Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

He himself knew the fierce silent urge toward death, when there was no hope left.

But Hamish, always practical, said, “Where did they buy good wine?”

That was always the sticking point. The wine.

He drove in the early dusk toward Marling, his headlamps picking out the overgrown hedgerows and the dark pockets of thick grass between trees that sometimes marched in avenues for a little distance. Vistas that in summer were glorious with a patchwork of green were now brown and dry, and the long sweep of the land had lost much of its charm.

He was not more than a hundred yards from the first cottage marking the outskirts of the town when he saw someone quickly moving into a clump of trees edging a field. Moving as if afraid to be seen.

Pulling hard on the brake, Rutledge brought the car to a halt, and got out, running toward the faintly seen outline of a human form. The trees thinned almost at once as he plunged into them, and brought him out into another field. His feet sank heavily into the wet, plowed soil, where the summer’s crop had been turned under for the winter. Cursing, he tried to pick up his pace, but it was useless. Then the figure ahead of him stumbled and fell and swore harshly.

Rutledge reached him before he could flounder to his feet.

Hardly a murderer, he thought in disgust as the thick miasma of drunken breath hit him in the face before he could put out a hand to help the man to his feet.

“Leave me alone!” the man shouted, struggling to shake off his grip. “What’ve I done to you, to chase me off the road, then!”

He was standing now, a man with dark, sweaty hair and filthy work clothes. Rutledge realized that one shoulder was different from another, saw that the man had a useless left arm. It hung without life, clumsily and straight. Catching Rutledge’s glance, the man clapped his right hand over the shoulder in a protective action that was clearly habit now.

Rutledge said, “What are you doing out here?” It was the voice of command.

“Looking for a quiet place to sleep it off. If it’s any concern of yours!”

“Men ‘sleeping it off’ have been found dead the next morning. Or haven’t you heard?”

“I’m not drunk enough to die. I’m not drunk enough to stop hurting, either. What’s that to you?” The slurred voice was bellicose. The man stood his ground, with nothing more to say.

“Come on,” Rutledge said, tired of argument. “I’ll take you to the police station, where you can sleep until you’re sober enough to go home.”

“I don’t have a home anymore,” the man said, beginning to feel sorry for himself. “She said if I got drunk again, not to come back. But it’s all there is now. Getting drunk.” His hiccup turned into a sob. By the time they’d reached the edge of the first field, the man was on his knees, sick by the base of a tree.

Rutledge waited impatiently for him to finish and then got him to the motorcar and inside it.

“Where do you live?” he asked, when they were moving toward Marling. “What’s your name?”

“Bert Holcomb, if its any of your business. From Seelyham. But if I drink in the pub there, the barmaid goes to my wife. I come here, and tell her I have two days’ work.” He groaned. “That was good beer I lost. I can’t afford no more this week.”

“What happened to your arm? The war?”

“Caught it on the wire. Like all the other poor bastards. The doctors saved it, but it’s worthless now. I can’t move it on my own.” He leaned his head against the back of the seat. “God, my mouth tastes something terrible.”

“Did you know the men who’ve been killed outside of Marling? Taylor, Webber, Bartlett?”

“We were together through most of the war. Men of Kent. We were proud of that. I’m going to be sick again-!”

Rutledge brought the motorcar to a swift halt and waited again. When the man crawled back into the vehicle, he groaned wretchedly. “I never could drink the way the others could!” A shudder ran through him.

“Do you know a man called Jimsy Ridger?”

The ravaged face turned toward Rutledge. “What do you want to find him for? Good-for-nothing bastard!”

“Where does he live?”

“Second person to ask me that today.”

Rutledge said, “Who was the other person?”

“I don’t know. He gave me money, and I drank it.”

“Where did you meet him?”

“Walking over from Seelyham.”

“Did you tell him where to find Jimsy Ridger?”

There was a gurgling laugh. “Now how could I do that? I don’t know myself. But I wanted the money badly enough to make up a good story!”

After depositing the sodden Holcomb at the Marling station, Rutledge went on to The Plough. He felt tired and restless, a man at loose ends. Afraid of his past now, and afraid for his future. He had been very certain he was right in the Shaw case. How many others had he botched, in blind belief that his experience and intuition were infallible? Would he botch this one as well? He felt like getting as drunk as the man on the road. Except that he knew it would not buy peace.

Hamish said, “Judgment is no’ a safe profession.”

“My father said that to me once,” Rutledge remembered as he walked up the stairs toward his room. “He said the law was only as good as the men who devised it and the men who carried out the burden of it.”

He turned down the passage, stopping before his door and staring at it for a moment before opening it. What is there about the Shaw case that isn’t satisfactory? Why have I been digging into the past and doubting everything that was done? He shut the door behind him and walked to the window. It looked down the back garden, bleak in the November darkness, with the stumps of cabbages and the withered leaves of carrots and the ferny yellowed wisps of asparagus. As dead as his spirits tonight.

The answer was not hard to find. When self-doubt awakens, it feeds on itself…

Rutledge said aloud, under his breath, “Shaw was guilty. I know that for a certainty.”

Yet he’d uncovered other possible motives now. It was Pandora’s box, an overturned case where everything that spilled out pointed accusing fingers at him for not seeing them before…

Hamish reminded him, “Mrs. Shaw is a verra’ persuasive woman.”

That was true. The fact that she was unattractive in every sense, and that he had disliked her from the start, had perhaps shaped his view of her and of events. Then and now. But she had aroused such guilt in him-such a fierce doubt of his own abilities-that he was unable to see his earlier actions as clearly as he had done when Philip Nettle’s death had first thrust the affair into his hands.

Rutledge turned away from the window and fumbled for the lamp on the desk, watching the flame bloom and brighten his room. The brass bed gleamed, and the white china of the washstand pitchers reflected a golden light.

With Bowles baying for results, there had been unnatural pressure on the investigating officers. Results, results, results. They had worked nearly around the clock, interviewing, cataloging statements, going back again to ask other questions, trying to sort through the simple lives and the tangled activities of everyone who had had contact with the elderly victims for the previous two years. The dustman, the man who brought the coal, the grocer’s boy who delivered boxes of goods, the butcher’s boy, the woman who came to clean and to cook one meal a day, the man bringing the post, the visitors from charities and churches, nurses who came to see to bedsores or bathe their patients. The chimney sweep-It had been an endless task, sorting through the sheets of closely written notes collected from all the officers assigned to the murders.