Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

“What letter?”

“I never saw it. But after she read it, she cried for hours. Then she came out of her room and was herself again.”

“A letter your father had written?”

She frowned. “I don’t see how it could be. It only came this autumn. But I overheard her tell Mr. Cutter that a cousin was dying. She said, ‘Everyone is gone. There’s no one left.’?”

“And what has been your feeling all these years? About your father’s guilt?” he asked quietly, without judgment.

She shook her head. “I never cared whether Papa was guilty or not. It didn’t matter. When they took him away, I wept all night. I hated the police, I hated you. He was my father- I didn’t know how we were to get along without him! And indeed, it’s been the hardest thing we’ve ever had to face. Nobody understands!”

Hamish said, “She would ha’ been at an age where she doted on him.”

It was true. Rutledge recalled the stricken, white-faced child standing in the doorway, staring up at her father, waiting for him to tell her it was all a mistake, that he’d be home by the morning. And Shaw had looked at her, pain in his eyes, and said nothing.

The boy, her brother Ben, had been belligerent, beating his fists against the young constable escorting his father, crying out to let him go, he’d done nothing. But the girl had been unable to speak, crushed by events, not even coming forward to kiss her father as he turned a last time on the road and looked back at her.

“It’s important to realize that your mother may be wrong. That she’s going to be disappointed,” Rutledge began, slowing in the wake of a lorry. “I know she’s desperate and afraid and clinging to hope. But what if there is none? So far I’ve found nothing, no real proof to support her belief that this new evidence-”

“That’s no’ true!” Hamish thundered. “It’s no’ the truth!”

Rutledge silently defended himself. “I will not give her false hope! It won’t help her mother, and it won’t serve her!” he said adamantly. “Nothing is black and white-it’s more often shades of gray!”

Hamish replied defiantly, “Aye, so you say!” His upbringing in a barren, harsh land, compounded by his rigid faith, had always set out the lines of battle cleanly. One faced and dealt with life, and if necessary, with death. It was what had led him to refuse a direct order in the field, this stubborn, suicidal belief that compromise was unacceptable. Hedged in by exhaustion and disgust and grief, he had had nowhere to go. And so had chosen execution rather than lead even one more man to his death in the teeth of the German guns…

“-evidence,” Rutledge went on, overriding the protest, “is sufficient to satisfy either the police or the Home Office that this file should be reopened.”

“But there’s the locket! Mama says you haven’t spoken to anyone-that you’ve come here about other murders, and forgotten us.” The girl bit her lip again, and turned to look out at the fields. “Mama says-” She broke off as her voice quivered. Pride forbade her to cry in his presence.

“I know what your mother says,” he told her, more gently. “And I have spoken to people who remember your father and his trial.”

“And nobody wished to help,” she said forlornly. “I’m not surprised.”

“Who else could have killed those women?”

There was a long silence.

He hadn’t expected an answer. He said, finally, “I can understand why your mother took the locket from that drawer-it was human nature, it was vindication, and she didn’t think beyond that possibility. Still, Mrs. Cutter is dead. We can’t question her about how it came into her possession.”

“But I don’t think Mrs. Cutter intended to harm Papa, when she told the police about the change in our circumstances. I think when George-that was Mrs. Cutter’s son from her first marriage-told her about the murders, she saw a way to make trouble for Mama. Because she wanted Papa to come to her for help.”

“Your father worked in the victims’ houses, not your mother.”

“But Mama was always after Papa to ask pay for what he did. And he wouldn’t hear of it. Mrs. Cutter told me one afternoon that Mama would go round to the houses herself and say that we were desperate for whatever they could spare. Mrs. Cutter told me that Mama would ask to be remembered in their wills, if the old ladies couldn’t pay much.”

Nothing in the original testimony suggested that Mrs. Shaw had had any contact with the victims. Was this the truth? Or a fabrication?

“How did Mrs. Cutter know these things?”

“I don’t know. I was afraid to ask her!”

Her son George?

“Did you ever speak to your parents about her accusations?”

Margaret shook her head vigorously. “Oh, no. It was shameful to think of Mama begging.”

Which might have scuttled Janet Cutter’s intentions.

He drove with only half his mind on the road. It would be easy to believe that Mrs. Cutter had simply used the killings to her own advantage-except for that locket. The locket put an entirely different complexion on the interactions between the Shaws and the Cutters. Would Janet Cutter have asked her son George to bring her a small token, some property of the dead that she could use in her persecution of Nell Shaw? And instead the police had taken her literally and investigated the husband, not the wife! She’d have buried the locket away, then, for fear it would condemn the wrong Shaw Mistaking his silence, Margaret Shaw turned to face Rutledge. “It will break Mama’s heart if you fail her. I don’t know what I’m to do then! Mama has always been that strong! How will my brother and I survive without her?” Her voice ended in a wail that made him flinch.

Rutledge swore to himself. He mustn’t-he couldn’t-afford to find himself entangled in the emotional turmoil of the Shaw family. His objectivity slipped with every encounter. The locket was damning-but where had it come from? That was the crux of his dilemma.

Where had the locket spent the last six years?

It couldn’t have been in the possession of Janet Cutter’s dead son. Unless he’d sent it to her in a final and desperate need to justify his suicide “It would be a tidy answer,” Hamish interjected sourly.

The whole case was revolving around Janet Cutter. And she was dead…

Rutledge said, “Your mother means well, Margaret, but she’s living under the delusion that the police and a jury and a judge were wrong in their findings. And that doesn’t happen very often-”

“That’s what Mama said to us-‘It doesn’t happen very often-but they wronged your father, and they wronged me, and they wronged you-’ Mama was there in the courtroom. She could see that a jury believes what the lawyers tell them. What the police tell them. But Papa never said a word in his own defense. Who gave his side?”

The defense had put up the best arguments it could. But the most damning evidence had been Shaw’s refusal to deny his guilt when the police had questioned him.

Hamish said, “If Mrs. Cutter had told him what she told the lass, and he believed her lies-”

“-he would have taken his wife’s place in the dock, for the sake of the children…” Rutledge completed the thought.

Miss Shaw was silent for a long breath. Then she said stoutly, “I never liked Mrs. Cutter. There was a slyness about her. She’d be very kind, offering tea cakes or hair ribbons. And then once I was lulled into accepting, she’d begin to pick and pry. She’d ask about my parents, about my father. I didn’t know how to stop her, or turn the questions. It was like being pinned, the way insects were in a museum display I saw once-”

“What sort of questions?”

“What Papa and Mama talked about together. If they had arguments. What my father had given my mother on her birthday. It was as if she couldn’t bear for them to be happy together.”