Wilson turned back to the files. “She gave London as her home. There’s no other information. The father was dead. In the war. She cried when I told her she had a son. She said he would have been proud. A good many women tell me that. I have tried to grow accustomed to it, and failed. Children need fathers. Too damned many of them in these last years had none to go home to.” He rubbed his eyes. “Is that all you want of me?”

“Did Mrs. Cook have lung disease of any kind?”

“No. She was young and healthy. There was a complication, however. It was a difficult birth. Long and tiring, and there was a good deal of trouble. Breech birth, you see. Touch and go, but I saved her and the baby. Infection set in. She was quite lucky she was here—she’d have died otherwise. The fact remains, she’ll not be able to conceive again. Well, she has her child and I doubt she’ll marry again. So many men died. . . .”

It was cold comfort, but all the doctor had.

“Why did she come to Scotland to have this child if she lived in London?”

“She was traveling. Foolishness on her part at that late stage, but she was on her way to London when the bag of waters broke.”

But Wilson had no idea what had brought Mary Cook north from London or how long she might have lived in Lanark before consulting him. “I don’t have time to question my patients about their private lives. Still, there’re any number of Cooks in the neighborhood of Loch Lomond. She might well have been visiting one of them.”

IF MAUDE COOK was the mother of Fiona’s child, she had had the boy in a clinic, not on some windswept mountainside. And left there well enough to travel.

Was she in fact Eleanor Gray? And had she given Fiona a child she did not want to keep? In exchange for a sworn promise never to reveal the boy’s parentage?

It was possible—but not very likely. As for Mary—

Where had they met? Why had the mother so readily given up her son to a comparative stranger?

There was absolutely no certainty that Maude Cook and Mary Cook were the same person—Cook was a common name, as the doctor had pointed out.

Rutledge drove back to Duncarrick feeling the long hours at the wheel of the motorcar and in no mood to confess he’d found only the most tenuous threads to account for the number of miles covered. Or endure the constant hammering of Hamish’s questions.

The woman at the desk of The Ballantyne smiled at him as he came into the lobby and then turned to a drawer, where apparently she kept messages for hotel guests.

There was one for him, but not from Old Bowels, as he’d expected.