Read Online A Fearsome Doubt by Charles Todd - Free Book Online

us.”
    As the engine turned over, he got into the car beside her, then realized that earlier she’d folded the rug for her knees and laid it in the rear seat. With a cold shock of dread, he turned and fished for it, his eyes carefully away from the spot that Hamish seemed to favor. As his fingers touched the wool, he drew it toward him. It seemed to come with unexpected ease, as if Hamish had given it a push in his direction. But that was imagination, and he took a deep breath to dispel the feeling of having come close to the one thing he feared—finally confronting the nemesis that haunted his waking hours.
    Hamish had died in France in 1916, in the nightmarish days of the first battle of the Somme. He had died as surely as any of the war dead. Shot by a firing squad at Rutledge’s orders, shot by the coup de grâce that Rutledge had administered with his own hand, buried deep in the stinking mud that the artillery shell had thrown up, killing men like nettles before a scythe. Rutledge had not wanted to execute the Scottish corporal, but Hamish MacLeod had been stubborn in his refusal to do what he had been ordered to do, and in the heat of battle, disobeying an order in the face of his men had left his commanding officer no alternative but to make an example—and hope with all his being that the young Scot would see the error of his ways well before the threat had to be carried out. But Hamish, worn and exhausted and tired of watching men die in the withering fire of No Man’s Land, would not lead them out again. And Rutledge had had to do what he had sworn he would.
    Hamish MacLeod had been a natural leader, not a coward, respected by officers and men alike. But he had been battered by too much death and too little sleep. He’d watched the corpses piling up, he’d lost count of the replacements, and the shock of the endless bombardments had left him shaken and tormented. Death had come as a release for him—and had nearly destroyed Rutledge.
    And while Hamish lay somewhere in France—buried securely beneath a white cross lost in an alien garden of thousands upon thousands of war dead, hardly distinguishable from the soldiers who slept on either side of him—if his ghost walked, it walked in Scotland, not England. He had loved the Highlands with a passionate intensity, and the woman he’d left behind there. But in Rutledge’s battle-frayed mind, there was something that was still alive and stern and real, the essence of the soldier he’d known so well and had—for the sake of a battle—ordered killed. Murdered—
    Rutledge shut the thought out of his mind. As Elizabeth was settling the rug over her knees and he was putting the car into gear, he struggled to break the silence that engulfed him. But the first question he could think of was “What were these killings that Masters was talking about?”
    “Oh. I hadn’t said anything before. You’re on leave, and I hadn’t wanted to bring your work into this holiday.”
    “Masters seems to have had no such compunction,” he said wryly.
    “I’ve never faced death,” she said thoughtfully. “So I can’t tell you what I’d do if someone—a physician—told me I probably wouldn’t live much longer. But Raleigh has fought it bravely. It’s just that he’s turned . . . bitter—I suppose that’s the word. The worst of it was, he’s had to give up his work in London. And he’s not the man we once knew. I expect that’s why we’re so tolerant of him. As well as for poor Bella’s sake. She doesn’t quite know how to cope. He won’t let her touch him—they have nurses in for that.”
    She sighed, drawing herself away from the Masterses’ dilemma. “The murders. There have been two ex-soldiers killed. One was found on a lonely road, the other by a field, and no one quite knows who would do such a thing—or why. The pity is, they survived the war, and now it’s not a German killing them, but an Englishman. Their own side! I find that rather