Rutledge stopped his pacing and swore. “Holden lost all his horses to the war. He’s having to start again. But if he could show that he was the father of the boy, and Eleanor Gray was the mother—true or not, it doesn’t matter!—Ian MacLeod would be the heir to the trust that should have come to Eleanor Gray. If Holden knew how that trust stood, if Eleanor had talked about it on their long drive north, through the boy he could find himself in possession of a bloody fortune—”

He began pacing again, the room seeming to shrink and close in around him. He swung a chair out of his way.

“It might not matter whose bones they are—or whose child Ian MacLeod might really be. What matters is what people are led to believe. And if Fiona MacDonald is hanged for the murder of Eleanor Gray, then the child she’d been raising has to be the child of Eleanor Gray. At least in the eyes of the law. And when there is no one left alive to name the boy’s true father, Holden has a very clear run! Very civic-minded of him to step reluctantly forward rather than let the child go to an orphanage.”

“Aye. He wouldna’ want his indiscretion to hurt his wife,” Hamish agreed sourly. “That’s the way half the town will see it.”

“There have always been two standards,” Rutledge answered. “People called Fiona a whore, but there’s no name for a man who has an illegitimate child.”

Chapter 27

27

IT SOUNDED PLAUSIBLE.

But the police required proof, not speculations, to arrest a man.

And Rutledge had discovered in his first year at the Yard that what was logical about evidence was not always the truth it was pointing to.

“The first step is to find out all I can about Sandy Holden. And Gibson will have to do that from London. Starting with the Army and the Saxwold medical records. And in the meantime, I need a very good excuse to call on the fiscal again!”

RUTLEDGE PUT IN his call to London, setting in motion the search for the past movements of one Alexander Holden since the end of 1915. “I particularly need to know when and for what periods of time he was in England. And see if you can find any trace of a Major Alexander, also at Saxwold at the right time. But odds are they’re one and the same.”

Old Bowels, delighted to hear that Rutledge had found a possible solution to the mystery of Eleanor Gray, said expansively, “Well done!”

“We aren’t ready to say that Holden’s guilty of anything. We can’t find any trace of Miss Gray after the spring of 1916. He may have driven her to Scotland and left her anywhere from Berwick to John o’Groats. Alive. And if she’s the mother of the child, she didn’t die in the spring!”