A cold treachery - Charles Todd [7]
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 . . .”
Rutledge had had to be satisfied with that.
And now as he drove through the darkness, Hamish kept him company in the lonely silence.
This part of the Lake District was bounded on the east by the Pennines and on the west by the sea where the high country fell away to coastal plains. It was a land of farming and sheep, where damsons ripened in August but apples were gnarled and sour, where a