Legacy of the Dead - Charles Todd [71]
“Are they certain she actually went to Winchester? She could have lied about her plans.”
“Yes, sir, I thought of that, and took the liberty to call on the people she was to stay with. Miss Gray never got there. She was set to drive down with an officer she’d known in London. But she changed her mind at the last minute and said the two of them would be going to Scotland instead— he was on sick leave and it wasn’t up for another week. She promised to call back when she returned to London, but never did.”
Scotland! “Did you ask the name of this officer?” Rutledge asked.
“That I did, sir!” Gibson’s voice came strongly down the line. “But they’ve forgotten it. Still, it was someone she’d met before. Not a stranger, or she wouldn’t have asked to bring him to Winchester with her. They tell me she was not one to impose on her hostess in that way.”
“Well done, Gibson!” Rutledge said. “Do you have a number where I can reach these people in Winchester?”
He could hear down the line the shuffling of papers. “Yes, sir, here it is! A Mrs. Humphrey Atwood. She was the Honorable Miss Talbot-Hemings. Went to school with Miss Gray for a time and stayed friends.” There was a pause. Rutledge could hear a door shut. And then with a note of triumph, Gibson added, “The Chief Superintendent told me I wasn’t to bother talking to the suffragette ladies. Addled, all of them, he said. A waste of time.” There was another pause. “Bit of luck, wasn’t it, sir!”
If he hadn’t known Gibson better, Rutledge would have imagined him grinning ear to ear. It was there in the voice. But Gibson seldom smiled. He was also seldom wrong in his findings or his conclusions. He was the kind of man who took pride in himself and in his work, and was bulldog tenacious when he wanted to be. Only his eyes warned that inside the beefy, middle-aged body was a brain sharp as a razor. Rutledge had always suspected that Old Bowels and Gibson were enemies from years back.
That didn’t put Gibson in Rutledge’s column at the Yard. But it meant that an opportunity to blacken Chief Superintendent Bowles’s eye was savored by the man, and often produced information that Rutledge found valuable.
As in this case.
Rutledge thanked him and put up the receiver, standing there for all of a minute, thinking.
Here was the first tie between Eleanor Gray and Scotland. Secondhand it might be, but it was better than none.
Why would a man bring a woman some months pregnant from London to Scotland—unless he was the father of her child?
Hamish said, “Unless there wasna’ anyone else she could turn to, and he felt sorry for her.”
There was also that possibility, Rutledge acknowledged, opening the door of the little room and taking a deep breath of fresher air. But he thought it was more likely that the officer must have known the father, if indeed he wasn’t the father himself. He himself would have done as much for a friend at the Front.
He closed the door again and was on the point of asking for the number Gibson had given him, when he realized that he ought to go to Winchester himself.
It would mean a long, fast drive there and back, but it had to be done. A telephone was a device that allowed people to hide behind distance. Nothing said into the telephone could match the nuances of expression and tone of voice that he used so often to judge information and people.
Hamish said, “It’s been close to three years. It’s likely true they canna’ remember the officer’s name now.”
On the way to his room to pack what he needed, Rutledge answered, “Very likely. But you never can tell what other information they still have.”
16
RUTLEDGE SPENT THE NIGHT IN THE MIDLANDS. HE had tried to persuade himself that he was good for another hour or more of driving. But heavy rain caught up with him, nearly blinding him. When he narrowly missed an unlit wagon going in the same direction, he pulled over, waiting for the worst of the downpour to pass. Only then did he recognize just how tired he was. There was an inn on the High Street of the next village, and