“Another excellent reason to wait, I should think,” Rutledge said, ignoring Hamish, and then he backed off. “I can’t tell you that any of this is true. I do know that friends of your son believed he loved Eleanor Gray as much as she loved him. Young men who served with him, to whom he would never have lied about his feelings. Eleanor and her mother quarreled shortly before her disappearance. The timing indicates it was after your son had returned to the Front but before his death. Perhaps Eleanor told Lady Maude that she wanted to marry a country lawyer, not a title. Lady Maude, however, refuses to discuss the quarrel.”

“I will not hear another word! I will not believe that that child in Duncarrick is my son’s bastard! I don’t care who the mother was!”

Like so many bereaved fathers, Fiscal Burns had kept a holy image of his dead son in his heart—the dutiful, honorable young man who had died bravely for King and Country. Reared in another age, believing in other ideals, he could not contemplate the possibility that love had clouded duty in his son’s last days. It would be a betrayal of that pure image, born of the child the fiscal had watched grow up to manhood and march off to war. A Tennyson knight in khaki.

“There’s no dishonor here. He’d have married Eleanor Gray. But he died before she could tell him she was carrying their child. I cannot, in good conscience, believe otherwise.”

Rutledge stood as he finished saying it, then thanked the fiscal for tea before adding almost as an afterthought, “I don’t know what will become of that child in Duncarrick. But if he is abandoned by everyone, it will be sad. His bloodlines appear to be impeccable.”

As he walked out of Burns’s office, disregarding Hamish and the heavy silence he’d left behind him, Rutledge was well pleased with the seeds he’d sown. Turning his car around, he headed back to Duncarrick.

He told himself he’d spiked the guns of Alex Holden. If Lady Maude did come to accept her grandson at the end of Fiona’s trial, she’d find herself with two contenders for the boy’s father. And there was some safety in numbers.

IN DUNCARRICK, RUTLEDGE considered his next move.

If Alex Holden was as clever as it appeared he was, it would require more than an inspector of police arriving at his door to shake his nerve.

On the other hand . . . single-minded people often were victims of their own intense preoccupations. It was where they were most vulnerable.

It was late the next afternoon before his opportunity came.

Rutledge had lain in wait in the filthy, half-decayed stone pele tower, where he could watch the drive that led to the Holden farm.