Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

To order the Shaw file brought to his office on the heels of a visit by Mrs. Shaw would ring alarm bells at the Yard. Old Bowels would hear about it before the day was out, and send someone down the passage to ferret out what was going on. Hanged felons were finished business. Even if Mrs. Shaw found a hundred new pieces of evidence.

The Yard, like the Army, demanded obedience and rigorously followed the chain of command.

“Aye, it’s as guid an excuse as any,” Hamish taunted, “for doing nothing.”

“Or a damned good reason for exercising caution,” Rutledge countered, getting up from his chair.

He went himself to the vast cavern where records were kept and, after some hunting among dusty cabinets, located the folder he was after.

With his office door shut, and no one but Hamish to observe him, Rutledge opened the file and began to read.

At the end of it, he sat back in his chair and watched the reflection of pale November light from his windows as it played across the ugly walls.

The sheets of paper and notes and conclusions that had been meticulously written seemed-in the light of Mrs. Shaw’s discovery-to lack conviction now. And yet in 1912, they had rung with truth No one had questioned one Henry Cutter, or his wife-except in regard to the comings and goings of Ben Shaw, his reputation in the neighborhood, and whether he was capable of killing anyone. The residents on either side of the Shaw house had had very little to say about their neighbor. They hadn’t seen suspicious goings-on and they hadn’t noticed any changes in Ben Shaw’s manner after the first murder or the last.

Mrs. Cutter-her given name was Janet-had unexpectedly provided one important clue. The two Shaw children had been taken out of the local school and put into better ones, a small private school for the son, and an academy for the daughter. An inheritance, Mrs. Shaw had claimed, from Shaw’s late uncle. Records turned up no such inheritance-the uncle had died in debt twenty years before, leaving his young son no choice but to emigrate. It was not long before Inspector Nettle was digging deeper into Ben Shaw’s sudden financial windfall.

This had been the point on which the evidence had turned. The Shaws had been a struggling family until just after the first body was found. A Mrs. Winslow. Many of her belongings had been unaccounted for, but it was believed at the time of her death that most of these had been sold to enable her to continue to live independently in her own home. It was not until the second murder, of Mrs. Satterthwaite, that the police had begun to draw a wider net and stumbled on the Shaws. It was the third murder that had concentrated attention on Ben Shaw’s activities on the three nights in question.

Especially after Mrs. Cutter had provided the most important reason to concentrate there. But no one had wondered why she was so cooperative…

Could it have been to her advantage?

A shocking thought. That he could have sent an innocent man to the gallows on the basis of a woman’s perverted evidence. Rutledge closed his eyes against the pale light, looking back instead into the darkness of the past.

He had been so sure of his evidence and Nettle’s. So thoroughly convinced of the man’s guilt was he that his certainty was palpable in the courtroom. A well-thought-out investigation, the judge had applauded in his summation to the jury. For there had been no reason to connect the Cutters with the three women. Certainly, no evidence in that direction!

What could have been Henry Cutter’s motive for murder? His style of living hadn’t altered, but the Shaws’ had.

After the sudden death of Inspector Nettle, Rutledge had interviewed the neighbors again, including Henry and Janet Cutter. Nettle had been in increasingly severe pain for several days, covering it with wry humor and massive doses of cathartics. He often scrawled his notes in a shaking hand that was hard to follow. Rutledge had left nothing to chance. He had backtracked to substantiate each fact.

Mrs. Cutter had not had kind words to say for Mrs. Shaw (“a nosy and overbearing woman with few saving graces”), but she claimed that Mr. Shaw had never demonstrated any vicious tendencies that would account for his killing elderly women. “Kind to animals, and all that,” she’d said to Rutledge, bewildered. “A good father, too, and he put up with that wife of his when no one else would. Always after him to do better with his life, provide for his family. It doesn’t seem right that the smallest sign of wickedness didn’t show in his face or his ways! How are we to know, I ask you, if there’s no sign to warn us?”

And then she had added, almost as an afterthought, that last damning sentence. “And he did provide for his children. It hasn’t been six months since they were put in better schools, never mind the cost!” She had repeated it for Rutledge’s edification. “Not six months!”

The first murder had occurred just seven months before…

Henry Cutter had described Ben Shaw as a man clever with his hands, always called on by his neighbors when something failed to work. “And I’ve never known him to take a ha’penny for what he done. Never saw him drunk, nor known him to strike his wife. It seems queer that he’d kill helpless old ladies for what he could scavenge in their houses…”

“What he could scavenge” had been over a hundred pounds’ worth of jewelry and small, portable treasures that could, in the right quarter, be sold without questions asked.

But Henry Cutter, in the notes, had called Mrs. Shaw a kind and loving wife, “and Ben would have done anything for her, he cared that much for her.”

Kill and steal to give her the kind of life she goaded him into providing? Rutledge had, at the time, wondered if Mrs. Shaw wasn’t equally guilty for hounding her husband to desperate measures to keep her satisfied. But there was no law in English jurisprudence to cover that crime, even if she had.

Certainly their house had shown an influx of money that their combined income-his as a carpenter and hers as a shopkeeper’s assistant-couldn’t explain. But there were the small jobs that Ben Shaw did, for it seemed that he did charge when his services were sought by those well able to pay. He had never kept an accounting of what he’d earned in that fashion. His wife had probably spent most of it on clothes for the children, better schools, and certainly better food than their neighbors enjoyed.

Someone had told Rutledge-a neighbor two houses away-that she’d heard that Ben Shaw had come from better stock than his wife, who “had pulled him down, if you want the truth. Common, she is,” determined though she was to give her children opportunities to rise above their station. “I’ll say that for Nell Shaw, she never tried to hold either of them back, on her own account!”

Rutledge would have put his money on Mrs. Shaw as the killer, if there had been the slimmest chance of that. He hadn’t liked her, for one thing, and he’d felt some sympathy for her husband after enduring her sharp tongue in the early stages of the investigation. Nell Shaw had been angry, defending her family like an enraged tigress, accusing the police of failing at their own duty and having nothing better to do than badger a poor man into night terrors.

But neither Rutledge nor Nettle had ever fully explored the background of the neighbors-what opportunities they might have had to meet the three dead women, what reasons they might have had to commit murder. There was no evidence at all that pointed in their direction, even though Henry Cutter’s wife seemed to know more about the victims than Mrs. Shaw had. She had read about them in the newspapers… so she claimed.

Instead he had focused on two facts: that Ben Shaw was often in the homes of the deceased. And that after he was charged, Ben Shaw had all but admitted he was the murderer.