Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

“Don’t be silly,” she retorted. “Mr. Churchill already has his eye on filling those shoes. Gallipoli was a setback, it’s true, but he won’t languish forgotten for long!”

After seeing Mrs. Crawford to her motorcar and placing her safely in the hands of her driver, Rutledge went back into the hotel and asked for a telephone. He knew Elizabeth Mayhew was on the exchange, but there was no answer to his call. The operator told him after ten rings, “There appears to be no one at home.”

But there were servants in the house.

He found himself worrying about Elizabeth and unable to sleep. As the bells in the clock tower struck the hour of one, Hamish said, “It willna’ matter what you want. It’s her life, and no’ your own.”

The next morning, as Rutledge stood shaving in front of the framed mirror above his washstand, he began to feel a stirring of intuition as he reviewed what he had seen and heard about the three men who had been killed near Marling. A stirring that was just out of reach in his mind, a pattern that was on the edge of consciousness. He had felt this kind of thing before, when he was working on what seemed at first to be disconnected events and facts. For there was always a key, in murder-a logical progression of circumstance that led to the destruction of another human being.

He knew what had brought these men out into the night, to walk a lonely road home. It was the wine that was incongruous. How was it offered? And where? Under what pretense? What had happened then? Had the men been left to die on the roadside? Or had the killer watched each die, before abandoning the body? That was a macabre thought… .

Walking down the stairs to his breakfast, Rutledge tried to re-create the scene in his mind. Instead, he found himself intercepted by the elderly desk clerk, who had been standing behind the reception desk as if waiting for someone. For him, it appeared “Good morning, Inspector! There are-um-two persons who asked for you. I’ve put them in the small sitting room.”

Two persons. Someone, then, not acceptable in the eyes of the hotel staff. Rutledge cast about in his memory. Elizabeth’s servants, perhaps? He remembered she hadn’t been at home last night when Melinda Crawford had telephoned.

“I’ll see them.”

He followed the man’s directions to the small sitting room, usually dark and unused at this hour. But watery sunlight poured in now, and the two women sitting on the edges of the chintz-covered chairs by the hearth looked up nervously as he opened the door.

One of them rose to her feet, her red face tired and drawn. The unbecoming black hat she wore matched the threadbare black coat, giving her an air of poverty and depression. The younger woman accompanying her stood up more slowly, her eyes anxious as they scanned Rutledge’s face. Her blue coat, ill-fitting in the shoulders, was a slightly different shade from the blue hat she wore with a surprising degree of grace.

The older woman was Nell Shaw. She had managed to track him down.

“Mrs. Shaw-” Rutledge began, completely unprepared to find Ben Shaw’s widow here in Marling. As out of place in Kent as a blackbird would be in a gilded cage.

“I went to the Yard yesterday and asked for you. A sergeant-Gibson, his name was-told me you’d gone down to Kent to look into a murder. I thought you was looking into my Ben’s murders!”

Rutledge said gently, “Mrs. Shaw, I must go where I’m sent-”

But she interrupted him again. “I’ve traveled all night. Well, nearly. We got a lift on a lorry from Covent Garden, and then from Maidstone came most of the way with a farmer carrying pig meat to the butcher shops hereabouts. And we walked from Helford. Why didn’t you come and tell me you was not in London anymore? We’ve been waiting for word!” Her voice was accusing, on the verge of tears.

The young woman beside her blushed and looked down at her shoes. Rutledge regarded her. Taller than Mrs. Shaw, with fairer hair and a very fine complexion, she seemed out of place in the older woman’s company.

Catching the shift in his attention, Mrs. Shaw added, “This is Margaret. Ben’s and my daughter. She’s of an age to be married, and what prospects do you think she’s got, the daughter of a hanged man? It’s not fair to burden her with what they say her father done. A wrong ought to be put right!”

The flush deepened, and Margaret Shaw bit her lip, as if wishing the floor might open and swallow her.

Rutledge said, “Sit down, Mrs. Shaw. Miss Shaw. I’ve done my best to look into the earlier investigation, as I promised I would.”

Seating themselves warily, they regarded him with doubtful eyes.

“There’s nothing I can point to so far that upholds your belief that your neighbor was somehow involved. There are a number of ways that Mrs. Cutter might have come by the locket-”

“Name one!” Mrs. Shaw demanded harshly.

He hesitated. “Your husband may have given it to her.”

“A mourning pendant? Inscribed for a man she didn’t even know? And his name all over it, and no way of hiding it? You must be right barmy to believe my Ben would have done such a stupid thing!”

“Yes, I know, Mrs. Shaw. I understand-”

“You don’t understand! You was like the rest of them, eager to see my Ben hang for what was done to the old ladies. It was easier than digging out the truth! ”

He tried to keep his voice level. “As I told you earlier, there’s no proof,” he said, “that the locket was in your neighbor’s drawer. We have only your word for that.”

“Oh, yes? Because my husband was hanged, I’m a liar, am I? Well, let me tell you, if it had been in my house all this time, someone would have discovered it! And you searched the very rafters in the attic, didn’t you? Where do you think I might have hidden it away? In the teapot? Among my corsets?”

The young woman winced. “Mama-”

“No, I’m being honest, that’s what I’m doing! There’s no one else to speak for us, love, and we can’t sit back politely and hope for the best!”

“Mrs. Shaw,” Rutledge said, “please listen to me. I must have irrefutable proof in order to ask my superiors to reopen this investigation-”

She stared at him. “Can you sleep nights, with us on your conscience?” Her voice was hard, angry. “My Ben’s dead, and unjustly so. You gave evidence against him in that courtroom, and might as well have put the noose around his neck with your own hands. I’m telling you he was not guilty, and you tell me that there has to be proof! When God stands in judgment of you, will you tell Him that there was no proof?”

Hamish stirred into vicious life. “Ye’re burning in Hell already-and no’ just for Ben Shaw!”

Rutledge said, “Mrs. Shaw, I’m doing what I can within the limits of my power. No, listen to me! I have no authority to open this investigation. Do you understand me? But I have asked questions-”

“You’ve spoken to Henry Cutter?” It was accusing.

“Not yet-”

“Let him tell you that his wife had a stroke after Ben was hanged, and never got out of her bed again! Let him tell you that her own son by her first husband was the constable on one of them streets where the victims lived! And let him tell you that George Peterson left the police force months after the trial and two years later was found drowned in the sea off Lyme Regis, where he’d gone to drink himself blind!”

There had been nothing in Philip Nettle’s early reports of the Shaw investigation that had linked George Peterson with the Cutters. Nor had much official notice been taken of Peterson’s subsequent death. It had been Peterson’s duty to alert the Yard of any connection and he hadn’t informed anyone. Why?