Legacy of the Dead (8 page)

“And yet you can’t put your finger on the author of these letters.”

McKinstry frowned and set down his cup.

“And that’s what I find most disturbing,” he said, considering it. “Why can’t I go and knock on a door and see guilt written in the face answering it? I walk down the street on my rounds, and I look into the eyes of the people I meet. I stand and talk to them for a time. I watch them go about their daily business. And there’s nothing about them that I can put my finger on and say, ‘Now, that’s the action of a guilty woman.’ ”

“Why are you so certain it’s a woman?”

“Because why would a man think to warn a laundress that her soul was in danger, washing a whore’s sheets? Or warn a young mother that her small daughter had a bastard for a playmate and was likely to see goings-on at the inn that weren’t fit for an innocent child’s eyes?”

Hamish was already there, but Rutledge set aside his plate and finished his tea before saying, “A man might write such things to throw you off the scent. Or he may recognize that it’s the women in Duncarrick who form public opinion—”

McKinstry’s face darkened. “Then he’s a bloody coward. Begging your pardon, sir!”

Rutledge asked for a chronology of the case, and McKinstry painstakingly gave it to him, this time leaving out nothing that he considered important. Rutledge paid close attention, noting facts as well as listening for nuances. When McKinstry had finished, he said, “Well done.” Hamish, silent in his head, stirred uneasily. Rutledge found his thoughts straying for an instant, then went on.

“My guess is that whoever wrote such letters knew they’d be believed. And that’s the next point.
Why
would people so readily believe them? Why didn’t the first person to find one on his doorstep march straight to the police or to the accused and make it clear that this wasn’t going to continue?”

McKinstry took a long breath. “You are asking me to answer you that she’s guilty. The accused. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, they say. But I’m not prepared to believe that. I’d rather believe that the letter-writer chose her— his—targets very carefully. Some people relish gossip if it’s shocking enough.”

“Will you make a list of all the people who have admitted to receiving these letters? What they do for a living. What reason they might have had for disliking the accused. How well they might have known her.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll do that today. But, begging your pardon, sir, I don’t see how that will help you find out the truth about the bones said to be Lady Maude Gray’s daughter’s.” He shook his head. “And that’s another whole kettle of fish.”

“It is,” Rutledge agreed. “But in my experience, where coincidence dovetails so perfectly, it becomes suspect. First we have these letters, apparently accepted as truthful. And now you tell me there was another one, from here—or from Glasgow, depending on how reliable the postmark may be— only this anonymous writer stoutly defends the accused, and in so doing puts her in even greater jeopardy. A charge of murder, not mere wantonness. There’s a search of the inn—where a body turned up. Only it isn’t the boy’s mother. Now, who knew enough about the history of The Reivers that he or she sent Inspector Oliver on such a wild-goose chase? But it does whet Oliver’s appetite for the hunt, and he begins to search for missing persons. The upshot of that is a set of unidentified bones and a connection with a woman in England whose daughter has not been seen since 1916. Now we have larger questions to answer than who wrote the letters. I wonder, was someone counting on just that?”

There was confusion in McKinstry’s eyes. “I don’t follow you, sir.”

But Hamish did. He said, “Is the woman in yon cell a murderer—a victim—or a scapegoat?”

AS RUTLEDGE TOOK
his leave, McKinstry said, “The worrisome thing in all of this—to my way of thinking—is that no one has lifted a hand for Fiona. No one has spoken up for her. Not Mr. Elliot, not Mr. Robson, not Mr. Burns—the fiscal. Not Inspector Oliver. It’s as if she’s been found guilty already, and the trial’s a travesty that’ll put a stamp on it for the world to see:
We were right in what we did. A jury has
said as much.
And the truth will be buried with her. That keeps me awake at night.” He ticked the words off on his right hand. “Minister, Chief Constable, procurator-fiscal, policeman. And what if she’s innocent and they hang her?”

WALKING BACK TO
his motorcar at the hotel, Rutledge went over again the information McKinstry had laid out for him. What intrigued him was how skillfully balanced each scrap of the puzzle seemed to be.

Like a game of chess, where the player knows in advance the moves of each piece on the board. In chess there were two players. Attack and counterattack. In life, there would be no certainties about the outcome. . . .

Before Rutledge left the house, the constable had taken out a copy he had made of the letter that had been addressed to Mr. Elliot, the minister. He read it aloud. As Rutledge listened, he found himself thinking that Elliot would have been better advised to go directly to the woman herself and ask for some explanation. Instead he’d chosen to involve the police, indicating that he had already half believed the malicious accusations brought to him by his parishioners. That would be worth exploring. . . .

Taking the copy from McKinstry, Rutledge had scanned it. It was untutored, apparently the work of a woman who earnestly tried to defend—and instead unwittingly pointed a finger of guilt. If it was a hoax, it was very cleverly devised. There was a ring of sincerity in the simple wording.

I have heard horrid gossip about a young woman in
Duncarrick . . . It is sad that no one has spoken a word in
her defense . . . I will lose my place if I tell you how I met
her . . . Her given name was Fiona . . . It was the late summer of 1916 . . . She was traveling with a very young baby
and had no milk for him . . . It struck me that she could not
be the mother, and indeed, I learned that the mother had just
died and she had been given the baby to raise as her own . . .
I was distressed for her, because she was unwed and had no
family except for an elderly spinster aunt . . . When I asked
her if the mother had any family who could help, she began to
cry, and wouldn’t tell me how the poor creature had died or
even where she had been buried . . . She told me fiercely that
she would be a good mother and would not allow anyone to
take the boy from her . . . I could see that she was very
agitated . . . She was always looking over her shoulder as if
expecting to see someone there. But there was no one . . . I
soon gave up trying to reason with her . . . What struck me
was her unshakable belief that she could bring up this poor orphan as her son . . . I cannot be convinced that she
would turn wanton and betray the trust that had been placed in
her . . . Please, do what you can on her behalf . . . It isn’t
right for her to be tormented in this way . . . I would as soon
believe that Fiona was a murderer as believe she has become a
whore . . .

He had even read it a second time, finding the wording and the sense of it more interesting than the content. “And you never discovered who’d written this?”

“No, sir, though we made every effort. It came from Glasgow, but there’s no telling who had put it in the post box there. It doesn’t quite say that the mother of the boy was murdered, you see. But if the death was natural, surely there would have been a doctor in attendance—relatives notified? And Fiona should have been able to tell us where to find such witnesses! Instead there’s a mystery about where and how the child was born. She won’t say. She won’t tell us where the mother is buried, if it’s true that she’s dead.”

“But that’s knowledge after the fact. What convinced the Chief Constable that there ought to be some investigation into the matter? Merely the letter? Or was there more?”

“I’ve never been offered an answer to that.” McKinstry tugged at his earlobe, uncertain. He’d never considered the question himself. Orders were orders.

Rutledge had said, “After all, it began as a moral issue. Whether or not the accused was what she claimed to be, a decent widow with a child to raise on her own. And Mr. Elliot chose to do nothing about it. An admission that he had reason to believe the first letters were telling the truth?”

It would be damning.

McKinstry shook his head. “I can’t say. The Chief Constable summoned Inspector Oliver, and then Inspector Oliver sent me to search the premises, and I did. There was nothing out-of-the-way in the living quarters or the inn. The stables were a public place, I couldn’t see a body being buried out there, even in the dead of night. Any work would have been noticed straightaway by the handyman. But Inspector Oliver prides himself on being thorough, and he had the place apart. That’s when he found the bones in the back of a cupboard that had been walled up. It dumbfounded the lot of us, I can tell you!”

“And he believed he’d found the body of the child’s mother?”

“Oh, yes. There was long hair on the skull. I was sent to summon Dr. Murchison, and he came at once, then told Inspector Oliver he’d been brought out of his surgery on a wild-goose chase. The bones were not a woman’s. They belonged to a man. And they were all of a hundred years old!”

8

WALKING BACK THROUGH DUNCARRICK’S MAIN SQUARE,
Rutledge stopped and considered the shops and houses lining either side of the road. These townspeople were prosperous enough, as Hamish had pointed out, but without obvious signs of wealth. Surely a small inn on the outskirts of town would offer neither problem nor competition. If The Reivers provided extra rooms to people on market day, so much the better. As for competing with the only hotel, Rutledge doubted if it could hold a candle to the amenities offered there. It would have served a simpler class of person who couldn’t afford the grandness of The Ballantyne. And any success it had enjoyed would have been modest in comparison to this part of the town. A good living for the owners, yes, but hardly extravagant.

He moved on, watching people going about their daily lives. Women entering and leaving the shops, a nursemaid with a pram carefully maneuvering it through the door of a house, a woman sweeping her front step, a small boy playing with a top, men in dark suits coming out of offices, others in work clothes, carrying the tools of a trade, a crocodile of schoolgirls marching in the wake of a schoolmistress wearing a thick coat and unbecoming hat.

Ordinary people, their eyes avoiding those of the stranger passing them. No curiosity about his presence or his business. As if once burned, twice shy . . .

Hamish said, “McKinstry was right. They’re a dour lot!”

There was one other common feature among them. Un-smiling faces and thin, tight mouths. As if life was a burden, and they were used to enduring it.

A woman stepped out of a shop close to where he was standing and cast a surreptitious glance in his direction.

Hamish saw her before he did, commenting that she could have studied him just as clearly from the front window. A tall woman, pretty in a severe way, with her hair in a tightly confined bun, her sweater and skirt a very prim gray with only a touch of color in the silk shirtwaist, a paisley of peach and gray and white.

She made a fuss over the potted plants that stood on either side of the shop door. They were pretty, a mixture of rose geraniums and something lavender and white, like pansies. Satisfied, she turned and went quickly back inside. He looked at the neatly painted sign above the door. A. TAIT MILLINERY. He filed it away for future reference. If she had been interested enough to inspect a stranger, she might also be a gossip. . . .

Rutledge retrieved his car from The Ballantyne’s yard and drove out past the church. He found The Reivers again and stopped across the road to look at it. Yes, he’d been right. Comfortable, decent—hardly a blot on the conscience of Duncarrick. Neither a wild tavern nor a seedy lodging.

Small and long, no more than two stories with an attic above, the inn was one of those old buildings that survived because they were in nobody’s way—no one wanted to build a square here, or shops, or a large house.

Duncarrick’s main square, on the other hand, had probably seen the demise of a whole street of houses to widen the space to suit nineteenth-century builders with Progress on their minds.

The houses on either side here and down the lane by the inn’s stables were neither picturesque nor ugly, more a reflection of the straightforwardness of the people who lived in them. Only the house to one’s left facing the inn was by any measure grand, boasting three stories and an extension toward the rear, as if it had grown over the years with the family living there. The windows had been set with some eye to symmetry and style, lending a faint touch of grace.

The inn looked rooted in its earth, tidy, freshly whitewashed in the past year, the door to the bar hidden behind a climbing rose that had spread with age to cover the porch it had been intended to adorn. It was a hardy rose to survive in this climate, and the small garden at its feet showed some care for the impression the inn made on passersby. The bar parlor, on the side facing the narrow lane into the inn yard at the rear, had a green door, and crisp white curtains showed behind the windows next to it.

Time could have turned this into a rowdy pub on the outskirts of town, but the inn had managed, somehow, to retain a certain dignity. Because two women had had the care of it?

“I canna’ think why they’d persecute a lass with such a dowry as the inn,” Hamish was saying. “They’d be more likely to want their sons to wed her.”

And that, too, was a question worth considering. It all kept coming back to that: Why had the town united so easily against this woman?

On impulse, Rutledge shut off the engine and got out, crossing the road and walking down into the inn yard, where the stables and outbuildings stood.

They were in a fair state of repair. With little work done during the war and no money after it to tackle major improvements, upkeep spoke well for the management.

He was poking about in the stable, looking for the cabinet where Inspector Oliver had discovered the first set of bones, when a loud voice said, “Here! What do you think you’re doing!”

He turned to find a tall, heavy-shouldered man of middle age standing in the doorway, arms akimbo, staring at him with harsh dislike. Shadowed by the doorway, his face was dark and ugly but had a strength to it as well.

Rutledge, well aware that he was trespassing, replied peaceably, “I’d heard that the inn might be for sale.”

“There’s no decision been made to sell or not sell,” the man said.

“I see.” Rutledge turned, having found what he was looking for, the part of the wall pulled down to bring a skeleton to light. The cupboard, deep enough to start with, had been made shallower to conceal the grave behind it. A careful bit of work—a hundred years ago trouble had been taken to make the spot seem ordinary, unsuspicious. It must have been quite a shock for Inspector Oliver to discover that his “corpse” was nearly as old as the inn.

Rutledge began to walk toward the man blocking the exit. It made him uneasy to have his way closed—even in the relative spaciousness of the stable, he could feel the claustrophobia it invoked. The air seemed thick, suffocating—

“Tell me about the owner—” He broke off. After being buried alive in the impenetrable mud of a shell crater, weighed down by Hamish’s body, Rutledge had come to hate being shut in—confined in any fashion. Traveling on trains, sleeping in a small room, seeing himself cut off from escape through a door or down a stair—the need for space was so urgent that it ignited a rising panic. Even here he could feel the sudden dampness of sweat on his face, the difficulty breathing, the awareness of hideous danger—

“You’ll be wanting to speak to the police, then,” the man told him bluntly but didn’t elaborate. His stance was intentionally threatening now, belligerent, as if he sensed Rutledge’s sudden uneasiness. Rutledge felt his own muscles tensing.

Rutledge replied, “A woman, I understand. What has she done to find herself of interest to the police?”

“None of your affair, is it?” At last the man moved out into the sunlight, and Rutledge followed, his breathing still uneven.

Damn this,
he swore, fighting the claustrophobia.
Keep
your mind on what you’re doing, can’t you?

But Hamish, too, was responding to the man’s aggressive stance, asking if he had believed the innuendoes and the letters—or was incensed by them. Rutledge thought, It was difficult to tell. He was a man who showed little in his face; he would not be easy to interrogate.

“Does she have any family? Heirs?”

“None.” Uncompromising. Cold. Then, grudgingly, “None that I know of.”

No mention of the boy. But he would inherit nothing . . . would he?

“Then I’ll be on my way.” Walking back toward the inn, Rutledge could sense the man’s stare boring into his back between his shoulder blades.

If this was any example of how the townspeople felt about the woman who owned this property, it was evident that she had somehow made abiding enemies.

Which didn’t fit into the picture of her that McKinstry had so glowingly painted.

Who was the woman in the eye of a controversy that might well end with a hanging?

Rutledge realized suddenly that he didn’t even know her full name. Not that it mattered, he thought, but it was an indication that whatever crime she had committed—from lying to murder—she had somehow lost her identity because of it. As if, by refusing to call her by name, Duncarrick could finish what they had begun back in June—shunning her until she was without reality and finally disappeared.

What had this woman done to stir up such dark passions?

It was odd, he thought, crossing the quiet street to his car. First the venomous letters and then the one to the minister—Elliot? The finding of one body that didn’t match the crime, and another that did. Persistence, patience—and what else? Luck? Or persecution?

It smacked of the latter. Hamish, in the back of his mind, agreed.

Rutledge stopped before turning the crank and looked back at The Reivers. The accused owned this inn. Did someone covet it? She had a small child to provide for, never mind whether it was rightfully hers or not. Did someone covet the child? Or want it taken away to punish the accused, a twisted revenge for a real or imagined grudge? And these were the more obvious reasons for wanting the woman in prison and out of the way. What others might there be? Was there something in the inn that no one knew about, which mattered to another person? Or was it something in the past of the accused that put another person in jeopardy? Hanging was a certain way of silencing her.

He found himself thinking of the child again. Torn away from its mother, from the only home it had known, put to live with strangers. There was a cruelty in that.

Then why hadn’t she lied to protect the boy? “I don’t have my marriage lines—my husband took them, to show the Army. . . .”

Why hadn’t she left the town as soon as the shunning had begun? But he thought he had the answer to that—the shunning had reduced custom at the inn to the point that she might not have had the money to go away. Had that been the intent of it—?

The woman’s voice behind him startled him. “Are you looking for someone?”

Rutledge turned and removed his hat. Hamish, responding to his surprise, was suddenly alert, watchful. She was tall and plump, dressed in black but young, perhaps twenty-four or -five. A little girl of six or seven held her hand.

“I was admiring the inn. I’d heard it might be for sale.”

The woman shook her head. “Early days to know that!” She turned to the door of the house in front of which he’d left his car. A neighbor, then . . .

“I understand the owner is to stand trial on some charges.”

Her face hardened. “She is.”

He found himself asking, “Do you know the name of her barrister? I might speak with him.”

“Armstrong’s his name, but he doesn’t live in Duncarrick. Jedburgh, I think I was told.”

Rutledge smiled down at the little girl. She smiled shyly back. He wondered if she’d played with the child living in the inn but couldn’t ask in front of the mother. And as if the thought had sprung from his mind to hers, the girl said in a soft, sweet voice, “I used to play with him. The little boy at The Reivers. But he’s gone away. I miss him.”

“Hush! You were told never to speak of that again!” the woman commanded, and the child turned her face into her mother’s skirts, flushing with shame, as if she had transgressed horribly.

The woman opened the house door and went inside, shutting it firmly behind her. Shutting out Rutledge and his questions. Unwilling to gossip—to speculate—or to defend.