A Fearsome Doubt ir-6

by Charles Todd

  Hamish was roaring in his ears, telling him that Masters had seen through him and he had nowhere to turn.

  But Rutledge responded with courtesy, “As you were not a party to the trial, sir, I’m afraid I must rely on the opinion of others.”

  Before his host could frame a retort, Mrs. Crawford was on her feet. “ Raleigh! You are not only rude, you are very drunk.” She turned to the maid standing stricken behind Mrs. Masters’s chair. “Will you summon my driver, please? I am leaving. Bella, I must tell you that I will not dine with you again until your husband has apologized to me and everyone present.”

  Bella, her voice trembling, said, “Mrs. Crawford-Melinda-”

  But her husband’s voice cut across hers. He was standing now also. Something in Mrs. Crawford’s face had finally penetrated the alcoholic haze and touched him.

  Or else he had fired all the salvos he’d intended.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I beg forgiveness for my behavior. If you will excuse me, I shall retire. Mr. Rutledge, you have been a gracious and pleasant guest in my home. I don’t know what possessed me to attack you, but you must put it down to my intemperance.”

  Raleigh bowed, retrieved his cane, and walked steadily from the room, closing the door softly behind him. Rutledge had the feeling that he was very nearly sober…

  Bella was almost in tears. “I don’t know what to say-” she began.

  Melinda Crawford replied briskly, “It’s better if you say nothing. There is never any defense for rudeness.” She signaled to the maid. “I think we’re ready for our tea, if you please. And I believe the gentlemen will join us in the sitting room tonight.”

  She nodded to Elizabeth and Brereton, then said to Rutledge, “You behaved with generosity. My father would have commended you for keeping your temper. But I will tell you that the man who insulted you is not the man I have known for some years. Now, we shall put this behind us and have our tea!”

  With a sweep of her skirts, she ushered the still-trembling Bella toward her own sitting room, with Elizabeth at her heels. Brereton said, following them with Rutledge, “It’s true. He isn’t the same man. But that hardly changes anything-”

  Rutledge, still seething with anger, smiled and said, “I am a policeman, you know. It must be the first opportunity he has had to break bread with one. And it marks a dramatic change in his circumstances.”

  “All the same-” Brereton began, and then went on, “I would have believed Raleigh Masters was guilty of murder before I would have believed what has become of him.”

  He stumbled, catching his foot on the edge of the carpet in the hall, and swore. The loss of his eyesight, Rutledge realized, must be worse than Brereton admitted, even to himself.

  They drank their tea dutifully, and kept the conversation bright and reasonably unforced. When a proper length of time had passed to do so gracefully, the guests took their leave and left.

  Rutledge’s last glimpse of Bella Masters’s face as she closed the door herself on her departing guests caught the mask of civility slipping and a black despair behind it.

  Elizabeth said, as they reached the road to Marling, “I was never so appalled in my life! Raleigh has been unbearable-but never insulting.”

  “Don’t think about it,” Rutledge told her. “He will have to make amends to his wife, now. She’ll be hard pressed to find any dinner guest willing to put up with his temper.”

  “I don’t think it’s temper,” Elizabeth responded, considering it. “It’s something else. I don’t know… death creeping up.”

  “Enough to make any man despair,” Rutledge agreed.

  But Hamish was saying from the rear seat, “I willna’ believe it. It’s no’ death. Nor the wasting. Something else.”

  Rutledge tended to agree with him, and returned to the possibility that Chief Superintendent Bowles knew Masters-it wasn’t unlikely-and had dropped a hint of some sort. But that didn’t make sense, either.

  Elizabeth was finishing a remark that he’d missed, ending with “-I shall have to invite Bella to tea. Without Raleigh. To let her know I’m not blaming her for her husband’s behavior. She’s never quite known how to cope with his moods, you know, but she adores him. There isn’t anything she wouldn’t do for him.”

  He was reminded of what Margaret Shaw had said about marriage-that it seldom works out the way it ought to. “What is the medicine he takes in that glass? Laudanum?”

  “I suspect it is. For pain initially, of course, but it helps with his-moods.”

  Or created them?

  Elizabeth sighed. “Why do so many people hurt each other?”

  He had no answer to that question. And in the silence that followed he remembered the conversation about the house in Marling that had been sold to a wealthy merchant. “Tell me about the man you saw. At the train station in Helford.”

  “There’s really nothing more to tell. He was exceedingly well dressed; you could almost smell expensive tailors. But his voice was overloud, and it grated. New money. That was my first thought.”

  “Describe him physically.”

  “I’m not sure I can. It was a nasty evening, and he was wearing a heavy coat and a hat. My guess is that he was fair.” She looked across at him. “Tallish, I’d say, but not as tall as you. A bit on the heavy side, perhaps, but with the coat it was difficult to tell. He came rushing into the waiting room, spoke to the stationmaster, and then went out again. I’d been standing inside, out of the weather, but Richard’s motorcar was waiting by the gate. He must have seen it! And so I turned away, for fear he might ask if I was driving in the direction of Marling.” She smiled ruefully. “He seemed to be the sort who might be -encroaching. ”

  It was inbred in an Englishman’s nature, this dread that someone casually met might brashly overstep the unwritten rules of acceptable behavior. It was, perhaps, at the root of Raleigh Masters’s abhorrence of a policeman in his house…

  A visit to the stationmaster then, tomorrow morning, to follow up on this man Elizabeth Mayhew had seen.

  They had reached Elizabeth’s house and she was thanking him for driving her. He saw her to her door, and then turned to go.

  She called, “Ian.”

  He turned again. “Yes?”

  But whatever it was she was planning to say, she changed her mind. It was visible in her face, however much she tried to hide it. “Perhaps we can have lunch one day. While you’re here.” Brightly spoken.

  “I’d like that,” he said. And watched the door close quietly before walking back to his motorcar.

  The lobby of The Plough was empty when he came through, a night lamp burning by the desk and another by the stairs. But when he opened the door to his room, he found a sheet of paper slipped under it. One of the staff had taken a telephone message for him.

  It was from Sergeant Gibson. In regard to the person you’d inquired about. He made it home from France and then ended up in the river. There’s a grave to prove it in Maidstone.

  So much for tracking down Jimsy Ridger, Rutledge thought, as he shut his door and began to take off his coat. Yet someone was combing the countryside trying to run the man to earth. Someone without Sergeant Gibson’s resources-someone who hadn’t discovered the Maidstone grave.

  But why was this same person killing men?

  “You canna’ know it’s the same man doing the killing,” Hamish reminded him.

  “That’s true,” Rutledge said, answering aloud from old habit when he was alone. The voice seemed so real then that he could almost hear it echoing around the walls.

  Helford was a small village, with a tall spired church and a churchyard set behind a low stone wall that boasted the remains of wildflowers in the crevices, a pretty sight in the spring. The main street wound down a hill, houses and shops spread on either side of it, before curving away in the direction of Marling. The railway station sat on the northern outskirts, as if added as an afterthought. Which it had been, Helford itself predating the train by some four hundred or mo
re years. Hop gardens and farms encircled the town, picturesque in the brightening morning light. Several very nice old houses faced the main street, one of them pedimented and the other boasting an elegant bay window. There had been money here, and an air of gentility lingered. The Tudor gatehouse of a sizeable manor house lay at the bottom of the hill, tall and graceful, with a battlemented facade and an assortment of shields announcing the proud heritage of the family within. Its aged stone church lay just up the hill, green lawns and half-buried tombstones visible beyond its wall.

  After a courtesy call on Inspector Cawly, Rutledge went in search of the stationmaster.

  The man was still at his breakfast.

  “The next train isn’t due for another hour,” he told Rutledge when he’d been tracked down to a cottage not far away. “You can wait at the station, if you like. It’s open!”

  Rutledge explained his interest in a traveler who had arrived from the coast one evening at the end of October, during a rainstorm. “He’s not a local man. He was looking for transportation to Marling,” he added.

  The stationmaster, idly stroking his graying Edwardian beard, stared at the floor. “Heavy rain, was it? We had only one passenger on the nine-forty from the south, and the ten-ten was late by two minutes coming in from London. You’re asking about the nine-forty, then, because there was a lady here to meet the passenger on the ten-ten. I’ve seen her before, traveling to London on occasion.”

  A lady. Elizabeth Mayhew…

  “That would be right.”

  “He was what you might call a turnip in velvet. And he made a right nuisance of himself!”

  “Indeed.”

  “After the train pulled out, he came into the station and told me he needed to reach Marling that night. I said I doubted he’d find anyone who would drive him at that hour, in that weather. ‘I’m willing to pay whatever is asked. All you have to do is send for someone.’ ‘Send who?’ I wanted to know. I wasn’t about to get wet through, running errands for the likes of him. He wasn’t best pleased, I can tell you. ‘I have to reach Marling,’ he said again, as if I was deaf, and finally I told him he’d have to put up at the hotel for the night, and in the morning have Freddy Butler send for one of the lads who regularly take the goods wagon over to Marling. Well, he wasn’t about to arrive in Marling with the chickens and cabbages, he said. He wanted a proper carriage.” The stationmaster chuckled. “If he’d been the gentleman he thought he was, I’d have told him the smith kept a carriage he could have in the morning. He left, cursing under his breath.”

  Rutledge smiled. “Did he indeed go to the hotel?”

  “He didn’t. My guess is he was smarter than he looked and knocked on the first door he came to. They’d have sent him to the smith.”

  “Was there anything more that you noticed about him?”

  “He had blue eyes. I’d not have remembered that, but Freddy Butler’s son John had eyes the same color, like the summer sky. John didn’t come back from Arras.”

  “How would you describe him? Educated? A Londoner? From the Midlands?”

  “And how am I to guess that? He’s not a Kent man, I can tell you. I know what a Kent man sounds like!”

  “Had you seen him before that night? Or after?”

  “He came back this way a day or two later, didn’t he, to take the train again. And he looked like the cat that supped on cream. Whatever his business in Marling, he was that pleased about how it went. Cheeky bastard!”

  19

  After some discussion with sergeant Burke and a half hour of searching, Rutledge ran to earth the agent who was handling the sale of the house in Marling that the Leeds merchant allegedly had his eye on.

  Mr. Meade was alarmed to be faced with a policeman across his desk. And a policeman from Scotland Yard at that.

  “For if there’s anything untoward about this man, the sale will not go through-” He fiddled with the papers on his desk, fastidiously edging them with one side of the blotter, before moving several envelopes in the other direction and adjusting the position of the inkwell.

  Rutledge said blandly, “I’ve no reason to believe that he’s involved in any crime. On the contrary, I’m after information that will close doors, not open them.”

  Meade was not reassured. “He doesn’t live in Kent. At least-he will, when the sale is completed. I can’t see how he could help you. And I hope it won’t be necessary to contact him. It could put him off living here, to find Scotland Yard on his doorstep about murderers loose in Marling!”

  “All the same,” Rutledge persisted, “I need to know whatever you can tell me about him.”

  With a sigh, Meade said, “Wealthy. He’s prepared to sign for the house, and on his behalf I’ve already spoken with a man in Helford who can begin renovations immediately, as soon as the paperwork is completed. And that’s not all-he wants to restore the gardens. The house was once noted for its gardens. But that’s in the spring, of course, when the weather-”

  Rutledge said, interrupting, “Describe him, if you will.”

  “Younger than I’d expected, considering the fact that he’s done as well as he has. Fair. Putting on the weight of prosperity, I’d say. I’m told he made his money up north, in Leeds or thereabouts.” Meade was clearly more impressed with the man’s money than anything else about him.

  “Name?”

  “Aldrich. Franklin J. Aldrich,” the agent responded reluctantly. “The firm originally belonged to his father-in-law, I believe. Mr. Aldrich lost his father-in-law and his wife to the Influenza, and has decided to sell up and move away.”

  “Why did he choose Kent?”

  “The better climate. That’s what he told me. I daresay now he’s made his money, he’d like to enjoy spending it. And no doubt there’s a desire to put some little distance between himself and his roots, if he’s looking to set up as a gentleman.” Meade seemed to run out of virtues to extol and looked out the window at the busy street.

  “How often has Aldrich traveled to Kent?”

  “Most of our negotiations have been by letter, through his bankers. He came one weekend at the end of October, to view the property I had described. I’d actually offered him two or three possible choices, but he seemed to be in no doubt about the kind of house he wanted. It explains his success, I should think. Knowing what he wants.”

  “How did he make his fortune?”

  “I haven’t-er-felt free to ask him. He’s a very private person, actually. He did tell me once that the war had treated him well, and from that I assumed he’d been in manufacturing of one sort or another. That’s where most of the money was made.”

  Aldrich wasn’t the first to make a fortune from the war. But even Meade seemed to feel uncomfortable with that. He added, almost as an afterthought, “It’s no bad thing for Marling, to have fresh blood coming in.” As if in apology for his own eagerness to conclude this sale. “A widower, of course-”

  Hamish observed, as Rutledge finished his questions and rose to go, “Yon Aldrich will be good company for Raleigh Masters, when there’s no one left to dine wi’ him.”

  Rutledge smothered a smile.

  There had been no time to consider lunch, and Rutledge had bought a pork pie and apples at a small shop on the High Street before calling on Mr. Meade. He finished the apples as he made his way back to the scenes of the killings, drawn by reasons he couldn’t explain.

  The roads were quiet at this hour of the day, and clouds were building to the east, over the Downs, threatening yet more rain. A cold wind had blown up as he came to the line of trees where Will Taylor had died, and he reached for his coat as he left his car.

  What was there about these stretches of country roads, out of sight of witnesses, that had invited murder?

  Rutledge had always depended on intuition, on a sense of what was there beneath the surface, unplumbable unless the mind was open to receive whatever swam up from the depths and into the light. He had no way to describe his intuition; he had never really questio
ned it. But something was there. Not on command-intuition was never amenable to conscious will. It simply responded in its own fashion, with an unexpected knowledge.

  He walked the length of the line of trees, and tried to feel some response that would help him understand the terrible thing that had happened here. But nothing came, no small whisper of knowledge or breath of emotion. It was as if these trees, older than he was, open to the wind and elements, to time and space and seasons, had nothing to offer him except mute witness.

  Here a man died. We don’t know why Smiling wryly at his morbid imagination, he went back to the motorcar and turned toward the other two scenes.

  Hamish, always at his shoulder, unseen but never mute, had nothing to say, his mood dark.

  Rutledge stood at the place where Kenny Webber had died, and listened to the soft soughing of the wind in the bare trees. He was standing so still that a small meadow mouse crept out of the high grass to stare at him before scurrying off to safer ground.

  There was nothing, Rutledge told himself, that fitted any particular theory well enough to support it.

  But the Shaw case had been much the same…

  No clues to the killer of women who had little to steal but whose pitiful treasures had offered a poorer man hope. It had been sheer accident that the police had stumbled on the name of a man-of-all-work who had come to help and ended up killing.

  Would it be the same thing here? Would these two cases, seemingly so similar to a man tormented by the past, end up with the wrong suspect hanged?

  He shivered at the thought, and turned back to the motorcar.

  And Hamish, the practical Scot, whose family tree boasted feuding clansmen through centuries of bloody warfare, insisted, “It isna’ the same in the light. It isna’ the same… The murders happened at night.”

  Rutledge stopped in his tracks.

  And he was walking here in the light, where everything was different.