A Fearsome Doubt ir-6

by Charles Todd

  Even on the battlefield, the night had been different from the day. You could see what was coming in the daylight. You could prepare yourself for defense or attack. At night, sounds seemed to roll in from nowhere; movement was hidden and stealthy. A wind jangling the wire, a man coughing, the unexpected stirring of the rats-nerves, raw and alert, jumped like live things, and eyes watered with trying to pierce the darkness for the first sign of anything that could kill.

  Rutledge said, “It’s true,” and bent to crank the motorcar, his mind already busy.

  In the country it was not uncommon for people to walk long distances. There were few means of transportation as available as shank’s mare. And a good many of the horses kept for carriages or riding had been swallowed up by the war, to die dragging heavy artillery or wagons in the mud of France, work many of them were not accustomed to. Bicycles were a common means of getting about in the country-clerics used them, police constables, boys delivering groceries and housewives pedaling into the villages to market.

  A bicycle, then, for a man unaccustomed to country distances…

  And he thought he knew where to find one.

  Rutledge walked through the hotel doors and turned toward the dining room, in search of a cup of tea.

  The man behind the desk said, “Inspector? There’s a letter for you. It came in the morning post.”

  He turned back, and the man limped around the desk to meet him halfway.

  Glancing at it, he couldn’t place the writing. It was rounded, curlicued, as if the owner had been at great effort to conceal his or her normal hand.

  Going through the dining room door, he tore open the envelope and unfolded the letter.

  It had come from Mrs. Shaw.

  This woman, he thought tiredly, would haunt him like the husband he’d sent to a doubtful death.

  Dear Mr. Rutledge,

  I am hoping you are making some progress in the matter of my husband’s innocence. I cannot think why you have not come to see Henry Cutter and look for the chain to the locket that is still lying in Mrs. Cutter’s chest, where I left it. The locket is proof that someone besides my Ben killed those women, and I don’t know why it is taking so long to bring the truth to light! My heart is breaking with the weight of my worry, and yet nothing is happening to help my family recover from this terrible burden. You mustn’t let us down! We are counting on you to save us. It is poor recompense for not being able to bring my Ben back to life, but it will give my children a chance to live properly when the stigma is removed from our name. I do not want to die of hard work and hopelessness. It must be God who rectifies the wrong done to my poor husband, but you have it in your power to give something back to me and mine.

  Your trusting servant, Nell Shaw.

  Rutledge swore under his breath.

  She was a master at touching him on the raw. She seemed to see into his soul and find the most certain way of stirring up guilt and mistrust of his own judgment. She had brought her daughter with her, she had come on swollen feet to hunt him down, and she held over his head like the sword of Damocles the knowledge that he may well have failed her and her children.

  And yet he was beginning to see, too, the will that must have driven Ben Shaw to murder, to satisfy the needs that this woman had felt were rightfully hers. Middle-aged and far from attractive, Nell Shaw still had a power that was intransigent and unyielding.

  And yet Henry Cutter had admired her strength…

  He read the letter again. She pleaded as well as any K.C., he thought bitterly, her abilities wasted by her station in life and her limited opportunities.

  But was she telling the truth?

  He didn’t know. Nell Shaw believed it. And that was all that mattered to her.

  Rutledge slept for four hours. Rousing himself at the end of that allotted time with the internal clock that more than one soldier had taught himself to use-when a lighted match to see the face of a watch spelled death from a waiting sniper or machine-gunner-he dressed in dark clothes and pulled a heavy black sweater over his head. Lacing his boots, he went through a mental checklist. Satisfied that he was ready, he descended the back stairs and slipped out to the hotel yard.

  The night porter kept his bicycle there, and from casual observation Rutledge had noted that it arrived at the same time every evening, departing at the same time every morning. In between it was never moved.

  Availing himself of it, Rutledge tested the tires and the brakes, and then, reassured that it would serve him well enough, mounted it and rode out into the quiet High Street.

  It was a little after ten-thirty by the clock in the church tower as Rutledge looked up at the Cavalier on his plinth, pleased to see that the face was shadowed by the broad-brimmed hat, and the bronze was lackluster in the pale light of the stars. The heavier clouds had blown through as he slept, leaving behind wet roads, a colder wind, and clearing skies.

  He pedaled steadily, without haste, a nondescript man on a nondescript bicycle, head down as if tired and looking forward to home and his bed. On the outskirts of Marling he turned toward Seelyham, his eyes already accustomed to the dim light and his ears picking up the night noises: the bark of a fox, off in the fields, an owl calling his mate from the deep shadows close to the trunk of a spreading oak, the whisper of wind through the autumn grasses and the dead stalks of summer. His tires made a rhythm of their own, soft and sibilant, never intrusive.

  When he had reached Seelyham, he turned at the crossroads for Helford, a lone traveler with no company except his own. From time to time he whistled, not for his own sake, but to throw off any suspicion that he was himself the elusive murderer. The last thing he wanted, as Hamish had warned, was someone mistaking him for a killer and trying to get in the first blow.

  Hamish, unhappy over the heavy shadows and fading moonlight, was wary, as watchful as he had been leaning against the trench walls in France. He’d had a keen eye for movement, while their best shot had stood at his side, with his rifle ready to fire where his corporal pointed. But there was no one here with a rifle, no one to stand guard.

  Rutledge had once loved the night. He had been at home in the open spaces of the Downs or the dales of Yorkshire or the valleys of Wales. Like many Englishmen of his time, he had found walking a means of reaching out-of-the-way places where he was completely alone, open to the sounds and smells and mysterious moods of a land inhabited over centuries stretching back in time. Self-sufficient and capable of protecting himself if need be, he had never thought twice about the dangers or the loneliness. Neither superstitious nor overly fanciful, he had felt safe in the dark, however strange the place, however far from civilized society it might lie.

  This, after all, was England…

  France had taught him a different kind of night. With star shells and artillery fire and snipers and dread of the first faint glow of morning when the gas came over. Night didn’t cloak; it concealed, and death lay in the blackness of a shell hole or behind the blasted trunk of a tree. Death came out of the night as often as it came out of the day, but in the night it could break a man’s nerve.

  Such memories were only just beginning to fade a little. The space of a year had taken the edge off the tension and the watchfulness but had failed to put them behind him. The year had given Rutledge back the ability to sleep through a night, and to look people in the eye without wondering what they could read in his face. But Hamish was still there. His uncertainties were still there. And unexpected shocks still threw him into the chaos of self-doubt, an awareness of the changes that had not yet come. Might never come.

  Hamish reminded him of the Roman candles at the Guy Fawkes bonfire, and Rutledge winced at the memory. It was stupid to react irrationally to fireworks. And yet fear and its blood-brother, self-preservation, were so deeply buried in the very marrow of a soldier’s bones for so long that they were hard to root out. To start at sounds and sudden movement, to act primitively and quickly, was the difference between living and dying. Even when he had wanted
so badly to die, the body-and bloody luck-had taken the choice out of his hands.

  Fear and courage-and boredom. The three faces of battle.

  Rutledge threw off the past and concentrated on the night. But there was no one abroad, not on the roads he had chosen to take.

  He paused from time to time, standing astride his bicycle and listening. Feeling the darkness, feeling the loneliness. The three men killed here were at home on these roads; they knew them intimately. And this familiarity was their shield-as well as their gravest peril. They considered themselves to be safe-and so they would be vulnerable, unsuspecting.

  A farmer passed with a sick calf in the back of his cart, calling to Rutledge with the cautious voice of a man who was worried about strangers on the road, after three murders. Rutledge answered him, saying, “Far to go?”

  “My son’s a better cowman than I am. He’s willing to try his hand at saving her.”

  “Good luck, then.”

  “Thank’ee. I may have need of luck before the night’s done.” The farmer spoke to his horse and, before he was out of sight, turned down a narrow lane toward the distant shapes of a barn and a house.

  Rutledge rode on, already beginning to think he was on a wild-goose chase and needed good fortune himself. But now he knew that whoever stopped these men had been considered by each victim to be “safe…”

  With Hamish carrying on a conversation in the back of his mind, Rutledge reached Helford and then turned back toward Marling. The muscles in his legs were beginning to complain about the unaccustomed exercise, and he ignored them.

  This part of Kent was vast enough that three roads hardly touched the sum of choices that he could have made. Still, Rutledge had passed all three murder scenes, waiting for his senses to be tweaked, for something in the quiet night to speak to him, but there were only the foxes and owls and once a hunting cat, frozen in a tense crouch as he came upon her. With a twitch of her tail, she had jumped into the tall grass and vanished. Dogs barked at his passage, desultory and without ferocity, as if merely doing their duty.

  The wind had picked up, cold knives cutting through his sweater.

  A motorcar was ahead of him for a short distance, turning off into a side lane that Rutledge hadn’t noticed before. On the map it had appeared to go nowhere, down to a wooded stream and up the hill beyond to a field. He pedaled on, staying with the main roads rather than break off from his triangular sweep.

  In the end he came back to Marling empty-handed. Tonight there was nothing in the darkness that wanted to be found…

  He would have to try again.

  20

  Rutledge secured the night porter’s bicycle where he had found it, and wearily made his way to the back door of the hotel. It was still unlocked, just as he had left it hours earlier. So much for the night porter’s rounds. The man would most likely be asleep somewhere warm and quiet.

  Rutledge was thinking too that somewhere warm and quiet would be inviting, as he moved through the empty kitchens and service quarters to the door that led into the lobby. Letting it shut silently behind him, he strode swiftly down the passage and rounded the stairs with one hand on the newel post.

  “’Ware!” Hamish spoke sharply in his mind.

  A woman coming down the steps toward Rutledge, her coat open in the warmth of the hotel, gasped in startled disbelief at what seemed to be a dark and sinister figure hurrying toward her.

  In the same instant Rutledge recognized Elizabeth Mayhew and stopped stock-still in surprise at finding her here of all places, and at this hour.

  “Ian?” she said uncertainly. “Is that you?”

  “Elizabeth?”

  “Ian, you must come-for the love of God, you must come! I don’t know what else to do-!” she said with breathless intensity. “Oh, please-!”

  She reached him where he stood at the bottom of the stairs, her fingers clutching the thick, dew-wet knit of his sweater, pleading with him. Her face was streaked with tears and tight with fear.

  “I didn’t know what to do-I knocked and knocked-you weren’t there -I didn’t know where to turn! ”

  He took her hands in his, holding them firmly. His were cold from the night air, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Elizabeth. Take a deep breath and tell me what’s wrong.”

  “There isn’t time-could we go in your motorcar? I ran all the way from the house. I don’t think I have the strength to walk back!”

  Indeed, she looked to be at the end of her tether. Rutledge led her to one of the lobby chairs but she refused to sit. “No, we must go! He’s bleeding! ” The last words came out with a sob.

  Rutledge said, “The motorcar is in the hotel yard. This way.” He took her through the kitchen passages, where he himself had just walked moments before, and out through the small flagstoned entry that led to the back gardens and sheds.

  She sat huddled in the car as he drove fast down the High Street, and he glanced at her once or twice to see if she was all right. As they pulled up in the drive beside her house, she was out and running before he could stop the engine. Swearing under his breath, he followed her.

  She came to a halt at the main door, bending over something on the front steps. Rutledge was beside her in time to see a man’s face lift up from the cradle of his arms, the features twisted with pain. Even in the faint light of the stars, the face seemed unnaturally pale. The man’s hair was dark with sweat, and it was hard to judge its normal color.

  “Who is he?” Rutledge asked Elizabeth. “How did he get here?”

  “I had gone to Lydia Hamilton’s for a women’s committee meeting, and when Lawrence brought me home-he was here! Oh, please, do something!”

  “Did Lawrence see him?”

  “No! No, I told him I could find my own way-”

  Rutledge knelt down beside the figure. “Are you hurt? Tell me where.”

  Elizabeth said, “His shoulder. His chest. I don’t know. When I tried to help him to his feet, there was blood everywhere. It was horrible!”

  “Knife,” the man managed to say. One hand groped toward his left side.

  Rutledge pulled away the heavy cloth of the man’s coat and felt the hot warmth on the sweater under it. His hand came away black with blood.

  “We’ve got to get him inside, and send for a doctor,” he said.

  “No-” The injured man’s voice was firm as he spoke the single word, echoed almost immediately by Elizabeth’s breathless “No!”

  “Nonsense,” Rutledge responded briskly, and held out his hand. “Your key, Elizabeth.”

  She hesitated. Then she gave it to him, torn between worry and what seemed to be a fear of bringing the stranger inside.

  Rutledge was already heaving the man to his feet, noting with relief that he seemed to have both arms and both legs. And there was no wine on his breath There was a small lamp burning in the entrance hall, left for Elizabeth’s return. Beyond that table was an ornate Jacobean chair, and Rutledge got his burden lowered into it just as Henrietta, the spaniel, began to bark ferociously from behind the closed door of the sitting room. Distractedly Elizabeth called to the dog to hush.

  “Go to her, or you’ll have every servant in the house down here to see what’s happening,” Rutledge commanded. And Elizabeth hurried off, calling the dog’s name and shushing her.

  The man slumped in the chair seemed to be slipping in and out of consciousness, his head rolling on his shoulders. Rutledge, working swiftly, managed to get the coat off and was just lifting the sweater to rip it and clear the wound when his eyes met those of his patient. He froze, staring.

  Gentle God! It was the face from the bonfire-it was the German!

  In the poor light of the stars, with the grimace of pain distorting the man’s features, Rutledge had failed to notice any resemblance.

  And even as he stepped back in alarm, the pain-filled blue eyes stared back at him, recognition-and resignation-in them.

  The man started to say something, shook his head, and then found the
words in English.

  “A long way from France.” His voice was quiet, pitched so that Elizabeth couldn’t hear him. Her soothing words to the spaniel had roused the puppies, and they were whimpering.

  Rutledge, with Hamish hammering at the back of his mind, asked harshly, “Who the hell are you?” A dozen images pressed and overlapped and faded with such speed that he was unable to sort through them or comprehend their significance. He was on a road-a road filled with figures, men he didn’t know-there were caissons and lorries, abandoned where they stood-voices he couldn’t understand-confusion, and a blank, impenetrable haze…

  “Don’t you know? I’ve come-” The man winced, caught his breath, and went on, “-I’ve come back from the dead.”

  “You don’t belong here-”

  “True. Yes. I know that.”

  Rutledge’s mind was reeling, fighting shock and disbelief.

  And then relief surfaced, the realization that what he’d seen on Guy Fawkes Day two weeks before had been no hallucination, no slippage of the mind into madness. The man was real. He was real.

  Rutledge had no idea who he was-or where he had come from-except out of the darkness of war.

  And Hamish was saying, “But he’s deid. You said yoursel’ he’s deid.”

  “I thought you were dead,” Rutledge found himself repeating aloud. “I watched you die!”

  “Yes. Well. I am hard to kill.” The man shivered, and Rutledge came back to the present, staring at the warm blood on his fingers, at the sweater thick with it. He reached out and fumbled for an instant, lifting the heavy wet wool, then found his pocket knife and began to cut it away. With his hands busy, his mind seemed to anchor itself, as if rejecting anything but the work that needed to be done.

  He could hear Elizabeth walking back down the passage, her feet hurrying.

  The man cautioned hastily, “We will talk about the war another time. Not now.”

  She came into the hall, moving quickly to help Rutledge pull away the last of the ripped yarn, gasping at the dark wet blood all over the man’s shirt.