A Fearsome Doubt

by Charles Todd

  But the sadness lingered. And a certain unacknowledged responsibility. He remembered what his sister Frances had said: “You’re afraid you are letting Richard down . . .”

  Hamish remarked, “She’s no’ on her way to the altar. Only in the direction of yon kirk.”

  And it was true. Time enough to worry later.

  DOWLING REGARDED THE Plough’s menu like a starving man faced with a banquet.

  Rutledge watched in amusement as the inspector chose very carefully, as if half afraid such an opportunity might not come his way again.

  After they’d ordered, Dowling leaned back in his chair. “Sergeant Burke has told me about Peter Webber. How much faith do you put in what the boy had to say?”

  “I don’t know,” Rutledge answered honestly. “But it’s a place to begin. Tell me, do you know someone called Jimsy Ridger?”

  “Good God, how did you come to hear of him?”

  “Apparently someone has been asking for him.”

  “As in, someone who might be our murderer?”

  As their soup was set before them, Rutledge replied, “It’s hard to judge. But rather a coincidence, don’t you think? Tell me about Ridger.”

  Dowling spooned up the carrot-and-onion soup with great gusto, then said, “He’s not local. Never was. As a boy he came with the hop pickers out of Maidstone, a rough sort of child with a bullying nature and a particularly unclear concept of personal property. There were innumerable complaints about him. The hop pickers often camped or caravaned, you see. There were precious few things worth stealing, but it was easy enough if you saw a man’s pipe you fancied, or a silver bangle forgotten on a bench, even a bit of ribbon for the hair. Most of the adults, and the children who were old enough to work, were too tired to be overly troublesome, but the younger ones, with too much energy and too little guidance, were always skirting trouble. Ridger might have become the ringleader, if he’d been clever enough to go about it in the right way. But he was always out for himself. For our sakes, I was always glad he hadn’t seen his golden opportunity.”

  “He came in the autumn, then, for the picking?”

  “And sometimes the haying before that. Depended on the weather, you see, when one finished and the other began.” He finished his soup with a sigh of satisfaction.

  “At any rate,” Dowling went on, “Ridger was soon off to fairer fields of endeavor. He ran away to London with an older boy, and his mother didn’t have the energy to care. Nothing was ever proved against Ridger. But there was a trail of near misses. Petty theft, some minor forgery, cheating old women out of their savings—the sort of trouble a boy is likely to fall into, running with the wrong crowd.”

  “I’m surprised you followed his career.”

  Dowling grinned. “Hardly that. From time to time I’d be contacted by London when they’d run out of likely places to look for him.”

  “He kept his ties in Kent?”

  “I doubt he cared tuppence for Marling. It was more a case of going to earth when London got too warm for him. One spring he came back to work in the orchards, and after that he moved on to the hop gardens. He disappeared one day and then was back in the autumn with a swollen eye and a cut on his chin deep enough to leave a scar. I suppose he never had a home of his own in the true sense. His mother was a decent enough woman, but she produced children like rabbits and never seemed to know where half of them were. They fell into rivers and out of trees and over walls—we’d clean them up and send them back to her for a scolding.”

  Rutledge said, “Not a vicious man, then, Ridger.”

  Dowling frowned. “No, I’d not call him vicious. On the other hand, Ridger was out for himself. And that sort can sometimes turn violent.”

  “He was in the war?”

  The woman serving tables brought them a platter of roast chicken, and Dowling’s eyes gleamed with hungry relish. He fell to with an apologetic smile.

  After a few mouthfuls, he answered, “He joined the army here in Kent, with the rest of the men hereabouts. He told Sergeant Burke at the time that he felt closer to them than to his friends in London. Or trusted them more, is my guess. Still, Ridger had a wonderful way with him, when it suited him. He could call the birds from the trees, as my grandmother was fond of saying. And from all reports, he was a good soldier. And the best scavenger in the regiment.”

  Rutledge had known more than a few of those himself. A Scot in his company, a man called Campbell, had a knack for disappearing and then coming back hours later with a full haversack. Tins, biscuits, matches, even a cold roast hen with cold potatoes, probably scooped up from some French farmer’s abandoned kitchen. Campbell had found dry socks after a week of rain, and gloves in the middle of winter, and whisky for those too well to go back to aid stations and in too much pain to stand their duty. Officers tried to keep the thievery to a minimum, but what they didn’t see they couldn’t stop.

  “What became of Ridger after the war?” Rutledge asked.

  “He’s back in London, I expect.”

  “Unless he’s gone to earth again,” Hamish suggested, “and someone thinks he’s in Kent . . .”

  The Campbells of this world, excellent scavengers though they were, occasionally forgot the rules and made enemies.

  Dowling ordered a flan for his dessert, and Rutledge settled for a plate of cheese.

  The inspector sighed as he put down his spoon. “I must thank you,” he said with a wry smile. “I feel blissfully content.”

  AFTER DOWLING HAD left the hotel, Rutledge searched for the man who usually served behind the desk. Haskins was his name, and he had just finished his own meal in the kitchen, his napkin still under his chin. He pointed out the telephone, and Rutledge put in a call to London.

  Sergeant Gibson’s gruff voice came over the line. “Yes, sir, you wanted to speak to me?”

  “I’m looking for a man named Jimsy Ridger.” Rutledge gave Gibson a brief sketch of Ridger’s background and history. “He’s probably in London, and he may have returned to his old ways. Or he may have acquired a new name and taken up a more respectable line of work. But someone will know how to find him, even so.”

  Gibson chuckled. “He wouldn’t be the first to turn respectable, and find old friends on his doorstep. Anything else, sir?”

  “He’s a personable man, with a scapegrace way about him when he puts his mind to it.” He added as an afterthought, “He could be passing himself off as an ex-officer rather than a common soldier.”

  Gibson noted it. “Not many of them in the stews of London,” he retorted dryly. “I’ll see what I can come up with, sir. But it will take a little time.”

  Rutledge gave him the number at The Plough and rang off.

  As he walked up the stairs, Hamish said, “Yon Ridger is a wild-goose chase, like as not.”

  “True enough,” Rutledge answered. “In police work, we often close more doors than we open. On the other hand, Will Taylor was killed hours after he was questioned about Ridger. And our drunken friend tonight had been asked about him. I don’t want to find Ridger appearing as our cooked goose in the middle of a trial.”

  THE NIGHT’S DREAMS were a mixture of unsettled thoughts and emotions—the sounds of gunfire in the dark, the flashes of light, the arcing descent of flares, the first finding shots of artillery, and Rutledge was hunched behind the barrier of the trench wall, waiting for a lull to go over the top. The living Hamish was with him, and others long since dead, and he tried to keep up their courage as the minutes wore on. And then he was standing in a twilit Kent road, talking to Alice Taylor, and searching through the hop fields for the boy, Peter Webber. Mrs. Shaw was sitting in the car, a baleful presence, with her daughter weeping in the seat beside her.

  Rutledge woke with a start, his body wet with sweat, his eyes searching the room for something—anything—that was familiar. He had no idea where he was.

  And then the shape of the window and the pale light of a moon feeling its way through the thinning clouds brought hi
m back to The Plough Hotel and the small village of Marling.

  He got up and washed his face.

  Hamish, lurking in the shadows of the room, said something, and Rutledge shook his head. Hamish repeated, “It’s almost dawn.”

  So it was.

  Rutledge said, “The summer dawns came early at the Front. You never liked them.”

  “There was no’ much worth seeing when the light strengthened. Except for the dead, and the wire, and the men coughing with the damp.”

  “Or the gas rolling in.”

  “Aye.” The Highland Scots, used to the open hills, had been good at spotting the telltale sweep of a German gas attack. All their lives they’d seen sea mists, and that particular floating gauze that was ground mist in the valleys. They knew the feel of the air before these blew in. And they knew the different feel of the air before the gas came toward them on still mornings when the wind wouldn’t disperse it too quickly.

  Hamish had often been the first to cry a warning. They had fumbled for their masks, shielding any bare skin, and waited for the attack to pass over them. Anyone too slow, anyone with an ill-kept mask, breathed in the fumes and felt the linings of his throat and lungs burn with a fire that was unforgiving. The damage, once done, lingered for whatever remained of a man’s life.

  Looking back at the past in that odd moment, there was something besides the haunting voice and the haunted man in the quiet, dark room. That bond that held together soldiers over millennia, the shared experience of the devastation of war.

  17

  RETURNING TO BED WAS USELESS; IT WOULDN’T BRING sleep. Rutledge bathed and shaved and then dressed, his mind occupied with murder in this quiet part of Kent.

  Sitting in a chair by the window, he waited patiently for the hotel to rouse from the night, and then went down to breakfast at the appointed time. The dining room was empty, and a yawning girl was just opening the drapes that shut off the view of the street.

  She looked up, smiled, and said, “I expect you’d like your tea.”

  “I’d be grateful,” he said, returning the smile. She blushed and looked away, hurrying to the door that led through to the kitchen.

  As he turned to the window, he saw a man driving a familiar motorcar pulling up at the hotel. The man, too, was familiar.

  It was Tom Brereton, whom he’d met at Lawrence Hamilton’s dinner party. A guest brought by Raleigh and Bella Masters. The man whom Melinda Crawford was thinking of including in her will.

  Brereton came striding into the dining room, and didn’t at first recognize Rutledge. His eyes were on the kitchen door, and when the girl serving tables came through with Rutledge’s tea, he called, “Do you suppose you could manage toast and a pot of that for me as well?”

  She led him to the table just beyond Rutledge’s, and it was then that Brereton peered at the man from London and paused, as if trying to place him.

  Rutledge greeted him by name, and reminded him of the dinner party.

  Brereton nodded. “Yes, that’s right. The policeman from Scotland Yard. What brings you back to Kent? The murders here, I suppose. Do you mind?” He gestured to the other chair at Rutledge’s table.

  “No, please join me.” Brereton nodded to the girl and she went off to fetch his tea.

  “I’m half asleep,” Brereton said, sitting down. “Bella was worried that Raleigh had finished his drops and finally sent one of the servants down to my cottage to ask if I’d mind coming in this morning to ask the doctor for a new supply.”

  “For his pain?”

  Brereton grimaced. “It’s more for his moodiness. They’ve given him a new foot, you know, and it hurts like the devil. Both physically and psychologically. If he could manage it, he’d have his ravaged one back.”

  “I expect that giving up his practice would weigh heavily on a man like Masters.”

  “Yes, that’s probably more true than we know. He lived for the law, and he’s at sixes and sevens now.”

  His tea and a plate of toast arrived, and Brereton added as he poured hot milk into the cup, “I don’t suppose Masters has ever been easy to live with. He’s a remarkably clever man. Nothing else has ever touched him the way the law did, and he’s having trouble filling all those empty hours. Bella fusses, which doesn’t help. But then she’s worried sick about him. They end up aggravating each other to the point of scenes.” He shook his head. “It’s rather sad.”

  “He’s not likely to take up growing vegetable marrows,” Rutledge agreed, smiling. “I’m surprised that he hasn’t thought of writing about his career. At the Hamiltons’ dinner party he spoke warmly of Matthew Sunderland. He must have known or worked with a number of famous men.”

  “Interesting possibility! I ought to drop a hint along those lines. Sunderland was Raleigh’s mentor and his standard. You’d think the man walked on water, the way Raleigh extols his virtues. I wonder if he could be objective—Sunderland made his share of mistakes, from what I’ve heard!”

  Rutledge said, “Did he!”

  “There was a famous case just at the turn of the century. Hushed up, of course, but Sunderland was reportedly too—er—fond of the wife of the man he was prosecuting. There was an odor of vengeance about the proceedings, as if he’d gladly see the man punished not for the alleged crime but for marrying the woman Sunderland had fancied for himself. Naturally I’ve never asked Raleigh if there was another side of the story.”

  “Where did you hear this?”

  “It was during the war, I had taken a train back to hospital after leave, and I found myself seated with an elderly barrister. We talked about the law for most of the journey. And he made a comment about the famous Mr. Sunderland having feet of clay. Apparently there was a lampoon that showed the Q.C.—as he was then!—as David, sending Bathsheba’s husband not to the forefront of battle but to prison for life. In any event the jury decided otherwise, for whatever reasons, and it was one of the few cases that Sunderland ever lost.”

  Hamish added dryly, “I canna’ see him taking a fancy to yon harridan.”

  “I saw Sunderland in top form during the Shaw trial. He was impressive.”

  “Shaw? Oh, yes, the man hanged for murdering women in their beds. It was another trial that created a good deal of publicity. Sunderland died within the year, I think.” Brereton smiled wryly. “Bella tells me Raleigh all but went into a decline.”

  “There was no suggestion of illness or impairment in the courtroom.”

  “According to Raleigh, it was a sudden death. Sunderland’s heart simply stopped. He was sitting at his desk dictating letters to his clerk, and between one word and the next, he was gone.” Brereton took out his watch and peered at it intently, as if having trouble reading it. “Another half hour before the doctor’s likely to be up!” He put the watch away carefully. “The truth is, the man you saw at the dinner party is a far cry from what he once was. Raleigh has lost the edge that made him a superb barrister. He probably wishes he could die as swiftly as Sunderland did. In all likelihood, he won’t live out the winter.”

  “It’s sad to watch a man deteriorate,” Rutledge agreed.

  “It’s Bella I worry about. She’s going to wear herself into illness if she isn’t careful. And he doesn’t seem to notice. Or to care.”

  “There’s a self-centeredness in dying,” Rutledge pointed out.

  Brereton looked up at him. “So there is in blindness, too. The difference is in age. And perspective. I’ve still much of my life ahead of me, and I don’t fancy spending it tapping along the pavement with a cane!” He said restively, “I must go. Bella—Mrs. Masters—will be anxious. I may be able to persuade Dr. Pugh to let me in.”

  He stood and looked around for the girl who had served him, then went to the kitchen door to call to her. After settling his account, he came back to the table. “I live in the cottage just down the road from the Masterses’ house. If you find yourself in the neighborhood, stop and have a drink with me.”

  Rutledge thanked him and,
after Brereton had gone, finished his own tea. But it was still too early to call on Elizabeth Mayhew, and when the serving girl came back to clear the table, he ordered his usual breakfast.

  By that time the other guests in the hotel began to arrive, and the room took on new life as voices filled the spaces. He sat by the window, watching the street come to life as well, as carts moved among the shops, bringing in chickens and cabbages and beets and loaves of bread fresh from the bakery. A small cart filled with baskets of apples rolled past, the farmer’s cheeks as round and red as his wares, his bald pate gleaming in the first rays of the late-rising sun. Through the glass, Rutledge could hear the clock in the church tower strike the hour faintly. Brereton, driving out of Marling, was hunched over the wheel, intent on avoiding an accident.

  How had Brereton felt about the murdered ex-soldiers? Rutledge wondered. Had he understood their suffering better than most, and felt the irony of their death in a peaceful country finished with war? Or had he secretly envied them their quiet and painless end?

  Hamish said, “He isna’ blind yet. Ask him in five years.”

  Which was more to the point.

  His breakfast finished, Rutledge set out to do what had been on his mind since dawn.

  Elizabeth Mayhew was surprised to see him at this hour, but he apologized with the reminder that he was in Marling on Yard business.

  “You’ve lived here since well before the war,” he said as he followed her into the small reception room off the entry hall. “Do you remember hearing of a Jimsy Ridger?”

  She frowned. “The name isn’t familiar at all. Richard would have known. He knew better than most what went on. He had deep roots here. People talked to him, confided in him.” She looked around her at the comfortable room, her home since her marriage. “I’m considering selling up. There are no children to inherit. I might as well let the house go to someone who can keep it as Richard would have wished.”