Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

Rutledge said, “Are you telling me that this man Peterson could have robbed and suffocated those women, not your husband?”

He tried to bring back to mind the young constable whose patch it had been. Tall, lanky, quiet. There had been some question around the Yard about his suitability to deal with the stark reality of murder. .. but no question about his family background had arisen. And wouldn’t have, if he’d used his father’s name.

Hamish said, “There was a lapse-”

Yes. Philip Nettle, ill and soon to die, had been as careful a man as any on the force, covering every possible aspect of any case. But somehow the constable had never come under suspicion. Never questioned, or it would have appeared in the files. He was the Law, and not investigated, one of the hunters, not the hunted.

Dear God-how many other oversights had there been?

Mrs. Shaw was saying, “I only know the one thing, that my husband wasn’t guilty, and we had no way of making anybody listen.”

“You yourself believed in his guilt. I saw you turn away at the sentencing.”

Mrs. Shaw sucked in a quick breath, as if the charge had been a physical blow, then said harshly. “You made a believer out of me. Then. I was tired and shocked and I had two children to care for all alone, and I didn’t know what to make of anything Ben said or the barristers said or the judge said. That K.C. with the white hair-he stood there quoting verse and precedents and Latin, like Moses handing down the Ten Commandments. And I couldn’t follow a word of it. All in a voice that would convince a saint that he was a sinner.”

Matthew Sunderland… for whom the law was a lofty profession.

“But also a pulpit?” Hamish wondered, derisively.

She looked ill, the strain of her obsession beginning to tell, and the long, tiring journey to Kent. “Don’t you think Constable Peterson would have protected his mother if she was the guilty party?”

“Mama?” Margaret said, leaning toward her mother almost protectively. “You’re not to distress yourself like this! We’ll manage, we always have.”

Nell Shaw ignored her, saying instead to Rutledge, “Look at the girl. She’s got her father’s blood in her, the looks and the height and the graces. She deserves better than to languish in some nasty workroom where she’ll be worn out at thirty and no one to care about her when I’m gone. It isn’t right, and you must open your eyes and see what you’re condemning her to!”

Rutledge said, “Mrs. Shaw-”

“No, I’m putting it bluntly. When you sent an innocent man to the gallows, you cursed his family, too. Where’s the guilt of that, on your shoulders? Tell me, where’s the guilt?”

She got up rather clumsily, her swollen feet heavy in her tightly laced shoes. “I’m going back to London where I belong. But if you’re half the man you ought to be, you’ll not sleep until you do something about my Ben. You’ll find out what’s behind this business, and whether there’s any hope for us. But you’d better do it soon. I can’t sleep nights anymore for thinking over what’s right and wrong. I’d rather end up in the river, and have it all over and done with!”

She marched to the door, Margaret trailing after her, apologetic and at the same time defensive. The girl cared about her termagant mother, and she was worried.

“Please, can’t you at least listen?” she seemed to say as she turned, her eyes pleading in place of her voice.

Rutledge said, “Let me make arrangements for your return-”

Mrs. Shaw wheeled to face him. “I mayn’t have much else, Inspector, but I have my pride. If you won’t help my Ben, I don’t want your charity!”

“I will help,” he heard himself saying. “But as one man, I can’t promise that I’ll accomplish miracles.”

“We aren’t looking for miracles. We’re looking for fairness.”

She walked away, her head high, her body chunky and compact. Her daughter followed after her, uncertain what to do, uncertain how to help. Watching her, Rutledge was reminded suddenly of her father. Ben Shaw had had that same lost-dog manner, that resigned acceptance of whatever fate had thrown at him, deserved or not. He had been afraid and wary and patient, as the law ground to its foregone conclusion of guilt, and he had not had the spirit to fight on.

Life-or years of marriage to a woman of a different class and upbringing-had defeated Shaw long before the judgment of the courts. Shaw was one of the victims, not one of the shapers of events. If he had killed those women, he had done it in desperation for the money his family needed. He had accepted the court’s decision with a crushed spirit that didn’t know where to turn for solace. And he had gone to his death a pale shadow of the man he could have been.

Ben Shaw had never fought. He had never tried to stem the march to the hangman in any way.

It had been seen as a sign of his guilt. His acceptance of the right of the Law to punish him for what he had done.

Hamish said, “Aye, a victim.” Then, echoing Mrs. Shaw, he asked, “How will ye sleep with Ben Shaw on your conscience? I canna’ follow you there-but he will.”

Rutledge closed the door of the sitting room behind him and walked through the foyer of the hotel. He was no longer hungry. Standing on the street outside, he tried to decide what to do. He was in the midst of one investigation, and bedeviled by another. He should be clearheaded and have his wits about him, and instead he was having to face himself in ways that he had never thought possible.

Mrs. Shaw was a master at one thing if nothing else-she knew the demon of guilt would be his undoing.

And the tenuous connection he had been trying to build for the Marling murders had slipped, unnoticed, from his mind.

In the end, Rutledge tracked down the Shaws AND drove them back to Sansom Street, himself. Mrs. Shaw had protested, but he had swept that aside and handed her daughter into the rear of the motorcar-to share the seat with a restless Hamish.

Mrs. Shaw was silent most of the way, her black hat and coat giving her the air of a lump of coal capriciously shaped in human form.

“This won’t change my mind,” she said once. “I won’t be cozened by a kindness into forgetting what’s due me and my family.”

“No one is trying to cozen you,” Rutledge replied. “I have business in London.”

But she made no answer to that, as if she didn’t believe him.

When the Shaw women had been returned to their home, Rutledge went in search of his sister Frances. She was dressing for a luncheon and called to him from her bedroom, “Ian, is it urgent?”

“In a way.” He went upstairs.

She came out of the dressing room wearing a very stylish suit and carrying a matching hat in her hand. Sitting down to brush her hair, she said, “You look tired, darling. What’s wrong?”

He took the chair by the pair of windows overlooking the square and the houses that stood around it. “Elizabeth Mayhew. Has she said anything to you about a new man in her life?”

Frances’s eyes met his in the dressing-table mirror. “Interesting! No, she hasn’t. She’s still mourning Richard, as far as I know-I’ve tried to talk her into coming to London for several weeks, but she doesn’t want to leave Kent.”

“For very different reasons, now. I think she’s involved with someone who might be somehow connected to a series of murders I’m working on.”

Frances put down her brush and turned to face him. “Are you sure of this, Ian? It’s rather sudden, her new interest. And who is the man? Anyone we know?” The English view of acceptable social contacts: Anyone we know?

He shook his head. “I can’t tell you his name. I do know he’s from Northumberland. I have the word of Mrs. Crawford’s seamstress on that.” A brief smile touched his eyes and then faded. “But there’s something odd here. Hackles rising on the back of the neck.” He thought about that for a moment and then added, “Or jealousy, for Richard’s sake.”