A Fearsome Doubt (6 page)

“Our first cook was horribly shocked by the deaths, even though they occurred in London. I remember she refused to let a man into her cottage after that. She was convinced she’d die the same way. Dreadful to be old and fearful. I went myself a time or two to help nail up the back steps or whatever needed doing, and always took care that Lydia was with me.” He shook his head. “The poor woman died in her sleep, and wasn’t found for two days.”

“Did you know Matthew Sunderland at all?”

“I knew him to nod to, as we passed each other. I was too provincial and too young to have the courage to sit at the great man’s feet. Although, to do him justice, he was never as lofty as he appeared. But the man had a regalness about him, the white hair and his carriage. Someone, I forget who, compared Sunderland to General Gordon—that same charismatic belief in his own power.” Hamilton smiled. “To tell you the truth, I often wondered how many cases Sunderland carried just striding into the courtroom. And he had a voice to match, deep and impressive enough to read the Old Testament to savages. We won’t see his like again this century!”

8

A
S SHE STEPPED INTO HIS CAR,
E
LIZABETH
M
AYHEW SAID TO
Rutledge, “Sorry! I didn’t mean to keep you waiting so long. But if Lydia and I don’t settle the flower schedule ourselves, there’s endless confusion. People by nature want to change things, and it takes hours for the committee to draw up a satisfactory list. We’ve learned to circumvent argument by working it out between us.”

As the engine turned over, he got into the car beside her, then realized that earlier she’d folded the rug for her knees and laid it in the rear seat. With a cold shock of dread, he turned and fished for it, his eyes carefully away from the spot that Hamish seemed to favor. As his fingers touched the wool, he drew it toward him. It seemed to come with unexpected ease, as if Hamish had given it a push in his direction. But that was imagination, and he took a deep breath to dispel the feeling of having come close to the one thing he feared—finally confronting the nemesis that haunted his waking hours.

Hamish had died in France in 1916, in the nightmarish days of the first battle of the Somme. He had died as surely as any of the war dead. Shot by a firing squad at Rutledge’s orders, shot by the coup de grâce that Rutledge had administered with his own hand, buried deep in the stinking mud that the artillery shell had thrown up, killing men like nettles before a scythe. Rutledge had not wanted to execute the Scottish corporal, but Hamish MacLeod had been stubborn in his refusal to do what he had been ordered to do, and in the heat of battle, disobeying an order in the face of his men had left his commanding officer no alternative but to make an example—and hope with all his being that the young Scot would see the error of his ways well before the threat had to be carried out. But Hamish, worn and exhausted and tired of watching men die in the withering fire of No Man’s Land, would not lead them out again. And Rutledge had had to do what he had sworn he would.

Hamish MacLeod had been a natural leader, not a coward, respected by officers and men alike. But he had been battered by too much death and too little sleep. He’d watched the corpses piling up, he’d lost count of the replacements, and the shock of the endless bombardments had left him shaken and tormented. Death had come as a release for him—and had nearly destroyed Rutledge.

And while Hamish lay somewhere in France—buried securely beneath a white cross lost in an alien garden of thousands upon thousands of war dead, hardly distinguishable from the soldiers who slept on either side of him—if his ghost walked, it walked in Scotland, not England. He had loved the Highlands with a passionate intensity, and the woman he’d left behind there. But in Rutledge’s battle-frayed mind, there was something that was still alive and stern and real, the essence of the soldier he’d known so well and had—for the sake of a battle—ordered killed. Murdered—

Rutledge shut the thought out of his mind. As Elizabeth was settling the rug over her knees and he was putting the car into gear, he struggled to break the silence that engulfed him. But the first question he could think of was “What were these killings that Masters was talking about?”

“Oh. I hadn’t said anything before. You’re on leave, and I hadn’t wanted to bring your work into this holiday.”

“Masters seems to have had no such compunction,” he said wryly.

“I’ve never faced death,” she said thoughtfully. “So I can’t tell you what
I’d
do if someone—a physician—told me I probably wouldn’t live much longer. But Raleigh has fought it bravely. It’s just that he’s turned . . . bitter—I suppose that’s the word. The worst of it was, he’s had to give up his work in London. And he’s not the man we once knew. I expect that’s why we’re so tolerant of him. As well as for poor Bella’s sake. She doesn’t quite know how to cope. He won’t let her touch him—they have nurses in for that.”

She sighed, drawing herself away from the Masterses’ dilemma. “The murders. There have been two ex-soldiers killed. One was found on a lonely road, the other by a field, and no one quite knows who would do such a thing—or why. The pity is, they survived the war, and now it’s not a German killing them, but an Englishman. Their own side! I find that rather horrible, don’t you?”

E
LIZABETH HAD FALLEN
asleep, her head against his shoulder. He was no more than two miles or so from her house as the crow flew, and Rutledge could feel the weariness of the long day turning to drowsiness of his own as he drove. Fighting it, he concentrated on the road ahead—and swerved as he realized too late that a man was standing at a crossroads, almost in his path.

As the lamps of his motorcar pinned the figure in their bright beams, he would have sworn in that instant that it was the face he’d seen the night of the Guy Fawkes bonfire.

Elizabeth came awake as the motorcar veered wildly. She said quickly, “What’s wrong—?”

Rutledge’s heart rate seemed to have doubled as he fought the wheel to bring the car back to the road. He had all but
killed
the man!

“Someone—in the road—I didn’t see him until I was on him—”

He must stop, he told himself disjointedly—be certain the man was all right—the wing had missed him—given the idiot a shock perhaps as severe as his own—but done the man no harm
—there had been no contact—

Yet he didn’t want to go back—he didn’t want to find that the figure on the road had existed only in his dream-filled brain as he had drifted unexpectedly into sleep.

“I don’t see anyone in the road.” Elizabeth said it doubtfully, turning to look over her shoulder. “Are you sure, Ian? There’s no one there—Ought we to go back?”

Hamish said, “You must go back! You canna’ leave him to bleed to death in a hedgerow!”

Rutledge was already slowing the motorcar, and with some difficulty turning it on the narrow road. Dread filled him, a deep and abiding belief that if he was right, there would be no body and no sign of one.

And when they reached the crossroads again, although he searched for a good ten minutes, no one was there—

R
UTLEDGE WAS AWAKE
before dawn, standing at the windows looking out over the back lawns of Elizabeth Mayhew’s house. It was a pretty view, even in the early morning mists. Flower beds laid out asymmetrically formed a pattern that led the eye down a grassy walk to a bench overlooking the small pool at the bottom of the garden. In summer the beds held a wonderful variety of blooming plants, but an early frost had blighted summer’s growth, leaving behind only the skeletons of what once was.

But what he saw at this moment was not a Kentish garden; it was the blighted landscape of France. It seemed he could still hear the guns, using up their stockpiled shells in a mad frenzy of noise and destruction. It was as if there was to be no Armistice in a few hours. The rattle of machine guns, punctuated by the sharper fire of rifles, added to the din, and men were still dying, and would go on dying until the eleventh hour. He had tried to husband them, to stop the waste of life and the long, long lists of the wounded, but he could hear the cries of pain and the screams of the dying and the scything whisper of bullets overhead.

A political decision it had been, not a battlefield victory: The Armistice would commence on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, at the eleventh hour of the morning—11 November, 1918, eleven
A.M.

It had held no reality for Rutledge. He had stood in the trenches, Hamish alive in his mind, and stared across the bleak, tortured land he had known intimately for four unthinkable years. And the Scot’s words kept forming in his head:
“I shallna’ see this eleventh hour, I shallna’ go home with the rest, I shallna’ prosper in the years ahead. And you willna’ prosper, either.”

Better to be dead. Better to walk out into that machine-gun fire and be dead, than to go home to nothing. . . .

He could hear the voices around him, men who had survived, talking tentatively about what would actually happen here. But not of home. Not yet. No one could quite grasp an end to the bloody Great War. There was neither jubilation nor hope, only an odd reluctance to think beyond the appointed hour. As if it would be unlucky. He wondered if the Germans in their hidden trenches were feeling the same fatalistic acceptance, or if they, too, counted their dead in their thoughts, and wondered why it had all begun anyway.

He didn’t know why it had begun, this war. He understood the political reasoning, the invoked alliances, the assassination in Sarajevo, where the Austrian archduke had died. He had succumbed to the banners and the enthusiasm and the euphoria as all the others had, he had trained and shipped out for France, and gone into battle with a sense of duty and honor. Then he had watched it metamorphose into the most appalling slaughter in living memory. And still the generals and the political leaders and the press had fought on, safe in their cocoons far from the dying . . .

Appalling . . .

Coming back to the present, he watched a wind lift the boughs of the trees and run lightly across the grass.

Was it barely a year ago that this slaughter had ended, with no banners and no enthusiasm and no posturing, in a last barrage of shells and the cold gray November dawn? He shivered. For too many men, this was not a day of solemn commemoration but a day of agonized remembrance.

For him, a reminder that Hamish MacLeod had
not
come home.

W
HEN HE WENT
down to breakfast, Elizabeth was already there. “Good morning!” she said cheerily, then seeing his face, the tired lines that marked a sleepless night, she went on in a more subdued tone, “Melinda Crawford has asked us to tea. There’s a note that just arrived. I’m to send back an answer.”

“Yes, why not?” Rutledge answered. “And I’ll take you both to dinner afterward, if you like.”

“I’d like that,” she agreed. She watched him lift the lids of serving dishes on the handsome buffet, and fill his plate. “I’ll give the staff the day off. They’ll be delighted.”

Sitting down across from her, he picked up the napkin ring and then reached for the teapot. It was a quiet domestic scene, far removed from the images that had haunted him only a short hour ago, soothing in a way that he hadn’t anticipated. As if it had the power to wipe away the past, simply by being so normal, so undemanding.

As he looked up, he thought Elizabeth was about to say something to him, and he waited, expecting her to suggest plans for the morning. But she finished her toast instead, eyes dropping to her plate.

“I’ll just tell the chauffeur we’re coming,” she said after a moment. “He’s waiting in the kitchen for my reply.” Rising, she walked gracefully to the door and left him to his own meal. He knew, none better, that an appearance of hearty appetite was an accepted indication of good health. The knowledge had served him well when he had spent more than a week in his sister’s home, an invalid after being shot in Scotland.

But Elizabeth had been picking at the food on her plate, and he wondered what was on her mind. The policeman in him was too well trained not to take notice. It would, he thought, come out one way or another in its own good time.

The door opened and she came back into the room, frowning. “Ian. The most horrid thing. There’s been another murder—closer to us this time. And on the road we took just last night. Mrs. Crawford’s chauffeur, Hadley, was regaling the cook and scullery maid with the gruesome details. He’d come that way this morning—the police stopped him to ask his business—”

Rutledge stared at her. Had he struck the man in his headlamps? Was this the body that the police were examining even now?

“Who was killed? Was the driver told?” He kept his voice steady with an effort of will.

“The police didn’t say. But a farmer who was bringing his horse to the farrier had seen the body and told Hadley that it was a one-legged man. Like the others.”

“How did he die?”

“I don’t think they know yet. It wasn’t an accident. Hadley was certain of that. Ought you to do something?”

The last thing Rutledge wanted to do was to go back to that crossroads and look down on the face of a man he might recognize. And yet he knew very well that the figure he’d seen had had two good legs. It was coincidence—and a damned uncomfortable one. He had to believe that. Whatever he’d glimpsed was a trick of memory, a startling but harmless tearing of the curtain between sleeping and waking.

Hamish was saying,
“You werena’ asleep at the bonfire . . .”

“There’s nothing I can do to help. I don’t have the authority here,” Rutledge told Elizabeth truthfully.

She pressed her hand to her cheek as if for comfort. “What a terrifying start to the morning—”

“Come eat your breakfast, and don’t dwell on it,” Rutledge responded quietly. “There’s nothing you can do. Nothing I can do, for that matter. I’d only be in the way.”

With a twist of her shoulders as if trying to shake off her unsettled mood, she said, “I’d never realized, quite, how unpleasant your work must be. Dealing with such things.”