A Fearsome Doubt (20 page)

After a courtesy call on Inspector Cawly, Rutledge went in search of the stationmaster.

The man was still at his breakfast.

“The next train isn’t due for another hour,” he told Rutledge when he’d been tracked down to a cottage not far away. “You can wait at the station, if you like. It’s open!”

Rutledge explained his interest in a traveler who had arrived from the coast one evening at the end of October, during a rainstorm. “He’s not a local man. He was looking for transportation to Marling,” he added.

The stationmaster, idly stroking his graying Edwardian beard, stared at the floor. “Heavy rain, was it? We had only one passenger on the nine-forty from the south, and the ten-ten was late by two minutes coming in from London. You’re asking about the nine-forty, then, because there was a lady here to meet the passenger on the ten-ten. I’ve seen her before, traveling to London on occasion.”

A lady. Elizabeth Mayhew . . .

“That would be right.”

“He was what you might call a turnip in velvet. And he made a right nuisance of himself!”

“Indeed.”

“After the train pulled out, he came into the station and told me he needed to reach Marling that night. I said I doubted he’d find anyone who would drive him at that hour, in that weather. ‘I’m willing to pay whatever is asked. All you have to do is send for someone.’ ‘Send who?’ I wanted to know. I wasn’t about to get wet through, running errands for the likes of him. He wasn’t best pleased, I can tell you. ‘I have to reach Marling,’ he said again, as if I was deaf, and finally I told him he’d have to put up at the hotel for the night, and in the morning have Freddy Butler send for one of the lads who regularly take the goods wagon over to Marling. Well,
he
wasn’t about to arrive in Marling with the chickens and cabbages, he said. He wanted a proper carriage.” The stationmaster chuckled. “If he’d been the gentleman he thought he was, I’d have told him the smith kept a carriage he could have in the morning. He left, cursing under his breath.”

Rutledge smiled. “Did he indeed go to the hotel?”

“He didn’t. My guess is he was smarter than he looked and knocked on the first door he came to. They’d have sent him to the smith.”

“Was there anything more that you noticed about him?”

“He had blue eyes. I’d not have remembered that, but Freddy Butler’s son John had eyes the same color, like the summer sky. John didn’t come back from Arras.”

“How would you describe him? Educated? A Londoner? From the Midlands?”

“And how am I to guess that? He’s not a Kent man, I can tell you. I know what a Kent man sounds like!”

“Had you seen him before that night? Or after?”

“He came back this way a day or two later, didn’t he, to take the train again. And he looked like the cat that supped on cream. Whatever his business in Marling, he was that pleased about how it went. Cheeky bastard!”

19

A
FTER SOME DISCUSSION WITH
S
ERGEANT
B
URKE AND A HALF
hour of searching, Rutledge ran to earth the agent who was handling the sale of the house in Marling that the Leeds merchant allegedly had his eye on.

Mr. Meade was alarmed to be faced with a policeman across his desk. And a policeman from Scotland Yard at that.

“For if there’s anything untoward about this man, the sale will not go through—” He fiddled with the papers on his desk, fastidiously edging them with one side of the blotter, before moving several envelopes in the other direction and adjusting the position of the inkwell.

Rutledge said blandly, “I’ve no reason to believe that he’s involved in any crime. On the contrary, I’m after information that will close doors, not open them.”

Meade was not reassured. “He doesn’t live in Kent. At least—he will, when the sale is completed. I can’t see how he could help you. And I hope it won’t be necessary to contact him. It could put him off living here, to find Scotland Yard on his doorstep about murderers loose in Marling!”

“All the same,” Rutledge persisted, “I need to know whatever you can tell me about him.”

With a sigh, Meade said, “Wealthy. He’s prepared to sign for the house, and on his behalf I’ve already spoken with a man in Helford who can begin renovations immediately, as soon as the paperwork is completed. And that’s not all—he wants to restore the gardens. The house was once noted for its gardens. But that’s in the spring, of course, when the weather—”

Rutledge said, interrupting, “Describe him, if you will.”

“Younger than I’d expected, considering the fact that he’s done as well as he has. Fair. Putting on the weight of prosperity, I’d say. I’m told he made his money up north, in Leeds or thereabouts.” Meade was clearly more impressed with the man’s money than anything else about him.

“Name?”

“Aldrich. Franklin J. Aldrich,” the agent responded reluctantly. “The firm originally belonged to his father-in-law, I believe. Mr. Aldrich lost his father-in-law and his wife to the Influenza, and has decided to sell up and move away.”

“Why did he choose Kent?”

“The better climate. That’s what he told me. I daresay now he’s made his money, he’d like to enjoy spending it. And no doubt there’s a desire to put some little distance between himself and his roots, if he’s looking to set up as a gentleman.” Meade seemed to run out of virtues to extol and looked out the window at the busy street.

“How often has Aldrich traveled to Kent?”

“Most of our negotiations have been by letter, through his bankers. He came one weekend at the end of October, to view the property I had described. I’d actually offered him two or three possible choices, but he seemed to be in no doubt about the kind of house he wanted. It explains his success, I should think. Knowing what he wants.”

“How did he make his fortune?”

“I haven’t—er—felt free to ask him. He’s a very private person, actually. He did tell me once that the war had treated him well, and from that I assumed he’d been in manufacturing of one sort or another. That’s where most of the money was made.”

Aldrich wasn’t the first to make a fortune from the war. But even Meade seemed to feel uncomfortable with that. He added, almost as an afterthought, “It’s no bad thing for Marling, to have fresh blood coming in.” As if in apology for his own eagerness to conclude this sale. “A widower, of course—”

Hamish observed, as Rutledge finished his questions and rose to go, “Yon Aldrich will be good company for Raleigh Masters, when there’s no one left to dine wi’ him.”

Rutledge smothered a smile.

T
HERE HAD BEEN
no time to consider lunch, and Rutledge had bought a pork pie and apples at a small shop on the High Street before calling on Mr. Meade. He finished the apples as he made his way back to the scenes of the killings, drawn by reasons he couldn’t explain.

The roads were quiet at this hour of the day, and clouds were building to the east, over the Downs, threatening yet more rain. A cold wind had blown up as he came to the line of trees where Will Taylor had died, and he reached for his coat as he left his car.

What was there about these stretches of country roads, out of sight of witnesses, that had invited murder?

Rutledge had always depended on intuition, on a sense of what was there beneath the surface, unplumbable unless the mind was open to receive whatever swam up from the depths and into the light. He had no way to describe his intuition; he had never really questioned it. But something was there. Not on command—intuition was never amenable to conscious will. It simply responded in its own fashion, with an unexpected knowledge.

He walked the length of the line of trees, and tried to feel some response that would help him understand the terrible thing that had happened here. But nothing came, no small whisper of knowledge or breath of emotion. It was as if these trees, older than he was, open to the wind and elements, to time and space and seasons, had nothing to offer him except mute witness.

Here a man died. We don’t know why—

Smiling wryly at his morbid imagination, he went back to the motorcar and turned toward the other two scenes.

Hamish, always at his shoulder, unseen but never mute, had nothing to say, his mood dark.

Rutledge stood at the place where Kenny Webber had died, and listened to the soft soughing of the wind in the bare trees. He was standing so still that a small meadow mouse crept out of the high grass to stare at him before scurrying off to safer ground.

There was nothing, Rutledge told himself, that fitted any particular theory well enough to support it.

But the Shaw case had been much the same. . . .

No clues to the killer of women who had little to steal but whose pitiful treasures had offered a poorer man hope. It had been sheer accident that the police had stumbled on the name of a man-of-all-work who had come to help and ended up killing.

Would it be the same thing here? Would these two cases, seemingly so similar to a man tormented by the past, end up with the wrong suspect hanged?

He shivered at the thought, and turned back to the motorcar.

And Hamish, the practical Scot, whose family tree boasted feuding clansmen through centuries of bloody warfare, insisted, “It isna’ the same in the light. It isna’ the same . . . The murders happened at night.”

Rutledge stopped in his tracks.

And he was walking here in the light, where everything was different.

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.

R
UTLEDGE 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.

R
UTLEDGE 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, ais ne 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 some ne mistaking him for a killer and trying to get in the first blow.

Hamish, unhappy over the heavy shadows and fadYng moonlight, was wary, as watchful as he had been leanYng 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 walkYng a means of reachYng 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 stretchYng back in time. Self-sufficient and capable of protectYng 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.