Charles Todd - Legacy of the Dead

Cook. Maude or Mary. Two names. A woman in Brae, a woman in the private clinic here… Separated by a matter of miles He went up the steps and through the door.

The sergeant on duty, a bluff man growing stout with years, looked up and said, “What might I do for you, sir?”

“Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard. I need some information.”

“Are you here on official business?” the sergeant asked warily.

Someone was banging a metal cup against the bars of a cell, the clanging echoing through the building like a berserk, off-key bell. The sergeant appeared not to notice the racket.

“Indirectly. I’ve been trying to trace several families. What can you tell me about anyone by the name of Cook living in or around Lanark in 1916? Late summer, at a guess.”

“There’s a number of Cooks. Mostly from Loch Lomondside. Tell me what they’ve done and I’ll tell you what matches.”

“As far as I know, they’ve done nothing. We’re searching for a missing woman. She called herself Mary Cook. Or possibly even Maude Cook. There’s some indication she was in Lanark in 1916 for a period of several weeks. After that we seem to have lost track of her.”

The sergeant nodded. “Before the war I could have given you the history of nearly every family in Lanark, and a good bit of the countryside around it. It’s harder now. Even a small town like Lanark has seen its changes. But I don’t recall a woman by either name going missing. It was 1916, you said?” He gave the matter some thought. “An inheritance involved, is there?”

“Possibly. We won’t know until we find her.”

“My guess is, there’s nothing here for you. Unless someone reported her missing, we’d have no record of her.”

A constable came in from his rounds, nodded to the sergeant, and went through a door on the far left.

“Still, if you come back in the morning, I’ll have it nailed down. I wouldn’t raise my hopes too high if I were you-but I’ll look into it.”

“Fair enough.” Rutledge took out a card and wrote the number of The Ballantyne Hotel on it. “You can find me there tomorrow night. I’d appreciate any help you can give me.”

The sergeant grinned. “Duncarrick? That’s Inspector Oliver’s turf. Good man, Oliver. I worked with him on a case in 1912. A series of murders that were never solved. Took it hard, he did.”

“In Lanark?”

“No, Duncarrick. Five women found with their throats cut. There was a scrap of paper pinned to each of the corpses. Right over their breasts. Called them whores. Harlots. They weren’t, of course, just young, pretty in a way. Lively. Working-class women. The bodies were found over a matter of months, but always on the same day of the month. Odd business. Had Duncarrick in a sweat, I can tell you! But the killer must have moved on. We never caught him.”

“What was the reaction of the public to the accusations on those pieces of paper?”

“What you’d expect-where there’s smoke, there’s bound to be fire. Unfair, but the belief was that such things didn’t happen to nice women.”

Rutledge said, “Can you recall any other details?”

“That’s the whole of it. Two were servant girls, one was a scullery maid at The Ballantyne, and the other two worked on outlying farms. Clever bastard, left no evidence behind. None we could use, at any rate. Just words on a scrap of paper. And the bodies out on the western road.”

Back on the pavement outside the station, Rutledge listened to Hamish, savagely drawing conclusions of his own.

The five dead women had no connection with Fiona MacDonald. She had been in Glencoe in 1912, a young girl living with her grandfather. All the same, their deaths had paved the way for her persecution. “Whore” was a charge that the good people of Duncarrick already associated with murder.

By the time Rutledge reached Duncarrick the next day, there was a message waiting from Sergeant Bowers in Lanark.

“No one by either name shown as missing in the year in question. The only Mary Cook living in the district is sixty. There is no record of a Maude Cook. Sorry.”

It had been a long shot, but he’d already taken the advice Bowers had given him. He hadn’t raised his hopes.

Fiona’s lawyer was summoned to Duncarrick and the brooch was shown to him. He was a dyspeptic man, with lines incised deeply in a dark face. Even his eyebrows, thick and wiry, seemed to be set in a permanent frown. His name was Armstrong, and he seemed more English than Scottish.

Hamish took an instant dislike to him and said so clearly. “I wouldna’ have him defend my dog!” Rutledge winced.

Oliver was inquiring after someone in Jedburgh who was an acquaintance, and Armstrong responded with unconcealed relish, “Not likely to last the month out, I’d say. The cancer is spreading too fast. You’d be advised to visit if you want to find him coherent. Now, what’s this nonsense about a brooch found on a mountainside?”

Oliver took it out of his desk drawer and passed it to Armstrong.

The lawyer examined it with care, squinting at it through spectacles he strung across his nose. “There’s an inscription, you say?”

With the nib of his pen, Oliver pointed it out. “MacDonald.” He rummaged in his desk drawer and came up with a large magnifying glass. “See for yourself.”

Armstrong studied the back of the brooch for some time. “MacDonald is a common name in the Highlands. And how do we know that the name wasn’t put there by someone other than my client?”

“Well, of course it was put there by someone else!” Oliver was losing patience. He had found exactly what he wanted, and he would brook no opposition to the conclusions he’d drawn from it. “The engraver.”

“I meant,” said Armstrong, looking up at him with a sour expression, “that the name could have been engraved on the back just before the brooch was put where it might be found, to please the police.”

Oliver held on to his temper and said, “Which is exactly why you are here. We want to show it to the accused and ask her its history.”

“Ah, yes.” Armstrong handed back the glass and took off his spectacles. But he held on to the brooch. “I don’t think I can allow that. Her answer might be self-incriminating.”

“I should hope it might be,” Oliver retorted through clenched teeth. “That’s the intention of the police, to prove her guilt.”

“It’s no’ the place of a policeman to worry his head about innocence,” Hamish said. “Nor the church either!”

“You may show it to her,” Armstrong answered after letting Oliver stew for several minutes as he looked at the brooch with concentrated attention. “But I will not allow you to badger her. Do you understand?”

Oliver got to his feet and retrieved the key from behind his desk. “You’d better come as well, Rutledge. She might have something to say about the dead woman.”

They walked back to the cell and Oliver unlocked the door. As it swung open, Fiona rose from her chair to face them. She looked at the three men, then her eyes swung back to Rutledge’s.

He could read the silent message she had sent him: What has happened?

Armstrong went up to her and took her hand with unctuous courtesy, rubbing his thumb across her knuckles. “There’s nothing to fear, my girl. The police want to ask if this object belongs to you. Please answer that question and that question only.”

He opened his palm, and the dim light in the cell caught the brightness of the gold but left the smoky stone dark.

Fiona stared at it. “It’s my mother’s brooch.”

“Not yours, then?”

“No, I-”

Armstrong cut her short. “There you are, Inspector. It does not belong to the accused.”