A Fearsome Doubt

by Charles Todd

  “Short of bringing her husband back, I doubt there’s anything anyone can do. Even Simpson.” Rutledge paused. “She hasn’t prospered since Shaw’s death. I expect she was hoping for a handout.”

  “Yes, well, Shaw ought to have considered his family before taking to murder.” Bowles stirred in his chair, preparatory to dismissing Rutledge. “See what you can do in Kent. I’ve already told the Chief Constable you’ll be there smartly!”

  It was an unmistakable warning: Get out of London and don’t meddle with things best left alone.

  RUTLEDGE MADE A point, before leaving his desk, to remove any papers connected with the Shaws. Simpson, if mining for trouble, would find none. . . .

  But on his way into Kent, he paused in Sansom Street and again left his motorcar where it would attract less notice. He walked as far as the Shaw house, and then to the neighboring door of Henry and the late Janet Cutter.

  “It’s no’ wise!” Hamish told him. “There’ll be someone to see, and in the end, a tale will be carried back to the Yard.”

  “There may not be another chance.” Rutledge found himself wondering if Simpson had already questioned the constable on this street. It would be like him.

  A girl-of-all-work opened the door to him, her hands red from laundry.

  “Mr. Cutter’s not to home,” she confided in the tall, attractive stranger on the doorstep. “He’s just off to work after his dinner, but I wouldn’t look him up there. Mr. Holly is not one to like gossiping on company time.”

  It had all the earmarks of a quote overheard from her employer. She smiled up at Rutledge with artless interest, then remembered her duty. “Is there a message you’d care to leave, sir?”

  “Did you serve Mrs. Cutter, before her death?” he asked. “I don’t remember you here, before the war.” There had been an older woman, as he recalled, worn down with childbearing and worry, who did the heavy work.

  “I came in ’17,” she said, “when Mum had Tommy. Mum wasn’t well, after, and Mrs. Cutter asked if I’d like to work, instead. And a good thing, too, for Tommy was trouble from the start. Colic.” A cloud passed over her face, darkening her sunny spirits. “Mum and Tommy were took by the Influenza. Within a day of each other.” She nodded wisely. “She never knew he went. Best that way!”

  “Was Mrs. Cutter a good employer? Did you enjoy working for her?”

  “She wasn’t a bad employer,” the girl said, groping for words to explain how she felt. “Mum said she were different before the stroke. Jollier. It was as if that took the spirit right out of her. And she seemed—sad—when I came here. As if there was a burden she couldn’t carry and it was getting heavier with every year that went by. And finally it buried her under its weight.”

  “Did you have trouble pleasing her?” He encouraged her guileless chatter. The stroke had occurred after the trial. Mrs. Cutter had been well enough the last time he’d come here, to question the couple.

  “Oh, it weren’t that, so much as the heaviness of her mind. It was like working in a house where there’d been a death. As if black crepe hung on the mirrors and the shades were drawn.”

  For such a young girl, as Hamish was also pointing out, it would have been a depressing atmosphere.

  “And Mr. Cutter? Did he find the house bleak, too?”

  “Mum said he was bewildered, but when I came in ’17, he was more resigned. The Missus was young for a stroke, Mum said. Came on of a sudden, like a flash of light. Mum heard her calling, and then the sound of someone falling down the stairs. Frightened her witless to find Mrs. Cutter lying up against the balustrades halfway down, and not able to move. Doris and Betsy and I had nightmares, hearing it, but the boys wanted her to tell it over and over again.”

  “Where was your mother when this happened?”

  “Hanging out the clothes. She left a sheet dragging, to run in.”

  He thanked the girl, still more of a child than a woman, and walked back to his motorcar, thoughtful and uneasy.

  “I ought to find Henry Cutter,” he told himself as he drove on to the Lambeth Road, and turned toward Kent.

  “It’s no’ been pressing for all these years,” Hamish reminded him.

  “It hasn’t, no,” Rutledge agreed, and fell silent. Trying to remember the case not in hindsight but the way it had unfolded at the time—that was what was hard. How he’d felt, how he’d thought, how he’d watched the evidence build.

  He had been another man then. Young, idealistic. A stranger to the hollow shell who had come back from the war and for months struggled to rebuild his peacetime skills. He had more in common with the voice of Hamish MacLeod than he did with his prewar self. That Ian Rutledge might have lived six centuries ago, not a mere six years. Somewhere they had lost each other.

  NOVEMBER ANYWHERE IN England was a cold and often rainy month. The air was heavy, damp, and chill, and with the sun retreating toward the equator, the shorter days seemed to drag through their appointed hours with a dullness that sometimes made the difference between sunrise and sunset a matter only of conjecture. Had the sun risen? Was it setting or was there another squall of rain on its way? Along the rivers, fog could hold on for a good part of the morning, and heavy clouds finished the late afternoon long before night could fall. The lingering sunsets of Midsummer, when light filled the air well past eight and nine, and sometimes as late as ten, were a thing of memory.

  A depressing season . . .

  Hamish said, “The rain was worst, in France. I couldna’ get used to the rain.”

  It had soaked their greatcoats and left shoes a soggy, rotting mess, and it had ruined tempers, brought out the miasma of smells from the trenches, and made the heavy mud so slippery that a man could lose his footing and go down as he raced across No Man’s Land. Rutledge had fallen more than once, feeling the swift plucking at his shoulder or elbow where machine-gun fire had barely missed him. And then scrambled back to his feet into the steady scything, waiting for the blow to his body that never came, never more than just that ghostly plucking. Living a charmed life had frightened him as much as it had defeated him. He’d wanted to die.

  KENT WAS A fertile part of the country, covered with pasturage and hop gardens, with orchards blazingly white in spring, and apples or plums or cherries hanging darkly from summer boughs. Agriculture was its mainstay, though there had been iron at one time, and the cutting of the great forests for making charcoal to smelt the iron had opened up the Weald to grass for sheep or horses or the plow. There was still industry along the Medway, and shipbuilding on the coast where the tradition of putting to sea was strong. But most of Kent was green, with ash and beech and sometimes oak in the hedgerows or marching in shady rows down the lanes.

  This was also the gateway to England from the Continent, the path taken by invaders, by priests, by merchants, and by the weavers who at the request of Edward III had come to teach the English how to turn their valuable wool into far more valuable cloth. Prosperous and rural and content, most of the villages turned their backs on the Dover–London road, and got on with their lives in peace.

  Marling was a pretty village, even by Kentish standards, settled on a ridge overlooking the long slope of land that fell away toward the Weald. A High Street ran through the center, dividing where a triangular space opened up and created the irregular square that had held the Guy Fawkes bonfire. The Tuesday Market here had been one of the village’s mainstays for generations, giving it status among its neighbors.

  The square had been cleared long since of the last of the ashes, and today lay quiet and colorless in the cold rain that had followed at Rutledge’s heels. Even the Cavalier standing bravely in the wet on his plinth appeared to huddle under his plumed hat.

  Rutledge knew where to find the police station—it was several doors down from the hotel where he’d dined with Elizabeth Mayhew and her friends after the bonfire. Tucked in between a bakery on the one side and a haberdashery on the other, the station occupied one of the old brick buildings still carryin
g proudly the Georgian facades that gave Marling its particular character.

  The midday traffic was light, a few carriages and carts, a motorcar or two, and women hurrying from butcher to greengrocer to draper’s shop—one, pausing to speak to a friend, pushed her covered pram with metronomic rhythm, back and forth, back and forth. Another, carrying a small wet dog in her arms, was lecturing the animal for running into the road, warning it of dire consequences.

  On the surface, it was a peaceful scene, a prewar England in some ways, seemingly detached from the hardships and shortages that scarred Sansom Street’s inhabitants in London.

  Hamish, observing it, said, “You wouldna’ think murder had been done here. Or ever would be.”

  “No,” Rutledge agreed, “but night falls early this time of year. It’s always after dark that people begin to look over their shoulders.”

  He left the motorcar by the hotel, and when he entered the police station was greeted by an elderly sergeant dressing down a young constable who was red about the ears.

  The constable glanced up with undisguised relief at the interruption and earned another condemnation for not paying strict attention. When the sergeant sent him on his way, the young man scuttled out without looking back.

  The sergeant straightened his jacket, squared his shoulders, and met Rutledge’s glance levelly, identifying him at once as a stranger. “Sergeant Burke, sir. What can I do for you?”

  “Inspector Rutledge, from the Yard. I’m looking for Inspector Dowling.”

  “He’s just gone home to his meal, sir. I expect him back on the half hour.” The sergeant studied him. “Come about the murders, then, sir?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Well, the Chief Constable knows best, sir, but I doubt even the Yard can help us. There’s no sense to these murders. At least not so far. Unless we’ve got ourselves a shell-shocked soldier who thinks he’s still at war.”

  Rutledge flinched as the remark struck home.

  The sergeant leaned against the back of his chair, thick arms resting on the top to ease his weight. “I’ve been sergeant here for fifteen years,” he went on, “and was constable for ten before that. And I can tell you, this is the first inquiry where I’ve not got a hint about who’s behind it. No whispers in the shops, no words dropped in the pubs, nothing that makes me prick up my ears and wonder, like. There’s always a root cause waiting to be found, if you look hard enough, but I’m blessed if we can see it. The only thing the victims have in common, so far as we can tell, is their service in the war. Poor men, all three, who served their country well and came back with little to show for it but the loss of a limb. No hero’s welcome nor bands playing nor offers of work. A crying shame, to see the lads lying like old rags by the roadside, and feeling helpless to do anything for them.”

  “How well did you know them?”

  “I watched them grow up, you might say, sir. Never any real trouble from any of them, except what you’d expect from high-spirited lads with time on their hands. Nothing vicious, or mean.”

  “Yes, I understand,” Rutledge responded neutrally, knowing well that it was human nature to praise Caesar after he was dead. “That’s mainly why I’m here. Another pair of eyes, another perspective.”

  “In the war, were you, sir?”

  “Four years of it.”

  Burke nodded. “Then you’ll know, better than most, what the lads went through. Well, then, Inspector Dowling’ll give you what little we’ve found. Shall I fetch him for you, sir?”

  “No, let him finish in his own good time.”

  Rutledge left, promising to return in half an hour. He thought for a moment about calling on Elizabeth Mayhew, but instead went to The Plough for his lunch. At a table to himself by the window, he looked out on the square and watched people going about their business in the rain. A bobbing of black umbrellas above black coats, a bowed head here or there, and one man hurrying along with a newspaper held over his hat. Rutledge’s own hat sat in the chair opposite him, darkly spotted with rain. It was, he thought, as good a way as any to prevent company—Hamish or someone else—from taking the empty chair. For the dark-paneled room was quite busy with custom, as if the rain had discouraged people from making the journey home for their midday meal.

  Hamish said, from just behind his shoulder, “Yon sergeant has a level head.”

  Rutledge came within a breath of answering the voice aloud, used to its cadence in his mind. Stopping himself in time, he responded silently, “Let’s hope Dowling is as competent.”

  When he’d given his order, he turned again to the window, hoping to put an end to Hamish’s conversation. And he saw Elizabeth Mayhew just taking leave of a man in a heavy coat whose back was to him. She was smiling, her face alight, upturned, as she leaned toward the figure.

  Rutledge found himself suddenly jealous. Not for himself but for Richard Mayhew, dead now and buried in France. As schoolboys, he and Richard had tramped in the face of cold winds that in winter blew across the Hoo peninsula like a knife, bringing mists on their heels. Or in summer followed the old Saxon ways that crisscrossed the Kent countryside, footpaths now but once the high roads of a dim past, serving settlers, warriors, or pilgrims.

  Adventures that had shaped their boyhood, and through that fashioned the men they would become. They’d gone their different ways soon enough, but each had carried with him that mark of self-reliance and independence learned on the Downs and in the marshes—experience that had served them well in the war. They’d discussed that, once, on a bombed-out road in France where they’d briefly crossed paths—unaware that it was for the last time.

  Richard had said, “The first thing I’ll do when I get home is walk out over the Downs again. When I’m too tired to sleep, I retrace my steps and find that solitude again, and the silence.”

  Rutledge had answered, smiling, “I never expected that learning to tell time by the stars or guess at wind speed would save my life one day. It was a game then. Do you still have your uncle’s compass?”

  Richard had dug it out of his pocket, holding it out like a holy relic. “Never without it. Do you remember the night we were washed out by the rain? I thought I’d never be that wet again. But we were, our first week in France. While my men were cursing and swearing, I was standing there laughing. Only, it was summer on the Downs, and a damned sight warmer than December in the lines!”

  They had had nearly ten minutes before the snarl of traffic had opened up, and Rutledge had had to move on. Richard’s last words had been, “When the war is over, I’m going to have a son, and I’ll teach him everything I know about that safe other world. But I won’t tell him about this one. It’s too obscene . . .”

  A week later Richard was dead, and there would be no sons.

  In his second year at Oxford, Richard had fallen deeply in love with Elizabeth. He’d been absent-minded and daydreaming by turns, plotting ways to see her again, driving his tutor to despair when Elizabeth had gone to Italy in the spring, for her mother’s health. Rutledge had never seen a happier groom on their wedding day, or a bride more beautiful. Or two people more perfectly suited to each other. It was time for Elizabeth to put her mourning aside—he’d said as much himself—but was it time for her to fall in love again?

  For the glow on her face was telling. Rutledge had seen it before.

  Hamish said, “There’s no accounting for the heart.”

  But surely, Rutledge countered, a love like theirs lasted?

  “The man is dead,” Hamish reminded him. “There’s wee comfort in memories when the other side of the bed is cold and empty.”

  Rutledge’s own fiancée had deserted him. But the woman who had loved Hamish mourned still. His last word as he lay dying had been her name. Fiona was more faithful than Jean, who had preferred to put the war behind her.

  The man walked on, passing the Cavalier’s statue without looking back. Elizabeth followed him with her eyes, standing stock-still where he’d left her. Then, liftin
g the black bowl of her umbrella, she moved on with a spring in her step, as if the rain had vanished.

  Rutledge felt an extraordinarily strong sweep of loneliness, as if here in the window of the hotel dining room he was cut off from the quiet voices and soft laughter that filled the room on the other side of him. And cut off, too, from the villagers going about their business in the weather. An observer with no role in the reality of life . . . He lived with the dead, in more ways than one.

  Hamish said, “Ye’ll never know better. It’s the price of what ye are.”

  12

  INSPECTOR DOWLING WAS A THIN MAN WITH A NOSE TOO LARGE for his face. Its weight seemed to pull him forward, stooping his shoulders. But the brown eyes on either side were warm and friendly, like a dog’s.

  Shaking hands with Rutledge, he said, “I’m glad you’re here. Sergeant Burke should have sent for me.”

  “He was kind enough to suggest it, but I took the opportunity to have my own meal.”

  “At the hotel? Good food there, is it?” Dowling said almost wistfully. “My wife, dear heart that she is, has never mastered the culinary arts.”

  Rutledge smothered his smile.

  Dowling shuffled papers on his desk with a sigh. “Well, then, on to this business of the murders. Each of the victims lived within a twenty-mile radius of Marling. All were ex-soldiers, men with perfectly sound reputations. The last victim was found close by Marling, but the others were discovered along the road coming in from the south. There were no signs of violence—no wounds, no bruises. You’d have thought, looking at them, that they’d stepped off the road for a brief rest.”

  “How did they die, if there was no violence?”

  “An overdose of laudanum, but in suspicious circumstances. I’m told by the local doctor that amputations often leave behind a residual pain, as if the limb’s still there and hurting from whatever it was that made removing it necessary—in these cases, machine-gun fire or shrapnel, and the infection that followed. Amputees, each of them got about on crutches.” He shook his head. “Myself, I don’t know how I’d deal with that. Thank God, I’ve never had to find out.”