A Fearsome Doubt ir-6

by Charles Todd

  And Hamish was right. Men who had stood shoulder to shoulder in the terrifying bombardments, leaning against the slick mud of the trench walls as they waited for the signal to go over the top, were as close as brothers. What passed between them was kept to themselves, and they looked out for each other. The Scots under Rutledge were as feuding a lot as he’d ever come across in civilian life, but they’d close ranks before an officer, turning bland faces his way and swearing that all was well.

  Admirable in some ways, this silence, and infuriating in others.

  It could well turn out to be deadly now.

  Grimes was saying, “I’ve asked about strangers as well. Not one of these men has seen someone hanging about.”

  “There was a boy who came down with the hop pickers. A Jimsy Ridger. Has someone from their ranks been searching for him?” Rutledge asked. “Ridger might not be viewed as a stranger if they’d served with him.”

  “If there was, no one spoke up. I recall Ridger, as a matter of fact. An unlikely lad to settle down to a decent living. To my knowledge, he hasn’t been around since the war ended a year ago.” Grimes picked up the thread of his discussion. “But the women, now, they’re a different story. And that’s where we were heading when you walked through the door. If you want to come along, I’d ask only that you let me do the talking.”

  Taking acceptance of the invitation for granted, Grimes got heavily to his feet, and Dowling said diffidently, “Ought I to wait here? Too much officialdom-”

  “No, you might as well hear what’s said.”

  The three men walked briskly in the direction of the brick cottages that stood in a cluster where the High Street ran into the Marling Road. For the most part the homes were well kept, sedate with white curtains at the windows and pots of flowers set in the sunny doorways.

  “Mrs. Parker lives here,” Grimes was saying, indicating one of them. “You can see how that pair of windows in the front room overlooks the street.” He tapped lightly on the door, and stood back.

  An elderly woman opened it a crack and peered out at them. “Now, then, Mrs. Parker,” Grimes said with gruff affability, “I’ve brought Mr. Dowling and Mr. Rutledge here to listen to what you told me you saw the other night. If you’d not mind repeating it for us.”

  She was swathed in shawls, stooped and breathing with noticeable difficulty. She didn’t offer to invite her visitors in; she stood her ground in the doorway, clutching the frame and the edge of the door as if to support herself. A brief gust of wind stirred her thin gray hair and she stepped back into the shelter of the entry. She spoke to them from there, like a frail ghost of the woman she must once have been, her large frame shrunken with illness and age.

  “I don’t rest of a night, as you know very well, Bill Grimes! I sit by my windows”-a gnarled finger pointed out the one he’d indicated earlier-“and sleep in my chair when I sleep at all. It was last Tuesday night, I think it was. There was someone walking by, and I leaned forward to tap on the glass.”

  “Did you know who it was?”

  “Well, I thought I did. I thought it was Tommy Jacobs, and one of the twins had taken ill.”

  “And was it?”

  She glared at him. “You know very well it wasn’t. You went straight to his door after you left here, and asked him yourself!”

  “I know, Mrs. Parker,” Grimes answered patiently. “But these gentlemen don’t.”

  “If it’ud been Tommy, he’d have stopped and told me what he was doing out at that hour. Instead he crossed the road there, head down, and hurried off, as if he hadn’t heard me.”

  “And how would you describe him?”

  She pressed her lips together, trying for breath. “He looked like Tommy Jacobs,” she said after a moment. “Tall. Good shoulders. He had on a heavy coat and his hat. It was cold that night. That’s all I saw.”

  “I’ll let you step in out of the wind, then, Mrs. Parker. Kind of you to talk to us, I appreciate it.” Grimes tipped his hat again.

  She looked from him to Dowling, then to Rutledge. “I’ve seen him before,” she said, indicating the inspector from Marling. “But not him. ”

  “Mr. Rutledge has come down from London,” Grimes informed her.

  She gave Rutledge a toothless grin, her bright blue eyes suddenly dancing. “From London, is it? Mr. Parker was from London. I always fancied London men!”

  With that she shut her door firmly, and left them standing on the street.

  “Do you believe her?” Rutledge asked Grimes.

  “I think I do. She’s not well, but her eyesight is keen enough, and so is her mind.”

  Dowling said, “Her windows are near enough to the street for a clear look at the man.”

  They considered the story for a moment longer before walking on.

  “If her testimony was the only one we had, I’d be more chary of taking it seriously,” Grimes said. “The next woman in a way corroborates what Mrs. Parker saw. But before we walk on, notice the direction of the church from here.”

  Rutledge and Dowling turned to observe that the church was closer into town.

  “Now, look down there, the house set back from the road in the trees.”

  It was on the outskirts of Seelyham, a good fifty yards away, and rather finer than the cottages. Rutledge thought it might have been at one time a Dower House, judging by the low brick wall in front and a handsome portico.

  Grimes set off with determination, explaining as he went.

  “Miss Judson and her father live in that house. It’s called The Swallows, and it’s too far off the road to see who’s coming and going. But that same Tuesday night, Miss Judson went out to fetch the rector to her father. He isn’t well, and sometimes he takes a bad turn and wants to make his peace with God. She does what she can to keep his spirits up.”

  Rutledge said, “They live together, then.”

  “Oh, yes. Miss Judson is what you might describe as a mature lady. I’d guess Mr. Judson is well past his three score years and ten.”

  They had reached the property and were walking up the drive when a woman with a dog came out of the house, went down the stone steps, and stopped to stare at them with interest before moving in their direction.

  “Inspector Grimes,” she said, nodding to Dowling and Rutledge. A tall, angular woman in her forties, with clear gray eyes and a no-nonsense manner, she waited with composure for Grimes to explain himself.

  “I’ve brought Inspector Dowling from Marling to speak with you, and Inspector Rutledge, from London. I’d like them to hear what you told me.”

  Frowning, Miss Judson said, “You attach more importance to it than I do.”

  “I daresay we do,” Grimes agreed affably. “But in police work, it’s the small things that sometimes loom large in the end.”

  She faced the other two men and explained in her abrupt fashion, “I had gone to fetch the rector to my father. As I walked down the drive and turned toward the rectory, I passed a man coming out of Seelyham. It was late, and I didn’t expect to find anyone else on the road. I nodded as I passed him, and went on to knock on Mr. Sawyers’s door. When the two of us walked back, the man was nowhere to be seen.”

  “Did you recognize him?” Rutledge asked.

  “Indeed not.”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “Well enough to be a gentleman. Certainly not shabby enough to be a beggar, even though he was on foot. We’re the last house, you see, and I thought perhaps he might have been staying at The Arms and couldn’t sleep. I suggested as much to Inspector Grimes, here.”

  “Could you see his face or judge his coloring?”

  She smiled. “There was no moon, Inspector-Rutledge, is it? I wouldn’t know him again if he came to tea. Except that he had a good bearing. I thought perhaps he’d been in the war.”

  They thanked her and took their leave. As Grimes walked back to the main road he told them, “I asked at The Arms. There was no one who might have taken it in his head to try the air we
ll after midnight. Two ladies visiting a cousin, and a pair of travelers too drunk after their dinner to have made it down the stairs again without breaking their necks.”

  “Then we have a man walking out of Seelyham on a Tuesday night. No one was murdered on a Tuesday,” Rutledge pointed out.

  “But there was on a Saturday,” Grimes reminded him. “And here’s the other bit of the puzzle. Another woman was walking through the churchyard around nine o’clock Saturday evening. She was coming home from sitting up with a child with croup. Rounding the corner by the church she walked straight into a man coming out of the bushes. He was living rough, she thought, and she didn’t care for that. She walked on, and came to find me. But by the time I reached the churchyard, he’d taken the hint and moved on.”

  “She spoke to him?”

  Grimes laughed. “Miss Whelkin would ask the devil who he was roasting over the fires of hell. If we’d sent her to fight the Kaiser, the war would have been over in two years.”

  Rutledge smiled. Such women were the bane of ordinary villagers, and the delight of policemen.

  “She stopped stock-still and wanted to know if he was waiting for someone. There’s a young girl here in Seelyham who is no better than she ought to be, and Miss Whelkin was of the opinion the man was loitering for a chance to meet her. She asked him outright, and he answered that he’d come a long way and was tired. He’d fallen asleep when he went into the church to pray. She was fairly certain he was from Cornwall.”

  “Has she visited Cornwall?”

  “My guess is that she hasn’t,” Grimes replied sourly. “But she swore he could pass for Tristan. Whoever he might be when he’s at home.”

  Rutledge, who had been studying the churchyard, turned to look sharply at Grimes.

  Tristan…

  His first thought was the opera. But he doubted Miss Whelkin had ever set foot in a London theater. She was not likely, from Grimes’s description, to be a lover of foreign works.

  “How old is she, this Miss Whelkin?”

  “Fifty-five if she’s a day,” Grimes declared. “Her father was schoolmaster here for most of her life.”

  “Then she’d have known the Idylls of the King- ” Tennyson’s romantic series of poems about Arthur and his Court. They had brought the Round Table knights back into fashion, and all things Gothic. Tristan…

  Grimes’s face cleared. “Tennyson,” he nodded, recalling his school days. “I had to learn a good bit of his poems by heart.”

  Dowling was talking to Grimes, and Rutledge shut out their voices as he dredged his memory. There had been a painting just before the war, very popular with Londoners. C. Tarrant’s portrait of a young, fair man on a narrow, grubby back street of a Midlands town, staring up at an aeroplane overhead. Ignoring the signs of poverty all around him, the young man’s eyes were fixed in wonder on the miracle of flying. Earthbound, he longed for the skies. Like a Grail Knight blind to the misery of the world in his vainglorious search for the miraculous Cup. And the artist had called it Tristan.

  There had been two schools of thought on the intent of the portrait, and much had been written about it. The show had been a triumph. Much later, Rutledge had met the man who might have posed for that knightly figure…

  Miss Whelkin would probably have agreed with the artist about the depiction of Tristan. There had been reproductions of the painting in bookshops, and she might even have seen one of them. But why had she connected that Tristan with a stranger from Cornwall?

  Hamish said, “You canna’ be sure she did!”

  Rutledge said aloud, “I think we ought to speak to Miss Whelkin.”

  “You’ll have to come back, then. She’s off to her sister’s in Canterbury for the week. Miss Whelkin visits her every November, like clockwork. They don’t get on together. It’s a trial for both of them. But she’s bent and determined to do her duty by her kin.”

  Dowling wistfully suggested luncheon at the hotel before returning to Marling, but Rutledge still had to address the problem of Nell Shaw’s daughter. Grimes and Dowling set off toward the police station, where Dowling had left his bicycle, and Rutledge walked on to the Seelyham Arms.

  Margaret Shaw had managed to reach Marling on her own, but it was necessary to find her safe transportation back to London. With promises that he would not forget her mother and would visit her as soon as possible, Rutledge handed her into the carriage of an elderly and respectable greengrocer driving to London to see his dentist. He also gave her fare for a cab to take her across the river from Charing Cross.

  There was trepidation in her face as she asked, “But what must I do about Mama? I can’t go home and tell her there’s nothing new, and watch her worry herself into one of her blinding headaches! She’ll be fit to be tied, if I come back empty-handed!”

  Rutledge said, “Did she send you to me?”

  The girl shook her head. “No, but she’d want to know where I’ve been and who I saw. She’s that strict! I’ll have to tell her-if I lie, she catches me out, and it’s all the worse. Last night she sat on the side of my bed and told me she was at her wit’s end. She had that pinched look about her eyes, as if the lamp was too bright.” She stared around her at the village of Seelyham, her gaze wandering to the stone church tower, green with moss, and the hummocky ground of the ancient churchyard. “Do you believe Papa killed those women? Truly believe it?”

  As her eyes swung back to his face, she read the uncertainty there before he could control the doubt that had plagued him since the day her mother had walked back into his life.

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe,” he said wearily.

  The key to this muddle was very likely the stroke Janet Cutter had had shortly after Shaw’s sentencing-and shortly after her son’s suicide, come to that. But which piece of news had destroyed her? If the truth were known…

  “Did you know George Peterson?” he asked then.

  Margaret was surprised. “Hardly at all. He was grown up when I was a child, and I was rather afraid of him.”

  “Because he was older?”

  As if digging into her memory, she answered slowly, “He was a policeman, and Mama would threaten to call him to come and take us away if we were naughty.”

  It was a common enough threat-in many households, the police had replaced the devil as a deterrent to bad behavior. Rutledge smiled.

  Following her own train of thought, Margaret Shaw said, “I don’t know why Mrs. Cutter cared for Papa. He was whimsical. And I think she must have liked that.”

  “How did Henry Cutter behave toward your mother?”

  “Oh, he was always asking her advice. I think he admired Mama’s strength, and Papa liked Mrs. Cutter’s softness. She reminded him of growing up somewhere else, not Sansom Street. It was almost as if they’d all married the wrong people. I don’t expect to wed,” she added with a candidness that was a measure of her own lost childhood. “There’s too much heartache. It seldom comes out right!”

  Rutledge drove inspector Dowling back to Marling. Halfway there the inspector began, “We don’t see many murders in this part of the country. Not like some of the towns, where there’s an uncertain element. Maidstone, for instance. Or Rochester. Dover sees more trouble, being a port where all kinds mix. The last murder in Marling was just before the war, a son who killed his father before the old fool could marry again and change his will. I understand that kind of violence. The son felt he was being cheated out of his inheritance, and the father was bent on having a pretty young wife. She knew a good thing when she saw it, and if there was blame anywhere, it lay at her door. She was greedy, not to put too fine a point on it. She saw the father could give her more than the son. Without her stirring up the pair of them, that farmer would be alive today. But the courts can’t take such behavior into account. If they could, a jury would have hanged her along with the dead man’s son.”

  It was, in some ways, the story of the Shaws. A wife wanting what she couldn’t have…

  Rutle
dge said, “It’s straightforward, at least. I once had an investigation that hinged on a lamp. Where it had actually been placed before the crime. Through a window the murderer had seen something in the room that triggered an explosive anger, jealous anger. But only because the lamp’s light illuminated it in that position. Once the lamp was moved, we saw nothing out of the ordinary. There was nothing to give her away.”

  Dowling glanced at Rutledge. “Where’s our lamp, then?” he asked. “I understand what you’re saying, but I can’t apply it to our situation.”

  “The roads,” Rutledge answered. “Each of the dead men had a family at home. Other eyes to see whatever transpired. It put the men out of reach, in a sense. But they were always accessible along the road. The question is, what drew each of these victims into the killer’s net? Circumstance? Opportunity? Or trickery?”

  Dowling turned his head to consider the road behind them. They had nearly reached the trees where one of the victims had been discovered. Taylor. The first…

  “It can’t be theft,” the inspector said, ticking off the possibilities on his fingers. “These three had little worth stealing. No one stole what they did have. And no one stands to gain from their deaths, as far as I can tell. The murders took place on different roads, different nights. That’s a vote for opportunity, not circumstance. They had the war in common, of course.”

  “And there’s Jimsy Ridger,” Rutledge said.

  “If someone was looking for Jimsy, he wouldn’t have to kill a man to ask where to find him.”

  “He might kill a man he thought would warn Ridger.”

  “Then I think it’s time we found out where Ridger is, and what he knows about this business.”

  18

  In the event, neither Dowling nor Rutledge had to search far for the missing Jimsy Ridger.

  Sergeant Gibson had left a message at The Plough. It read, “In regard to the man you want: he’s not in London. Rumor has it he’s dead. My guess is that he’s in hiding. No one is prepared to say where.”