Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

“Tell me about this first victim. What was his name? Taylor?”

“That’s right. Will Taylor. He worked in the hop gardens before the war. But there’s not much call for a one-legged man in that line. He’d found a job in Seelyham, putting up a fence that had blown down with the last storm. Good with his hands, and married, with two children.”

“Did you know him?” Rutledge asked. Weaver had missed the war by a matter of months, too young to serve, but probably eager.

“He was my brother’s age-Simon was lost off Gallipoli, when his ship went down,” Weaver replied somberly. “And I know Taylor’s wife, as well. Alice was in school with my sister. Too young to marry, but her mother signed the papers.”

“The sort of man who’d find himself mixed up with something he ought to leave alone?” Rutledge asked, looking up and down the quiet road.

“I never knew Will to be dishonest. He used to complain about the hop pickers from the East End. Light-fingered and always after the girls, he’d say.”

Hop picking was labor-intensive. Help was brought in during the autumn to take in the crop, and sometimes the same workers were called on to do the haying first. They were often the dregs of London’s East End, willing enough to work for wages, and sometimes representing the third and fourth generation hired out to pick. It was good income with winter coming on, a little something laid aside for the coalman or a sick child or gin to warm the inside of a man when the cold winds blew. A goodly number of the pickers came from the Maidstone area, bringing with them their dogs and their children, both of which ran underfoot like chickens.

Weaver stared down at the broken stalks of last summer’s wildflowers. “I don’t see Will Taylor mixed up in anything sinister. He was bent on feeding his family. Took losing his leg hard, an active sort who liked working out in the air. But he was trying to manage somehow.”

Rutledge said, “Did his wife have anything to tell you?”

“I questioned Alice myself,” Weaver responded. “But she didn’t know much. He was staying over in Seelyham to finish the fence, saying he’d come home when it was done. She didn’t expect him for another day or two. Sergeant Burke went on to Seelyham and asked about Taylor’s work. The fence was done properly, and a day early. Taylor was told he could wait until the morning, but was eager to get home, and set out after his dinner.”

“Was Taylor carrying his pay?”

“Yes, sir, and it was still there, in his pocket. You’d think, wouldn’t you, sir, that a thief wouldn’t fail to find that!”

The second victim had been found on the road from Helford. It ran into the Seelyham road at an angle, just outside Marling. Lying in a ditch by the side of fields, he was almost invisible until the sun rose high enough to pierce the shadows.

Beyond where Weaver stood with Rutledge, the hop gardens spread out toward a distant farm, tucked into a fold of land. Their frames and their green vines gone for the winter, the gardens looked bare and fallow. An oast house, one of the most recognizable features of the Kent landscape, reared its head like a decapitated windmill close by a stand of trees, its white walls streaked and wet from the rain. Inside it was an oast, the drying kiln that was an essential part of the processing of hops.

“Tell me about this man-Webber?” Rutledge encouraged Weaver as they got out in the rain and stood by the spot. “What sort was he?”

“Most everyone in Marling knew who he was. Not the sort you’d find carousing of a Saturday night. He’d had a strict upbringing, and his mother was Temperance-mad. A carpenter by trade. Made tables and chests and the like, as his father had done before him. He was in Helford, recaning chairs. The caning Webber did was known all over. No breaks and no missed steps.”

“Was there money in his pocket?”

“Yes, sir, we found two pounds.”

Hamish commented, “A clever man, now, he’d ha’ taken the money and put it in the puir box. To confound the police.”

Rutledge responded aloud without thinking. “Both of them married: Taylor and Webber. Not likely to be unfaithful, would you say?”

Weaver answered him. “They weren’t likely, no, sir. Past an age for wild oats, and that. There’s no jealous husband looking for revenge.”

The third body had been found close by the crossroads where Rutledge thought he’d seen a face in his headlamps. He felt an odd frisson of cold down his spine as he got out of the motorcar, as if there were traces of something unnatural here still, a scent or lingering shadow.

Hamish, ordinarily quick to point out foolishness, was a Highlander, who understood moods.

But the corpse was a local man, not a straying doppelganger. Harry Bartlett had gone to visit a friend who was ill-and ended by dying before him.

“Bartlett wasn’t what you’d call a staunch churchgoer,” Weaver was saying. “He had a reputation as a hell-raiser before the war, and was the first in Marling to sign up. Told everyone he was tired of bashing local heads, and thought he’d try a few Germans. He was a good soldier, from all reports. That lot often are. But he got hung up on the wire one night that last spring of the war and when they brought him in, he was near to bleeding to death.”

Hamish was asking a question. Rutledge said, “Did these three men serve in the same unit?”

Weaver blinked. “Yes, sir, I expect they did. The Kent men stayed together. Looked out for each other.”

Officers had found that men who knew each other fought better side by side. They often died side by side, when a shell went up in their faces.

Rutledge walked along the road for some distance, then turned and walked back. “All right then, the war. Find out all you can about where they served, and who their friends were.”

“Sir? I can’t see how that might help. The war’s been over for a while now.”

“It hadn’t ended for them, had it?”

After a last look around, Rutledge turned back to the motorcar. They drove back to Marling as dusk was falling, and the road seemed long, lonely.

Hamish commented, “A man with crutches would accept a ride.”

“So he would,” Rutledge silently agreed. “But why should he be saved from a painful walk-and then be killed?”

Still, it was something to consider. What had these three men had in common, besides lost limbs? According to Weaver, not much beyond their working-class backgrounds and their service in the war. Bartlett’s wife, Peggy, was a girl he’d married since coming home, and there were no children.

Dowling had been right. There was hardly any evidence to build on. What had brought these men face to face with a killer? Greed? A secret that was dangerous to know? A killer wouldn’t offer a man a glass of wine and then fill him with laudanum, unless he first wanted to learn something from his victim… Where had they drunk together?

Rutledge, listening to Hamish in the back of his mind, wondered how many more would join this unholy clutch of dead men, before the police found any answers.

The rain fell with depressing steadiness, cold and coloring everything a bleak gray. Even the church at the top of High Street seemed dark and dreary, its ragstone facade streaked with damp, and the dead flower stalks among the churchyard stones a sign of desertion rather than loving memorials. What did you grow in the churchyard in winter besides ivy and hellebore? Rutledge wondered as he drove back to the hotel. Too late for Michaelmas daisies and too early for pansies.

He washed up and unpacked his luggage, then came down to the dining room-to find Melinda Crawford ensconced at the best table. She looked up as he came into the paneled room and smiled broadly.