The Confession - Charles Todd [15]
“A waterman by the name of Acton. He got it into his boat and brought it in. You can speak to him if you like. He should be back in Gravesend in about five hours.”
“You have his statement? It’s satisfactory?”
“On my desk. And yes, Acton has been on the river for years. No reason to think he had anything to do with Russell’s death.”
“Then I’ll take the statement rather than wait.” As he replaced the sheet over the dead man, Rutledge said, “If you learn any more about him—if anyone in Kent comes to you searching for him—let me know. But I rather think you’re right about London being the place to begin.”
“I’ve already gone through our list of missing people. No one fits his description, and he’d have been missed by now. Surely someone would have come looking for him.”
“What about Tilbury, across the Thames from you?” Rutledge asked as they left the hospital.
“We sent a photograph to the police there at the same time we sent one to the Yard. I followed it up with a telephone call, and my opposite number didn’t know him or have him on any lists there. Still, I’ll ask again, now that I have a name to give them and I know he once lived in Essex.”
Rutledge thanked him, taking with him the locket, a copy of the statement from the ferryman, and the report of the postmortem.
They lay in an envelope on the seat beside him as he drove back to London. And from the rear of the motorcar came the voice he knew as well as his own, and dreaded to hear.
Hamish said, “You didna’ believe him. Russell. Ye ken, if ye had, he might well be alive.”
“No. He made his choice. He wouldn’t tell me what I needed to know. He made a mystery of what he had to say because he didn’t want to incriminate himself. Or betray someone else.”
There was a derisive chuckle.
Hamish wasn’t there. Rutledge had told himself that a thousand times, but it was no comfort. Hamish was dead and buried in France, and that was no comfort either.
The doctors had called it shell shock, this hearing of a voice that was so real Rutledge answered it in his head—or sometimes to his absolute horror, aloud. Corporal Hamish MacLeod had fought beside Rutledge almost from the start, a young Scot, but with a grasp of military tactics well beyond his years. A bond had grown between the two of them, officer and man, because each knew he could trust the other implicitly, and both knew that the care of the men under them was paramount. Watching the maimed and the dying through two years of heavy fighting had taught them that. Green men, facing battle for the first time, had only a slim chance of survival. If their officers could double those odds, it counted for much.
And then on the Somme, in those first bloody weeks of fighting, Hamish MacLeod had put Rutledge in an untenable position: he had refused an order outright, in front of his men. His reasons were sound—he knew going over the top one more time after a well-concealed German machine-gun nest was insane, that more men would die needlessly. And yet HQ had ordered that it be taken out at any cost before the next assault, and Rutledge had had no alternative but to try, for the sake of the hundreds of British soldiers who would be crossing No Man’s Land in only a matter of hours. The good of the few—or the good of the many. That was the choice. Hamish had chosen his bleeding and exhausted company.
No amount of argument could sway him. Even when, as an example to other weary and dispirited men, Rutledge had to threaten his corporal with a firing squad, it had not changed his mind. And Rutledge had had to carry out that threat, against his better judgment and against the weight of his own guilt. He had had to deliver the coup de grâce to the dying man, taking out his pistol and firing