A Fearsome Doubt (10 page)

“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, lifting 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

I
NSPECTOR
D
OWLING 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.”

“Suicide, then?” Machine-gun fire and shrapnel tore at a limb, making it nearly impossible to save. Rutledge had seen the aid stations with the bloody remains piled high under a tarpaulin, waiting for disposal.

“It’s not likely, for two very good reasons: Each was the sole support of his family, and his pension ended if he died. I don’t think any man in his right mind would leave his family destitute, if he could still feed them and clothe them. However bad the pain got.”

Hamish quietly agreed.

Rutledge was thinking instead of Raleigh Masters, who resented his lost foot with a bitter passion. And yet he clung to his life as if only to make those around him suffer through the blight of his own.

He wondered if there was a similarity, if these victims had also made life wretched for those around them. That might explain one murder. Not three.

Dowling was saying, “Moreover, I’ve spoken with each of the widows. They absolutely refuse to consider suicide.”

But wives and widows—witness Nell Shaw!—were often the last to accept the desertion of their husbands, even in death.

“And there’s one other small detail here. These men had been drinking wine before they died. But no one seems to know where it came from, this wine. Not from home, certainly; there was none in any of the three houses. And no one recalls seeing any of the three men in a public house the nights of their deaths.”

“What time of night did they die?”

“It was after eleven, certainly. That’s the latest time we’ve been able to establish. The bodies weren’t discovered until close on to morning, when the light was improving. I’ve sent my men round to talk to everyone who might have been on those roads after dark. They all swore there wasn’t a body lying there when they passed.”

But dusk came early in November. . . . A dark bundle in the high grass at the side of the road might not be visible.

Hamish said, “How many would stop to ask if a drunk needed help? And the next day, how many of those would admit they’d passed by without stopping?”

It was an interesting point.

“Why were the victims out on the road at that hour? Eleven o’clock or later?” Rutledge asked Dowling. “If they hadn’t been visiting a pub, where had they been?”

“For the most part they were looking for work, picking up whatever they could find. All three often went from village to village, accepting lifts when one was offered, walking if they had to. Taylor had been mending a fence, Webber repaired furniture, and Bartlett—who’d been a glazier before the war—had gone to sit by a friend’s bedside. The man had been gassed at Ypres, and was dying. Lungs burned out. As a rule, the three victims stayed the night where they were, if there was work. Sleeping in a barn or outbuilding, whatever they could manage. Which also explains why there was no hue and cry when they didn’t come home.”

Rutledge said thoughtfully, “And all three killed at night . . .”

Hamish said, “What did they see, that they shouldn’t have seen?”

Which was a reasonable key to unexpected murder: These men had stumbled on something they shouldn’t have. Still, death had come on three different nights, and on three different roads. Kent was hardly a hotbed of crime, where something evil lurked at the crossroads, waiting for dark. Smuggling had once been a cottage industry along the coast, but that was long past.

Dowling tossed his papers aside. “We’ve combined our efforts, Inspector Grimes in Seelyham, and Inspector Cawly in Helford, and I. Keeping an eye out for strangers hanging about, questioning everyone who’d seen the victims the day before they were killed, making a master list of everyone who admits to being on the roads each of the three nights. And we’ve come up with what we could have told ourselves before the killings began: The victims knew each other, they were poor, they were wounded in France. But half the ex-soldiers in Kent fit that description, and if that’s what the murderer is after, he’s got an endless supply of choices. Why these three, and so close to Marling? I can tell you that Grimes and Cawly will be happy to drop this business into your lap, Inspector, but I’m a stubborn man and don’t give up easily.”

B
EFORE LEAVING THE
hotel, Rutledge had arranged for a room. His glimpse of Elizabeth Mayhew’s face as she stood in the rain on the High Street had made him uncomfortable about staying with her for a few days, although she would have been the first to urge him. Or would she?

She had asked him to help clear out Richard’s clothes. In preparation for what?

It was none of his business, he reminded himself, and yet it had left an oddly unpleasant taste in his mouth, as if he had been excluded from what had always felt like a family circle.

Hamish said, “You were nearly sure at breakfast that she was on the point of speaking her mind.”

“And she stopped herself. I’d like to know why. It would have been—easier, coming from her.”

Instead, it was as if the relationship had changed in unexpected ways.

Taking along the young constable—now silent and shy—who had been dressed down by Sergeant Burke, Rutledge set out to visit the places where each body had been found.

“Put yourself in the murderer’s shoes,” Rutledge suggested to the young man as they drove past the square and out of Marling on the way to Seelyham. “How well would you need to know this part of Kent, in order to find a quiet place for a killing?”

Constable Weaver brightened, as if no one had asked his opinion before. “I’d say ours are fairly well-traveled roads,” he answered after a moment’s thought. “Anyone coming down them in the direction of Marling would see the empty stretches. You’d only have to keep in mind where.”

Which meant, Hamish pointed out, that the possibilities were wide open.

“Were the three dead men heavy drinkers?”

“They’d not say no to a pint, sir, if someone was buying. They didn’t have the money for much else.”

“They hadn’t developed a taste for wine, in France?”

“There’s a story about that, now you mention it. Some of the Marling men took shelter during a storm in a burned-out French farmhouse. It had a wine cellar, and the men helped themselves. They were sick as dogs for two days, after drinking the lot.” Weaver chuckled. “Tommy Bilson brought home the silver cream jug he found there under a mattress. And it shined up something wonderful. I told him I ought to arrest him for stealing it.” He suddenly remembered who sat beside him in the motorcar and cast an anxious glance in Rutledge’s direction.

It was as old as warfare, this propensity to appropriate souvenirs. Rutledge had seen countless small acquisitions while boxing up possessions of the men he’d lost. There had been no way to discover where these objects had come from, much less who might have owned them once. For the most part he’d closed his eyes to them and sent them home. One of the most touching had been silver buttons, for a bride who would never wear them to the altar. . . .

Weaver pointed just ahead, where a line of trees marched along a winding stretch of road, giving some protection from the sun or rain. Rutledge pulled the motorcar to the verge. The constable was saying, “Seelyham’s not more than three miles in that direction. Inspector Grimes was called to have a look at what a farmer had found, and he sent for us.”

They got out to stand by the trunk of an ash tree. Its thickness offered an ideal place for a man to rest if he was drunk or tired. Shadowed by tall grass and the branches overhead, it was also an ideal spot where a body might be disposed of.

There were no cottages or farms within sight just here, no windows overlooking the road, but a hundred yards or so in the direction of Marling an overgrown drive wound between leaning stone pillars to a house protected from view by trees and a thick shrubbery. Only its roof and several chimneys were visible over the treetops. Too far away to hear anything, too far to see the road. Still . . .

“Who lives there?” Rutledge asked, pointing out the gates.

“Nobody now. The family died, and the lawyers are trying to find the heirs. Gone to New Zealand for a fresh start, or so I’m told.”

“Tell me about this first victim. What was his name? Taylor?”

“That’s right. Will Taylor. He worked in the hop gardens before the war. But there’s not much call for a one-legged man in that line. He’d found a job in Seelyham, putting up a fence that had blown down with the last storm. Good with his hands, and married, with two children.”

“Did you know him?” Rutledge asked. Weaver had missed the war by a matter of months, too young to serve, but probably eager.

“He was my brother’s age—Simon was lost off Gallipoli, when his ship went down,” Weaver replied somberly. “And I know Taylor’s wife, as well. Alice was in school with my sister. Too young to marry, but her mother signed the papers.”

“The sort of man who’d find himself mixed up with something he ought to leave alone?” Rutledge asked, looking up and down the quiet road.

“I never knew Will to be dishonest. He used to complain about the hop pickers from the East End. Light-fingered and always after the girls, he’d say.”

Hop picking was labor-intensive. Help was brought in during the autumn to take in the crop, and sometimes the same workers were called on to do the haying first. They were often the dregs of London’s East End, willing enough to work for wages, and sometimes representing the third and fourth generation hired out to pick. It was good income with winter coming on, a little something laid aside for the coalman or a sick child or gin to warm the inside of a man when the cold winds blew. A goodly number of the pickers came from the Maidstone area, bringing with them their dogs and their children, both of which ran underfoot like chickens.

Weaver stared down at the broken stalks of last summer’s wildflowers. “I don’t see Will Taylor mixed up in anything sinister. He was bent on feeding his family. Took losing his leg hard, an active sort who liked working out in the air. But he was trying to manage somehow.”

Rutledge said, “Did his wife have anything to tell you?”

“I questioned Alice myself,” Weaver responded. “But she didn’t know much. He was staying over in Seelyham to finish the fence, saying he’d come home when it was done. She didn’t expect him for another day or two. Sergeant Burke went on to Seelyham and asked about Taylor’s work. The fence was done properly, and a day early. Taylor was told he could wait until the morning, but was eager to get home, and set out after his dinner.”

“Was Taylor carrying his pay?”

“Yes, sir, and it was still there, in his pocket. You’d think, wouldn’t you, sir, that a thief wouldn’t fail to find that!”

T
HE SECOND VICTIM
had been found on the road from Helford. It ran into the Seelyham road at an angle, just outside Marling. Lying in a ditch by the side of fields, he was almost invisible until the sun rose high enough to pierce the shadows.

Beyond where Weaver stood with Rutledge, the hop gardens spread out toward a distant farm, tucked into a fold of land. Their frames and their green vines gone for the winter, the gardens looked bare and fallow. An oast house, one of the most recognizable features of the Kent landscape, reared its head like a decapitated windmill close by a stand of trees, its white walls streaked and wet from the rain. Inside it was an oast, the drying kiln that was an essential part of the processing of hops.

“Tell me about this man—Webber?” Rutledge encouraged Weaver as they got out in the rain and stood by the spot. “What sort was he?”

“Most everyone in Marling knew who he was. Not the sort you’d find carousing of a Saturday night. He’d had a strict upbringing, and his mother was Temperance-mad. A carpenter by trade. Made tables and chests and the like, as his father had done before him. He was in Helford, recaning chairs. The caning Webber did was known all over. No breaks and no missed steps.”