A Fearsome Doubt

by Charles Todd

  “Do you know what I remembered most about Kent, as a child in India?” she asked Rutledge at one point.

  “That it was green?”

  “No, I remembered the orchards, trees filled with white and pink blossoms, like butterflies, and I remembered the man on stilts with grape leaves on his head.”

  “Good God!”

  “When they do the twiddling—that is, when they’re tying the hop strings from the ground to the wires that run on the wooden framework built above the gardens—there’s a man on stilts who does the high knots. It’s quite a difficult task—the vines as they grow follow those strings, and mustn’t be led astray. And such a man will often wear a hat to keep the sun off his head. This one had found young grape leaves—they’re not unlike hop leaves, you know—and had twisted himself a Bacchus crown, to keep his head cool. We stopped at the hop farm to water the horses, and he came over to the carriage and bent down to peer in at me, making a face because I was tired and cross. I was instantly enchanted. And I wanted to see him again.” She smiled. “I was quite in love. With a man on stilts.”

  “And what did Mr. Crawford, when he arrived on the scene, think of your infatuation?”

  “He was a tall man. I’ve always fancied tall men. That’s your claim to my affection, by the way. And he went to the bazaar in Agra one day and found someone to fashion him a pair of stilts. I was grown up by that time, and knew better than to laugh when he went headfirst into the nasturtiums.”

  Rutledge chuckled, and then sobered. “I think Elizabeth Mayhew has found someone to love.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Crawford said pensively as she poured milk into her tea. “I tried to warn you of that.”

  “I wasn’t in danger of falling in love with her.”

  “No, but you’d put her on a pedestal, you know. Richard’s widow. She’s quite human, like the rest of us.”

  “Who is this man?” He heard the edge in his voice.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been invited to meet him. But I hear from my seamstress that he’s from Northumberland, and quite handsome.”

  “I wasn’t aware that Elizabeth or Richard had friends in Northumberland.”

  “My dear Ian! What does that have to say to anything?” Mrs. Crawford demanded, amused.

  “I meant,” he replied testily, “that it’s likely to be someone she’s met since the war. Since Richard’s death.”

  “Yes, I should expect it is. He was buying a trinket for a lady. A shawl, my seamstress told me. It was described to me in great detail, because it was so lovely. And quite a harmless gift. The very next week, I happened to see Elizabeth wearing that particular shawl. I didn’t ask how she came by it. Occasionally I do remember my manners.” Her lips curved in amusement, but her eyes were no longer smiling. “Nor did she tell me, when I admired it.”

  Hamish spoke up for the first time in an hour. “She’s no’ happy with this match. But she willna’ tell you why . . .”

  They spent the remainder of the meal talking about Mrs. Crawford’s years in India. In the span of her life, the subcontinent had changed enormously. The vast private holding in the hands of the East India Company had collapsed in the Great Indian Mutiny, which had seen such bloody horrors at Cawnpore. The British government had taken over the country after that, and in the course of time, Disraeli had made Queen Victoria Empress of India, equal in majesty to the German Kaiser Wilhelm. Britain had poured civilians and soldiers into the subcontinent since then, and now there were rumblings of a movement for independence.

  “It will come,” Mrs. Crawford said. “In time. But what will happen then is not to be thought of. I’m glad I won’t be here to see it. Civil war is always the bloodiest. And this Mr. Wilson in America has pushed through the self-determination clause he was so bent on having. It will bear bitter fruit, mark me. Well-intentioned people are often blind to the results of their good deeds.”

  Rutledge said, “Germany is broken. And under the heel of heavy war reparations. From what I hear, people are starving in the towns, and there’s no money to buy food or fuel.”

  “Yes. If I were a German, I would get out. Try my luck in Argentina or Chile. Sell up, beg, borrow, or steal the money for my passage, and go.”

  “If the best people leave, how will she rebuild? Or more to the point, how will she be rebuilt? In what form? I think I’d stay and fight.”

  “Of course you would.” She nodded. “And in the end be shot for your pains. Germany isn’t ready for democracy. India is better suited for change than Germany because they’ve learned from us how a country is run. They’d inherit our infrastructure, the railroads and the communications systems, the trained bureaucracy and so on. It’s the religious issue that will tear India apart. In Germany it will be the vacuum of leadership.”

  Hamish said, intrigued, “My ain granny never traveled more than thirty miles in any direction. The glen was her home. She never fancied telling her menfolk how to run the world.”

  Rutledge answered, “Your grandmother never had the opportunities that came this woman’s way.”

  As if she’d been a party to the exchange between Rutledge and Hamish, Mrs. Crawford smiled and added, “Politicians never heed old ladies. It’s more than time we women had the vote and showed them a thing or two.”

  Rutledge laughed. “You’d make a superb prime minister.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she retorted. “Mr. Churchill already has his eye on filling those shoes. Gallipoli was a setback, it’s true, but he won’t languish forgotten for long!”

  AFTER SEEING MRS. Crawford to her motorcar and placing her safely in the hands of her driver, Rutledge went back into the hotel and asked for a telephone. He knew Elizabeth Mayhew was on the exchange, but there was no answer to his call. The operator told him after ten rings, “There appears to be no one at home.”

  But there were servants in the house.

  He found himself worrying about Elizabeth and unable to sleep. As the bells in the clock tower struck the hour of one, Hamish said, “It willna’ matter what you want. It’s her life, and no’ your own.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, as Rutledge stood shaving in front of the framed mirror above his washstand, he began to feel a stirring of intuition as he reviewed what he had seen and heard about the three men who had been killed near Marling. A stirring that was just out of reach in his mind, a pattern that was on the edge of consciousness. He had felt this kind of thing before, when he was working on what seemed at first to be disconnected events and facts. For there was always a key, in murder—a logical progression of circumstance that led to the destruction of another human being.

  He knew what had brought these men out into the night, to walk a lonely road home. It was the wine that was incongruous. How was it offered? And where? Under what pretense? What had happened then? Had the men been left to die on the roadside? Or had the killer watched each die, before abandoning the body? That was a macabre thought. . . .

  Walking down the stairs to his breakfast, Rutledge tried to re-create the scene in his mind. Instead, he found himself intercepted by the elderly desk clerk, who had been standing behind the reception desk as if waiting for someone. For him, it appeared—

  “Good morning, Inspector! There are—um—two persons who asked for you. I’ve put them in the small sitting room.”

  Two persons. Someone, then, not acceptable in the eyes of the hotel staff. Rutledge cast about in his memory. Elizabeth’s servants, perhaps? He remembered she hadn’t been at home last night when Melinda Crawford had telephoned.

  “I’ll see them.”

  He followed the man’s directions to the small sitting room, usually dark and unused at this hour. But watery sunlight poured in now, and the two women sitting on the edges of the chintz-covered chairs by the hearth looked up nervously as he opened the door.

  One of them rose to her feet, her red face tired and drawn. The unbecoming black hat she wore matched the threadbare black coat, giving her an air of poverty and depression. The
younger woman accompanying her stood up more slowly, her eyes anxious as they scanned Rutledge’s face. Her blue coat, ill-fitting in the shoulders, was a slightly different shade from the blue hat she wore with a surprising degree of grace.

  The older woman was Nell Shaw. She had managed to track him down.

  13

  “MRS. SHAW—” RUTLEDGE BEGAN, COMPLETELY UNPREPARED to find Ben Shaw’s widow here in Marling. As out of place in Kent as a blackbird would be in a gilded cage.

  “I went to the Yard yesterday and asked for you. A sergeant—Gibson, his name was—told me you’d gone down to Kent to look into a murder. I thought you was looking into my Ben’s murders!”

  Rutledge said gently, “Mrs. Shaw, I must go where I’m sent—”

  But she interrupted him again. “I’ve traveled all night. Well, nearly. We got a lift on a lorry from Covent Garden, and then from Maidstone came most of the way with a farmer carrying pig meat to the butcher shops hereabouts. And we walked from Helford. Why didn’t you come and tell me you was not in London anymore? We’ve been waiting for word!” Her voice was accusing, on the verge of tears.

  The young woman beside her blushed and looked down at her shoes. Rutledge regarded her. Taller than Mrs. Shaw, with fairer hair and a very fine complexion, she seemed out of place in the older woman’s company.

  Catching the shift in his attention, Mrs. Shaw added, “This is Margaret. Ben’s and my daughter. She’s of an age to be married, and what prospects do you think she’s got, the daughter of a hanged man? It’s not fair to burden her with what they say her father done. A wrong ought to be put right!”

  The flush deepened, and Margaret Shaw bit her lip, as if wishing the floor might open and swallow her.

  Rutledge said, “Sit down, Mrs. Shaw. Miss Shaw. I’ve done my best to look into the earlier investigation, as I promised I would.”

  Seating themselves warily, they regarded him with doubtful eyes.

  “There’s nothing I can point to so far that upholds your belief that your neighbor was somehow involved. There are a number of ways that Mrs. Cutter might have come by the locket—”

  “Name one!” Mrs. Shaw demanded harshly.

  He hesitated. “Your husband may have given it to her.”

  “A mourning pendant? Inscribed for a man she didn’t even know? And his name all over it, and no way of hiding it? You must be right barmy to believe my Ben would have done such a stupid thing!”

  “Yes, I know, Mrs. Shaw. I understand—”

  “You don’t understand! You was like the rest of them, eager to see my Ben hang for what was done to the old ladies. It was easier than digging out the truth!”

  He tried to keep his voice level. “As I told you earlier, there’s no proof,” he said, “that the locket was in your neighbor’s drawer. We have only your word for that.”

  “Oh, yes? Because my husband was hanged, I’m a liar, am I? Well, let me tell you, if it had been in my house all this time, someone would have discovered it! And you searched the very rafters in the attic, didn’t you? Where do you think I might have hidden it away? In the teapot? Among my corsets?”

  The young woman winced. “Mama—”

  “No, I’m being honest, that’s what I’m doing! There’s no one else to speak for us, love, and we can’t sit back politely and hope for the best!”

  “Mrs. Shaw,” Rutledge said, “please listen to me. I must have irrefutable proof in order to ask my superiors to reopen this investigation—”

  She stared at him. “Can you sleep nights, with us on your conscience?” Her voice was hard, angry. “My Ben’s dead, and unjustly so. You gave evidence against him in that courtroom, and might as well have put the noose around his neck with your own hands. I’m telling you he was not guilty, and you tell me that there has to be proof! When God stands in judgment of you, will you tell Him that there was no proof?”

  Hamish stirred into vicious life. “Ye’re burning in Hell already—and no’ just for Ben Shaw!”

  Rutledge said, “Mrs. Shaw, I’m doing what I can within the limits of my power. No, listen to me! I have no authority to open this investigation. Do you understand me? But I have asked questions—”

  “You’ve spoken to Henry Cutter?” It was accusing.

  “Not yet—”

  “Let him tell you that his wife had a stroke after Ben was hanged, and never got out of her bed again! Let him tell you that her own son by her first husband was the constable on one of them streets where the victims lived! And let him tell you that George Peterson left the police force months after the trial and two years later was found drowned in the sea off Lyme Regis, where he’d gone to drink himself blind!”

  There had been nothing in Philip Nettle’s early reports of the Shaw investigation that had linked George Peterson with the Cutters. Nor had much official notice been taken of Peterson’s subsequent death. It had been Peterson’s duty to alert the Yard of any connection and he hadn’t informed anyone. Why?

  Rutledge said, “Are you telling me that this man Peterson could have robbed and suffocated those women, not your husband?”

  He tried to bring back to mind the young constable whose patch it had been. Tall, lanky, quiet. There had been some question around the Yard about his suitability to deal with the stark reality of murder . . . but no question about his family background had arisen. And wouldn’t have, if he’d used his father’s name.

  Hamish said, “There was a lapse—”

  Yes. Philip Nettle, ill and soon to die, had been as careful a man as any on the force, covering every possible aspect of any case. But somehow the constable had never come under suspicion. Never questioned, or it would have appeared in the files. He was the Law, and not investigated, one of the hunters, not the hunted.

  Dear God—how many other oversights had there been?

  Mrs. Shaw was saying, “I only know the one thing, that my husband wasn’t guilty, and we had no way of making anybody listen.”

  “You yourself believed in his guilt. I saw you turn away at the sentencing.”

  Mrs. Shaw sucked in a quick breath, as if the charge had been a physical blow, then said harshly. “You made a believer out of me. Then. I was tired and shocked and I had two children to care for all alone, and I didn’t know what to make of anything Ben said or the barristers said or the judge said. That K.C. with the white hair—he stood there quoting verse and precedents and Latin, like Moses handing down the Ten Commandments. And I couldn’t follow a word of it. All in a voice that would convince a saint that he was a sinner.”

  Matthew Sunderland . . . for whom the law was a lofty profession.

  “But also a pulpit?” Hamish wondered, derisively.

  She looked ill, the strain of her obsession beginning to tell, and the long, tiring journey to Kent. “Don’t you think Constable Peterson would have protected his mother if she was the guilty party?”

  “Mama?” Margaret said, leaning toward her mother almost protectively. “You’re not to distress yourself like this! We’ll manage, we always have.”

  Nell Shaw ignored her, saying instead to Rutledge, “Look at the girl. She’s got her father’s blood in her, the looks and the height and the graces. She deserves better than to languish in some nasty workroom where she’ll be worn out at thirty and no one to care about her when I’m gone. It isn’t right, and you must open your eyes and see what you’re condemning her to!”

  Rutledge said, “Mrs. Shaw—”

  “No, I’m putting it bluntly. When you sent an innocent man to the gallows, you cursed his family, too. Where’s the guilt of that, on your shoulders? Tell me, where’s the guilt?”

  She got up rather clumsily, her swollen feet heavy in her tightly laced shoes. “I’m going back to London where I belong. But if you’re half the man you ought to be, you’ll not sleep until you do something about my Ben. You’ll find out what’s behind this business, and whether there’s any hope for us. But you’d better do it soon. I can’t sleep nights anymore for
thinking over what’s right and wrong. I’d rather end up in the river, and have it all over and done with!”

  She marched to the door, Margaret trailing after her, apologetic and at the same time defensive. The girl cared about her termagant mother, and she was worried.

  “Please, can’t you at least listen?” she seemed to say as she turned, her eyes pleading in place of her voice.

  Rutledge said, “Let me make arrangements for your return—”

  Mrs. Shaw wheeled to face him. “I mayn’t have much else, Inspector, but I have my pride. If you won’t help my Ben, I don’t want your charity!”

  “I will help,” he heard himself saying. “But as one man, I can’t promise that I’ll accomplish miracles.”

  “We aren’t looking for miracles. We’re looking for fairness.”

  She walked away, her head high, her body chunky and compact. Her daughter followed after her, uncertain what to do, uncertain how to help. Watching her, Rutledge was reminded suddenly of her father. Ben Shaw had had that same lost-dog manner, that resigned acceptance of whatever fate had thrown at him, deserved or not. He had been afraid and wary and patient, as the law ground to its foregone conclusion of guilt, and he had not had the spirit to fight on.

  Life—or years of marriage to a woman of a different class and upbringing—had defeated Shaw long before the judgment of the courts. Shaw was one of the victims, not one of the shapers of events. If he had killed those women, he had done it in desperation for the money his family needed. He had accepted the court’s decision with a crushed spirit that didn’t know where to turn for solace. And he had gone to his death a pale shadow of the man he could have been.

  Ben Shaw had never fought. He had never tried to stem the march to the hangman in any way.

  It had been seen as a sign of his guilt. His acceptance of the right of the Law to punish him for what he had done.

  Hamish said, “Aye, a victim.” Then, echoing Mrs. Shaw, he asked, “How will ye sleep with Ben Shaw on your conscience? I canna’ follow you there—but he will.”