Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

And yet Henry Cutter had admired her strength…

He read the letter again. She pleaded as well as any K.C., he thought bitterly, her abilities wasted by her station in life and her limited opportunities.

But was she telling the truth?

He didn’t know. Nell Shaw believed it. And that was all that mattered to her.

Rutledge slept for four hours. Rousing himself at the end of that allotted time with the internal clock that more than one soldier had taught himself to use-when a lighted match to see the face of a watch spelled death from a waiting sniper or machine-gunner-he dressed in dark clothes and pulled a heavy black sweater over his head. Lacing his boots, he went through a mental checklist. Satisfied that he was ready, he descended the back stairs and slipped out to the hotel yard.

The night porter kept his bicycle there, and from casual observation Rutledge had noted that it arrived at the same time every evening, departing at the same time every morning. In between it was never moved.

Availing himself of it, Rutledge tested the tires and the brakes, and then, reassured that it would serve him well enough, mounted it and rode out into the quiet High Street.

It was a little after ten-thirty by the clock in the church tower as Rutledge looked up at the Cavalier on his plinth, pleased to see that the face was shadowed by the broad-brimmed hat, and the bronze was lackluster in the pale light of the stars. The heavier clouds had blown through as he slept, leaving behind wet roads, a colder wind, and clearing skies.

He pedaled steadily, without haste, a nondescript man on a nondescript bicycle, head down as if tired and looking forward to home and his bed. On the outskirts of Marling he turned toward Seelyham, his eyes already accustomed to the dim light and his ears picking up the night noises: the bark of a fox, off in the fields, an owl calling his mate from the deep shadows close to the trunk of a spreading oak, the whisper of wind through the autumn grasses and the dead stalks of summer. His tires made a rhythm of their own, soft and sibilant, never intrusive.

When he had reached Seelyham, he turned at the crossroads for Helford, a lone traveler with no company except his own. From time to time he whistled, not for his own sake, but to throw off any suspicion that he was himself the elusive murderer. The last thing he wanted, as Hamish had warned, was someone mistaking him for a killer and trying to get in the first blow.

Hamish, unhappy over the heavy shadows and fading moonlight, was wary, as watchful as he had been leaning against the trench walls in France. He’d had a keen eye for movement, while their best shot had stood at his side, with his rifle ready to fire where his corporal pointed. But there was no one here with a rifle, no one to stand guard.

Rutledge had once loved the night. He had been at home in the open spaces of the Downs or the dales of Yorkshire or the valleys of Wales. Like many Englishmen of his time, he had found walking a means of reaching out-of-the-way places where he was completely alone, open to the sounds and smells and mysterious moods of a land inhabited over centuries stretching back in time. Self-sufficient and capable of protecting himself if need be, he had never thought twice about the dangers or the loneliness. Neither superstitious nor overly fanciful, he had felt safe in the dark, however strange the place, however far from civilized society it might lie.

This, after all, was England…

France had taught him a different kind of night. With star shells and artillery fire and snipers and dread of the first faint glow of morning when the gas came over. Night didn’t cloak; it concealed, and death lay in the blackness of a shell hole or behind the blasted trunk of a tree. Death came out of the night as often as it came out of the day, but in the night it could break a man’s nerve.

Such memories were only just beginning to fade a little. The space of a year had taken the edge off the tension and the watchfulness but had failed to put them behind him. The year had given Rutledge back the ability to sleep through a night, and to look people in the eye without wondering what they could read in his face. But Hamish was still there. His uncertainties were still there. And unexpected shocks still threw him into the chaos of self-doubt, an awareness of the changes that had not yet come. Might never come.

Hamish reminded him of the Roman candles at the Guy Fawkes bonfire, and Rutledge winced at the memory. It was stupid to react irrationally to fireworks. And yet fear and its blood-brother, self-preservation, were so deeply buried in the very marrow of a soldier’s bones for so long that they were hard to root out. To start at sounds and sudden movement, to act primitively and quickly, was the difference between living and dying. Even when he had wanted so badly to die, the body-and bloody luck-had taken the choice out of his hands.

Fear and courage-and boredom. The three faces of battle.

Rutledge threw off the past and concentrated on the night. But there was no one abroad, not on the roads he had chosen to take.

He paused from time to time, standing astride his bicycle and listening. Feeling the darkness, feeling the loneliness. The three men killed here were at home on these roads; they knew them intimately. And this familiarity was their shield-as well as their gravest peril. They considered themselves to be safe-and so they would be vulnerable, unsuspecting.

A farmer passed with a sick calf in the back of his cart, calling to Rutledge with the cautious voice of a man who was worried about strangers on the road, after three murders. Rutledge answered him, saying, “Far to go?”

“My son’s a better cowman than I am. He’s willing to try his hand at saving her.”

“Good luck, then.”

“Thank’ee. I may have need of luck before the night’s done.” The farmer spoke to his horse and, before he was out of sight, turned down a narrow lane toward the distant shapes of a barn and a house.

Rutledge rode on, already beginning to think he was on a wild-goose chase and needed good fortune himself. But now he knew that whoever stopped these men had been considered by each victim to be “safe…”

With Hamish carrying on a conversation in the back of his mind, Rutledge reached Helford and then turned back toward Marling. The muscles in his legs were beginning to complain about the unaccustomed exercise, and he ignored them.

This part of Kent was vast enough that three roads hardly touched the sum of choices that he could have made. Still, Rutledge had passed all three murder scenes, waiting for his senses to be tweaked, for something in the quiet night to speak to him, but there were only the foxes and owls and once a hunting cat, frozen in a tense crouch as he came upon her. With a twitch of her tail, she had jumped into the tall grass and vanished. Dogs barked at his passage, desultory and without ferocity, as if merely doing their duty.

The wind had picked up, cold knives cutting through his sweater.

A motorcar was ahead of him for a short distance, turning off into a side lane that Rutledge hadn’t noticed before. On the map it had appeared to go nowhere, down to a wooded stream and up the hill beyond to a field. He pedaled on, staying with the main roads rather than break off from his triangular sweep.

In the end he came back to Marling empty-handed. Tonight there was nothing in the darkness that wanted to be found…

He would have to try again.

Rutledge secured the night porter’s bicycle where he had found it, and wearily made his way to the back door of the hotel. It was still unlocked, just as he had left it hours earlier. So much for the night porter’s rounds. The man would most likely be asleep somewhere warm and quiet.