Free Legacy of the Dead by Charles Todd Page B

for. She might not have told her mother the truth.” There was a pause. “One thing we did learn. She was a suffragette. Independent young miss, arrested a number of times for chaining herself to fences and making herself a public nuisance in whatever fashion got her the most notice. A young woman likely to find herself in trouble of one kind or another, I’d say. Sergeant Gibson remembered her from before the war, and he says she hasn’t been in trouble with the police for some years now. Could mean she’d learned her lesson. Or that she is dead.”
    Bowles took a long breath, indicating a change of subject.
    “We’ve had a call from Lady Maude. You’re to go to Scotland and find out what you can about this corpse. She’s insisting that you take over the case, and her family’s not to be dragged into it, no speculation about her daughter, public or private, until you are absolutely certain that the corpse is Eleanor Gray’s. What the hell did you say to her?”

7

    BY TEN O’CLOCK THAT MORNING, RUTLEDGE HAD ASKED directions from Trevor, accepted the generous packet of sandwiches that Morag had put up for him, and turned south and west toward Jedburgh and Tweedesdale. It was a day of mixed sun and clouds, with a brief shower or two that raised the damp smell of earth. Long shadows were cast across the countryside when the sun came out, vanishing and reappearing like magic as the clouds shifted across the sky. There always seemed to be more sky in Scotland than in England, a different sky. Vast and empty, as if God weren’t at home.
    He had come to Scotland for a weekend owed to his godfather, and now duty was keeping him here. He felt misgivings, his mind unsettled, the peace he’d found at Hadrian’s Wall worn off. And Hamish, in his accustomed place behind the driver’s shoulder, was as disturbed by the turn of events as Rutledge himself. He could hear the voice as clearly as if there
were
a passenger. Blaming—stubbornly refusing to accept the change in plans.
    “And I’ll no’ go to the glen again—”
    Rutledge tried to shut him out and then fell prey to another kind of haunting, awakened grief.
    For the motorcar also carried the “ghost” of Ross Trevor. Rutledge had felt the dead man’s presence so strongly at The Lodge. In France he had arrived at an acceptance of Ross’s death, but in the house where Ross had spent every summer for twenty-five years or more, it seemed that he must surely be somewhere just out of sight—down the passage—upstairs in his room—out riding and expected soon—talking to Morag in the kitchen. His laughter preceding him, his swift, energetic footsteps approaching the door. Ross Trevor had been a powerful presence, and Rutledge had found himself watching the doorways, listening over the ticking of the grandfather’s clock or the wind in the eaves, for some sign of it. It seemed impossible that such a man had vanished so completely, swallowed by the sea—
    Over the last four months, Rutledge had begun for the first time to realize what the civilian population had endured during the long, dark days when casualties mounted and there seemed to be no end to the fighting. It was different from the way that soldiers saw the dying. But no less terrible. A time for mourning . . .
    He wondered if David felt that same sense of anticipation, and if he did, how he lived with it—and then realized that for Ross’s father and for Morag, it might be oddly comforting.
    Hamish said, as if picking up the thought, “They never saw him dead. They never closed the lid over his coffin and watched the earth shoveled down on it. Like me, he never came home. And so they’re still waiting—”
    JEDBURGH, LIKE ITS neighbors from Berwick to Dumfries, was not the Scotland of kilts and pipes and Bonnie Prince Charlie. These were the Marches that ran on either side of the frontier between Scotland and England, the border towns of the Lowlands, where a different kind of war had raged for