“Then turn it another way. What’s the use of a trial? No’ to discover the child’s name or parentage but to punish Fiona for killing the mother. To put the blame on someone for a woman’s death. So that when the body is found, it won’t point a finger at the true killer. The likes of the fiscal and the Chief Constable and their friends would protect their own!”

Making his way back to his motorcar, Rutledge shook his head. “No. It can’t be that. But the fiscal’s an intelligent man, and he should have said ‘If someone is claiming my son’s involved in this business, I want you to look into it.’ And then given me a list of people who knew the son well enough to tell me the truth. But he didn’t. And that’s what’s odd.”

As he bent to turn the crank, Rutledge added, “Don’t you see? McKinstry is absolutely right. The verdict on Fiona MacDonald is already in.”

Chapter 18

18

THE NEXT MORNING RUTLEDGE RECEIVED BY PRIVATE messenger permission to take Fiona MacDonald to Glencoe, as long as they were accompanied by a matron and a constable.

It was not how he had wanted to go there. He had thought of it as an expiation, sitting in the fiscal’s office. He had seen it, too, as an excuse for getting Fiona out of that small, dark cell and into the light. A muddle of reasons, none of them wise.

But the sooner he went, the better, before someone changed his mind.

He arranged for sandwiches in a basket to be packed for the journey, and then went out to his motorcar to drive around to the police station.

Oliver wasn’t there. Pringle thought he had gone out the Jedburgh road to look into a theft of a lorry’s contents. “It seems,” Pringle ended wryly, “that the driver fell asleep and ran off the road. When he went to find help dragging the lorry out of the ditch, someone helped himself to the contents instead.” Pringle shrugged. “The driver’s in a rage, but Inspector Oliver isn’t likely to be swayed by that. We had an incident once before where a driver sold off part of the contents and then claimed he’d been robbed. Inspector Oliver has a long memory. You don’t make a fool of him twice!”

Rutledge found himself thinking of the skeleton discovered in the stables at The Reivers. Oliver had gone on from that embarrassment to find the bones in Glencoe—

Rutledge thanked Pringle and decided to drive out the Jedburgh road himself. But he had hardly reached the outskirts of Duncarrick when his engine spluttered, caught, and then died.