Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

The scene, violent and shocking, was vivid in Rutledge’s mind.

Masters took a deep, shuddering breath. “I suspected. I didn’t know. But I suspected-”

“It was a practice for death.”

“Yes. She thought-God forgive her-she thought that it would be easier, when they removed the rest of my leg, just to end it. But she wasn’t sure how to go about that. It took her two attempts before she got the mixture right. The first man, Taylor, was hours dying-she told me this afternoon. It must have been dreadful to watch. And I had a nurse-she dared not risk arousing the woman’s suspicions by making me unexpectedly ill. Webber was easier, but to make absolutely certain, she tried again. Bartlett, that was. She chose men who were suffering. As I was. Not someone who was healthy-until Brereton. But there was his blindness, you see. It would have masked the real reason for killing him.”

He stopped.

Hamish demanded, “Do you believe him then?”

Rutledge silently answered him. “I’ll see what his wife has to say first. If she’s coherent. Please God, Dr. Pugh is still at Brereton’s cottage!”

“Aye.”

As the motorcar drew up in front of the house, Rutledge asked Masters, “Where are the servants? Is someone with her?”

“They were given the day off, early on. She didn’t want them to see her walking down the drive to Brereton’s cottage. Since Porter-our chauffeur-was gone as well, I had to drive myself there. Which meant I had to put on this damned false foot! And even so it was unbelievably difficult.”

Raleigh refused help getting out of the car. His heel rang heavily against the metal frame as he tried to manage the long step to the ground. Swearing, he stood there grimacing against the pain, and then walked steadily up to the door of the house.

In the light from the hall, shining through the narrow lancet windows by the door, Rutledge could see Masters’s hands clearly for the first time. They were cut and bruised, where he had tried to stave off blows. His face was bloody from a head wound that was still oozing from under his hat and dripping down his temple to soak into his torn collar. A slit cheek had swollen grotesquely.

Acknowledging his stare, Masters said impassively, “She used my cane. She took it from me and broke my grip with it, when I tried to hold her.”

Rutledge said again, “Where is she?”

“Go on,” he replied wearily. “Go in and see your handiwork. I wish to God you’d never set foot in Kent! ”

He slumped against the doorframe, his back to the house, looking ready to drop. There was no color in his skin, except for the ugly streaks of blood. But he watched with venomously cold eyes as Rutledge opened and stepped through the door.

“’Ware!” Hamish warned.

The staircase ran up the center of the hall as it always had. The glass cases of Venetian splendor stood where they had always stood. A beautiful room, lighted with candles and lamps.

But as he looked up, Rutledge could see, swinging slowly from a carefully fashioned noose, the dead body of Bella Masters. She had used the upper balustrade as her gallows, and was hanging free in the stairwell. Her face, shielded by her disheveled hair, was turned away from him, but her neck was broken. The angle of her head seemed obscenely coquettish.

“Murderers hang…” The words ran through his mind like an epitaph.

It shook him as few things ever had.

For several minutes he stood there, Hamish silent at his shoulder, simply looking up, watching the pendulumlike motion of Raleigh Masters’s wife.

Aloud, he asked, “Did you do this?” It was hard to keep the anger out of his voice.

“No. While I was at Brereton’s, trying to collect my wits, she came back here. She did what she had to do.” Then he said with difficulty, “My enemies would have enjoyed prosecuting her.”

“Did she want you dead so very much?”

“I don’t think it was that. It was just that she knew me so very well, and she was terrified, at the end, that it would be up to her-deciding when it would happen. And so she tried to accustom herself to death, and perfect the means of death. She didn’t want me to suffer. Instead, she suffered for me…”

His voice broke. Masters added after a moment, “It wasn’t pity. I don’t think it was pity. In her own way, she saw it as love.” But there was doubt behind the tentative words.

He pushed himself away from the wall and started to walk awkwardly toward the motorcar. “For God’s sake, shut this door and leave her. For tonight. Take me somewhere where no one knows me.”

“I can’t. I must report this.”

“Take me to Melinda Crawford, then. While they do what must be done here.”

Rutledge forced himself to look away from Bella Masters. The sight was already seared in his mind.

This was how Ben Shaw had looked. And so many others… But without the terrible indignity of the hangman and the warden and the witnesses.

“I’m sorry.” It was all he could find to say. He wasn’t certain whether the apology was to Bella Masters, or her husband. He walked out of the hall, and closed the door behind him.

Masters said, “It doesn’t matter, you know. The doctor told me the last time I was in London that the infection is moving quite rapidly. I won’t live to see Christmas, even if they cut off my leg. It’s taken hold, the gangrene.”

“Brereton told me you were improved-”

“He wasn’t in the room during the consultation. And I lied to him afterward. I didn’t want Bella to travel to London with me, you see. I didn’t want Bella to know the truth. Not yet. Not until I’d made peace with it myself. I was afraid.”

Rutledge, grateful for the blessed darkness of the drive, asked, “Why didn’t you stop her? If you knew what was happening, in God’s name, why did you let it continue! ”

Raleigh Masters turned to face him across the bonnet of the motorcar. “I didn’t know in the beginning, not until Webber was already dead. The second victim. She came up late to bed that night, smelling of wine-depressed, on the verge of tears. And then-suddenly I didn’t want to know. I didn’t have the courage. I told myself the time might come when I would be glad to drink wine by the fire and go to sleep forever. But the time has come, you see. And it’s too late. She was right. I could never kill myself.”

He opened the passenger door. “If there’s any mercy left in you, get me out of here!”

But the lights from the hall seemed to pursue them down the drive until the trees finally blotted them out. And still they blazed brightly behind each man’s eyes.