Charles Todd: A Cold Treachery

Blakemore had been kind. But then the Chief Inspector hadn't understood, fully, the impact of the conviction that Rutledge had helped him win…

B y ten o'clock that morning Rutledge was well on the road north, a frigid wind blowing through the motorcar and clouds sweeping in again from the west. He was pushing his speed, taking advantage of every empty stretch to make better time, taking risks where he had to, to gain a few extra miles. The towns and villages strung along the road like a haphazardly designed strand of somber beads often slowed him to the point of exasperation, and at one point he was out of the motorcar directing traffic like the rawest constable, sorting out a tangle of wagons in a narrow market square.

A child out in this weather couldn't survive for long…

The thought drove him like a spur.

Hamish reminded him from the rear seat that the search parties were the boy's best hope. If he's alive, the men in the district will find him, no' us.

It was true, but the urge to hurry was ever present. If a man had murdered five people, Rutledge knew, he would have nothing to lose by killing more. And what had become of him was as important as what had become of the lost child.

He picked up the snow two hours later, at first a dusting that was already muddy and torn, and then growing deeper by the mile. Rutledge swore. A fresh storm on the heels of one that had already left the North buried would make the journey a trial, turning the roads into slippery, unpredictable ruts. It would hinder the search in Urskdale, as well. If they hadn't given it up… or already found the child's body. The sooner he got there, the sooner he would know the latest news.

He was tired, and adding to his fatigue, the case in Preston still weighed heavily on his mind. The murderer had been a young man, Arthur Marlton, aged eighteen and mentally disturbed. Driven by voices to attempt to kill himself-and in the end driven to kill someone he had come to believe was stalking him. In his confusion and emotional distress, Marlton had lashed out to deadly effect. The man his wealthy family had quietly set to watch over their distraught son had been his unfortunate victim, allegedly striking his head on a curbstone as he fell and dying without regaining consciousness. The victim's version of the attack died with him. But the circumstances pointed to murder-and witnesses supported it. A tragedy compounded by tragedy.. .

Rutledge wasn't convinced that an asylum was a kinder sentence than facing the hangman. He himself found the thought of being shut away out of the light and air for the rest of one's life an appalling prospect.

But the young man's family had been in tears, grateful, watching their only son with inexpressible relief, striving to be patient in their need to touch and hold him. And the son, barely aware that his life had hung in the balance for a week, wore his chains in bewilderment as he listened to words they couldn't hear.

Beyond the sweep of Rutledge's headlamps, darkness closed down, coming early this time of year. Gray stone villages lining the road had thinned to more open country; and the rising ground that would eventually lead up the fells still lay before him. The air already seemed colder as he pointed the motorcar's bonnet north.

What troubled Rutledge as he had testified against the young man in the dock was that he himself heard voices. A voice. Not that of madness, where the mind tricked itself into believing the twisted commands of its own fabrication. Or-at least he prayed it wasn't! What he heard was more fearful-a dead man. Corporal Hamish MacLeod pursued him like the Furies, following him through the last years of the war and into its aftermath as if the man were still alive. So real that the soft Scots accent created a presence of its own, as if Hamish stood just out of sight, where Rutledge would surely find him if he turned unexpectedly. A presence that was the embodiment of too much horror piled on horror. The product of shell shock. The legacy of war.

For two days Rutledge had listened to the testimony of expert witnesses, aware of the difference between himself and the prisoner in the Preston dock. And yet at the same time Rutledge had known with a cold certainty that he was the only person in that courtroom who could fully understand what the doctors and the barristers were trying to describe: a haunting so real it was at times terrifying.

He could even understand why the prisoner had wanted to kill himself. He, Rutledge, had in the depths of his torment walked into heavy fire as he crossed No Man's Land with his men and waited for the peace of death, and it had eluded him. When, against all odds, he'd survived the war, he had made a promise to himself: When he could see Hamish, when the day came that he could feel the dead man's breath on the back of his neck, or the touch of a ghostly hand on his shoulder, it would be finished. By whatever means.

The revolver that had belonged to his father lay in a flannel cloth behind the books in his sitting room in London, where he could reach it at need.

The legacy of war… It had left Rutledge so scarred emotionally that the blurred, ghostly faces of men he had led into the teeth of battle seemed to mock him, their useless deaths on his very soul. War, he thought, was madness of a different kind. And the final ordeal had been the death of Corporal MacLeod. Not by enemy fire, like so many others, but by Rutledge's own hand. The epitome of waste, a man who had broken under fire even as Rutledge himself was breaking-a man who preferred dying in shame to leading others into another futile massacre: the long, deadly slaughter called the Battle of the Somme. Hamish MacLeod's decision had left an indelible mark on his surviving officer. A good man-a lost man-who had perished on the unhallowed altar of Military Necessity. In bald truth, murdered.

And yet Rutledge-and Hamish-had survived the trenches, after a fashion. Haunter and haunted, they had lived through the bloodiest conflict in the history of warfare. It was Peace that had made the presence of the young Scots soldier, invisible and at the same time more real than in life, an even more unspeakable burden for Rutledge to carry.

“You were one of the lucky ones,” Dr. Fleming had told him not a fortnight ago. “But you can't see it as luck. In your view it's intolerable, your survival. You're punishing yourself because a whimsical God let you live. You think you've failed the dead, failed to protect them and keep them alive and bring them back home again. But no one could have done that, Ian. Don't you see? No one could have brought all of them through!”

But Hamish had tried, Rutledge answered Fleming silently. And so I had had to try as well.

Rutledge had come to the doctor's London rooms that fair and windy December afternoon before driving to Preston to ask when-if-his expiation would end. After concluding a particularly unsettling investigation where Hamish seemed to be on the brink of revealing himself at every turn, Rutledge was looking for absolution-hope-from a man he had once hated and slowly learned to respect.

Only eight months before, sleep-deprived, goaded beyond endurance, he had lived in silence and despair, hardly aware of himself as a man. At Rutledge's sister's insistence, Dr. Fleming had taken him out of the military hospital, settled him in a private clinic-and forced him to speak. Reliving the trenches had nearly destroyed him, but out of the ruin of the barriers he had erected in his mind, he had found a way to return to Scotland Yard, slowly and painfully reclaiming himself. A long road, with no end in sight. It had been a hard eight months. And very lonely.

Fleming had added cryptically, as Rutledge stood at the window, staring out at traffic in the street, “It really depends on you, Ian. I don't have an answer. I expect no one does. Time? Learning to forgive? To forgive yourself most of all? I can't cure you. But you may be able to cure yourself…”