Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

“Why did he choose Kent?”

“The better climate. That’s what he told me. I daresay now he’s made his money, he’d like to enjoy spending it. And no doubt there’s a desire to put some little distance between himself and his roots, if he’s looking to set up as a gentleman.” Meade seemed to run out of virtues to extol and looked out the window at the busy street.

“How often has Aldrich traveled to Kent?”

“Most of our negotiations have been by letter, through his bankers. He came one weekend at the end of October, to view the property I had described. I’d actually offered him two or three possible choices, but he seemed to be in no doubt about the kind of house he wanted. It explains his success, I should think. Knowing what he wants.”

“How did he make his fortune?”

“I haven’t-er-felt free to ask him. He’s a very private person, actually. He did tell me once that the war had treated him well, and from that I assumed he’d been in manufacturing of one sort or another. That’s where most of the money was made.”

Aldrich wasn’t the first to make a fortune from the war. But even Meade seemed to feel uncomfortable with that. He added, almost as an afterthought, “It’s no bad thing for Marling, to have fresh blood coming in.” As if in apology for his own eagerness to conclude this sale. “A widower, of course-”

Hamish observed, as Rutledge finished his questions and rose to go, “Yon Aldrich will be good company for Raleigh Masters, when there’s no one left to dine wi’ him.”

Rutledge smothered a smile.

There had been no time to consider lunch, and Rutledge had bought a pork pie and apples at a small shop on the High Street before calling on Mr. Meade. He finished the apples as he made his way back to the scenes of the killings, drawn by reasons he couldn’t explain.

The roads were quiet at this hour of the day, and clouds were building to the east, over the Downs, threatening yet more rain. A cold wind had blown up as he came to the line of trees where Will Taylor had died, and he reached for his coat as he left his car.

What was there about these stretches of country roads, out of sight of witnesses, that had invited murder?

Rutledge had always depended on intuition, on a sense of what was there beneath the surface, unplumbable unless the mind was open to receive whatever swam up from the depths and into the light. He had no way to describe his intuition; he had never really questioned it. But something was there. Not on command-intuition was never amenable to conscious will. It simply responded in its own fashion, with an unexpected knowledge.

He walked the length of the line of trees, and tried to feel some response that would help him understand the terrible thing that had happened here. But nothing came, no small whisper of knowledge or breath of emotion. It was as if these trees, older than he was, open to the wind and elements, to time and space and seasons, had nothing to offer him except mute witness.

Here a man died. We don’t know why Smiling wryly at his morbid imagination, he went back to the motorcar and turned toward the other two scenes.

Hamish, always at his shoulder, unseen but never mute, had nothing to say, his mood dark.

Rutledge stood at the place where Kenny Webber had died, and listened to the soft soughing of the wind in the bare trees. He was standing so still that a small meadow mouse crept out of the high grass to stare at him before scurrying off to safer ground.

There was nothing, Rutledge told himself, that fitted any particular theory well enough to support it.

But the Shaw case had been much the same…

No clues to the killer of women who had little to steal but whose pitiful treasures had offered a poorer man hope. It had been sheer accident that the police had stumbled on the name of a man-of-all-work who had come to help and ended up killing.

Would it be the same thing here? Would these two cases, seemingly so similar to a man tormented by the past, end up with the wrong suspect hanged?

He shivered at the thought, and turned back to the motorcar.

And Hamish, the practical Scot, whose family tree boasted feuding clansmen through centuries of bloody warfare, insisted, “It isna’ the same in the light. It isna’ the same… The murders happened at night.”

Rutledge stopped in his tracks.

And he was walking here in the light, where everything was different.

Even on the battlefield, the night had been different from the day. You could see what was coming in the daylight. You could prepare yourself for defense or attack. At night, sounds seemed to roll in from nowhere; movement was hidden and stealthy. A wind jangling the wire, a man coughing, the unexpected stirring of the rats-nerves, raw and alert, jumped like live things, and eyes watered with trying to pierce the darkness for the first sign of anything that could kill.

Rutledge said, “It’s true,” and bent to crank the motorcar, his mind already busy.

In the country it was not uncommon for people to walk long distances. There were few means of transportation as available as shank’s mare. And a good many of the horses kept for carriages or riding had been swallowed up by the war, to die dragging heavy artillery or wagons in the mud of France, work many of them were not accustomed to. Bicycles were a common means of getting about in the country-clerics used them, police constables, boys delivering groceries and housewives pedaling into the villages to market.

A bicycle, then, for a man unaccustomed to country distances…

And he thought he knew where to find one.

Rutledge walked through the hotel doors and turned toward the dining room, in search of a cup of tea.

The man behind the desk said, “Inspector? There’s a letter for you. It came in the morning post.”

He turned back, and the man limped around the desk to meet him halfway.

Glancing at it, he couldn’t place the writing. It was rounded, curlicued, as if the owner had been at great effort to conceal his or her normal hand.

Going through the dining room door, he tore open the envelope and unfolded the letter.

It had come from Mrs. Shaw.

This woman, he thought tiredly, would haunt him like the husband he’d sent to a doubtful death.

Dear Mr. Rutledge,

I am hoping you are making some progress in the matter of my husband’s innocence. I cannot think why you have not come to see Henry Cutter and look for the chain to the locket that is still lying in Mrs. Cutter’s chest, where I left it. The locket is proof that someone besides my Ben killed those women, and I don’t know why it is taking so long to bring the truth to light! My heart is breaking with the weight of my worry, and yet nothing is happening to help my family recover from this terrible burden. You mustn’t let us down! We are counting on you to save us. It is poor recompense for not being able to bring my Ben back to life, but it will give my children a chance to live properly when the stigma is removed from our name. I do not want to die of hard work and hopelessness. It must be God who rectifies the wrong done to my poor husband, but you have it in your power to give something back to me and mine.

Your trusting servant, Nell Shaw.

Rutledge swore under his breath.

She was a master at touching him on the raw. She seemed to see into his soul and find the most certain way of stirring up guilt and mistrust of his own judgment. She had brought her daughter with her, she had come on swollen feet to hunt him down, and she held over his head like the sword of Damocles the knowledge that he may well have failed her and her children.

And yet he was beginning to see, too, the will that must have driven Ben Shaw to murder, to satisfy the needs that this woman had felt were rightfully hers. Middle-aged and far from attractive, Nell Shaw still had a power that was intransigent and unyielding.