Legacy of the Dead (12 page)

“Inspector Rutledge,” he said, “Scotland Yard. I won’t keep you. I’m searching for the mother of the child Fiona MacDonald calls”—he hesitated—“Ian MacLeod. I’m asking young women who might have known her if she had at any time confided in them.”

“Are you, indeed?” Her eyes were angry suddenly. “Well, if Fiona had seen fit to confide in me, why should I rush to tell you whatever might have been said between us? It’s ridiculous to expect anything of the kind. You’re a policeman. You should be able to do your duty without my help!”

Hamish said, “Aye, but then, she doesn’t know you, does she? Or how well or ill you do your duty!”

“I’m not,” Rutledge said gently, “looking for evidence to convict her. Only for evidence of the child’s parentage so that he can be returned to his mother’s family. Or, failing that, to his father’s.”

She turned away. “I have better things to do with my time than provide you with local gossip. I don’t particularly like Fiona MacDonald. Anyone will tell you that. On the other hand, I think she’s been wretchedly treated, and I’m not going to be one of those throwing stones.”

“Why didn’t you like her?”

“I thought we might become allies. We were alike in one thing, at least. We didn’t squeeze dutifully into the rigid mold of Duncarrick. Silly notion, as it turned out. She kept to herself. I suppose that’s understandable in light of what’s happened since, but at the time I felt—betrayed. As if she’d turned her back on me, preferring instead to ingratiate herself with her aunt’s friends. Apparently, she didn’t succeed very well, did she? In the end they turned their backs on her!”

“Did you receive one of those anonymous letters?”

Her laughter pealed out, harsh and startling in the ambiance of the shop. “I am more likely to be the subject than the recipient of such things. In point of fact, I’ve sometimes wondered why they targeted Fiona rather than me. There are people in this town who would gladly see the back of me.” She gestured at the walls and the hangings that shut off the back room of the shop for privacy, their flamboyance almost a defiance. “But I’m trapped here. I inherited the shop, and I don’t have the money to walk away from Duncarrick and start again elsewhere. I lived in London for a time— worked there before the war and for two years of the fighting, learning my craft from a Frenchwoman who had come from Paris to design hats in London. She closed her shop— no one had a taste for extravagant hats, no one wore them anymore, the war changed that. Women made do with what they had or refurbished them themselves. And I came here. This place had stood empty for nearly three years—it had been a haberdashery.” With an angry shake of the head, she added, “Why am I telling you this!”

Hamish said, “It’s the way you listen, I’m thinking. People forget you’re a policeman—I did mysel’ many and many a time!”

Rutledge asked, more as a shot in the dark than with the expectation of an answer, “In London, did you by any chance know Eleanor Gray?”

She shrugged. “I knew who she was. But we moved in different circles. I had no interest in becoming a suffragette. I didn’t find it an attractive prospect to be dragged off to prison and force-fed by beefy matrons with a taste for sadism.”

“Is she still in London? Or has she gone elsewhere?”

“The Honorable Miss Gray was as unlikely to confide in me as Fiona MacDonald is. Why, is she a friend of yours? Is that why you’re looking for her?” She studied him with interest, deciding that he was a very attractive man despite the thinness and the haunted eyes. “Men did seem to interest her more than women did. It was odd, she could collect them by the droves if she was in the mood to talk. Women bored her. Eleanor Gray was one of those people others gossiped about. What she did, what she wore, where she went. I doubt if a quarter of it was true, but it was fun to pass along. But you haven’t answered my question.”

Rutledge smiled. “No, I’ve never met her. Did you ever hear gossip that she was preparing to become a doctor?”

“No, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had. She was a very handsome woman, she had more money than she knew what to do with, and her bloodlines went back to William the Conqueror—or Alfred the Great, for all I know. And yet—there was something that burned in her. A passion. I was never told what it was, but she seemed to waste a good deal of energy on makeshift enthusiasms. Like suffragism. And then the war itself. She was always manning one of the canteens for soldiers, always visiting the hospitals, writing letters for the wounded, always pushing for better care, better conditions. I’ve heard she was a superb horsewoman, too, and was rabid about the treatment horses received at the Front.”

“You know a great deal about a woman you’ve never met.”

She shrugged again. “I was envious, if you want the absolute truth. And so I listened when people talked about her. If I’d had her money and her breeding, I’d have married well and never set foot in this shop. Now, I have a hat that must be finished by this afternoon. Is there anything else you want to know?”

“I understand that Dorothea MacIntyre lives above your shop—”

“She does, and you’ll leave her alone, do you hear me? She goes in lively terror of half the town as it is, and it won’t help to have the police harassing her. She thinks Fiona and her aunt Ealasaid walk on water. Well, that’s as may be. In my humble opinion, Ealasaid should have been taken out and shot for putting that girl into Mr. Elliot’s vicious clutches!”

“In what sense, vicious?”

“Dorothea is a silly goose who never did any harm to anyone, and all he can think of is whether she has unconfessed sin on her soul. On the subject of sin, he’s worse than the Inquisition, that man! And she’s driven to despair thinking that nothing she does is worthy of him. That’s why I offered her a room here—I thought it would be the ultimate cruelty for her to live under Elliot’s roof. It has been an inconvenience and a hardship, but I take great satisfaction from the fact that when she’s here, she isn’t scrubbing and hauling coal and cooking and washing up and fetching the laundry back from Mrs. Turnbull’s, not to speak of the other heavy tasks he puts on her. All because he’s too miserly to hire another girl. He took her in, you see, when she had no work, and he never lets her forget the duty owed him for that
kindness
!” Her eyes blazed.

He was on the point of asking if Fiona MacDonald’s child could have been Dorothea MacIntyre’s, and then stopped himself. Mr. Elliot’s housekeeper was no guardian of secrets, her own or anyone else’s.

12

THE BEDROCK OF POLICE WORK WAS THE STATEMENT, A
record of every witness questioned, scrupulously preserved in evidence.

Rutledge walked back to the station and asked Constable Pringle if he might read statements taken down when Inspector Oliver interviewed everyone who had received one of the letters denouncing Fiona MacDonald.

Pringle handed him a thick file box and said tentatively, “They’re in proper form, sir.”

“I’m sure they are.” He smiled, took the box, and moved one of the chairs nearer the door, giving himself a semblance of private space. Sitting down, he untied the red string. Pringle went back to his own work, glancing up from time to time. As if, Hamish growled, Rutledge were not to be trusted.

Ignoring that, Rutledge lifted out the papers inside and began going through them.

Mrs. Turnbull, laundress. “I’m a respectable woman. I don’t have anything to do with the likes of
her.
” Question: Have you ever done her washing? “No, I have not, and I thank God for it!” Question: Why, then, would someone send you such a letter? “Because they know I’m a good Christian, that’s why. And I’d lose custom if it got around that I was taking in washing from whores!”

Hamish, incensed, swore.

Mrs. Oliphant, neighbor. “It was a warning to mind where my husband was of an evening. But I didn’t need it, did I? Hadn’t I seen her slipping out of the inn late at night, while her aunt was still alive?” Question: Did you speak of this to Miss MacCallum? “I did not. She was ill, dependent on Fiona. It seemed a cruelty.” Question: Do you know where Miss MacDonald went when she left the inn so late? “I’m a decent woman, I don’t go prowling about in the dark.” Question: How often did she do this? “I saw her with my own eyes four, or maybe even five times.” Question: What direction did she take? “It was always the same, away from the town.” Question: How can you be so sure it was a lover Miss MacDonald went to meet? “Because I went out to that pele tower the very morning I found the letter on my doorstep. To see for myself if it was true. I found a bed of straw where a part of the roof had tumbled down and left a dry corner behind a heap of stone. And it smelled of lavender—that’s
her
scent!” Question: But you wouldn’t have thought to go to the tower if the letter hadn’t suggested it. “Oh, I’d wondered, right enough! Where else might a whore have some privacy?”

Hamish said bitterly, “Can ye no’ see that it’s what they want to believe?”

Or someone had been a step ahead of Mrs. Oliphant, and set the scene she was expecting to find. . . .

Mrs. Braddock, neighbor. “I’ve seen how my husband looks at her! He’s often offering to do work at the inn. But he isn’t eager to keep up his own house, is he? I’ve been after him to paint the kitchen for six months.” Question: So you believed the letter you found? “When it said my daughter was playing with a bastard and learning nasty things at the inn? Yes, I did. I had sometimes watched Ian while Miss MacDonald was out, and she’d returned the favor. He’d been no trouble at my house, but how was I to know what went on in hers?”

The silence from Hamish was thundering.

Mr. Harris, shoemaker. “She’d come in for her shoes, and was polite as you please. I never guessed, until the letter came! I’d known Ealasaid MacCallum for fifty years—she was a good woman, a good Christian.
She
wouldn’t have allowed such things to go on. It’s a disgrace, that’s what it is!” Question: Had you visited the inn? Before the letter came? “Aye, that I had. It was a respectable place for a pint of an evening. There was always good company, and a man could sit and talk with his friends. The Ballantyne, now, it’s all well and good, but crowded. You can hardly hear a word said to you!” Question: And while you were sitting in The Reivers, there was no indication—as far as you knew—that Miss MacDonald might be using the upstairs rooms for indecent purposes? “I should have guessed when Fiona took over tending bar herself. None of the MacCallums ever had! I said to Mrs. Harris, it’s not right, mark my words, no good will come of it. Ealasaid would never have agreed to it. Fiona blamed it on the war, and necessity, help being so hard to find, but it still wasn’t proper.” Question: Did Miss MacDonald ever offer you an opportunity to visit upstairs? “I’m a married man!”

“Aye,” Hamish commented through clenched teeth, “and sorry for it!”

The writer of these letters, Rutledge thought, thumbing through a dozen more statements, had been very clever indeed. Possibly too clever? She—or he—had known Duncarrick well, to choose the letters’ recipients with such unerring accuracy. The seemingly untutored handwriting and the cheap stationery were no more than carefully thought-out trappings. This could not be, in his opinion, the work of a jealous wife or a jilted lover, driven to striking out.

The widow whose husband had died in the war: “I thought she might be more sympathetic to
my
suffering, having lost her own husband. But she wouldn’t talk about Corporal MacLeod. Now I doubt he ever existed!”

The elderly woman who cleaned the church: “I went to Mr. Elliot, I was that upset! That she should be sitting among us, a two-faced harlot. And Mr. Elliot said he’d prayed over her from the start—she hadn’t worshiped with what he believed to be sincerity—”

“Is it likely yon Mr. Elliot has written these abominations?” Hamish demanded. “He claims he sees the weaknesses of people—”

It was something Rutledge had been considering. To teach Fiona a lesson? If so, it had gotten out of hand. . . .

Another woman with small children: “Young Ian had lovely manners. I never guessed that he was what he was— but blood tells, doesn’t it? In the end, blood tells! I’m so grateful that dear Ealasaid never lived to see this day. It would have been horrid. She was so happy when Fiona came—”

A woman who had been close to Ealasaid MacCallum: “I can’t sleep at night thinking how this would have hurt dear Ealasaid. I’ve known her since she was a girl, and it would have broken her heart to find out how she’d been—used— in this fashion. It won’t surprise me at all if Fiona
is
a murderess! Look how she treated her own flesh and blood—she knows no
shame
!—”

Hamish railed, “The shame’s
hers
—”

“It’s human nature we’re dealing with here,” Rutledge answered. “Don’t you see? The first stone has already been cast. When the police interview the next person, he or she wants to be counted among the righteous. It doesn’t prove anything except that people as a rule are easily led.”

Rutledge put the statements back in their original order and set them in the box. It had been unpleasant reading. Someone—Constable McKinstry, he thought—had likened Fiona MacDonald’s situation to the hysteria of witch hunts in the 1600s. And so it was. Fiona’s sin—if there was a sin— had been to keep to herself. Many people had held that against her and at the first test showed neither generosity nor trust.

In choosing so carefully, the writer of the letters had been successful in destroying Fiona MacDonald’s good name.

But were there other people, reluctant to step forward in the face of overwhelming public opinion, who privately might help?

RUTLEDGE WENT BACK
to the square and at random stopped several women doing their day’s marketing. The first one was red-faced, with graying hair straggling out of the tight bun at the nape of her neck.

Introducing himself, he explained that he was searching for anyone who could give him information about Fiona MacDonald’s history before coming to Duncarrick.

The red-faced woman assured him that she had no knowledge of “that person.”

He thanked her and moved on. His next choice was a middle-aged woman in a neat blue coat and a hat with a modicum of style. A schoolmistress, he thought, walking the narrow line of decorum required by her position.

She was flustered by his question, and he wondered if she had known Fiona better than she wished people to remember.

“No—no, I really didn’t know her well. A passing—acquaintance. I accepted her for her aunt’s sake, of course, believing that Ealasaid’s family must be above reproach. It was a terrible shock when I heard—my first thought was ‘Oh, I’m glad her aunt isn’t alive to see her taken up by the
police
!’ ”

“You knew nothing about where Miss MacDonald lived before coming here? Her aunt never spoke of her niece in your hearing?”

“Well—that is, I believe—er—Miss MacDonald lived with her grandfather until his death. Ealasaid must have said something about that. I—I seem to remember that she— Ealasaid, of course!—thought very well of
him.
A good man—well-respected in the Highlands. Which made it all the more shocking that his granddaughter should—well, disappoint the family so horribly.”

She had managed to appear totally ignorant of any facts—aware only of hearsay and half-remembered gossip. Her pale brows and lashes fluttered as she asked plaintively, “Is there anything else, Inspector?”

He shook his head and thanked her.

Hamish was pointing out, “That one hasna’ the courage to stand alone. She’s too afraid of people turning their faces fra’ her.”

A harried young woman with boisterous twins dragging at her heels blushed when he stopped her, and turned her face away to speak to the boys. They were just old enough— three? four?—to have been playmates for Fiona’s son. “I saw her sometimes on the street, and for her aunt’s sake tried to be nice. But she wasn’t a woman I was likely to be friends with.”

“Did your children ever play together?”

“Oh—! Well—sometimes, when I called on Miss MacCallum. That is, it was not a usual thing, you understand. But young children—they don’t
play
very much at this age, do they? They— It was more a matter of sitting and staring at each other across the room and—um—sometimes passing a toy back and forth.”

“Did you feel that the MacDonald child was not a proper companion for your children? After all, his mother worked at The Reivers.”

“It was a very
respectable
inn! Miss MacCallum would never have allowed any impropriety there. No—it’s just that we live on opposite ends of the town. It was not convenient. . . .” She let the words trail off.

Rutledge asked again, “Do you know where Miss MacDonald resided before she came to stay with her aunt?”

The woman scowled, and disentangled one boy’s chubby hand from the edge of her coat. “No, Donald, you mustn’t pull at me. We’ll be walking on presently.” She turned back to Rutledge. “I remember she said something about a family she’d lived with. How much she’d cared for the children.”

“Can you tell me who her friends were in Duncarrick?”

“No—of course I wasn’t close to her—she—I have no idea.”

Which was another way of washing her hands entirely of the matter. Hamish said, “She’s repeating what her husband has told her to say.”

Rutledge tended to agree with his assessment. There was neither warmth nor anger in her responses, only a determined effort to keep clear of the tangle of Fiona MacDonald’s affairs.

He let her go and crossed the street. Outside the milliner’s shop he met a tall, thin woman coming from the other direction. She had an air of fragility, as if she was recovering from an illness, but she moved with grace. When he removed his hat and spoke to her, she stopped with courtesy and waited for him to ask his question.

“I’m sorry,” she answered in a pleasant voice. “I’ve been unwell, and find it difficult to go into society as I used to. I don’t believe I have met Miss MacDonald. I can tell you Miss MacCallum was both respected and admired. She was very active in charity work and had a reputation for honesty in all her dealings. And as far as I knew, Miss MacDonald was a very fine young woman. The charge of murder against her is beyond belief.”

Hamish said, “Aye, it’s guid to hear the truth!”

This woman’s appearance and manner indicated that she might have been educated at one of the better schools. Or perhaps lived for a time in England. Rutledge asked, “Did you—do you know anyone by the name of Eleanor Gray?”

She frowned, considering his question. “Eleanor Gray? No, I can’t say that I ever met anyone by that name. I did know a Sally Gray.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“In Carlisle at a party given for my husband. But that was before the war. I haven’t seen her in years. Her husband was something in shipping, I think.”

A dead end. He thanked her and walked on, immersed in his own thoughts.

Realizing that he’d arrived at the stone monument at the top of the square, Rutledge stopped there for a time, listening to Hamish comparing this town with the scattered houses that comprised his own small village. Like most Highlanders, Hamish had been used to the silences of the mountain glens and the long, smooth mirrors of the lochs. These had given him, as a soldier, a resilience and a strength of mind that had raised him from the ranks.

Idly watching the medley of activity that gave life and color to the street, Rutledge considered the townspeople of Duncarrick. If anyone here had had close ties with Fiona MacDonald, they were busy now burying them as deep as possible.

It also seemed unlikely that Fiona had confided in her aunt.