Charles Todd - Legacy of the Dead

Had Eleanor Gray left other small tokens of her presence here that had been swept away unnoticed in the general cleaning?

“It wasna’ what she intended,” Hamish said softly.

“No,” Rutledge answered silently. “And that’s very sad.”

He added aloud, “Does the fiscal-Mr. Burns-come to stay often?”

“He did when he went through his son’s clothes and such, after. I think the house holds too many memories now, and business doesn’t often bring him this way. I’ve a mind to make an offer for it if my niece settles down. I’m not as young as I used to be, and it will be a comfort to have her next door.”

“But not in the same house,” Hamish said, interpreting the tone of voice.

“I’d hoped she might marry the Captain. But then he went and got himself engaged to someone else. A pity. Still, she died of appendicitis, Julia did. If he’d come home from the war fancy-free, I’d have tried my hand at matchmaking.”

They went out the way they’d come in, and while Mrs. Raeburn locked the garden door, Rutledge walked toward the garden.

“It was once quite lovely,” Mrs. Raeburn told him, following down the path among the beds. “Now the gardener keeps it up but doesn’t go out of his way. But then, who’s to see it, I ask you!”

She turned around, a broad hint that it was time for him to accompany her back through the gate.

He went on, ignoring her. It was in fact a lovely garden- peaceful and secluded. A high wall marked the end.

It was Hamish who noticed the bench.

It had been dragged from its low stone dais by the wall and set in the midst of a bed of annuals. It looked out of place here, like a whale stranded on a foreign beach. The dimensions were somehow wrong, and the plants set in around it lacked the symmetry of other beds, as if having to compensate for the awkwardness of the bench.

The gardener’s doing-or someone else’s?

Mrs. Raeburn, complaining of her legs, had stopped by the sundial. Rutledge called to her, “How long has this bench been set here? It appears to belong over there by the wall.”

“How should I know? I never come that far-my legs, you know.”

Rutledge squatted on the grass and looked at the soil of the bed. It was loose, friable. As if it had been dug up each spring and restocked with plants that would grow contentedly in this corner shaded by the wall. There were forget-me-nots and pansies and a pair of small ferns set in a half-moon around the bench. But nothing was planted under the bench.

You wouldn’t plant under the bench…

He went to the shed to find a trowel, and Mrs. Raeburn called plaintively, “Have you finished, young man?”

“I’m sorry to be a nuisance,” he replied. “If you wish to go back through the hedge, I’ll come across in five minutes.”

She was mumbling something about taking advantage; he could hear her voice retreating even as she did.

It wouldn’t take considerable strength to move the bench. It was heavy and cumbersome, but a person could shift it if he or she knew how to “walk” it off the dais and into the bed. And it had rained both days…

The feet were deep into the soil of the bed now, as if the bench had stood there for several seasons. Rutledge used the side of the trowel to scrape away the layer of compost mulch that kept down the weeds. Then he put the tip deep into the ground and lifted the first clump of soil.

It was thick with what he took at first to be roots. And then he saw that he had uncovered a piece of cloth. Clothing, he amended, looking at it closely. No, it was a corner of blanket. No more than two inches by three.

Blankets weren’t put in with compost-they didn’t decay at the rate of garden clippings and hedge trimmings. An old blanket went into the dustbin.

He dug about under the bench for some time, but the ground yielded nothing more.

Hamish said, “Someone buried a pet here, a cat or a small dog, and moved the bench so that the grave wouldna’ be disturbed.”

Rutledge, rocking back on his haunches, reluctantly agreed. A pet wrapped in an old blanket…

After all, he hadn’t wanted to find Eleanor Gray here, buried in a back garden. It would finish his investigation in Scotland.

He hadn’t wanted to come to Scotland. Now he didn’t want to leave. There was too much still to be done.

Rutledge kept his promise and met Hugh Fraser for luncheon. It was a small restaurant that was popular with the noonday throng of marketgoers, and Fraser apologized for that. “But if we go to the hotel, a dozen people will stop by the table, their minds on business.”

“My father followed the law. He found it a fascinating mistress.”

Fraser grimaced. “The law is all right. And I’ve made a good living. My clients come from all corners of the district, from Loch Lomond to Callander. I just don’t have the same taste for it I once had. I never got used to watching men die. France was bad enough, but there we were firing back. The influenza epidemic was very different. There was a nurse bending over me, changing the dressing on my arm, and she collapsed across the bed. The orderlies carried her away like a sack of onions. Before dawn she was dead. It was like some damned medieval plague. The men on either side of me died of it, and seven men in another ward. I remember priests coming in the night, and not enough orderlies to bring us water. My father saw two people drop dead in the street before they could reach home.” He laughed without humor. “You’re a damned good listener, did you know that?”

“A professional requirement,” Rutledge said lightly.

“I’ve never talked about it before. The truth is, I couldn’t. I’d survived, you see-even come to terms with losing my arm. I was ready to go on living. And then this nightmare came out of nowhere. And I was terribly afraid of dying from it. It shook my nerve rather badly. I’m only beginning to understand that.”

“We all have our nightmares,” Rutledge said with more feeling than he’d intended. “Even when they last into the daylight.”

“Yes, but most people don’t wake up in a cold sweat, on the verge of screaming. I’ve done that a time or two-frightened the hell out of my wife, I can tell you.” But his face said it had happened far more often than he cared to admit.

The woman serving tables came to take their order. Fraser leaned back, sipping his wine. Some of the lines in his face smoothed out as he relaxed.

“Find what you were looking for at Robbie’s house?” he asked with frank curiosity.

“I may have. It appears-there’s no proof, mind you!- that Eleanor Gray came here in 1916, shortly after she heard the news of Captain Burns’s death. And she stayed at the house for two nights.”

Fraser stared at him. “Old Raeburn-I’m sorry, she’s the neighbor, Mrs. Raeburn-never told me that!”

“She didn’t know. Eleanor came to Scotland with someone who’d been told which door to knock on to find the key. Therefore a friend of Burns’s. Or so we assume. He could have been a friend of Eleanor’s, acting on her instructions. Mrs. Raeburn remembers him.” Rutledge gave Fraser a brief description of the man, pieced together from what Mrs. Raeburn had told him and a description of the friend who’d come to the Atwood house with Robbie Burns. “Recognize him?”

“Lord, no.” After a moment, he added, “Robbie must have met him in London while he was convalescing. Palestine, you say?” He shook his head. “Afraid I never had much to do with that lot. And the first time I was invalided home, I came here, I didn’t stay in London. I wonder why Robbie stayed.”

“He’d met Eleanor.”

“Yes. That probably explains it.” Their meal arrived. Rutledge saw that someone in the kitchen had already sliced Fraser’s chicken for him, the pieces tidily rearranged so that a left-handed man could spear them with his fork. “He was in hospital for well over a month, you know, then spent another two getting his strength back. It might be possible to discover the names of other patients there at the same time. The house was somewhere in Sussex. Saxhall-Saxwold-some such name.”