A Fearsome Doubt (16 page)

Her face, clouded with uncertainty, cleared as he recognized her. “It’s my mother,” she said hurriedly. “I’m so terribly worried about her.”

With a repressed sigh, he asked, “Is she ill? Shall I ask the doctor to come to the hotel?” Nell Shaw was, he thought, a better tactician than half the generals at the Front—But then, as Hamish was pointing out, perhaps she had a better cause. After all, Rutledge was the man who had brought her husband to judgment—and thus to his death. Shifting the burden of his self-doubt to her shoulders, blaming her for demanding what she perceived as justice, was shirking his duty to himself and to the Law.

“I’m sorry—No, she’s in London. I came down alone.”

Thanking God for small mercies, he said more sharply than he’d intended, “I must drive to Seelyham. My business there can’t wait. I’ll have to take you with me. We can talk on the way.”

She hesitated, as if half afraid of him, gnawing her lip like a child.

“Margaret,” he said more gently. “Would you prefer to wait here until I come back? I can’t promise how long it will be. On the other hand, if you drive with me, there won’t be any distractions or interruptions. We can discuss what’s wrong with your mother along the way, and I’ll see you safely home from Seelyham.”

Flushing with embarrassment and gratitude, she nodded, and Rutledge handed her into the passenger’s seat before turning toward the main road out of the village.

As they passed the ironmonger’s, a man leaning wearily against the wall stared blearily at them. Rutledge recognized the drunk, Holcomb, from the night before. Belching heavily, the man turned on his heel and shambled on.

Rutledge wondered if the man was sober enough to make any better sense now. But he couldn’t stop.

Picking up the thread of Margaret Shaw’s earlier remark, he asked, “Why are you worried about your mother?”

“It’s like an obsession,” Miss Shaw told him earnestly, as if relieved to find someone who would listen. She was not as hard as her mother, nor as intelligent, he thought. Sheltered—by choice or by circumstances—she was not worldly, in the true sense. And he wondered if she really understood why her mother was so adamant that the past be expunged.

“Clearing your father’s name?” He glanced toward her.

Her face reddened again. She had that kind of fair complexion that registered shifts in emotion easily. “She’s convinced Papa didn’t kill anyone . . . she can’t sleep, she can’t eat—it’s all she thinks about!”

“How long has this been going on? All these years? Or since she found the locket?”

“She’s always railed against the jury. But since the locket she’s been like a madwoman.”

“Tell me about finding the locket.”

“There’s nothing to tell. She went next door to help Mr. Cutter as he’d asked, and when she came home she looked sick, as if she was about to lose her dinner. She was that upset, she locked herself in her room. I’ve only known her to do that twice before. The day Papa was taken away, and the day the letter came.”

“What letter?”

“I never saw it. But after she read it, she cried for hours. Then she came out of her room and was herself again.”

“A letter your father had written?”

She frowned. “I don’t see how it could be. It only came this autumn. But I overheard her tell Mr. Cutter that a cousin was dying. She said, ‘Everyone is gone. There’s no one left.’ ”

“And what has been your feeling all these years? About your father’s guilt?” he asked quietly, without judgment.

She shook her head. “I never cared whether Papa was guilty or not. It didn’t matter. When they took him away, I wept all night. I hated the police, I hated you. He was my
father—
I didn’t know how we were to get along without him! And indeed, it’s been the hardest thing we’ve ever had to face. Nobody
understands
!”

Hamish said, “She would ha’ been at an age where she doted on him.”

It was true. Rutledge recalled the stricken, white-faced child standing in the doorway, staring up at her father, waiting for him to tell her it was all a mistake, that he’d be home by the morning. And Shaw had looked at her, pain in his eyes, and said nothing.

The boy, her brother Ben, had been belligerent, beating his fists against the young constable escorting his father, crying out to let him go, he’d done nothing. But the girl had been unable to speak, crushed by events, not even coming forward to kiss her father as he turned a last time on the road and looked back at her.

“It’s important to realize that your mother may be wrong. That she’s going to be disappointed,” Rutledge began, slowing in the wake of a lorry. “I know she’s desperate and afraid and clinging to hope. But what if there is none? So far I’ve found nothing, no real proof to support her belief that this new evidence—”

“That’s no’ true!” Hamish thundered. “It’s no’ the truth!”

Rutledge silently defended himself. “I will not give her false hope! It won’t help her mother, and it won’t serve her!” he said adamantly. “Nothing is black and white—it’s more often shades of gray!”

Hamish replied defiantly, “Aye, so you say!” His upbringing in a barren, harsh land, compounded by his rigid faith, had always set out the lines of battle cleanly. One faced and dealt with life, and if necessary, with death. It was what had led him to refuse a direct order in the field, this stubborn, suicidal belief that compromise was unacceptable. Hedged in by exhaustion and disgust and grief, he had had nowhere to go. And so had chosen execution rather than lead even one more man to his death in the teeth of the German guns. . . .

“—evidence,” Rutledge went on, overriding the protest, “is sufficient to satisfy either the police or the Home Office that this file should be reopened.”

“But there’s the locket! Mama says you haven’t spoken to anyone—that you’ve come here about other murders, and forgotten us.” The girl bit her lip again, and turned to look out at the fields. “Mama says—” She broke off as her voice quivered. Pride forbade her to cry in his presence.

“I know what your mother says,” he told her, more gently. “And I
have
spoken to people who remember your father and his trial.”

“And nobody wished to help,” she said forlornly. “I’m not surprised.”

“Who else could have killed those women?”

There was a long silence.

He hadn’t expected an answer. He said, finally, “I can understand why your mother took the locket from that drawer—it was human nature, it was vindication, and she didn’t think beyond that possibility. Still, Mrs. Cutter is dead. We can’t question her about how it came into
her
possession.”

“But I don’t think Mrs. Cutter intended to harm Papa, when she told the police about the change in our circumstances. I think when George—that was Mrs. Cutter’s son from her first marriage—told her about the murders, she saw a way to make trouble for Mama. Because she wanted Papa to come to her for help.”

“Your father worked in the victims’ houses, not your mother.”

“But Mama was always after Papa to ask pay for what he did. And he wouldn’t hear of it. Mrs. Cutter told me one afternoon that Mama would go round to the houses herself and say that we were desperate for whatever they could spare. Mrs. Cutter told me that Mama would ask to be remembered in their wills, if the old ladies couldn’t pay much.”

Nothing in the original testimony suggested that Mrs. Shaw had had any contact with the victims. Was this the truth? Or a fabrication?

“How did Mrs. Cutter know these things?”

“I don’t know. I was afraid to ask her!”

Her son George?

“Did you ever speak to your parents about her accusations?”

Margaret shook her head vigorously. “Oh, no. It was shameful to think of Mama begging.”

Which might have scuttled Janet Cutter’s intentions.

He drove with only half his mind on the road. It would be easy to believe that Mrs. Cutter had simply used the killings to her own advantage—except for that locket. The locket put an entirely different complexion on the interactions between the Shaws and the Cutters. Would Janet Cutter have asked her son George to bring her a small token, some property of the dead that she could use in her persecution of Nell Shaw? And instead the police had taken her literally and investigated the husband, not the wife! She’d have buried the locket away, then, for fear it would condemn the wrong Shaw—

Mistaking his silence, Margaret Shaw turned to face Rutledge. “It will break Mama’s heart if you fail her. I don’t know what I’m to do then! Mama has always been that strong! How will my brother and I survive without
her
?” Her voice ended in a wail that made him flinch.

Rutledge swore to himself. He mustn’t—he couldn’t—afford to find himself entangled in the emotional turmoil of the Shaw family. His objectivity slipped with every encounter. The locket was damning—but where had it come from? That was the crux of his dilemma.

Where had the locket spent the last six years?

It couldn’t have been in the possession of Janet Cutter’s dead son. Unless he’d sent it to her in a final and desperate need to justify his suicide—

“It would be a tidy answer,” Hamish interjected sourly.

The whole case was revolving around Janet Cutter. And she was dead. . . .

Rutledge said, “Your mother means well, Margaret, but she’s living under the delusion that the police and a jury and a judge were wrong in their findings. And that doesn’t happen very often—”

“That’s what Mama said to us—‘It doesn’t happen very often—but they wronged your father, and they wronged me, and they wronged you—’ Mama was there in the courtroom. She could see that a jury believes what the lawyers tell them. What the police tell them. But Papa never said a word in his own defense. Who gave his side?”

The defense had put up the best arguments it could. But the most damning evidence had been Shaw’s refusal to deny his guilt when the police had questioned him.

Hamish said, “If Mrs. Cutter had told him what she told the lass, and he believed her lies—”

“—he would have taken his wife’s place in the dock, for the sake of the children. . . .” Rutledge completed the thought.

Miss Shaw was silent for a long breath. Then she said stoutly, “I never liked Mrs. Cutter. There was a slyness about her. She’d be very kind, offering tea cakes or hair ribbons. And then once I was lulled into accepting, she’d begin to pick and pry. She’d ask about my parents, about my father. I didn’t know how to stop her, or turn the questions. It was like being pinned, the way insects were in a museum display I saw once—”

“What sort of questions?”

“What Papa and Mama talked about together. If they had arguments. What my father had given my mother on her birthday. It was as if she couldn’t bear for them to be happy together.”

O
N THE OUTSKIRTS
of Seelyham oast houses lined the fields, like misshapen windmills lacking their sails. Miss Shaw asked about them, staring over her shoulder. “I was never much in the countryside,” she said artlessly. “I don’t know anything about flowers or trees. But I like them.”

Rutledge, thinking of the shabby, cheek-by-jowl houses of Sansom Street, replied, “I expect you do. You should consider going into service in the country.” If he’d been on better terms with Elizabeth Mayhew, he could have recommended this girl to her. But she was considering selling up, and there would be no place for Margaret Shaw, when new owners took over.

The pretty face turned to him, brightening. “I could, couldn’t I? If Mama doesn’t find a way to help us. I learn quickly, if I’m taught.”

Hamish said, Covenanter to the bone, “It’s no’ a very fine future, service.”

“For many girls with no other place to go, it provides a home,” Rutledge pointed out.

At that Hamish snapped, “And salves your conscience, aye.”

O
N THE OUTSKIRTS
of Seelyham was a huddle of half-timbered cottages with thatched roofs that led into a broadening of the road, a few side streets, and a small green with two- and three-story brick buildings on either side, one of them half covered with ivy and sporting a sign identifying it as the Seelyham Arms. Around the corner stood a small public house with a pair of benches on either side of the door. The church was set on higher ground where a lane branched to the right, and the churchyard wall ran along the lane for some distance beyond, sharing it on the other side with a rather shabby house that rambled into three wings, its plaster faded to a soft cream and the pointed windows reflecting the church tower. The police station, a farmer walking his dog informed Rutledge, was just beyond the pub.

Rutledge left Miss Shaw in the parlor of the Seelyham Arms, ordering tea and sandwiches for her, before walking along to the station. It was crammed between a pair of shops, one with meats hanging in the window and the other a bakery displaying an array of cakes and bread.

He found Dowling talking with a heavyset, red-faced man who was introduced as Grimes, the local man on the scene. The small office, stuffy with the heat of bodies and the smell of stale food, was almost claustrophobic in atmosphere. Rutledge quickly found himself wanting to leave the outer door standing wide.

Gruff and to the point, Grimes declared, “I’ve just been acquainting Mr. Dowling here with the names of men who’d be included on any list of possible victims if our murderer widens his range. Seemed to be a good idea to say something to each man, and we’ve just done that.”

Rutledge wondered how many able-bodied men had gone marching off to war out of the village’s tiny population. He sat down in the chair offered him and replied, “I take it that they served with the Marling men?”

Grimes looked him over, the height, the thinness of the face, the haunted eyes. But something in Rutledge’s appearance made up his mind for him. “That’s right. Except for two that went to sea.” He sighed. “The farmers got used to their being away, managing somehow. But it’s not the same—never will be. And no money to mechanize.”

“What did these men have to say?” Rutledge asked.

“Not what you’d call helpful information. Dowling sat there and watched them, and he’s of the same mind: Nobody seems to know anything we don’t.” Grimes passed a list to Rutledge, who scanned it quickly. None of the names were familiar. “What’s more, I’d already spoken with the rector. Comparing impressions, you might say. He knows Seelyham as well as or better than I do. And there’s been no indication of secrets or trouble that he’s aware of.” He stirred in his chair, glancing briefly at Dowling. “All the same, the men and their families are worried. You could see it in their faces.”