He found himself thinking that a body, tossed into the river, would disappear for days. If it was ever found. Boats plying up and down were just as likely to slice it to shreds. He moved slightly, away from his companion.
“Who is she?”
“It will be in my report.”
Leslie couldn’t ask again, and he knew it.
Instead, he said, “There won’t be a trial, of course. But when the inquest is over, I should like to have the items he stole from my wife returned to us. I don’t know that these will make her feel any safer in that house, still, I think she would be pleased to have them.”
“I’ve already returned the lapis beads.”
“Yes. Unfortunate, that, isn’t it?”
“It doesn’t matter. I have the witness who found them. And where. I know the owner reclaimed them.”
“I doubt that will matter to the inquest. In my experience, the coroner’s jury will wish to see them. If they can’t be produced, they won’t be deemed important evidence.”
“Ah well, I expect I shall have to rely on my powers of persuasion.”
Leslie laughed briefly. “Be grateful for the dead soldier. Otherwise, who knows? The evidence might point in any number of directions. I’ve heard that those who suffer from shell shock have been known to run mad or hear voices in their heads that drive them to murder.”
He couldn’t know . . . There was no way he could have learned about Hamish!
In almost the same breath, he heard Hamish speak as clearly as if he too stood on the bridge with them.
“Yet canna’ let him rattle ye.”
Rallying his wits with an effort of will that left him gripping the stone parapet in front of him, Rutledge said dryly, “I’ll keep that in mind, while I’m looking for this particular killer. But if you want my personal opinion, the man I’m after is probably as sane as you are.”
Leslie turned to look at him. But the light was fading, and Rutledge’s face was hard to read, shadowed as it was by his hat.
Leslie said thoughtfully, “We should be grateful for our blessings. The inquiry is closed.” He was about to turn and walk back across the bridge.
Rutledge said, “I should still like to know why she had to die. And if the child she bore and lost belonged to you.”
He thought for an instant that he’d gone too far. Leslie stopped.
I’ve hit a nerve too, Rutledge realized, and braced himself for the blow that he knew would surely come.
Instead he watched Leslie fighting for control. And then the man said softly, black menace in his voice, “Be careful. She wasn’t a whore.”
And he was gone, striding for the end of the bridge with fists clenched.
Rutledge stayed where he was, watching him out of sight.
When he was certain that Leslie had gone, that he wasn’t lurking in the shadows at the far end of the bridge, Rutledge walked back the way they’d come.
It wouldn’t do for two Scotland Yard Inspectors to go at it almost on its doorstep. Wigs on the green. He was fairly sure he could take Leslie in a fair fight. They were of a height, but he was younger and he thought his reach was a little longer. But this wasn’t the time to bring down the condemnation of the Yard on both of them. It would only serve to make any arrest he made look like a petty revenge.
And the woman’s killer had used a knife, silent and swift and deadly. He wondered if Leslie still had it. Or if it was lying somewhere on the plain close by Avebury, waiting to be found, any traces of blood long since lost to the weather.
He rather thought the latter. Leslie was married. He wouldn’t want his wife to find something he’d hidden, and ask questions.
She wasn’t a whore.
The dead woman meant something to Leslie, then.
If that was true, why did she have to die?
Because he was married and back in England now? He’d been married well before the war broke out.
When he left France to return to England at war’s end, had Leslie believed that she was dead?
There was another answer. But Rutledge didn’t like it.
What if Leslie had thought she was dead because he was sure he’d killed her? Or left her for dead in France. It would have been a terrible shock to learn she’d come to England.
Reaching the riverbank, he went back to his motorcar, and late as it was, he set out to speak to Haldane.
He might have doubted his own conclusions before. But not any longer. Leslie had known the dead woman. Had known her in France during the war? And he’d hidden that knowledge from the start.
He’d fully expected to find that Haldane had gone out for the evening.
Instead he was told that Haldane was dressing for the evening, and he would be down shortly. Rutledge was shown into the man’s study, offered a drink, and when he refused, was left alone.
Twenty minutes later, Haldane came striding into the room. He was quite striking in his dress clothes as he nodded to Rutledge.
“My apologies. I’m expected at a party in half an hour. You’ve come about the woman?”
“Yes. Have you found anything that might shed light on who she is?”
“I have. She was a refugee from Armenia who made it to France in late 1915. There is a record of that, although how she escaped from Turkey is sketchy. One version says she somehow reached Egypt and got to Europe from there, another says she made it to Hungary, Vienna, and then Switzerland. Her family had connections, money. I expect a combination of bribes and friends got her out, and she was trying to protect them. In Paris she was very ill—she nearly died of grief and exhaustion. This was early spring of ’16 before the Somme offensive. She disappeared for a time, and then when the Paris peace talks began in early 1919, she was one of a group of people who were advocating for the Young Turks to be punished for what they’d done.”
Rutledge knew what he was talking about. The Armenians were a Christian minority in Anatolia, a part of the Ottoman Empire, and there had been some talk about bringing them to power if the Allies defeated the Turks during the war. Whether it was true or not, it became the excuse the increasingly militant Muslim faction had been looking for. And in the spring of 1915, the Armenians were forcibly removed from where they lived. Some were deported, others starved or killed in what was little short of a massacre. He had heard stories about thousands being driven out of their homes, men, women, and children, on forced marches. Anyone who couldn’t keep up was savagely beaten or killed. A world at war could do little, but the account of atrocities began to spread to Europe. She was damned lucky to make it to France.
“What was her name?”
“Karina. I don’t know if that was her true given name or not. No one did. She was afraid that the people who had helped her escape might be hunted down and killed. Some of them were Turks who knew her family and did their best to protect her.”
Karina. The port official had remembered her name as Katherine. Close enough? Or had she deliberately used Katherine when she applied for her papers?
“Does the Government know she came to England?”
Haldane fiddled with his cuffs. “I can’t answer that, you see.”
Which meant that they did. “Do they know why?”
“It was purely personal. Nothing to do with the cause she’d espoused.”