Charles Todd - Legacy of the Dead

Holden turned his head away, looking around them, trying to see beyond his headlamps. Satisfied at last, he turned back.

“You won’t believe me if I tell you the truth. No one will.” He lifted a hand to wipe the rain from his face. “Damn it, come to the house!”

“No. Your wife is ill. I won’t put her through this. Tell me here-or at the Duncarrick police station.”

“You’re a bloody stubborn man, did you know that? Eleanor Gray spent the night in Rob’s bed, which I thought rather macabre, but I couldn’t have cared less. I was so tired from driving that I fell asleep in the guest room almost at once. Heavily asleep. I don’t even remember closing my eyes. I must have been snoring. Or she might have felt ill, I don’t know. I woke with a start, and in the darkness sensed rather than saw someone bending over me.” He turned away again, the shadows on his face shifting and changing. “The Army had taught me how to kill. Fast and silently. My hands had found her neck before I’d even realized where I was or who was in the house with me. By the time I was awake enough to find a light, she was dead. I had to clean the carpet, and I was all for burying her in the garden. I even moved the bench so it would cover the grave. But the rain was coming down in buckets, I was afraid it would wash her out before the morning. So I got her into the back of the car, pulled a blanket and some of my clothes over her, and went through the house to find anything she might have left. The next morning as soon as the neighbor was up and about, I returned the key and drove off.”

“Where is Eleanor Gray now?”

“On that damned mountain in Glencoe! Where else? Or she was. I never dreamed- It was damned bad luck that Oliver was so good at his job, wasn’t it?”

Hamish growled a warning as Holden lifted a hand, but it was only to wipe his face again.

Rutledge said, “If her death was an accident, why didn’t you call the police straightaway, or a doctor?”

“She was professionally killed, man. Not a mark on her, except where my fingers found the spot on the back of her neck! Her mother is one of the richest women in England. Do you think Lady Maude would have believed me? She’d have seen to it that I hanged! I’d had a violent history at Saxwold, and the next hospital as well, and the Army was glad to send me off to France for cannon fodder. Look, I nearly killed a nurse once when she came up behind me unexpectedly. I had my hands on her throat before she could even scream. They thought I was out of my head. But I wasn’t. I’d lived too long with danger, and it was a reflex to strike first. Like a snake. They were ready to pack me off to an asylum with the shell-shocked men and leave me to rot!”

Rutledge involuntarily shuddered. With men like him- “How did you know the rocks were there-on the mountainside? They aren’t easily seen from the road.”

“My father took me there sometimes as a boy. He was obsessed with tales of betrayal and murder.” He pushed his rain-matted hair out of his eyes. “My father would have made a bloody Highlander if he hadn’t been born in Carlisle. He collected all those weapons you see in the hall, buying them up all over Scotland. It gave him a sense of history. I put them up when I married Madelyn. It was something from my own past. The rest of the house was hers.”

He looked at Rutledge for a long while, ignoring the rain. The patience of the hunter, waiting for the rabbit to break cover. But Rutledge was patient, too, and as skilled. Holden said at last, “You know the truth now. What do you think you should do about it?” When Rutledge didn’t respond, he continued, “I don’t intend to be railroaded into a sentence of death by Lady Maude and her lawyers. She was a distant and uncaring mother according to Eleanor, but she’ll raise heaven and earth to see me dead once she’s told I killed her daughter.” There was cold menace in the calm voice. “If I were you, I’d go back to London and let the MacDonald woman go to trial and pray that she’s acquitted. What is she to you, after all!”

What, indeed? Rutledge didn’t know the answer to that himself. He sat there feeling the rain soaking through his shirt to the skin, and fought his anger.

“Don’t threaten me!” he told Holden.

“Call it a friendly warning, Inspector. But keep in mind the fact that I could walk into The Ballantyne or anywhere else you believed yourself safe, and you’d be dead before you heard me come through the door. You can bank on that.” He put his car into gear again. “I didn’t intend to kill Eleanor Gray. And I won’t hang for it.”

The lights swung in the darkness, turning the slanting rain to silver. And Holden smiled at Rutledge before the car disappeared down the drive, a black shadow against the stark brightness of its lamps.

All the way to the hotel, Hamish’s voice pounded in Rutledge’s head, demanding to know how much he believed of what Holden had said.

Rutledge was wet through, cold, and very tired. But he said, “The man’s an accomplished liar-that’s what he was trained to do in the war. Still, I have a feeling he told me the truth about killing Eleanor Gray. That’s the pity-she went north with a man she considered a friend, and safe. Whatever Eleanor did that night in Craigness, whether it was waking him out of a sound sleep or in some way making him angry with her, she died for it. And if he killed her the way he described, there wouldn’t have been any marks on the body that the coroner would have been able to identify two years later.”

Rutledge took a deep breath, feeling his anger drain away.

Eleanor Gray was dead, she couldn’t contradict Holden’s account of how it happened. He might even rally enough support to get away with it.

Hamish agreed. “He said it himself-a snake. Quick to strike.”

The nurse, Elizabeth Andrews, had called him that too. “London will give me the rest of the evidence I need to present to the fiscal, but a good lawyer will twist it into whatever shape Holden devises. A jury will never convict him. They’ll believe him where they would never have believed Fiona. We shall have to make him betray himself.”

“He won’t betray himself. He didna’ betray himself when the Turks tortured him.”

“I’ll find a way.” There was grim determination in Rutledge’s voice.

The next morning Rutledge awoke to lowering skies and more rain, sweeping in gray sheets along the streets and rattling like stones against his windows. A depressing day.

Unable to sleep after he’d turned off his light, he’d lain awake trying to find a solution to the dilemma he faced. Hamish, playing devil’s advocate, seemed to relish pointing out that most of his answers wouldn’t work.

You couldn’t frighten a man like Holden. You couldn’t make him come to you. If he’d survived torture…

Then what did he want? What was it that Holden valued most?

His wife had made that clear. His revenge. He wanted Fiona to hang and his wife to know that she’d had the power to save her.

Rutledge lay in his bed, forearm resting across his forehead, and thought it out from start to finish.

Hamish said, “This way willna’ work either. He can claim he was trying to protect his wife.”

“Yes. He can say that. Oliver might believe him. But it’s worth a try.”

“It’s too damned risky!”

“I can take care of myself!”

Hamish laughed. “In the dark, there’s nothing you can do. You havena’ his experience, man!”

“I crawled through No Man’s Land that night in ’15 and took out that hidden machine-gun post. They never heard me coming.”

“It’s no’ the same!”

He got up, dressed, and went down for breakfast.

They let him in to see Fiona. He told Oliver and Pringle that he was leaving Duncarrick and wanted to appeal one last time to the conscience of the accused.