Legacy of the Dead - Charles Todd [111]
At Edinburgh, Rutledge turned west. And decided, after some thought and a good deal of comment by Hamish, to go directly to Jedburgh rather than to Duncarrick. To report to the fiscal rather than to Oliver.
He stopped for a quarter of an hour at Melrose, whose ruined abbey held only a shadow of its former beauty. Stretching his legs as he walked through the broken elegance of nave and chancel, Rutledge tried to picture it as the Cistercians had built it. It was an important enough house that the heart of Robert the Bruce had been buried there, brought home from Palestine and lost for a time in Spain.
Melrose had fallen victim to the Border wars that had burned Duncarrick and Jedburgh and bled half the Marches.
But Hamish remembered only that Field Marshal Haig, commander-in-chief of the British forces during the war, had been born near here. He did not like Haig, and was restless until Rutledge drove on.
IN JEDBURGH, BURNS rose to meet Rutledge but did not offer his hand. “I understand from Oliver that we’re ready to go to trial. I could wish that you had been more successful in finding what has become of the Gray woman. This brooch most certainly puts the accused in the glen near the bones that were found, but it would have been helpful to go into court with proof of her identity clearly set out.”
“Perhaps before the trial begins that will also be answered to everyone’s satisfaction,” Rutledge answered pleasantly. “I came here to ask you about an officer who may have known your son. Let me describe him for you.” Without waiting for a response, he gave Burns what little information he had.
Burns listened patiently, then said, “That could fit half the British army.”
“Half the Army didn’t serve in Palestine.”
“Yes, yes, I take your point. And you’re trying to locate the man who might have driven Miss Gray to Scotland. I’m still not convinced that he knew my son. He might have been a friend of hers, have you considered that?”
Rutledge omitted any account of his visit to Craigness. He had a feeling it would not sit well with the fiscal. Instead he replied, “Yes. Either way, I must start with the assumption that both men visited Atwood House in Miss Gray’s company. Which makes it seem likely that your son did meet him. My hope now is that one of Captain Burns’s other friends might remember him also.”
“Most of my son’s friends were from his own unit, or men he met on leave.” Burns turned and looked out the window of his office. “A good many of them are dead.”
“This man was interested in the structure of the Atwood House stables. Medieval stonework.”
“In the building trade, then. But an officer, you said.”
“Or a student of medieval history.”
“A don.” He began to list his son’s friends, giving their names, their ranks, their pre-war occupations. Rutledge closed his notebook when Burns had finished.
Of the seventeen men Burns could name, nine were dead, three before 1916. Two others had died of wounds. None of them had served in Palestine, and none of them was a builder or a don. “Although as I think about it now, Tom Warren was interested in history. His father had been attached to the embassy in Turkey at one time, and the family had traveled widely in the Near East.”
A slim thread, Hamish pointed out as Rutledge took his leave.
It would have to do.
Rutledge drove on to Duncarrick to find a message waiting from Gibson. He had had no success in locating the engraver.
FINDING MAJOR THOMAS S. Warren proved to be easier than Rutledge had expected. A call to the Foreign Office had brought him the name of the father, who had in fact been a diplomat and had come out of retirement during the war to serve as an authority on the Turks.
Thomas Warren was a solicitor in Durham. Nearly in Lady Maude’s backyard, as Hamish put it.
Rutledge set out with a box of sandwiches and a flask of tea, courtesy of The Ballantyne, and arrived in Durham before the hotel clerk had come on duty at The Bishop’s Arms. A bath and a shave did much for his appearance,