Legacy of the Dead - Charles Todd [137]
“She was professionally killed, man. Not a mark on her, except where my fingers found the spot on the back of her neck! Her mother is one of the richest women in England. Do you think Lady Maude would have believed me? She’d have seen to it that I hanged! I’d had a violent history at Saxwold, and the next hospital as well, and the Army was glad to send me off to France for cannon fodder. Look, I nearly killed a nurse once when she came up behind me unexpectedly. I had my hands on her throat before she could even scream. They thought I was out of my head. But I wasn’t. I’d lived too long with danger, and it was a reflex to strike first. Like a snake. They were ready to pack me off to an asylum with the shell-shocked men and leave me to rot!”
Rutledge involuntarily shuddered. With men like him— “How did you know the rocks were there—on the mountainside? They aren’t easily seen from the road.”
“My father took me there sometimes as a boy. He was obsessed with tales of betrayal and murder.” He pushed his rain-matted hair out of his eyes. “My father would have made a bloody Highlander if he hadn’t been born in Carlisle. He collected all those weapons you see in the hall, buying them up all over Scotland. It gave him a sense of history. I put them up when I married Madelyn. It was something from my own past. The rest of the house was hers.”
He looked at Rutledge for a long while, ignoring the rain. The patience of the hunter, waiting for the rabbit to break cover. But Rutledge was patient, too, and as skilled. Holden said at last, “You know the truth now. What do you think you should do about it?” When Rutledge didn’t respond, he continued, “I don’t intend to be railroaded into a sentence of death by Lady Maude and her lawyers. She was a distant and uncaring mother according to Eleanor, but she’ll raise heaven and earth to see me dead once she’s told I killed her daughter.” There was cold menace in the calm voice. “If I were you, I’d go back to London and let the MacDonald woman go to trial and pray that she’s acquitted. What is she to you, after all!”
What, indeed? Rutledge didn’t know the answer to that himself. He sat there feeling the rain soaking through his shirt to the skin, and fought his anger.
“Don’t threaten me!” he told Holden.
“Call it a friendly warning, Inspector. But keep in mind the fact that I could walk into The Ballantyne or anywhere else you believed yourself safe, and you’d be dead before you heard me come through the door. You can bank on that.” He put his car into gear again. “I didn’t intend to kill Eleanor Gray. And I won’t hang for it.”
The lights swung in the darkness, turning the slanting rain to silver. And Holden smiled at Rutledge before the car disappeared down the drive, a black shadow against the stark brightness of its lamps.
ALL THE WAY to the hotel, Hamish’s voice pounded in Rutledge’s head, demanding to know how much he believed of what Holden had said.
Rutledge was wet through, cold, and very tired. But he said, “The man’s an accomplished liar—that’s what he was trained to do in the war. Still, I have a feeling he told me the truth about killing Eleanor Gray. That’s the pity—she went north with a man she considered a friend, and safe. Whatever Eleanor did that night in Craigness, whether it was waking him out of a sound sleep or in some way making him angry with her, she died for it. And if he killed her the way he described, there wouldn’t have been any marks on the body that the coroner would have been able to identify two years later.”
Rutledge took a deep breath, feeling his anger drain away.
Eleanor Gray was dead, she couldn’t contradict Holden’s account of how it happened. He might even rally enough support to get away with it.
Hamish agreed. “He said it himself—a snake. Quick to strike.”
The nurse, Elizabeth Andrews, had called him that too. “London will give me the rest of the evidence I need to present to the fiscal, but a good lawyer will twist it into whatever shape Holden devises. A jury will never convict him. They’ll believe him where