“That’s the whole of it. Two were servant girls, one was a scullery maid at The Ballantyne, and the other two worked on outlying farms. Clever bastard, left no evidence behind. None we could use, at any rate. Just words on a scrap of paper. And the bodies out on the western road.”

BACK ON THE pavement outside the station, Rutledge listened to Hamish, savagely drawing conclusions of his own.

The five dead women had no connection with Fiona MacDonald. She had been in Glencoe in 1912, a young girl living with her grandfather. All the same, their deaths had paved the way for her persecution. “Whore” was a charge that the good people of Duncarrick already associated with murder.

Chapter 20

20

BY THE TIME RUTLEDGE REACHED DUNCARRICK THE next day, there was a message waiting from Sergeant Bowers in Lanark.

“No one by either name shown as missing in the year in question. The only Mary Cook living in the district is sixty. There is no record of a Maude Cook. Sorry.”

It had been a long shot, but he’d already taken the advice Bowers had given him. He hadn’t raised his hopes.

FIONA’S LAWYER WAS summoned to Duncarrick and the brooch was shown to him. He was a dyspeptic man, with lines incised deeply in a dark face. Even his eyebrows, thick and wiry, seemed to be set in a permanent frown. His name was Armstrong, and he seemed more English than Scottish.

Hamish took an instant dislike to him and said so clearly. “I wouldna’ have him defend my dog!” Rutledge winced.

Oliver was inquiring after someone in Jedburgh who was an acquaintance, and Armstrong responded with unconcealed relish, “Not likely to last the month out, I’d say. The cancer is spreading too fast. You’d be advised to visit if you want to find him coherent. Now, what’s this nonsense about a brooch found on a mountainside?”

Oliver took it out of his desk drawer and passed it to Armstrong.

The lawyer examined it with care, squinting at it through spectacles he strung across his nose. “There’s an inscription, you say?”

With the nib of his pen, Oliver pointed it out. “MacDonald.” He rummaged in his desk drawer and came up with a large magnifying glass. “See for yourself.”

Armstrong studied the back of the brooch for some time. “MacDonald is a common name in the Highlands. And how do we know that the name wasn’t put there by someone other than my client?”

“Well, of course it was put there by someone else!” Oliver was losing patience. He had found exactly what he wanted, and he would brook no opposition to the conclusions he’d drawn from it. “The engraver.”

“I meant,” said Armstrong, looking up at him with a sour expression, “that the name could have been engraved on the back just before the brooch was put where it might be found, to please the police.”