A False Mirror - Charles Todd [19]
Hamish brought him out of the nightmare, his voice loud in Rutledge’s ears. “He was wounded, but they sent him back to the Front.”
“Yes,” he answered silently.
They had been so short of men. The medical staff had cleared anyone who could still hold a rifle as fit for duty. Days later Rutledge himself had taken his own turn at the aid station, resting a few hours, then getting to his feet and stumbling out of the tent, like a man sleepwalking.
Rutledge remembered Mallory’s dazed eyes, the stiffly bandaged shoulder, the fearlessness that had bordered on recklessness. It had turned his salient against the lieutenant, and there had been whispers about him. That he was bad luck. That he got men killed. And Mallory had been hell-bent on proving he was no coward, whatever the doctors had murmured about possible shell shock.
“Missed the bone,” he’d told everyone, making light of it. “Still, it aches like the very devil. But nothing for the pain until I’ve won the war.”
And four days later, he had been found crouched in a shell hole, crying softly. This time the wound was in his calf, and he couldn’t walk. The stretcher bearers had got him back to the rear, while rumor debated whether he had shot himself or been picked off by one of the new German snipers. Or—by his own men.
They hadn’t seen him again.
Bowles was still waiting, searching Rutledge’s face.
Dragging himself back to the present, Rutledge looked up at him.
“He was in France.”
It was a reply brief to the point of curtness, but it was all he was prepared to say while the Chief Superintendent glared accusingly at him as if he bore the responsibility for whatever had happened along the south coast.
“So was half the male population of Britain in France. Why should this man Mallory summon you in the circumstances? With the war well over?” The suspicion in Bowles’s voice was palpable.
“I can’t answer that, sir. We weren’t—close friends, if that’s what you are suggesting. I can’t imagine why he should wish to see me now.” It was the truth. Rutledge was still recalling more details about Mallory, details stuffed long ago into the bottom of the black well that was nightmare and the war: a gifted officer, yet he lacked the common touch that made tired and exhausted soldiers follow him over the top. Hamish MacLeod had possessed that touch…and so, although he had hated it, had he himself. He had felt like a charlatan, a pied piper, using his voice and his experience in command to lure unwilling men to their deaths. A Judas goat, unharmed while so many were slaughtered around him, like cattle at an abattoir.
But Mallory had got out. He had deserted his men and got out.
“Hmmpf.” Bowles slammed a drawer shut, taking out his impotent anger on the unoffending desk. “So you say. Well, you’d damned well better get down there and see what this is all about. And you’re not to play favorites, you understand me? The man this Mallory is said to have attacked—he’s got friends in high places. They’ll be howling for my blood and yours if his wife’s made free with. You understand me?”
“Are you sending me to—” He glanced down at the message again. “To Hampton Regis?”
“I don’t have much choice, do I?”
“Who is the victim, this Matthew Hamilton?” The name was not uncommon.
“Foreign Office, served on Malta before he resigned. Went uninvited to the Peace Conference in Paris, I’m told, and wasn’t very popular with his views there. But he’s still too bloody important to ignore, and if his wife wants you, she’s to have you.”
“I thought