A Fearsome Doubt (15 page)

The Campbells of this world, excellent scavengers though they were, occasionally forgot the rules and made enemies.

Dowling ordered a flan for his dessert, and Rutledge settled for a plate of cheese.

The inspector sighed as he put down his spoon. “I must thank you,” he said with a wry smile. “I feel blissfully content.”

A
FTER
D
OWLING HAD
left the hotel, Rutledge searched for the man who usually served behind the desk. Haskins was his name, and he had just finished his own meal in the kitchen, his napkin still under his chin. He pointed out the telephone, and Rutledge put in a call to London.

Sergeant Gibson’s gruff voice came over the line. “Yes, sir, you wanted to speak to me?”

“I’m looking for a man named Jimsy Ridger.” Rutledge gave Gibson a brief sketch of Ridger’s background and history. “He’s probably in London, and he may have returned to his old ways. Or he may have acquired a new name and taken up a more respectable line of work. But someone will know how to find him, even so.”

Gibson chuckled. “He wouldn’t be the first to turn respectable, and find old friends on his doorstep. Anything else, sir?”

“He’s a personable man, with a scapegrace way about him when he puts his mind to it.” He added as an afterthought, “He could be passing himself off as an ex-officer rather than a common soldier.”

Gibson noted it. “Not many of
them
in the stews of London,” he retorted dryly. “I’ll see what I can come up with, sir. But it will take a little time.”

Rutledge gave him the number at The Plough and rang off.

As he walked up the stairs, Hamish said, “Yon Ridger is a wild-goose chase, like as not.”

“True enough,” Rutledge answered. “In police work, we often close more doors than we open. On the other hand, Will Taylor was killed hours after he was questioned about Ridger. And our drunken friend tonight had been asked about him. I don’t want to find Ridger appearing as our cooked goose in the middle of a trial.”

T
HE NIGHT
’
S DREAMS
were a mixture of unsettled thoughts and emotions—the sounds of gunfire in the dark, the flashes of light, the arcing descent of flares, the first finding shots of artillery, and Rutledge was hunched behind the barrier of the trench wall, waiting for a lull to go over the top. The living Hamish was with him, and others long since dead, and he tried to keep up their courage as the minutes wore on. And then he was standing in a twilit Kent road, talking to Alice Taylor, and searching through the hop fields for the boy, Peter Webber. Mrs. Shaw was sitting in the car, a baleful presence, with her daughter weeping in the seat beside her.

Rutledge woke with a start, his body wet with sweat, his eyes searching the room for something—anything—that was familiar. He had no idea where he was.

And then the shape of the window and the pale light of a moon feeling its way through the thinning clouds brought him back to The Plough Hotel and the small village of Marling.

He got up and washed his face.

Hamish, lurking in the shadows of the room, said something, and Rutledge shook his head. Hamish repeated, “It’s almost dawn.”

So it was.

Rutledge said, “The summer dawns came early at the Front. You never liked them.”

“There was no’ much worth seeing when the light strengthened. Except for the dead, and the wire, and the men coughing with the damp.”

“Or the gas rolling in.”

“Aye.” The Highland Scots, used to the open hills, had been good at spotting the telltale sweep of a German gas attack. All their lives they’d seen sea mists, and that particular floating gauze that was ground mist in the valleys. They knew the feel of the air before these blew in. And they knew the different feel of the air before the gas came toward them on still mornings when the wind wouldn’t disperse it too quickly.

Hamish had often been the first to cry a warning. They had fumbled for their masks, shielding any bare skin, and waited for the attack to pass over them. Anyone too slow, anyone with an ill-kept mask, breathed in the fumes and felt the linings of his throat and lungs burn with a fire that was unforgiving. The damage, once done, lingered for whatever remained of a man’s life.

Looking back at the past in that odd moment, there was something besides the haunting voice and the haunted man in the quiet, dark room. That bond that held together soldiers over millennia, the shared experience of the devastation of war.

17

R
ETURNING TO BED WAS USELESS; IT WOULDN
’
T BRING
sleep. Rutledge bathed and shaved and then dressed, his mind occupied with murder in this quiet part of Kent.

Sitting in a chair by the window, he waited patiently for the hotel to rouse from the night, and then went down to breakfast at the appointed time. The dining room was empty, and a yawning girl was just opening the drapes that shut off the view of the street.

She looked up, smiled, and said, “I expect you’d like your tea.”

“I’d be grateful,” he said, returning the smile. She blushed and looked away, hurrying to the door that led through to the kitchen.

As he turned to the window, he saw a man driving a familiar motorcar pulling up at the hotel. The man, too, was familiar.

It was Tom Brereton, whom he’d met at Lawrence Hamilton’s dinner party. A guest brought by Raleigh and Bella Masters. The man whom Melinda Crawford was thinking of including in her will.

Brereton came striding into the dining room, and didn’t at first recognize Rutledge. His eyes were on the kitchen door, and when the girl serving tables came through with Rutledge’s tea, he called, “Do you suppose you could manage toast and a pot of that for me as well?”

She led him to the table just beyond Rutledge’s, and it was then that Brereton peered at the man from London and paused, as if trying to place him.

Rutledge greeted him by name, and reminded him of the dinner party.

Brereton nodded. “Yes, that’s right. The policeman from Scotland Yard. What brings you back to Kent? The murders here, I suppose. Do you mind?” He gestured to the other chair at Rutledge’s table.

“No, please join me.” Brereton nodded to the girl and she went off to fetch his tea.

“I’m half asleep,” Brereton said, sitting down. “Bella was worried that Raleigh had finished his drops and finally sent one of the servants down to my cottage to ask if I’d mind coming in this morning to ask the doctor for a new supply.”

“For his pain?”

Brereton grimaced. “It’s more for his moodiness. They’ve given him a new foot, you know, and it hurts like the devil. Both physically and psychologically. If he could manage it, he’d have his ravaged one back.”

“I expect that giving up his practice would weigh heavily on a man like Masters.”

“Yes, that’s probably more true than we know. He lived for the law, and he’s at sixes and sevens now.”

His tea and a plate of toast arrived, and Brereton added as he poured hot milk into the cup, “I don’t suppose Masters has ever been easy to live with. He’s a remarkably clever man. Nothing else has ever touched him the way the law did, and he’s having trouble filling all those empty hours. Bella fusses, which doesn’t help. But then she’s worried sick about him. They end up aggravating each other to the point of scenes.” He shook his head. “It’s rather sad.”

“He’s not likely to take up growing vegetable marrows,” Rutledge agreed, smiling. “I’m surprised that he hasn’t thought of writing about his career. At the Hamiltons’ dinner party he spoke warmly of Matthew Sunderland. He must have known or worked with a number of famous men.”

“Interesting possibility! I ought to drop a hint along those lines. Sunderland was Raleigh’s mentor and his standard. You’d think the man walked on water, the way Raleigh extols his virtues. I wonder if he could be objective—Sunderland made his share of mistakes, from what I’ve heard!”

Rutledge said, “Did he!”

“There was a famous case just at the turn of the century. Hushed up, of course, but Sunderland was reportedly too—er—fond of the wife of the man he was prosecuting. There was an odor of vengeance about the proceedings, as if he’d gladly see the man punished not for the alleged crime but for marrying the woman Sunderland had fancied for himself. Naturally I’ve never asked Raleigh if there was another side of the story.”

“Where did you hear this?”

“It was during the war, I had taken a train back to hospital after leave, and I found myself seated with an elderly barrister. We talked about the law for most of the journey. And he made a comment about the famous Mr. Sunderland having feet of clay. Apparently there was a lampoon that showed the Q.C.—as he was then!—as David, sending Bathsheba’s husband not to the forefront of battle but to prison for life. In any event the jury decided otherwise, for whatever reasons, and it was one of the few cases that Sunderland ever lost.”

Hamish added dryly, “I canna’ see him taking a fancy to yon harridan.”

“I saw Sunderland in top form during the Shaw trial. He was impressive.”

“Shaw? Oh, yes, the man hanged for murdering women in their beds. It was another trial that created a good deal of publicity. Sunderland died within the year, I think.” Brereton smiled wryly. “Bella tells me Raleigh all but went into a decline.”

“There was no suggestion of illness or impairment in the courtroom.”

“According to Raleigh, it was a sudden death. Sunderland’s heart simply stopped. He was sitting at his desk dictating letters to his clerk, and between one word and the next, he was gone.” Brereton took out his watch and peered at it intently, as if having trouble reading it. “Another half hour before the doctor’s likely to be up!” He put the watch away carefully. “The truth is, the man you saw at the dinner party is a far cry from what he once was. Raleigh has lost the edge that made him a superb barrister. He probably wishes he could die as swiftly as Sunderland did. In all likelihood, he won’t live out the winter.”

“It’s sad to watch a man deteriorate,” Rutledge agreed.

“It’s Bella I worry about. She’s going to wear herself into illness if she isn’t careful. And he doesn’t seem to notice. Or to care.”

“There’s a self-centeredness in dying,” Rutledge pointed out.

Brereton looked up at him. “So there is in blindness, too. The difference is in age. And perspective. I’ve still much of my life ahead of me, and I don’t fancy spending it tapping along the pavement with a cane!” He said restively, “I must go. Bella—Mrs. Masters—will be anxious. I may be able to persuade Dr. Pugh to let me in.”

He stood and looked around for the girl who had served him, then went to the kitchen door to call to her. After settling his account, he came back to the table. “I live in the cottage just down the road from the Masterses’ house. If you find yourself in the neighborhood, stop and have a drink with me.”

Rutledge thanked him and, after Brereton had gone, finished his own tea. But it was still too early to call on Elizabeth Mayhew, and when the serving girl came back to clear the table, he ordered his usual breakfast.

By that time the other guests in the hotel began to arrive, and the room took on new life as voices filled the spaces. He sat by the window, watching the street come to life as well, as carts moved among the shops, bringing in chickens and cabbages and beets and loaves of bread fresh from the bakery. A small cart filled with baskets of apples rolled past, the farmer’s cheeks as round and red as his wares, his bald pate gleaming in the first rays of the late-rising sun. Through the glass, Rutledge could hear the clock in the church tower strike the hour faintly. Brereton, driving out of Marling, was hunched over the wheel, intent on avoiding an accident.

How had Brereton felt about the murdered ex-soldiers? Rutledge wondered. Had he understood their suffering better than most, and felt the irony of their death in a peaceful country finished with war? Or had he secretly envied them their quiet and painless end?

Hamish said, “He isna’ blind yet. Ask him in five years.”

Which was more to the point.

His breakfast finished, Rutledge set out to do what had been on his mind since dawn.

Elizabeth Mayhew was surprised to see him at this hour, but he apologized with the reminder that he was in Marling on Yard business.

“You’ve lived here since well before the war,” he said as he followed her into the small reception room off the entry hall. “Do you remember hearing of a Jimsy Ridger?”

She frowned. “The name isn’t familiar at all. Richard would have known. He knew better than most what went on. He had deep roots here. People talked to him, confided in him.” She looked around her at the comfortable room, her home since her marriage. “I’m considering selling up. There are no children to inherit. I might as well let the house go to someone who can keep it as Richard would have wished.”

Startled, he said, “But it’s been in his family for—what? Seven generations, at the least!”

“I know. There’s a cousin somewhere. Out in Kenya, I think, if he’s still alive. A remittance man. I’m not sure Richard would have liked the idea of his inheriting.”

Black sheep in a family were sometimes paid handsomely to take themselves out of England, with a monthly stipend to smooth their road and nip in the bud any fond thoughts of returning home uninvited.

Elizabeth smiled wryly. “If you’d married Jean, you’d have been looking for a country place, wouldn’t you? This house would have suited you—and that would have suited Richard. But we seldom know how our lives will turn out, do we?”

“Where would you go?” Rutledge asked, keeping to the main point. “To London?”

“I had thought about traveling—” she said vaguely.

“Europe is in a shambles. And I don’t quite picture you in the wilds of America or the missions of China. Like Melinda Crawford.”

One of the puppies, awakened by their voices, yipped from the other room, and Elizabeth turned the subject by saying quickly, “Oh, you must come and see how they’ve grown!”

Which in fact they had. But Rutledge was not to be distracted.

As she handed him one of the puppies to hold, kneeling by the box on the cold hearth, Elizabeth said, “Canada, perhaps.” And then caught herself as she remembered too late that Jean, too, had gone to Canada.

Rutledge pretended he’d made no such connection and admired the puppies. Then he said, “Will you do something for me? You know the Masters family better than I do. Can you ask—skirting the reason why—what Mrs. Masters recalls of a case in London before the war?” He described the Shaw murders for Elizabeth, and the brilliant prosecution that Matthew Sunderland had mounted.

“What in particular do you want to know?” she asked, confused. “This has nothing to do with the murders here, does it?”

“It’s an old case,” he said lightly. “But one I was assigned to when I was young and far from wise. I’d like to know if Sunderland described it to his friends. Or if Raleigh Masters ever discussed it with his wife. At the time it attracted considerable attention—it would be natural to relive it.”

Elizabeth nodded. “Oh—yes. Weren’t you about to ask Raleigh when he had one of his spells? I’ll try to see what I can learn.” It was as if she was grateful that the request was impersonal. “But I don’t know that Bella can tell me much, if it wasn’t Raleigh’s case—”

“I understand that. A shot in the dark, if you will.”

Her eyes probed his face. Then she said, unexpectedly, “Ian, is something about this case worrying you? You haven’t been quite the same since you were here the last time, you know. I shall do this, of course I shall, but if there’s a reason you aren’t telling me, I want you to know that you can trust me—”

He could have told her that she was the one who had changed. Not he.

Hamish said, “Aye, but who planted the seeds of doubt in your head?”

It had been Melinda Crawford . . .

“It’s not the case itself,” he answered Elizabeth now. “It’s the people who were involved. I’ve been reading through their statements again.”

And as he left the house, he thought they’d come to a sad pass, he and Richard’s widow—lying to each other as they never had before.

D
OWLING HAD LEFT
a message for him at The Plough. Rutledge walked on to the police station and learned from Sergeant Burke that the Marling inspector was already on his way to Seelyham.

Rutledge asked, “Has anything happened? Am I to follow him?”

Burke shook his head. “I doubt there’s any new development, sir, or I’d have heard it as soon as I came on duty. Constable Smith informed me that Inspector Grimes over in Seelyham had sent a man along to fetch Inspector Dowling, but there mustn’t been any urgency, sir. The inspector waited half an hour at the hotel for you before setting out. I expect it’s no more than a meeting to consider next steps, and Inspector Dowling included you as a courtesy.”

“You shouldna’ have lingered on your ain business,” Hamish scolded. “It’s no’ right to muddle the past wi’ the present.”

When in Rome—
Rutledge thought, but this was Marling . . .

And it was an opportunity to meet Grimes, in Seelyham.

He thanked Burke and was gone.

But he’d no more than turned the crank and started the engine when a young woman stepped out of the hotel’s side door and paused, as if waiting for him to drive on. It wasn’t until he’d climbed behind the wheel that Rutledge, his thoughts far from London, realized he knew her.

It was Nell Shaw’s daughter.

She simply stood there, prepared for rejection.

“Miss Shaw?” he said tentatively. He dredged his memory for a name, and somewhere in the mists of the past, he remembered that she was called Margaret.