Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

“Oh, it weren’t that, so much as the heaviness of her mind. It was like working in a house where there’d been a death. As if black crepe hung on the mirrors and the shades were drawn.”

For such a young girl, as Hamish was also pointing out, it would have been a depressing atmosphere.

“And Mr. Cutter? Did he find the house bleak, too?”

“Mum said he was bewildered, but when I came in ’17, he was more resigned. The Missus was young for a stroke, Mum said. Came on of a sudden, like a flash of light. Mum heard her calling, and then the sound of someone falling down the stairs. Frightened her witless to find Mrs. Cutter lying up against the balustrades halfway down, and not able to move. Doris and Betsy and I had nightmares, hearing it, but the boys wanted her to tell it over and over again.”

“Where was your mother when this happened?”

“Hanging out the clothes. She left a sheet dragging, to run in.”

He thanked the girl, still more of a child than a woman, and walked back to his motorcar, thoughtful and uneasy.

“I ought to find Henry Cutter,” he told himself as he drove on to the Lambeth Road, and turned toward Kent.

“It’s no’ been pressing for all these years,” Hamish reminded him.

“It hasn’t, no,” Rutledge agreed, and fell silent. Trying to remember the case not in hindsight but the way it had unfolded at the time-that was what was hard. How he’d felt, how he’d thought, how he’d watched the evidence build.

He had been another man then. Young, idealistic. A stranger to the hollow shell who had come back from the war and for months struggled to rebuild his peacetime skills. He had more in common with the voice of Hamish MacLeod than he did with his prewar self. That Ian Rutledge might have lived six centuries ago, not a mere six years. Somewhere they had lost each other.

November anywhere in England was a cold and often rainy month. The air was heavy, damp, and chill, and with the sun retreating toward the equator, the shorter days seemed to drag through their appointed hours with a dullness that sometimes made the difference between sunrise and sunset a matter only of conjecture. Had the sun risen? Was it setting or was there another squall of rain on its way? Along the rivers, fog could hold on for a good part of the morning, and heavy clouds finished the late afternoon long before night could fall. The lingering sunsets of Midsummer, when light filled the air well past eight and nine, and sometimes as late as ten, were a thing of memory.

A depressing season…

Hamish said, “The rain was worst, in France. I couldna’ get used to the rain.”

It had soaked their greatcoats and left shoes a soggy, rotting mess, and it had ruined tempers, brought out the miasma of smells from the trenches, and made the heavy mud so slippery that a man could lose his footing and go down as he raced across No Man’s Land. Rutledge had fallen more than once, feeling the swift plucking at his shoulder or elbow where machine-gun fire had barely missed him. And then scrambled back to his feet into the steady scything, waiting for the blow to his body that never came, never more than just that ghostly plucking. Living a charmed life had frightened him as much as it had defeated him. He’d wanted to die.

Kent was a fertile part of the country, covered with pasturage and hop gardens, with orchards blazingly white in spring, and apples or plums or cherries hanging darkly from summer boughs. Agriculture was its mainstay, though there had been iron at one time, and the cutting of the great forests for making charcoal to smelt the iron had opened up the Weald to grass for sheep or horses or the plow. There was still industry along the Medway, and shipbuilding on the coast where the tradition of putting to sea was strong. But most of Kent was green, with ash and beech and sometimes oak in the hedgerows or marching in shady rows down the lanes.

This was also the gateway to England from the Continent, the path taken by invaders, by priests, by merchants, and by the weavers who at the request of Edward III had come to teach the English how to turn their valuable wool into far more valuable cloth. Prosperous and rural and content, most of the villages turned their backs on the Dover-London road, and got on with their lives in peace.

Marling was a pretty village, even by Kentish standards, settled on a ridge overlooking the long slope of land that fell away toward the Weald. A High Street ran through the center, dividing where a triangular space opened up and created the irregular square that had held the Guy Fawkes bonfire. The Tuesday Market here had been one of the village’s mainstays for generations, giving it status among its neighbors.

The square had been cleared long since of the last of the ashes, and today lay quiet and colorless in the cold rain that had followed at Rutledge’s heels. Even the Cavalier standing bravely in the wet on his plinth appeared to huddle under his plumed hat.

Rutledge knew where to find the police station-it was several doors down from the hotel where he’d dined with Elizabeth Mayhew and her friends after the bonfire. Tucked in between a bakery on the one side and a haberdashery on the other, the station occupied one of the old brick buildings still carrying proudly the Georgian facades that gave Marling its particular character.

The midday traffic was light, a few carriages and carts, a motorcar or two, and women hurrying from butcher to greengrocer to draper’s shop-one, pausing to speak to a friend, pushed her covered pram with metronomic rhythm, back and forth, back and forth. Another, carrying a small wet dog in her arms, was lecturing the animal for running into the road, warning it of dire consequences.

On the surface, it was a peaceful scene, a prewar England in some ways, seemingly detached from the hardships and shortages that scarred Sansom Street’s inhabitants in London.

Hamish, observing it, said, “You wouldna’ think murder had been done here. Or ever would be.”

“No,” Rutledge agreed, “but night falls early this time of year. It’s always after dark that people begin to look over their shoulders.”

He left the motorcar by the hotel, and when he entered the police station was greeted by an elderly sergeant dressing down a young constable who was red about the ears.

The constable glanced up with undisguised relief at the interruption and earned another condemnation for not paying strict attention. When the sergeant sent him on his way, the young man scuttled out without looking back.

The sergeant straightened his jacket, squared his shoulders, and met Rutledge’s glance levelly, identifying him at once as a stranger. “Sergeant Burke, sir. What can I do for you?”

“Inspector Rutledge, from the Yard. I’m looking for Inspector Dowling.”

“He’s just gone home to his meal, sir. I expect him back on the half hour.” The sergeant studied him. “Come about the murders, then, sir?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Well, the Chief Constable knows best, sir, but I doubt even the Yard can help us. There’s no sense to these murders. At least not so far. Unless we’ve got ourselves a shell-shocked soldier who thinks he’s still at war.”

Rutledge flinched as the remark struck home.

The sergeant leaned against the back of his chair, thick arms resting on the top to ease his weight. “I’ve been sergeant here for fifteen years,” he went on, “and was constable for ten before that. And I can tell you, this is the first inquiry where I’ve not got a hint about who’s behind it. No whispers in the shops, no words dropped in the pubs, nothing that makes me prick up my ears and wonder, like. There’s always a root cause waiting to be found, if you look hard enough, but I’m blessed if we can see it. The only thing the victims have in common, so far as we can tell, is their service in the war. Poor men, all three, who served their country well and came back with little to show for it but the loss of a limb. No hero’s welcome nor bands playing nor offers of work. A crying shame, to see the lads lying like old rags by the roadside, and feeling helpless to do anything for them.”