Legacy of the Dead - Charles Todd [61]
He walked through the stones again, searching. There were Campbells and Lindsays, MacBrays and MacDougals, a long list of Highland and Lowland names that had no special meaning to him. He found a Trevor, and thought of Ross, then moved on. Little and Elliot, Davison and Robson, Pringle and Taylor, Henderson and one Gray. Evelyn Gray. He had died as an infant.
It was Eleanor Gray’s father’s name—the man she had called father all her life.
Had she been closer to him than to her mother in spite of the fact that he wasn’t her natural father?
Girls were often attached to their fathers, and if Evelyn Gray had accepted her publicly as his daughter, he would have brought her up to the best of his ability. Even if he had not loved her for her own sake, he would have treated her well for King Edward’s sake. The men had been close friends.
And he might have been the only warmth in Eleanor’s life. Rutledge could not envision Lady Maude holding a squirming child in her lap to read it a story, as Fiona had done with her charges in the Davison household.
But then, he might be doing Lady Maude an injustice. He had met her after the quarrel with Eleanor. Her daughter’s refusal to acknowledge her duty to her blood and heritage had hurt deeply. There might have been a very different relationship between mother and child before that.
Otherwise, why had Lady Maude insisted that he, Rutledge, take charge of this question of identifying the bones?
“She might,” Hamish said, “be wanting to protect her family’s honor—”
14
RUTLEDGE DROVE TOWARD GLASGOW WITH HIS MIND busy. Hamish was making comments on the evidence as well, but he tried to ignore them.
Such small things—the name on a grave—the Christian name of a woman—the fact that Fiona had told her aunt she was working out her time at Brae . . .
Where had she gone for that brief, unaccounted-for span of weeks?
And did it have anything to do with Maude Cook?
He spent Sunday in Glasgow, asking the police there for any information they might have had on anyone by the name of Cook, but the half-dozen families he was sent to see were unable to help him. They shook their heads when he asked them about a Maude Cook. As one middle-aged man put it, “It’s a pretty enough name, Maude, but not one of ours.” Nor had relations to their knowledge spent part of the war years in the village of Brae. “It’s not likely, is it?” a woman asked him. “So close by? Besides, I’d have sent any daughter or daughter-in-law of mine to our kin, not to live on the charity of strangers!”
But as Hamish pointed out, if Maude Cook’s connection with Glasgow was through her own family, Rutledge didn’t have her maiden name and would never find her in the welter of people in the city. It would require a door-to-door search. An enormous amount of manpower.
Driving back to Duncarrick on Monday morning, he reached the outskirts of Lanark and stopped the car, rubbing his face. Lanark—
He considered Lanark for a time. That it was close to Brae. That it was large enough that a woman using a false name might not be noticed and gossiped about. Especially if she was already certain there were no acquaintances living there who might see her in the street and recognize her. And it would offer adequate medical care to a woman on her own. . . .
Rutledge continued into the heart of the town, finding the local police station and then searching for a place to leave his motorcar. It was a busy morning; the town seemed to be full of people and lorries, carts and wagons. Men were setting up a pavilion near the church for a fete or exhibition. Others were carrying potted palms from the hotel, walking trees that wove their way along the pavement like Great Birnam wood come to Dunsinane and about to attack the waiting Macbeth.
When Rutledge made his way back through the crowds some fifteen minutes later, he had the information he needed.
The lying-in hospital was in a back street, a small but well-kept building that had potted geraniums in front of its door and a woman in a dark dress at the desk in the small reception hall.
Rutledge