Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

As she stepped into his car, Elizabeth Mayhew said to Rutledge, “Sorry! I didn’t mean to keep you waiting so long. But if Lydia and I don’t settle the flower schedule ourselves, there’s endless confusion. People by nature want to change things, and it takes hours for the committee to draw up a satisfactory list. We’ve learned to circumvent argument by working it out between us.”

As the engine turned over, he got into the car beside her, then realized that earlier she’d folded the rug for her knees and laid it in the rear seat. With a cold shock of dread, he turned and fished for it, his eyes carefully away from the spot that Hamish seemed to favor. As his fingers touched the wool, he drew it toward him. It seemed to come with unexpected ease, as if Hamish had given it a push in his direction. But that was imagination, and he took a deep breath to dispel the feeling of having come close to the one thing he feared-finally confronting the nemesis that haunted his waking hours.

Hamish had died in France in 1916, in the nightmarish days of the first battle of the Somme. He had died as surely as any of the war dead. Shot by a firing squad at Rutledge’s orders, shot by the coup de grace that Rutledge had administered with his own hand, buried deep in the stinking mud that the artillery shell had thrown up, killing men like nettles before a scythe. Rutledge had not wanted to execute the Scottish corporal, but Hamish MacLeod had been stubborn in his refusal to do what he had been ordered to do, and in the heat of battle, disobeying an order in the face of his men had left his commanding officer no alternative but to make an example-and hope with all his being that the young Scot would see the error of his ways well before the threat had to be carried out. But Hamish, worn and exhausted and tired of watching men die in the withering fire of No Man’s Land, would not lead them out again. And Rutledge had had to do what he had sworn he would.

Hamish MacLeod had been a natural leader, not a coward, respected by officers and men alike. But he had been battered by too much death and too little sleep. He’d watched the corpses piling up, he’d lost count of the replacements, and the shock of the endless bombardments had left him shaken and tormented. Death had come as a release for him-and had nearly destroyed Rutledge.

And while Hamish lay somewhere in France-buried securely beneath a white cross lost in an alien garden of thousands upon thousands of war dead, hardly distinguishable from the soldiers who slept on either side of him-if his ghost walked, it walked in Scotland, not England. He had loved the Highlands with a passionate intensity, and the woman he’d left behind there. But in Rutledge’s battle-frayed mind, there was something that was still alive and stern and real, the essence of the soldier he’d known so well and had-for the sake of a battle-ordered killed. Murdered Rutledge shut the thought out of his mind. As Elizabeth was settling the rug over her knees and he was putting the car into gear, he struggled to break the silence that engulfed him. But the first question he could think of was “What were these killings that Masters was talking about?”

“Oh. I hadn’t said anything before. You’re on leave, and I hadn’t wanted to bring your work into this holiday.”

“Masters seems to have had no such compunction,” he said wryly.

“I’ve never faced death,” she said thoughtfully. “So I can’t tell you what I’d do if someone-a physician-told me I probably wouldn’t live much longer. But Raleigh has fought it bravely. It’s just that he’s turned… bitter-I suppose that’s the word. The worst of it was, he’s had to give up his work in London. And he’s not the man we once knew. I expect that’s why we’re so tolerant of him. As well as for poor Bella’s sake. She doesn’t quite know how to cope. He won’t let her touch him-they have nurses in for that.”

She sighed, drawing herself away from the Masterses’ dilemma. “The murders. There have been two ex-soldiers killed. One was found on a lonely road, the other by a field, and no one quite knows who would do such a thing-or why. The pity is, they survived the war, and now it’s not a German killing them, but an Englishman. Their own side! I find that rather horrible, don’t you?”

Elizabeth had fallen asleep, her head against his shoulder. He was no more than two miles or so from her house as the crow flew, and Rutledge could feel the weariness of the long day turning to drowsiness of his own as he drove. Fighting it, he concentrated on the road ahead-and swerved as he realized too late that a man was standing at a crossroads, almost in his path.

As the lamps of his motorcar pinned the figure in their bright beams, he would have sworn in that instant that it was the face he’d seen the night of the Guy Fawkes bonfire.

Elizabeth came awake as the motorcar veered wildly. She said quickly, “What’s wrong-?”

Rutledge’s heart rate seemed to have doubled as he fought the wheel to bring the car back to the road. He had all but killed the man!

“Someone-in the road-I didn’t see him until I was on him-”

He must stop, he told himself disjointedly-be certain the man was all right-the wing had missed him-given the idiot a shock perhaps as severe as his own-but done the man no harm -there had been no contact Yet he didn’t want to go back-he didn’t want to find that the figure on the road had existed only in his dream-filled brain as he had drifted unexpectedly into sleep.

“I don’t see anyone in the road.” Elizabeth said it doubtfully, turning to look over her shoulder. “Are you sure, Ian? There’s no one there-Ought we to go back?”

Hamish said, “You must go back! You canna’ leave him to bleed to death in a hedgerow!”

Rutledge was already slowing the motorcar, and with some difficulty turning it on the narrow road. Dread filled him, a deep and abiding belief that if he was right, there would be no body and no sign of one.

And when they reached the crossroads again, although he searched for a good ten minutes, no one was there

Rutledge was awake before dawn, standing at the windows looking out over the back lawns of Elizabeth Mayhew’s house. It was a pretty view, even in the early morning mists. Flower beds laid out asymmetrically formed a pattern that led the eye down a grassy walk to a bench overlooking the small pool at the bottom of the garden. In summer the beds held a wonderful variety of blooming plants, but an early frost had blighted summer’s growth, leaving behind only the skeletons of what once was.

But what he saw at this moment was not a Kentish garden; it was the blighted landscape of France. It seemed he could still hear the guns, using up their stockpiled shells in a mad frenzy of noise and destruction. It was as if there was to be no Armistice in a few hours. The rattle of machine guns, punctuated by the sharper fire of rifles, added to the din, and men were still dying, and would go on dying until the eleventh hour. He had tried to husband them, to stop the waste of life and the long, long lists of the wounded, but he could hear the cries of pain and the screams of the dying and the scything whisper of bullets overhead.

A political decision it had been, not a battlefield victory: The Armistice would commence on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, at the eleventh hour of the morning-11 November, 1918, eleven A.M.

It had held no reality for Rutledge. He had stood in the trenches, Hamish alive in his mind, and stared across the bleak, tortured land he had known intimately for four unthinkable years. And the Scot’s words kept forming in his head: “I shallna’ see this eleventh hour, I shallna’ go home with the rest, I shallna’ prosper in the years ahead. And you willna’ prosper, either.”