A Fearsome Doubt (2 page)

The nightmare surrounded him, unending, like torment meted out carefully to make the pain last. He felt like the Guy, a helpless spectacle.

And then the Guy was consumed, the flames began to die back, and the euphoria of the evening seemed to wane as well. Women began to collect reluctant children, and men with rakes and brooms went to brush some of the ashes back toward the still-red coals at the center. Voices could actually be heard over the din and the crowd started to move in different directions, freeing him at last.

Elizabeth, her face pink from laughter, looked up at him and said gratefully, “Thank you for coming, Ian! I couldn’t have faced it on my own. Although it’s time I learned, isn’t it?” She was holding his arm again, her fingers like individual bands of steel gripping him.

And then as swiftly as he had seemed to suffocate, his mind cleared and he was himself again. He put his hand over hers and managed a smile.

As she moved away to speak to someone else, Rutledge scanned the far side of the smoking remains of the fire for a last time, but the face was not there. The man was not there.

Surely he never had been—

Elizabeth said, turning to look behind her, “Did you see someone you know? Do you want to try to catch him up?”

“No—!” Rutledge answered abruptly, and then added at Hamish’s prompting, “I— A trick of the light, that’s all. I was wrong.”

It was surely something about the night that had disturbed him, and the noise and the acrid smell of the fireworks lingering in the smoky air. There was no one there—

“He canna’ be,” Hamish reminded Rutledge. “He’s deid. Like me!”

Deid. Like me!

Rutledge hesitated, on the point of asking Hamish what he knew—what he might have seen. Then—or just now.

But before he could frame the words, he stopped himself.

What if this had nothing to do with the war?

A
FTER A VERY
fine dinner with Elizabeth and three of her friends at the hotel just along the High Street, Rutledge drove back to London. Introductions and the subsequent settling into chairs as everyone exclaimed over the success of the evening had given Rutledge time to collect himself and present a polite, pleasant facade in spite of his unsettled state of mind.

It was something he was becoming increasingly good at doing, finding the right mask for his terrors.

Caught up in their own excitement, no one at the table noticed his long silences or made anything of his distraction. He was the outsider among them, and they included him from kindness, expecting nothing in return. He overheard one of the women as she leaned toward Elizabeth and murmured, “He’s absolutely charming! Where did you find him?” as if he were a new suitor.

His hostess had replied dryly, “He was Richard’s best man. I’ve known Ian for ages. He’s been a great comfort.”

For Elizabeth’s sake, he was glad to find himself accepted. He couldn’t have borne it if he’d embarrassed her. Yet it could have happened all too easily.

Frances had been wrong—he was not ready to meet old friends and pick up the threads of an old life. There were too many walls that shut him off from people who remembered a very different man called Ian Rutledge.

Still, Elizabeth had not let him go without extracting a promise that he’d be back on 10 November.

“You
will
ask for leave, I hope,” she said anxiously, a reminder. “And Chief Superintendent Bowles will agree, won’t he?”

“I see no reason why not,” Rutledge responded, bending his head to kiss her cheek. “I’ll be here. If I can.”

What he didn’t tell her was that—with or without leave—he had no intention of being in London on 11 November.

But on the long drive home, watching the headlamps pick out the verges of the road and pierce the heavy shadows of trees and hedgerows, Rutledge had found himself seeing again and again the face he’d carried with him since the bonfire.

It lingered against his will, as if once having surfaced it refused to be stuffed down once more into the bleak depths from which it had risen. And there was no respite, for traffic was too light to distract him. The cloudy, moonless night seemed to be its ally, and even Hamish was silent. By the time Rutledge reached the outskirts of London, the shoulders and chest attached to the face had fleshed themselves out, bit by bit gathering substance like a reluctant ghost. They belonged not in the proper English clothing Rutledge thought he’d glimpsed tonight, but in a torn and bloody uniform.

And Hamish said, as if he’d been waiting for Rutledge to reach this point, “I’d no’ pursue it. There were sae many . . .”

In the pale morning light, as he made his way to Scotland Yard the next day, Rutledge realized he had arrived at the same conclusion.

3

I
T WAS 9
N
OVEMBER.
R
UTLEDGE WAS AT THE
Y
ARD
,
PREPARING
to clear his desk for leave due to begin that afternoon. He was looking forward to returning to Marling, in Kent. Not just as an escape from London to avoid the public commemoration on the eleventh, but as an opportunity to prove to himself that the memories awakened on Guy Fawkes Day were no more than an isolated and unexpected response to the noisy press of people around the bonfire and his own restiveness over the approaching celebration of the Armistice. There had been no recurring episodes. For that he was grateful.

He knew very well that it had become something of an obsession, this celebration. Hamish harped on the date, as did the newspapers, giving him no peace.

For weeks he’d watched the preparation of the temporary structure that London was building to honor the nation’s casualties of war. In fact, seeing every stage had been unavoidable as he came and went at the Yard. The permanent memorial would not be completed until the next year, but much had been made of the eventual design and placement.

A Cenotaph: a monument to the dead buried elsewhere . . .

And so many, so very many of them were: a sea of white crosses in foreign ground, some with names, some with no more than the bleak word
Unknown.
But
he
had known them; he and officers like him had sent them out to die, young and inexperienced and eager, dead before he could recall their names or remember their faces. . . . Dead before he’d had the chance to turn them into real soldiers, with some small hope of survival. Dead and on his conscience, like weighted stones. And no time to mourn—

Nor did he need a Cenotaph standing close by Whitehall and Downing Street as a focus for his grief and loss. He—like countless others—carried them with him every day. The men he had served with, shared hardship and fear with, bled and suffered with, were as sharp in his memory and his nightmares as they had been before they died. As was the recurring voice that lived in his mind. A reminder in every waking moment of the Scots he’d led and the one Scot he’d been forced to execute during the horrendous bloodbath that had been the Battle of the Somme.

Invading his thoughts, Hamish scolded, “Ye’ve read the same lines three times, man!”

Realizing he’d done just that, Rutledge finished the paragraph and signed the report, setting it aside to be handed to Superintendent Bowles. His mind often grappled with the long nightmare of the trenches, the blighted landscape of northern France, the narrowed focus of trying somehow to protect the men under him, and the black despair of failing. Sometimes these seemed more real than the paperwork in front of him.

He was reaching for the next folder when a young constable tapped at his door and stepped aside to usher in a florid-faced, middle-aged woman in a dowdy black coat and a black hat that did not become her.

“A Mrs. Shaw to see you, sir! She says you’d know who she is.”

The woman stared at Rutledge, her heavy features twisting into a mask of pain. Tears began to trickle down her face, ravaging it.

Rutledge nodded to the constable as the man hesitated before closing the door. It swung shut with a click.

“Please, sit down, Mrs. Shaw,” he said gently as he strove to find her name in his memory. But there were no Shaws in the files he’d been reviewing, and as far as he could recall, no Shaws who had served under him in France. She watched him from behind her tears, waiting for the first stir of recognition.

Before the war, then?

And it came back to him as she sank heavily into her chair.

She was the widow of a man he’d sent to the gallows. Shaw . . . Ben Shaw. Convicted of murdering elderly women and robbing them. He had been trusted: a man-of-all-work who came on call to do the small and necessary repairs that aging and ill householders couldn’t manage. And when they didn’t die soon enough to suit him, he’d eased their going with a pillow, and then ransacked their meager possessions for anything of value. Alone in the world and bedridden, they had had no chance against him.

One of the newspapers had written a sensational account of the scene as imagined by one of their journalists:
“He came boldly to the bed, speaking kindly, offering to plump the flat and lumpy pillows for them, as he must have done a hundred—nay, a thousand times!—and as they smiled gratefully, he slipped the pillow over their faces before that smile could be replaced by horror, and held it there firmly against their weak—futile—attempts to prevent him. And when the pale, flaccid arms fell back to his victims’ sides, he had lifted each graying head, slipped the pillow gently back beneath it, and closed the bulging eyes before walking back down the stairs and shutting the door behind him, leaving the pathetic corpse for a cleaning woman to discover in the morning . . .”

Inflammatory as it was, it had drawn a reprimand from the judge as he charged the jury and bade them ignore the overwrought misconceptions of a writer paid to stir up the public sentiment.

Rutledge, pushing the recollection aside, wondered what had brought her here, to the Yard. It was as unexpected as a resurrection. “You wished to see me, Mrs. Shaw? What can I do to help you?”

“Turn back the clock,” she answered tremulously. “But there’s no one can do that, is there?” She began to cry in earnest.

As a young policeman, he’d dreaded having to speak to friends and relatives of victims, dreaded the tears that seemed to fall without conscious will, a flood that made him feel exceedingly helpless. How do you offer comfort, where there is none? Experience had not taught him an answer.

Rutledge was silent, allowing Mrs. Shaw a space in which to recover, and then said with compassion, “No one knows a way to do that.”

It was, he thought, a prelude to a piteous account of life as the widow of a hanged man, followed by an entreaty for money to pay her rent. She must be in dire straits, to come to the police for help. He tried to recall the name of the clergyman he’d met while investigating the case. It would be in the files. Surely the parish must offer some provisions for the Mrs. Shaws of this world—she needn’t be reduced to begging!

She surprised him.

“Turn back the clock to that trial,” she said baldly, staring fiercely at him, “and this time find some way of bringing out the
truth
!”

Caught utterly off guard, Rutledge found himself fumbling for words. “I don’t quite understand—”

“The truth who it was killed them, the old ladies.” She began to dig in the purse she carried with her, and pulled out a small handkerchief. Unfolding it on the edge of his desk, she added triumphantly, “That’s your proof, right here! It won’t bring my Ben back, nothing will, but it should clear his name!”

Inside the square of cheap cloth was a locket without its chain. In the center was the face of a man in profile, carved in onyx from what Rutledge could see of it, against a pearl-gray background. A lacework of black-enameled laurel leaves framed it. She opened the locket for him next: inside lay a delicately braided coil of graying chestnut hair, protected by a crystal cover.

She watched him as he studied it, guarding it against any intent on his part to take it from her, turning it in her rough hands with the delicacy of a merchant exhibiting his wares.

It was mourning jewelry, worn to remind the wearer of a loved one.

“May I?” he asked. She nodded, and showed him the reverse.

And on the back of the locket were several lines engraved in the gold case:
Frederick Andrew Satterthwaite, loving husband, d. April 2, 1900.

Satterthwaite had been the name of one of Shaw’s victims.

“He couldn’t sell it, could he?” Mrs. Shaw was demanding. “Not with that inscription on the back of it! Anybody would have known at once where it come from. What surprises me was that he kept it at all. But I suppose he couldn’t think what to do with it. And it’s pretty, in a morbid way. That’s
gold
it’s set in.” A red finger with a chewed nail pointed at the setting, tapping it.

Rutledge rather thought she was right, on both counts. This was indeed a piece of jewelry that would have marked the possessor as a thief and murderer.

And it hadn’t been found in Ben Shaw’s possession—to his, Rutledge’s, certain knowledge. It had never come to light at all, and only a distant cousin’s memory of the locket had seen it included in the inevitable inventory of Mrs. Satterthwaite’s belongings.
“One mourning locket, bearing name of deceased’s husband, and date of his death, set in gold, onyx profile. Missing.”

The investigating officer, Inspector Nettle—Rutledge had not been the first on the scene—had written in his notes the query
“Very likely thrown into the river?”

“How did you find it?” Rutledge asked, leaning back in his chair. The locket was too difficult to fake—too expensive, for one thing. And for what purpose? “More to the point, where had your husband hidden it?”

“God save us,
no
!” she replied in a harsh, frustrated voice. “If he had, would I bring it to
you
? Now? To what end—I ask you, what good would it do?”

“Perhaps to put your mind at ease, in regard to your husband’s guilt?”

“I told you, the truth comes out with this, and too late to save Ben! No, this I took from my
neighbor’s
house yesterday. Henry Cutter, his name is. The old bitch, his wife, died last month, and he couldn’t bear to go through her clothes and such. Finally he asked me. And I found this in the back of the chest where she kept her corsets and drawers. Folded in that handkerchief.” The stubby finger stabbed at a bit of color in one corner. “See, it’s embroidered:
JAC—
for Janet Ann Cutter. And what I want from
you,
Inspector, is to find out what it was doing in
her
chest, and how it got there! I want to know if Henry Cutter stole it from a dead woman! And if my poor husband is innocent, I want you to clear his name. Do you hear me? My children deserve that—to have the shame taken away—even if you can’t bring Ben back to us!”

Hamish said, “It isna’ a small thing she wants.”

Her small, bright eyes glared balefully at Rutledge, as if he’d hanged her husband with his own hands. Which, in a way perhaps, he had. He’d been the investigating officer, after Philip Nettle had dropped dead of a burst appendix. It was his evidence, built on Nettle’s original investigation, that had put Benjamin Edward Shaw on trial for murder, in August 1912. Six years and more ago . . .