Legacy of the Dead (2 page)

Fiona swallowed hard, the lump in her throat threatening to choke her. Keeping her voice steady by sheer effort of will, she asked, “Was this—this letter anonymous, like the rest of them? Or was it signed?”

“No. It claimed that the writer was fearful to speak out. She’d held her tongue for your aunt’s sake, knowing Ealasaid MacCallum had been told lies. And she’s afraid she might be brought up on charges now.”

Fiona caught her breath. “The address?
Where did it
come from?”

“There was a Glasgow postmark, but that’s not to say it was written by anyone living there. You’d only have to drop it in a post box, wouldn’t you? The writer might live in Lanark—Inverness—” He looked down at his boots, missing her expression, bent to touch the cat, then thought better of it. Straightening up again, he went on earnestly. “Mr. Elliot went to the Chief Constable. The Chief Constable is not a man who likes anonymous letters and innuendoes. He told Inspector Oliver to get to the bottom of it. Inspector Oliver has sent me to have a look around. Mind you, only to see if any work’s been done in the last few years. To see if any of the flagstones have been taken up or the walls repaired or the cellars changed.”

“No one has done work here—not since 1914, the start of the war. Peter, the old man who was my aunt’s handyman, can tell you no work’s been done—”

“He has that. Inspector Oliver asked him. And your neighbors as well. But it would have been a secret business, after all. You’d not have told Peter, would you, if a body was being hidden? Nor your aunt, just as the letter said.”

“It’s not true! And it doesn’t make sense—if I brought the child here with me, how could I bring its dead mother, to bury her here! In a trunk—? In the back of the carriage—? Over my shoulder?” She was feeling desperate, frightened.

He winced at her bitter humor. “Mr. Robson addressed that. He said the mother might have recovered from the birth and wanted to keep the boy after all. And you stopped her when she came here to find him. I’ve had my orders—”

“This is my inn now. I won’t have anyone tearing it apart to search for a body—
there’s no body here
!”

“I must look, Fiona, or they’ll send someone else with a search warrant and an ax. Will you at least let me walk about and see with my own eyes that there’s nothing to find?”

“No!” Startled by her cry, the cat tensed and then vanished behind the heavy draperies at the side window.

“Fiona—”

“No!”

It took him a good half hour to convince her that he was the lesser of evils. That for her own sake she must agree to lead him around the premises. That he would look only where Fiona allowed him to look, move only what she allowed him to move. When, stiffly, she finally gave her permission, he said gently, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

But she ignored him. With a coldness he’d never felt in her before, she led him through the small wing, room by room, even where the child was sleeping in his crib, one hand tucked under his chin, and then through the aged building that had been her great-uncle’s inn and then her aunt’s, and now hers. Through the common rooms and the bars, through the kitchens and the cellars, and through the few bedchambers that could be taken by occasional travelers and marketgoers. Through the attics where old boxes and trunks littered the dusty floors amid the broken or outgrown furnishings stored there, the long-forgotten belongings of a family that had lived under the same roof for generations. To the cellars where there was still wine on the shelves but very little beer or ale—nobody came to drink it, and like the kitchens, the pantry, and barman’s little cubbyhole, the cellars were nearly empty. No sacks of flour or potatoes or onions, no tins of fruit or jars put up from the garden.

He looked as thoroughly as he could without insulting her. He sounded walls and stamped on the floors, peered into the chimneys and moved the largest chests and dressers, opened the tops of trunks and sniffed at their musty contents. Kept his mind and his attention on his task without letting his own misery show in his face.

When Alistair left, she accompanied him to the door and shut it almost before he’d thanked her properly.

Behind its solid oak, where no one could see her, she leaned her forehead against the cool wood and closed her eyes. And then the child, rousing from his sleep, began to sing off-key to himself, a Highland song she had taught him. She made an effort to collect herself, and called, “I’m coming, darling.” But it was another minute before she could turn and ascend the stairs.

Whatever Alistair McKinstry told his superiors, a fortnight passed before there were other policemen at her door, demanding to inspect the premises: Inspector Oliver, Sergeant Young, and both Constable McKinstry and Constable Pringle. In his anxiety not to offend her, McKinstry had not properly examined the outbuildings, she was told.

Fiona, torn between fear and disgust, told them to search as and where they pleased, then shut the door in their faces and kept the child out of sight.

It was in the stables in the inn yard that they found the bones, well hidden between the back wall and the little room the liveryman had lived in. Inspector Oliver had been the one to notice the unusual thickness of the plaster in one place. He tapped it with a hammer, found that there was space behind it, and tapped again, watching with interest as a spider’s-web crack ran across it. A suspicious man by nature, he went into the dusty room on the other side of the wall and found that a cupboard was not as deep as it ought to have been.

They had the wall down, then, and the skull rolled out before they had even seen the rest of the bones crammed into the long, narrow space. As it came to a stop, grinning up at them, Constable McKinstry smothered a curse.

The long hair still attached in places to the dry bone surely marked it as a woman’s.

IT WAS NOT
until late August that they arrested her.

The bones in the stables had catapulted the investigation into a dozen new directions. Inspector Oliver, with grim thoroughness, had scoured Fiona’s past, had followed every lead that came his way, and had succeeded in bringing new information to light—damning information that supported the theory he found so compelling. The procurator-fiscal had seen fit, after speaking with the Chief Constable, to order a trial on the charge of murder.

Fiona found someone to care for the boy and went to jail with an aching heart. She couldn’t be sure who her enemy was, or how he or she had tightened a noose about her neck so cleverly. But she did know one very important thing about this person. The planning and the execution had been quite shrewdly done. Someone had carefully arranged her death, and left it to the law to do the deed for him—or her.

Which meant that someone hated her very deeply.

But who was it?

The only living person she might have asked was the one person she could never turn to for help. Even if she went to the gallows.

She had made a promise, and she dared not break it.

It was the boy she wept for in the night. She loved him completely and without shame. What would he be told now about the woman he believed to be his mother? Who would care for him and keep him safe if she was not there?

The loneliness was nearly unbearable. And the idleness. She wasn’t used to sitting in silence the day long, with nothing, neither a book nor a needle, to make the time pass. Even as a child in her grandfather’s house, there had been books. A basket of mending. Letters to be written. Now there was no one to write to. Where were the many people who had claimed to be her friends, who had welcomed her first for her aunt’s sake and then for her own? She had been visited by none of them, had had no word of encouragement from them. She felt abandoned and wished with all her heart that her aunt were here to comfort her.

And she had no faith in the lawyer who came to speak to her. There was something in his narrow eyes that warned her to be very careful. He was not the sort of man who trusted women.

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.