“No!” she cried. “If I had, how could I have loved the child so deeply? Every time I look into his eyes, I see his mother’s face. How could I hold him and remember her dying by my hand? She trusted me with the most precious thing in the world to her. You went to war,” she went on, tears filling her eyes, “and you suffered horribly. But do you ever think about what it must be like for us to love a man who will never come back, never give us the children we might have borne, never hold us in the night, never watch our sons and our daughters marry? Never carry a grandchild in our arms or grow old together? Do you know what it is like to want someone so terribly that you ache, and dream, and wake up to find that it’s over?” The tears fell and she brushed them away angrily. “I have given this country my future too. And all that was left to me, another woman’s child, you’ve taken as well.”

It seemed to be an admission that the woman was dead. But as he looked into the dark eyes and saw the anguish there, he read something else too—fear. Not for herself, he was sure it wasn’t that. Nor was it guilt.

He struggled to concentrate, called on his intuition to bridge the gap between what he had seen—and what it meant.

Silence came back to him. Nothing but silence. And then—

The woman, he realized suddenly, must still be alive. The child’s mother. And for some reason, even to save her own life, Fiona MacDonald dared not name her.

Chapter 11

11

LOCKING THE CELL BEHIND HIM, RUTLEDGE STRODE past the woman collecting her brushes in the emptied pail and went out into the main room, where Constable Pringle sat reading through a stack of reports. He looked up as Rutledge handed him the key ring.

“All settled, then?” he asked.

“For the time being,” Rutledge answered.

He thanked the man and went out into the street. The day was fine, and there were people everywhere, attending to whatever business brought them out on a fair morning. Carts and wagons and lorries vied with motorcars for space on the roadway, and he heard a vendor shouting as a passing horse snatched at an apple from the baskets piled high on a trundle. Rutledge felt alone.

Hamish railed on in wild fury, begging, cajoling, pleading for Fiona, obsessed with what had been done to her. And helpless to change it.