A cold treachery - Charles Todd [6]
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