Legacy of the Dead - Charles Todd [84]
He’d just driven the car hard for four days—
Everyone in Duncarrick knew whose car sat in the hotel yard day after day. No one in his right mind would touch it.
“Unless,” Hamish pointed out, “you’ve tread on toes.”
RUTLEDGE WALKED TO the police station and from Constable Pringle borrowed the key to The Reivers again. The inn wasn’t likely to yield more information than it had, but he wanted to go there on his own and be sure.
Clarence, the cat, followed Rutledge soft-footed from room to room, a silent white ghost at his heels as he took his time in each. He couldn’t have said when he started what it was he wanted here.
Such a place as The Reivers, he thought, was not made for the morning. The echoes of the night would linger still in the air—laughter and voices—someone singing off-key—and the smell of spilled beer and ale, the reek of smoke would drift down the passages. There would be an emptiness, a loneliness, as if the inn stood waiting for the doors to swing open again and new patrons to stride through them, thirsty for a pint and the companionship that went with it.
Now there weren’t even the echoes of the previous night. The inn had stood empty long enough that the only smells stirred by his passage were of dust and old wood, and in the kitchen, the ashes of fires in the great stove.
Hamish, at his back, noted the smoke-darkened beams and the polished wood of the bar; the windows with their starched curtains and the small pewter pots on each table that must often have held flowers; the pretty handmade coverlets on the beds of each upstairs guest room—hardly a temptation to whoring; the tidy row of hooks that held gardening tools in the small stone-flagged room off the kitchen. The cupboard that held linens smelled faintly of lavender and rose petals. The pantry was empty, only a few tins of food standing like sentinels on the long shelves. In the kitchen, dishes were stored neatly in a huge wooden dresser, great iron pots hanging within reach, the sink dry where vegetables ought to be lying, waiting to be scrubbed and cooked.
“I could hae’ lived here,” Hamish said wistfully, “and been at peace. With her. I wouldna’ ache for the Highlands if she was here wi’ me. . . . I could rest easy.”
Rutledge tried to shut out the soft voice at his shoulder and listen for other ghosts that should dwell here. Ealasaid MacCallum for one. Or the sounds of a small boy as he played with his cat or ran shouting from room to room with his three-legged stuffed horse. Or Fiona’s presence as she went about her daily tasks. But he couldn’t find them. Especially he could not find Fiona’s.
It was as if even the floors had been scrubbed clean of the imprint of her shoe, to remove the last sign of her. Fiona had lived here—and put down no roots that he could see. She had done her duty by her aunt, had kept the inn alive and busy, had nurtured a child there. And let no one inside her heart, not even the building that she called her home.
After a time, to break the heavy silence that seemed to pervade the very walls, he turned to the cat and knelt to pet her. She reared her head under his hand, her eyes mere slits, and began to purr. “What would you have to tell me if you could speak?” he asked softly. “Hmmm?”
A voice said, “She’s naught but a dumb animal, man!”
Drummond, Fiona’s neighbor and guardian now of the child, stepped into the room, his presence startling the cat. Rutledge got to his feet as she disappeared behind the bar.
Even Hamish had not heard Drummond coming.
“But she has eyes, doesn’t she? And no reason to lie. I think it’s time that someone told me the truth,” Rutledge invited.
“There’s no truth to tell. What brings you here again?”
“I’m looking into the past, to see what’s hidden there that frightens so many