A Fearsome Doubt

by Charles Todd

  She was speaking not so much to him as she was to the place of her husband’s death. As if excusing to the shade of Will Taylor what had gone wrong in their fragile postwar relationship.

  It would bring no comfort to Mrs. Taylor to tell her that he’d seen the other side of this coin—hasty romantic weddings, a patriotic fervor, and in the beginning, dozens of love letters that flew back and forth like doves.

  How many men standing watch in the night had cleared their throats and gruffly admitted, “I’m worrit. There’s a difference in her letters noo. I think there’s someone else . . .” Darkness shielding anxious eyes, voices low-pitched.

  “She doesna’ write sae often. And she says she hardly kens what I look like, anymore. But then I have only a wee photograph, mysel’, and she must ha’ changed in two years. I’ve begged her for another, but she canna’ find anyone with a camera. She says . . .” A cough, as if denying the unspoken fear.

  They had sometimes come to him, to beg for leave. Not just the married men, but the single ones who had left someone behind. One soldier had stood there clutching in his hand a scrap of newspaper bearing the photograph of Gladys Cooper, the actress. Pointing to it, he’d said earnestly, “She’s mair real to me noo than Maggie. What am I to do?” Anguish sharpened his face and his eyes had pleaded.

  Where he could, Rutledge tried through channels of his own to find out what had happened to the wives at home. But sometimes the truth was more bitter than the suspicion. And he had concealed that.

  Rutledge said now, “Mrs. Taylor, I think I ought to take you home. It won’t help, standing here in the rain.”

  “Surprisingly, it does,” she told him forlornly. “I feel closer to him here than I do in the churchyard. I was afraid, when Sergeant Burke came to the door, that Will had—” She faltered.

  “Surely the other deaths proved that he wasn’t—didn’t kill himself.”

  Alice Taylor shrugged. “Only Will knows that.” She brushed her wet dark hair out of her face and began to walk slowly to the motorcar. Turning her head once, she looked back at the line of trees. “I wish I didn’t feel guilty. As if I’d driven him to whatever it was happened to him.”

  Rutledge held the door for her and she climbed into the motorcar.

  As he got in after cranking the motor, he said, “Did anyone come to see him before he died? A stranger? A man you didn’t know.”

  She turned to him. “I don’t know, to tell you the truth. Will took to walking out while I was doing up the washing-up after dinner. As if he didn’t have anything left to say to me. Or I to him. One night he came back and asked if I remembered Jimsy Ridger. I said I did, and I was sharp about it. Jimsy was no friend of Will’s. And he said someone was looking for Jimsy, but he’d given the man false directions. He didn’t like his cut.”

  “Those were his words, ‘I didn’t like the cut of him’?”

  She nodded, flicking wet hair out of her face again. In her own way, she was a pretty woman, with such white skin and dark coloring. Welsh, perhaps, or Cornish.

  “What did he mean by that, do you think?”

  “I can’t say. I wasn’t interested in Jimsy Ridger. He was in Will’s company, and I never liked him very much.”

  “Why?”

  “He was something of a scoundrel, Jimsy was. Light-fingered, like. He never stole anything from us, that I know of, but he wasn’t someone I quite trusted. I was afraid he might be hanging about looking for money.”

  “Where is Jimsy Ridger now?”

  She looked out across the wet fields. “In hell, for all I know. He didn’t come back to Kent after the war. He’d been to Paris, and won money at cards. So it was said. Kent wasn’t for the likes of him, after that. But then who knows, with someone like Jimsy?”

  RUTLEDGE TOOK HER to the small cottage she pointed out as hers. It was half-timbered, of a style popular in the late Victorian era. But the plaster between the black beams needed paint and the chimney sagged. She looked up at it.

  “Will was going to find someone to repair the chimney. I suppose that’ll be up to me now.”

  He came around to open the door for her and she stepped down into the wet grass that met the rutted road in an irregular verge.

  “I’ll do my best to find your husband’s killer,” he said.

  She had walked up the muddy walk before she turned. “I don’t know that it matters,” she answered him. “Will didn’t much want to live, anyway. Maybe the murderer did him a favor.”

  MRS. TAYLOR’S VOICE lingered in Rutledge’s mind as he drove down the roads that led out of Marling and toward the nearest villages, then back again, forming a mental map of the ground where the three murders had occurred. As darkness fell, he could see the lights springing up in the windows of farms and cottages off to either side, none of them close enough to matter.

  “They would ha’ been dark again, the occupants in their beds and sleeping soundly,” Hamish said, “when the killing was done. Country folk aren’t likely to keep late hours.”

  Yet someone had.

  He found himself wondering if Mrs. Bartlett and Mrs. Webber had felt as estranged from their husbands as Mrs. Taylor had done. It was hard to believe that one suicide had sparked two more as desperately tired men gave up trying.

  He himself knew the fierce silent urge toward death, when there was no hope left.

  But Hamish, always practical, said, “Where did they buy good wine?”

  That was always the sticking point. The wine.

  He drove in the early dusk toward Marling, his headlamps picking out the overgrown hedgerows and the dark pockets of thick grass between trees that sometimes marched in avenues for a little distance. Vistas that in summer were glorious with a patchwork of green were now brown and dry, and the long sweep of the land had lost much of its charm.

  He was not more than a hundred yards from the first cottage marking the outskirts of the town when he saw someone quickly moving into a clump of trees edging a field. Moving as if afraid to be seen.

  Pulling hard on the brake, Rutledge brought the car to a halt, and got out, running toward the faintly seen outline of a human form. The trees thinned almost at once as he plunged into them, and brought him out into another field. His feet sank heavily into the wet, plowed soil, where the summer’s crop had been turned under for the winter. Cursing, he tried to pick up his pace, but it was useless. Then the figure ahead of him stumbled and fell and swore harshly.

  Rutledge reached him before he could flounder to his feet.

  Hardly a murderer, he thought in disgust as the thick miasma of drunken breath hit him in the face before he could put out a hand to help the man to his feet.

  “Leave me alone!” the man shouted, struggling to shake off his grip. “What’ve I done to you, to chase me off the road, then!”

  He was standing now, a man with dark, sweaty hair and filthy work clothes. Rutledge realized that one shoulder was different from another, saw that the man had a useless left arm. It hung without life, clumsily and straight. Catching Rutledge’s glance, the man clapped his right hand over the shoulder in a protective action that was clearly habit now.

  Rutledge said, “What are you doing out here?” It was the voice of command.

  “Looking for a quiet place to sleep it off. If it’s any concern of yours!”

  “Men ‘sleeping it off’ have been found dead the next morning. Or haven’t you heard?”

  “I’m not drunk enough to die. I’m not drunk enough to stop hurting, either. What’s that to you?” The slurred voice was bellicose. The man stood his ground, with nothing more to say.

  “Come on,” Rutledge said, tired of argument. “I’ll take you to the police station, where you can sleep until you’re sober enough to go home.”

  “I don’t have a home anymore,” the man said, beginning to feel sorry for himself. “She said if I got drunk again, not to come back. But it’s all there is now. Getting drunk.” His hiccup turned into a sob. By the time they’d reac
hed the edge of the first field, the man was on his knees, sick by the base of a tree.

  Rutledge waited impatiently for him to finish and then got him to the motorcar and inside it.

  “Where do you live?” he asked, when they were moving toward Marling. “What’s your name?”

  “Bert Holcomb, if its any of your business. From Seelyham. But if I drink in the pub there, the barmaid goes to my wife. I come here, and tell her I have two days’ work.” He groaned. “That was good beer I lost. I can’t afford no more this week.”

  “What happened to your arm? The war?”

  “Caught it on the wire. Like all the other poor bastards. The doctors saved it, but it’s worthless now. I can’t move it on my own.” He leaned his head against the back of the seat. “God, my mouth tastes something terrible.”

  “Did you know the men who’ve been killed outside of Marling? Taylor, Webber, Bartlett?”

  “We were together through most of the war. Men of Kent. We were proud of that. I’m going to be sick again—!”

  Rutledge brought the motorcar to a swift halt and waited again. When the man crawled back into the vehicle, he groaned wretchedly. “I never could drink the way the others could!” A shudder ran through him.

  “Do you know a man called Jimsy Ridger?”

  The ravaged face turned toward Rutledge. “What do you want to find him for? Good-for-nothing bastard!”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Second person to ask me that today.”

  Rutledge said, “Who was the other person?”

  “I don’t know. He gave me money, and I drank it.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “Walking over from Seelyham.”

  “Did you tell him where to find Jimsy Ridger?”

  There was a gurgling laugh. “Now how could I do that? I don’t know myself. But I wanted the money badly enough to make up a good story!”

  16

  AFTER DEPOSITING THE SODDEN HOLCOMB AT THE MARLING station, Rutledge went on to The Plough. He felt tired and restless, a man at loose ends. Afraid of his past now, and afraid for his future. He had been very certain he was right in the Shaw case. How many others had he botched, in blind belief that his experience and intuition were infallible? Would he botch this one as well? He felt like getting as drunk as the man on the road. Except that he knew it would not buy peace.

  Hamish said, “Judgment is no’ a safe profession.”

  “My father said that to me once,” Rutledge remembered as he walked up the stairs toward his room. “He said the law was only as good as the men who devised it and the men who carried out the burden of it.”

  He turned down the passage, stopping before his door and staring at it for a moment before opening it. What is there about the Shaw case that isn’t satisfactory? Why have I been digging into the past and doubting everything that was done? He shut the door behind him and walked to the window. It looked down the back garden, bleak in the November darkness, with the stumps of cabbages and the withered leaves of carrots and the ferny yellowed wisps of asparagus. As dead as his spirits tonight.

  The answer was not hard to find. When self-doubt awakens, it feeds on itself. . . .

  Rutledge said aloud, under his breath, “Shaw was guilty. I know that for a certainty.”

  Yet he’d uncovered other possible motives now. It was Pandora’s box, an overturned case where everything that spilled out pointed accusing fingers at him for not seeing them before. . . .

  Hamish reminded him, “Mrs. Shaw is a verra’ persuasive woman.”

  That was true. The fact that she was unattractive in every sense, and that he had disliked her from the start, had perhaps shaped his view of her and of events. Then and now. But she had aroused such guilt in him—such a fierce doubt of his own abilities—that he was unable to see his earlier actions as clearly as he had done when Philip Nettle’s death had first thrust the affair into his hands.

  Rutledge turned away from the window and fumbled for the lamp on the desk, watching the flame bloom and brighten his room. The brass bed gleamed, and the white china of the washstand pitchers reflected a golden light.

  With Bowles baying for results, there had been unnatural pressure on the investigating officers. Results, results, results. They had worked nearly around the clock, interviewing, cataloging statements, going back again to ask other questions, trying to sort through the simple lives and the tangled activities of everyone who had had contact with the elderly victims for the previous two years. The dustman, the man who brought the coal, the grocer’s boy who delivered boxes of goods, the butcher’s boy, the woman who came to clean and to cook one meal a day, the man bringing the post, the visitors from charities and churches, nurses who came to see to bedsores or bathe their patients. The chimney sweep—It had been an endless task, sorting through the sheets of closely written notes collected from all the officers assigned to the murders.

  And yet Shaw had slowly emerged, slowly been identified, his life probed, his activities examined, until the timing had damned him.

  He had maintained that when he left, each of the women was still alive.

  But coincidence could be stretched only so far. And Shaw’s way of life had been changed by the small pieces of jewelry and silver frames and bits of flatware that had been sold to men whose own livelihood lay in convenient memory loss and a rapid dispersal of questionable goods to other dealers.

  Not one of them had described Ben Shaw. The man was forty. Young. Graying. Balding. A woman, they thought. Working-class. No better than she should be. Shabbily dressed and poor, but with a posh accent. Hard to trace, these remnants of a dead victim’s life, without help. But one or two had come to light in the windows of small shops, noticed by eagle-eyed young constables eager to make their mark. . . .

  One of those constables had been Janet Cutter’s son by her first marriage. George Peterson. The suicide . . .

  Rutledge paced the floor, his mind absorbed in the past.

  Hamish scolded, “Ye canna’ solve the problem, gnawing at it like an auld dog wi’ a shinbone! There’s work to be done here. You canna’ ignore it!”

  Rutledge recalled Mrs. Taylor’s weary face, and the uncertain future of young Peter Webber.

  Hamish was right. This was not the first time he’d had to juggle cases, when there was heavy pressure for answers. There had been times before the war when he hardly slept at all. And one of those times was the Shaw case.

  Where had that mourning locket spent the last six years?

  He looked at his watch, decided Dowling might still be at his desk. Leaving the room, he ran lightly down the staircase in the main lobby, and strode out the door, turning toward the police station. The evening was beginning to clear, a sharp wind brushing out the rain. Brushing out the cobwebs as well? Hamish wanted to know.

  Inspector Dowling was just turning to walk home. Rutledge called his name and the man stopped, looking around.

  “I’m late for my tea,” he said, “and I’m tired.”

  “Come to the hotel and have dinner with me. I need to talk to you, and this is as good a time as any.”

  Torn between his obligations at home and the chance of a fair meal, Dowling stood there in the street, his face a picture of his struggle. “Yes, all right, then. I’ll meet you at The Plough. I ought to tell my wife I’ll be late.”

  He walked on, and Rutledge retraced his steps to the hotel. Halfway there, he encountered Elizabeth Mayhew on the street.

  “Ian!” she said, startled. “What on earth—”

  “I’m in Marling for the present. Assigned to deal with these murders.”

  “Oh . . .” She bit her lip, as if uncertain what to do, whether to invite him to dine with her—or perhaps to stay at her house for the duration.

  Reading the dismay in her eyes, he said gently, “I’ve a room at the hotel. Come and dine with me one night. But not this evening, I’ve got a meeting with Dowling.”

  “He’s a good man,�
� she said distractedly. “I’d heard they had sent someone down from London. I never dreamed it might be you!”

  “And the puppies. They’re thriving?” It was the first thing that came into his head. Their old easy companionship had evaporated like the evening’s mists, and he felt nearly as awkward as she evidently did.

  “Yes—they’re growing—they’re quite adorable, actually, playful and sleeping less now that their eyes have opened—” She stopped, as if after such an enthusiastic report she felt she ought to invite him to come and see Henrietta’s brood for himself. The silence stretched out, as she searched for something else to say.

  “I mustn’t miss my meeting,” he said. “Will you leave a message at the hotel desk, when you’ll be free for dinner?”

  Relieved, she replied, “Of course. I’m—I’m glad you’re here, Ian. I look forward to dinner—”

  And then she was gone, a quick smile begging for understanding as she went on down the street in the direction of the church.

  He turned to look after her, saddened by the change in their relationship. But if there was someone, a new man in her life, then there would be little room left for Richard’s old friends. And he could appreciate that sea change. If he were courting a young woman whose late husband’s friends were in the picture, their presence would cause a certain degree of unease. Particularly judging whether the widow was yet free of the past, and what his own role would become if she wasn’t. . . .

  But he wasn’t courting Elizabeth. He was watching her fade from his life, a pleasant memory that was no longer his to enjoy.

  Richard, Rutledge said to himself as he turned again and walked on to the hotel, it’s not my place to play dog in the manger. Elizabeth must make her own way.