A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [5]
And Hamish said, as if he’d been waiting for Rutledge to reach this point, “I’d no’ pursue it. There were sae many . . .”
In the pale morning light, as he made his way to Scotland Yard the next day, Rutledge realized he had arrived at the same conclusion.
3
IT WAS 9 NOVEMBER. RUTLEDGE WAS AT THE YARD, PREPARING to clear his desk for leave due to begin that afternoon. He was looking forward to returning to Marling, in Kent. Not just as an escape from London to avoid the public commemoration on the eleventh, but as an opportunity to prove to himself that the memories awakened on Guy Fawkes Day were no more than an isolated and unexpected response to the noisy press of people around the bonfire and his own restiveness over the approaching celebration of the Armistice. There had been no recurring episodes. For that he was grateful.
He knew very well that it had become something of an obsession, this celebration. Hamish harped on the date, as did the newspapers, giving him no peace.
For weeks he’d watched the preparation of the temporary structure that London was building to honor the nation’s casualties of war. In fact, seeing every stage had been unavoidable as he came and went at the Yard. The permanent memorial would not be completed until the next year, but much had been made of the eventual design and placement.
A Cenotaph: a monument to the dead buried elsewhere . . .
And so many, so very many of them were: a sea of white crosses in foreign ground, some with names, some with no more than the bleak word Unknown. But he had known them; he and officers like him had sent them out to die, young and inexperienced and eager, dead before he could recall their names or remember their faces. . . . Dead before he’d had the chance to turn them into real soldiers, with some small hope of survival. Dead and on his conscience, like weighted stones. And no time to mourn—
Nor did he need a Cenotaph standing close by Whitehall and Downing Street as a focus for his grief and loss. He—like countless others—carried them with him every day. The men he had served with, shared hardship and fear with, bled and suffered with, were as sharp in his memory and his nightmares as they had been before they died. As was the recurring voice that lived in his mind. A reminder in every waking moment of the Scots he’d led and the one Scot he’d been forced to execute during the horrendous bloodbath that had been the Battle of the Somme.
Invading his thoughts, Hamish scolded, “Ye’ve read the same lines three times, man!”
Realizing he’d done just that, Rutledge finished the paragraph and signed the report, setting it aside to be handed to Superintendent Bowles. His mind often grappled with the long nightmare of the trenches, the blighted landscape of northern France, the narrowed focus of trying somehow to protect the men under him, and the black despair of failing. Sometimes these seemed more real than the paperwork in front of him.
He was reaching for the next folder when a young constable tapped at his door and stepped aside to usher in a florid-faced, middle-aged woman in a dowdy black coat and a black hat that did not become her.
“A Mrs. Shaw to see you, sir! She says you’d know who she is.”
The woman stared at Rutledge, her heavy features twisting into a mask of pain. Tears began to trickle down her face, ravaging it.
Rutledge nodded to the constable as the man hesitated before closing the door. It swung shut with a click.
“Please, sit down, Mrs. Shaw,” he said gently as he strove to find her name in his memory. But there were no Shaws in the files he’d been reviewing, and as far as he could