

The setting was gold, a dainty filigree.

A pretty thing, and had probably been treasured once.

Rutledge said, “May I?” and took the brooch to examine it more closely.

The stones, well polished, flashed in his hand. The color was striking. He turned the brooch this way and that, to catch the light. Under the pin he noted that something had been engraved. Time had worn whatever it was to a blur.

“See just there. Initials, I think.” He pointed these out to Oliver. “Or a name. I can’t quite make them out—” Working with the light and shadow, he finally said, “There’s an M— possibly an A—a D—surely that’s an A—L.”

Oliver took the brooch and turned it back and forth himself, then shook his head. “Is that an M? Are you certain? Or an N?”

He passed the brooch on to MacDougal. “I looked at it earlier,” he confessed. “With a glass, before I telephoned you. It’s an M right enough.” He paused, and then said, “With a glass you can read the whole of it. ‘MacDonald.’ ”

McKinstry moved, denial in the abrupt shift from one foot to the other. In the ensuing silence, MacDougal handed the brooch back to Betty Lawlor. Her fingers closed over it until the knuckles were white.

“How far from where the body was found would you say this came to light?” Rutledge asked MacDougal.

“Possibly a hundred feet downhill. But it could have washed that far. In the rains and melting snow. After all, if you take into account the fact that it was here for several years, it’s not surprising at all.” He pointed above their heads again, where scree had been brought down the rough face of the peak. “I’d say the brooch must have come from above. There’s no other explanation. People don’t walk just here. It’s too uncertain. Most climbers follow that line over there.” He shifted to show them the preferred path. “And there.” He pointed across the road to the opposite slope. “It’s not impossible someone would be walking in our direction, but I’d say the odds were strongly against it.”

Hamish said, “The cairngorm wasna’ scratched enough to ha’ washed that far!”

Rutledge turned to Betty Lawlor, standing silently as they talked, her eyes moving from face to face. A self-contained child . . . “How did it happen that you were up there?”

She shrugged. “I walk all over this land. Always have. Helping with the sheep. I doubt there’s a foot of it I havena’ covered at some time or another.”

“But you never came upon the body that was found higher up?”

“I might’ve if the sheep had gone that far up. But generally they don’t just there. Stupid beasts, they are, but not foolish.”

He looked down at her shoes as she spoke, thinking of her walking day after day over such rough terrain—a hard life for a child.

Her shoes were new. Sturdy. He could see the leather toes just peeking out at the hem of her gown. The gown was a hand-me-down, the shawl the same. But her shoes were new. Even the edges of the soles hadn’t been worn yet.

Oliver said, “Tell me what you told Inspector MacDougal when you brought in the brooch.”

She looked at him directly, shading her eyes with her hand. “It was nearly a year ago that I found it. Summer anyway. I saw it in the sun. It was the first day it hadna’ stormed in a week or more. I didna’ like to think it might belong to— to whoever it was they found. Up there. It was pretty, and I wanted to keep it. But I’m afraid my father will find it and beat me for stealing. So I went to Inspector MacDougal to ask him to set it right!” She broke off, then asked anxiously, “You aren’t going to take it away, are you? You can’t be sure it’s
hers
!”

Oliver said magnanimously, “I’m afraid it must be taken in evidence. But when we’ve finished with it, I’ll see that you have it back again.” His eyes switched to Rutledge’s face. He didn’t have to put into words what was in both their minds. This was the first direct link between Fiona and the mountain. Between Fiona and the bones that might be Eleanor Gray’s.

Rutledge said nothing.

MacDougal asked Betty to take them to the place where she found the brooch, and she turned to spring up the hillside like one of the sheep she watched out for. Strong for all her thinness, and agile, she seemed to fly. Oliver, puffing in her wake, swore under his breath, but didn’t ask her to slow down. McKinstry turned back to stay with the vehicles.

Rutledge was just behind her, watching the new shoes, watching her almost intuitive knowledge of where there was enough stability to place a foot. She had learned from the sheep—

MacDougal, keeping pace but red-faced, said, “Fra’ the top are fine views. I used to climb here as a lad, with my brothers.”

“Did you know the MacDonalds?” Rutledge asked him.

“I knew one of them—brother of the accused, I’d guess. A good man. He lost his legs and bled to death before they could get him back over the wire. My brother died the same day. Machine-gun fire. I was lucky—shot three times but nothing that kept me from going back.” There was a quiet irony in his voice.

They had come some distance, cutting diagonally across the mountain’s face, slipping and sliding here or there, and Betty had begun to look around, as if trying to find landmarks.

Finally she paused and pointed to an area that was perhaps ten feet square. “About here, I’d guess,” she told them.

It was a rocky slope that seemed to be no different from any of its neighbors for a hundred yards in any direction.

“Why are you so sure?” Oliver demanded, mopping his face with a large handkerchief. “I can’t see any difference between this patch and that one—or that one over there.”

“See for yoursel’. I can match that spot just above us with that one across the way—” She pointed to the great bare face opposite, and following her finger, they identified a small outcropping of rock.

If you looked, Rutledge thought, you could find your way easily. But it was always a matter of
seeing
. To the uninitiated, this was barren ground. Above their heads, another tumbled mass of rock stood out against the sky.

Following his gaze, MacDougal said, “It was there we found the remains. In a slight crevice where water has brought down the supporting scree and left a hollow.” He paused, then said, “You’d have to know it was there. The hollow. It isn’t visible from the road.”

In short, no one would think to leave a body there who didn’t have some familiarity with these mountains.

“Want to climb up?” MacDougal asked.

Rutledge nodded and they walked on, picking their way carefully. It was hot here in the sun, and feet unused to this terrain found it difficult to know where to step with any certainty.

Carrying a body, Hamish pointed out, would not be easy. And for a woman, very nearly impossible. “Unless the corpse was dragged on a rope.”

And there was no one to see such a long, laborious effort. From where he stood, Rutledge could look down at the two motorcars, Oliver standing talking to Betty Lawlor, and a ruined croft some distance away. In the far distance, he saw sheep, but no one with them.

“Hard place for a woman to carry a dead weight,” MacDougal said as if reading his thoughts. “But if that brooch belongs to the deceased, it means she’s not your missing woman. Eleanor Gray.”

“And if it belonged to the murderer, then we have her in custody,” Rutledge finished for him.

They had reached the outcropping where three heavy rocks were lying in a heap. Not so large by the standards of these mountains, but beyond a man’s strength to tumble together so tidily. And where the smaller fragments had washed out from under, there was indeed a crevice. Put a body here in April, and it might be found. But put it here before the weather turns and the autumn storms begin, and it would still be here in the spring. What was left.

Rutledge squatted on his heels. MacDougal said, “You won’t find anything. We were verra’ thorough.”

“I expect you were,” Rutledge said evenly. “I was just thinking that this was a perfect place for bones. What makes you so certain that the body was not here before 1916?”

“Condition, for one thing. And I talked to all the families who run sheep. They were certain it wasna’ here in the summer. A fox or dog had chewed the shoes, and what bits of clothing we found weren’t of any use. First thought was that we’d found a climber. People climb here who havena’ the sense of a beetle! They canna’ believe on a fine day like this one that the mists can come in sae fast, you’re lost before you take ten steps. And she was doubled up, as if trying to keep warm. Loose stones had washed around and over her.”

“Doubled? How?”

“Head on knees, arms around them. Made the body smaller, kept heat in the middle. The bones were still in a huddle, like. The doctor found no injuries, but that’s no’ to say she hadna’ turned her ankle or twisted her knee.”

Hamish said, “Doubled o’er, she’d fit behind the seat of a car, out of sight.”

Rutledge said, “If she was already dead, rigor had passed.”

“Aye, that’s right. Or hadna’ set in. The birds and foxes must have stripped the body in a matter of days. We couldn’t find one hand or the best part of a foot. Other bones had been pulled apart to get at the meat. The skull had rolled into her lap.” MacDougal sighed. “We’ve had a walker or two lost in these parts. But we always ken how they got into the glen. They’d be seen and reported. One left a bicycle. Another begged a lift on a crofter’s wagon. With this one, there’s no way of establishing when—or how—she came to be here. We don’t know the question to ask, do we? And it’s possible she came over the top, from the other side.”