Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

He was reaching for the next folder when a young constable tapped at his door and stepped aside to usher in a florid-faced, middle-aged woman in a dowdy black coat and a black hat that did not become her.

“A Mrs. Shaw to see you, sir! She says you’d know who she is.”

The woman stared at Rutledge, her heavy features twisting into a mask of pain. Tears began to trickle down her face, ravaging it.

Rutledge nodded to the constable as the man hesitated before closing the door. It swung shut with a click.

“Please, sit down, Mrs. Shaw,” he said gently as he strove to find her name in his memory. But there were no Shaws in the files he’d been reviewing, and as far as he could recall, no Shaws who had served under him in France. She watched him from behind her tears, waiting for the first stir of recognition.

Before the war, then?

And it came back to him as she sank heavily into her chair.

She was the widow of a man he’d sent to the gallows. Shaw… Ben Shaw. Convicted of murdering elderly women and robbing them. He had been trusted: a man-of-all-work who came on call to do the small and necessary repairs that aging and ill householders couldn’t manage. And when they didn’t die soon enough to suit him, he’d eased their going with a pillow, and then ransacked their meager possessions for anything of value. Alone in the world and bedridden, they had had no chance against him.

One of the newspapers had written a sensational account of the scene as imagined by one of their journalists: “He came boldly to the bed, speaking kindly, offering to plump the flat and lumpy pillows for them, as he must have done a hundred-nay, a thousand times!-and as they smiled gratefully, he slipped the pillow over their faces before that smile could be replaced by horror, and held it there firmly against their weak-futile-attempts to prevent him. And when the pale, flaccid arms fell back to his victims’ sides, he had lifted each graying head, slipped the pillow gently back beneath it, and closed the bulging eyes before walking back down the stairs and shutting the door behind him, leaving the pathetic corpse for a cleaning woman to discover in the morning…”

Inflammatory as it was, it had drawn a reprimand from the judge as he charged the jury and bade them ignore the overwrought misconceptions of a writer paid to stir up the public sentiment.

Rutledge, pushing the recollection aside, wondered what had brought her here, to the Yard. It was as unexpected as a resurrection. “You wished to see me, Mrs. Shaw? What can I do to help you?”

“Turn back the clock,” she answered tremulously. “But there’s no one can do that, is there?” She began to cry in earnest.

As a young policeman, he’d dreaded having to speak to friends and relatives of victims, dreaded the tears that seemed to fall without conscious will, a flood that made him feel exceedingly helpless. How do you offer comfort, where there is none? Experience had not taught him an answer.

Rutledge was silent, allowing Mrs. Shaw a space in which to recover, and then said with compassion, “No one knows a way to do that.”

It was, he thought, a prelude to a piteous account of life as the widow of a hanged man, followed by an entreaty for money to pay her rent. She must be in dire straits, to come to the police for help. He tried to recall the name of the clergyman he’d met while investigating the case. It would be in the files. Surely the parish must offer some provisions for the Mrs. Shaws of this world-she needn’t be reduced to begging!

She surprised him.

“Turn back the clock to that trial,” she said baldly, staring fiercely at him, “and this time find some way of bringing out the truth!”

Caught utterly off guard, Rutledge found himself fumbling for words. “I don’t quite understand-”

“The truth who it was killed them, the old ladies.” She began to dig in the purse she carried with her, and pulled out a small handkerchief. Unfolding it on the edge of his desk, she added triumphantly, “That’s your proof, right here! It won’t bring my Ben back, nothing will, but it should clear his name!”

Inside the square of cheap cloth was a locket without its chain. In the center was the face of a man in profile, carved in onyx from what Rutledge could see of it, against a pearl-gray background. A lacework of black-enameled laurel leaves framed it. She opened the locket for him next: inside lay a delicately braided coil of graying chestnut hair, protected by a crystal cover.

She watched him as he studied it, guarding it against any intent on his part to take it from her, turning it in her rough hands with the delicacy of a merchant exhibiting his wares.

It was mourning jewelry, worn to remind the wearer of a loved one.

“May I?” he asked. She nodded, and showed him the reverse.

And on the back of the locket were several lines engraved in the gold case: Frederick Andrew Satterthwaite, loving husband, d. April 2, 1900.

Satterthwaite had been the name of one of Shaw’s victims.

“He couldn’t sell it, could he?” Mrs. Shaw was demanding. “Not with that inscription on the back of it! Anybody would have known at once where it come from. What surprises me was that he kept it at all. But I suppose he couldn’t think what to do with it. And it’s pretty, in a morbid way. That’s gold it’s set in.” A red finger with a chewed nail pointed at the setting, tapping it.

Rutledge rather thought she was right, on both counts. This was indeed a piece of jewelry that would have marked the possessor as a thief and murderer.

And it hadn’t been found in Ben Shaw’s possession-to his, Rutledge’s, certain knowledge. It had never come to light at all, and only a distant cousin’s memory of the locket had seen it included in the inevitable inventory of Mrs. Satterthwaite’s belongings. “One mourning locket, bearing name of deceased’s husband, and date of his death, set in gold, onyx profile. Missing.”

The investigating officer, Inspector Nettle-Rutledge had not been the first on the scene-had written in his notes the query “Very likely thrown into the river?”

“How did you find it?” Rutledge asked, leaning back in his chair. The locket was too difficult to fake-too expensive, for one thing. And for what purpose? “More to the point, where had your husband hidden it?”

“God save us, no!” she replied in a harsh, frustrated voice. “If he had, would I bring it to you? Now? To what end-I ask you, what good would it do?”

“Perhaps to put your mind at ease, in regard to your husband’s guilt?”

“I told you, the truth comes out with this, and too late to save Ben! No, this I took from my neighbor’s house yesterday. Henry Cutter, his name is. The old bitch, his wife, died last month, and he couldn’t bear to go through her clothes and such. Finally he asked me. And I found this in the back of the chest where she kept her corsets and drawers. Folded in that handkerchief.” The stubby finger stabbed at a bit of color in one corner. “See, it’s embroidered: JAC- for Janet Ann Cutter. And what I want from you, Inspector, is to find out what it was doing in her chest, and how it got there! I want to know if Henry Cutter stole it from a dead woman! And if my poor husband is innocent, I want you to clear his name. Do you hear me? My children deserve that-to have the shame taken away-even if you can’t bring Ben back to us!”

Hamish said, “It isna’ a small thing she wants.”

Her small, bright eyes glared balefully at Rutledge, as if he’d hanged her husband with his own hands. Which, in a way perhaps, he had. He’d been the investigating officer, after Philip Nettle had dropped dead of a burst appendix. It was his evidence, built on Nettle’s original investigation, that had put Benjamin Edward Shaw on trial for murder, in August 1912. Six years and more ago…