Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

Her face was pale, the line of her brows like charcoal smudges above the dark-circled eyes.

“I’m all right,” she said. And then as an afterthought, “Thank you.”

He shifted into neutral, uncertain, and then switched off the engine. Opening his door, he stepped out into the road. She turned away, as if trying to ignore him. “I don’t like leaving you here. It will be dark soon. My name’s Rutledge, Inspector Rutledge, from London. If you will let me take you to your house-or to the police station-”

She turned at that, her eyes seeming to bore into him. “London, is it?” She took a shuddering breath. “Well. It won’t bring Will back.”

“Will?”

“Will Taylor. He was my husband. They found his body just here, they said. I’ve come to see it for myself. I didn’t want to before. But I-” She stopped.

Rutledge said gently as he walked toward her, “Perhaps it wasn’t the best of ideas… to come to this place. Not in the rain, surely.”

“I never really knew him, you see. We were married and then he went off to war. He came home twice, once with the broken arm, and then again when the Germans blew his foot off. They kept him in hospital then, and I’d go and sit by the bed, but the ward was full. There was no privacy. You couldn’t talk. Not really -talk. ”

“I understand,” he said.

“No, you don’t,” she said bitterly. “Nobody does! He had more in common with them, the other men in that ward, than he did with me, his wife. They’d all lost a limb, too. He wasn’t-different-there. Still one of the lads.”

She took a deep breath, fighting tears. “I was beginning to think there were no whole men left in England-”

Rutledge said nothing. There was no comfort he could offer.

Mrs. Taylor looked him up and down, as if assessing his wounds. They weren’t visible, and he felt himself flushing, as if guilty of being whole. “You were in the war, were you?” He nodded. “You came home with nothing missing. It’s all right for you, you didn’t have to find a new way of learning to live, to earn your keep. Will had to do that, and even when he was sent home the last time, we weren’t-comfortable-together. It was like having a stranger in the house. I hardly knew what to say to him! Nor he to me. Loving him wasn’t the same. I couldn’t get used to no foot. It hadn’t healed well, the stump. And we had no common ground of any kind, except the marriage and the children.”

She was speaking not so much to him as she was to the place of her husband’s death. As if excusing to the shade of Will Taylor what had gone wrong in their fragile postwar relationship.

It would bring no comfort to Mrs. Taylor to tell her that he’d seen the other side of this coin-hasty romantic weddings, a patriotic fervor, and in the beginning, dozens of love letters that flew back and forth like doves.

How many men standing watch in the night had cleared their throats and gruffly admitted, “I’m worrit. There’s a difference in her letters noo. I think there’s someone else…” Darkness shielding anxious eyes, voices low-pitched.

“She doesna’ write sae often. And she says she hardly kens what I look like, anymore. But then I have only a wee photograph, mysel’, and she must ha’ changed in two years. I’ve begged her for another, but she canna’ find anyone with a camera. She says…” A cough, as if denying the unspoken fear.

They had sometimes come to him, to beg for leave. Not just the married men, but the single ones who had left someone behind. One soldier had stood there clutching in his hand a scrap of newspaper bearing the photograph of Gladys Cooper, the actress. Pointing to it, he’d said earnestly, “She’s mair real to me noo than Maggie. What am I to do?” Anguish sharpened his face and his eyes had pleaded.

Where he could, Rutledge tried through channels of his own to find out what had happened to the wives at home. But sometimes the truth was more bitter than the suspicion. And he had concealed that.

Rutledge said now, “Mrs. Taylor, I think I ought to take you home. It won’t help, standing here in the rain.”

“Surprisingly, it does,” she told him forlornly. “I feel closer to him here than I do in the churchyard. I was afraid, when Sergeant Burke came to the door, that Will had-” She faltered.

“Surely the other deaths proved that he wasn’t-didn’t kill himself.”

Alice Taylor shrugged. “Only Will knows that.” She brushed her wet dark hair out of her face and began to walk slowly to the motorcar. Turning her head once, she looked back at the line of trees. “I wish I didn’t feel guilty. As if I’d driven him to whatever it was happened to him.”

Rutledge held the door for her and she climbed into the motorcar.

As he got in after cranking the motor, he said, “Did anyone come to see him before he died? A stranger? A man you didn’t know.”

She turned to him. “I don’t know, to tell you the truth. Will took to walking out while I was doing up the washing-up after dinner. As if he didn’t have anything left to say to me. Or I to him. One night he came back and asked if I remembered Jimsy Ridger. I said I did, and I was sharp about it. Jimsy was no friend of Will’s. And he said someone was looking for Jimsy, but he’d given the man false directions. He didn’t like his cut.”

“Those were his words, ‘I didn’t like the cut of him’?”

She nodded, flicking wet hair out of her face again. In her own way, she was a pretty woman, with such white skin and dark coloring. Welsh, perhaps, or Cornish.

“What did he mean by that, do you think?”

“I can’t say. I wasn’t interested in Jimsy Ridger. He was in Will’s company, and I never liked him very much.”

“Why?”

“He was something of a scoundrel, Jimsy was. Light-fingered, like. He never stole anything from us, that I know of, but he wasn’t someone I quite trusted. I was afraid he might be hanging about looking for money.”

“Where is Jimsy Ridger now?”

She looked out across the wet fields. “In hell, for all I know. He didn’t come back to Kent after the war. He’d been to Paris, and won money at cards. So it was said. Kent wasn’t for the likes of him, after that. But then who knows, with someone like Jimsy?”

Rutledge took her to the small cottage she pointed out as hers. It was half-timbered, of a style popular in the late Victorian era. But the plaster between the black beams needed paint and the chimney sagged. She looked up at it.

“Will was going to find someone to repair the chimney. I suppose that’ll be up to me now.”

He came around to open the door for her and she stepped down into the wet grass that met the rutted road in an irregular verge.

“I’ll do my best to find your husband’s killer,” he said.

She had walked up the muddy walk before she turned. “I don’t know that it matters,” she answered him. “Will didn’t much want to live, anyway. Maybe the murderer did him a favor.”

Mrs. Taylor’s voice lingered in Rutledge’s mind as he drove down the roads that led out of Marling and toward the nearest villages, then back again, forming a mental map of the ground where the three murders had occurred. As darkness fell, he could see the lights springing up in the windows of farms and cottages off to either side, none of them close enough to matter.

“They would ha’ been dark again, the occupants in their beds and sleeping soundly,” Hamish said, “when the killing was done. Country folk aren’t likely to keep late hours.”

Yet someone had.

He found himself wondering if Mrs. Bartlett and Mrs. Webber had felt as estranged from their husbands as Mrs. Taylor had done. It was hard to believe that one suicide had sparked two more as desperately tired men gave up trying.