Inspector Hildebrand sobered. He much preferred expanding on his success to any discussion of his failure. “We don’t know where they are. Yet. I’ve got my men searching now along the roadside. More than likely he’s done for the lot, but so far he’s sitting in his cell like a damned statue, as if he’s not hearing a word we say to him. But we’ll find them, never fear. And they’ll be dead as well, mark my words. Probably saved the woman for last, she got away from him, and he had to chase her. Just a matter of time, that’s all. We’ll find them in the end.”
He didn’t. In the end, it was Scotland Yard and Inspector Rutledge who had to sort through the tangled threads of deception and twisted allegiances. By that time it was far too late for Hildebrand to retreat from his entrenched position.
2
Ian Rutledge drove through the countryside with Hamish restive and moody in the back of his mind. Around them in the car the warm air carried the heavy smell of new-mown hay.
The scent of phosgene...
Will any of us ever be free of that memory? Rutledge asked himself. Of the silent destroyer that had rolled across the battlefields of the Front in clouds of gas? One learned quickly enough to tell them apart—mustard or phosgene or CNS. But familiarity had made them more terrifying, not less—knowing what they could do.
“It’s no’ the gas I can’t forget,” Hamish said roughly, “but the haying. August ’Fourteen. I did na’ know there was an archduke getting himself killed somewhere in some place I’d no’ heard of. The hay … and Fiona dusty with it on the wain, and the horses dark with sweat God, it was fair, that August, and the MacDonalds swearing like wild men because they couldna’ keep up wi’ one MacLeod …”
“Yes, you told me that, the night—” Rutledge began aloud, and then quickly stopped. Corporal Hamish MacLeod had talked to him about the August haying the night he’d died. In France. Odd that memory turned on something as simple as the smell of new-mown hay!
And yet he was accustomed to answering the voice in his head out of old habit. The Somme. A bloodbath for months, the toll climbing astronomically, and men so tired that their minds simply shut down. Assault after futile assault, and the German line still held.
Set against such appalling losses, one more casualty was insignificant. Yet in the midst of such horror, the death of a young Scottish corporal had incised itself on Rutledge’s soul.
The man hadn’t been killed by enemy fire. He had been shot by a firing squad for refusing a direct order in battle, and it was Rutledge’s pistol, in the shell-riven darkness before dawn, that had delivered the coup de grâce.
The act had been military necessity. Not cowardice, but exhaustion—and the sheer bloody senselessness of throwing lives away—had broken him. Hamish MacLeod had refused to lead his men into certain death.
Military necessity. For the sake of every soldier watching, an example had to be made. For the sake of thousands of men readying for the next assault an example had to be made. You had to know, facing death, that you could depend on the man next to you, as he depended on you.
Rutledge could still feel the late summer heat. Hear the din of artillery, the rattle of machine-gun fire, the cries of wounded men. Smell the fear and the rotting corpses. He could still see the defeated look in his corporal’s eyes, the acceptance that it was a relief to die rather than lead his men back into the black hail of German fire.
And all for nothing!
The artillery shell found its mark an instant later, buried living and dead, officers and men, in heavy, stinking mud. Killing most of them outright and leaving the wounded to suffocate before the search dogs could find them many hours later. And ironically, the next shell sprayed shrapnel into the machine-gun position they had failed to take all that long night.
Rutledge had barely survived. Deaf and blind, badly stunned, he lay under the corpse of one of his men in a tiny pocket of air. It had sufficed. He hadn’t known until someone told him at the aid station that it was Hamish’s blood soaking his coat, Hamish’s flesh clotting his face and hair, the smell of Hamish’s torn body haunting him all the rest of that day as he lay dazed. Severely claustrophobic from a living grave, severely shell-shocked, bruised and disoriented, he was allowed a few hours’ rest and was then sent back to the front. And Hamish went with him. A living reality in his mind. A voice with its soft Scottish burr. A personality as strong in death as it had been in life.
Rutledge never spoke of it. He fought it alone, silently, as certain as the breath in his body that it was only a matter of time before death—or madness—put an end to it. That expectation kept him sane.
And so he had brought Hamish home again, not as a ghost to be exorcised but as a deep-seated presence in the shocked and numbed recesses of his brain where only sleep could shut it out.
He’d shared his thoughts with a dead man for so long it was easier to respond than risk the tap of a ghostly hand on his shoulder to attract his attention or see a white, empty face at the edge of his vision, demanding to be heard. That hadn’t happened—yet—but Hamish was so real to him that Rutledge lived in mortal dread of turning too quickly one day or glancing over his shoulder at the wrong instant and catching a glimpse of the shadowy figure that must surely be there, just behind him. Within touching distance. Close enough for its breath to ruffle his hair or brush his cheek.
“There was a picnic, that August,” Rutledge said, desperate to change the drift of thought. “Up the Thames, beneath a stand of beeches so heavy the sun came through the leaves in purple shadows—”
And that particular memory led to Jean … she was as dead to him as Hamish. This very week he’d seen her engagement announced in the Times. To a man who’d served in a diplomatic posting in South America through most of the war. Away from guns and carnage and nightmares.
“He’s in line for a position in Ottawa,” Frances had said when she called round to offer what comfort there was to give. His sister knew everyone there was to know—few bits of gossip failed to find their way to her. “Away from all this.” She waved a languid hand in the air, and he’d known what she meant.
Away from a Britain still wearing the scars of death and pain and the poverty of peace. Away from Rutledge’s torment, which had frightened Jean.
“Jean has a knack for ignoring unpleasantness,” Frances had added wryly. “You won’t let it bother you, will you? That she found someone else so quickly? It simply means, my dear, that you’re well out of it, whether you’re aware of it yet or not. Shallow women make damnably dull and demanding wives. Although I must say, even I thought there was more to her. Or was that wishful thinking on my part too? Well, never mind, you’ll soon meet someone you can truly care about.”
Why was it that the mind was so adept at finding its own punishment? Jean—or Hamish—to fill his thoughts.
A bitter choice, Rutledge acknowledged with a sigh. The woman who had promised to marry him or the man whose life he’d taken. There was no surgery to mend a broken heart nor any to mend a broken mind.
The doctors had shrugged and told Rutledge, “Shell shock makes its own rules. When you’re able to sleep better—when the stress of the Great War—of your work—of your memories—fades a little, so will the reality of Hamish MacLeod.”
But stress was the nature of war. Stress was the very heart of his work at the Yard. He lived with death and blood and horror every day. It was what he did best, investigating murders. Hardly the most suitable work, perhaps, for a man back from the trenches, but he was trained for no other and didn’t have the spare energy to look for any other. And a prospective employer might well dig more deeply into his medical file than the Yard had done, taking him back after the war. Opening a Pandora’s box of things best left locked away.