A Fearsome Doubt (11 page)

“Was there money in his pocket?”

“Yes, sir, we found two pounds.”

Hamish commented, “A clever man, now, he’d ha’ taken the money and put it in the puir box. To confound the police.”

Rutledge responded aloud without thinking. “Both of them married: Taylor and Webber. Not likely to be unfaithful, would you say?”

Weaver answered him. “They weren’t likely, no, sir. Past an age for wild oats, and that. There’s no jealous husband looking for revenge.”

T
HE THIRD BODY
had been found close by the crossroads where Rutledge thought he’d seen a face in his headlamps. He felt an odd frisson of cold down his spine as he got out of the motorcar, as if there were traces of something unnatural here still, a scent or lingering shadow.

Hamish, ordinarily quick to point out foolishness, was a Highlander, who understood moods.

But the corpse was a local man, not a straying doppelgänger. Harry Bartlett had gone to visit a friend who was ill—and ended by dying before him.

“Bartlett wasn’t what you’d call a staunch churchgoer,” Weaver was saying. “He had a reputation as a hell-raiser before the war, and was the first in Marling to sign up. Told everyone he was tired of bashing local heads, and thought he’d try a few Germans. He was a good soldier, from all reports. That lot often are. But he got hung up on the wire one night that last spring of the war and when they brought him in, he was near to bleeding to death.”

Hamish was asking a question. Rutledge said, “Did these three men serve in the same unit?”

Weaver blinked. “Yes, sir, I expect they did. The Kent men stayed together. Looked out for each other.”

Officers had found that men who knew each other fought better side by side. They often died side by side, when a shell went up in their faces.

Rutledge walked along the road for some distance, then turned and walked back. “All right then, the war. Find out all you can about where they served, and who their friends were.”

“Sir? I can’t see how that might help. The war’s been over for a while now.”

“It hadn’t ended for them, had it?”

After a last look around, Rutledge turned back to the motorcar. They drove back to Marling as dusk was falling, and the road seemed long, lonely.

Hamish commented, “A man with crutches would accept a ride.”

“So he would,” Rutledge silently agreed. “But why should he be saved from a painful walk—and then be killed?”

Still, it was something to consider. What had these three men had in common, besides lost limbs? According to Weaver, not much beyond their working-class backgrounds and their service in the war. Bartlett’s wife, Peggy, was a girl he’d married since coming home, and there were no children.

Dowling had been right. There was hardly any evidence to build on. What had brought these men face to face with a killer? Greed? A secret that was dangerous to know? A killer wouldn’t offer a man a glass of wine and then fill him with laudanum, unless he first wanted to learn something from his victim. . . . Where had they drunk together?

Rutledge, listening to Hamish in the back of his mind, wondered how many more would join this unholy clutch of dead men, before the police found any answers.

T
HE RAIN FELL
with depressing steadiness, cold and coloring everything a bleak gray. Even the church at the top of High Street seemed dark and dreary, its ragstone facade streaked with damp, and the dead flower stalks among the churchyard stones a sign of desertion rather than loving memorials. What did you grow in the churchyard in winter besides ivy and hellebore? Rutledge wondered as he drove back to the hotel. Too late for Michaelmas daisies and too early for pansies.

He washed up and unpacked his luggage, then came down to the dining room—to find Melinda Crawford ensconced at the best table. She looked up as he came into the paneled room and smiled broadly.

“Either I’m in my dotage, or you’ve answered a maiden’s prayers.”

He laughed and came to join her. “What brings you to Marling?”

“I could ask the same of you, but I’ve already guessed that in your case it’s murder. In mine it might well be. I’ve been left at the altar, in a manner of speaking.”

“By whom?” he asked, surprised.

“I was invited to dine with the Masterses, but Bella says that Raleigh is in the foulest of moods and the cook is threatening to give notice, and poor Bella’s at her wit’s end. So I left. Fortunately I remembered that the hotel here has quite good food, and I thought I might perhaps ask Elizabeth to join me.”

“And have you?” He couldn’t alter the wary note in his voice.

“She wasn’t at home, either.” Mrs. Crawford sighed. “The one thing I hate about getting old is one’s shrinking circle of friends. But here you are, quite a delightful surprise, and I’m going to enjoy my evening with a handsome young man rather than a crabby old one.”

“Has Masters taken a turn for the worse?”

“I doubt his body has, but his temper most certainly did. I could hear him roaring from the front hall. If the man hadn’t been such a brilliant barrister and the most charming of people, I’d say he was paying for past sins. Still, I have both my limbs, and I can’t imagine what it must be like not to.”

“No reason to take his temper out on his wife.”

“Bella’s not as cowardly as you might think. In fact, she may in the end prove to be stronger than Raleigh. If she doesn’t poison him first. I think tonight I’d have had a go at it.”

Rutledge felt his spirits rising. Melinda Crawford was a charming woman, possessed of wit and insight and a very clear view of human nature. At the moment, she was the perfect antidote to his depression.

The meal was excellent, and the conversation exhilarating, leaving Hamish out as if shutting the door. The Scot was still making up his mind about Mrs. Crawford.

“In another time,” Rutledge heard him muttering, “she’d ha’ been burned at the stake for witchcraft.”

Amused, Rutledge had silently answered, “Or been the mistress of Kings.”

They talked about the war, and about India, where she’d spent her childhood, and about Kent.

“Do you know what I remembered most about Kent, as a child in India?” she asked Rutledge at one point.

“That it was green?”

“No, I remembered the orchards, trees
filled
with white and pink blossoms, like butterflies, and I remembered the man on stilts with grape leaves on his head.”

“Good God!”

“When they do the twiddling—that is, when they’re tying the hop strings from the ground to the wires that run on the wooden framework built above the gardens—there’s a man on stilts who does the high knots. It’s quite a difficult task—the vines as they grow follow those strings, and mustn’t be led astray. And such a man will often wear a hat to keep the sun off his head. This one had found young grape leaves—they’re not unlike hop leaves, you know—and had twisted himself a Bacchus crown, to keep his head cool. We stopped at the hop farm to water the horses, and he came over to the carriage and bent down to peer in at me, making a face because I was tired and cross. I was instantly enchanted. And I wanted to see him again.” She smiled. “I was quite in love. With a man on stilts.”

“And what did Mr. Crawford, when he arrived on the scene, think of your infatuation?”

“He was a tall man. I’ve always fancied tall men. That’s your claim to my affection, by the way. And he went to the bazaar in Agra one day and found someone to fashion him a pair of stilts. I was grown up by that time, and knew better than to laugh when he went headfirst into the nasturtiums.”

Rutledge chuckled, and then sobered. “I think Elizabeth Mayhew has found someone to love.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Crawford said pensively as she poured milk into her tea. “I tried to warn you of that.”

“I wasn’t in danger of falling in love with her.”

“No, but you’d put her on a pedestal, you know. Richard’s widow. She’s quite human, like the rest of us.”

“Who is this man?” He heard the edge in his voice.

“I don’t know. I haven’t been invited to meet him. But I hear from my seamstress that he’s from Northumberland, and quite handsome.”

“I wasn’t aware that Elizabeth or Richard had friends in Northumberland.”

“My dear Ian! What does that have to say to anything?” Mrs. Crawford demanded, amused.

“I meant,” he replied testily, “that it’s likely to be someone she’s met since the war. Since Richard’s death.”

“Yes, I should expect it is. He was buying a trinket for a lady. A shawl, my seamstress told me. It was described to me in great detail, because it was so lovely. And quite a harmless gift. The very next week, I happened to see Elizabeth wearing that particular shawl. I didn’t ask how she came by it. Occasionally I do remember my manners.” Her lips curved in amusement, but her eyes were no longer smiling. “Nor did she tell me, when I admired it.”

Hamish spoke up for the first time in an hour. “She’s no’ happy with this match. But she willna’ tell you why . . .”

They spent the remainder of the meal talking about Mrs. Crawford’s years in India. In the span of her life, the subcontinent had changed enormously. The vast private holding in the hands of the East India Company had collapsed in the Great Indian Mutiny, which had seen such bloody horrors at Cawnpore. The British government had taken over the country after that, and in the course of time, Disraeli had made Queen Victoria Empress of India, equal in majesty to the German Kaiser Wilhelm. Britain had poured civilians and soldiers into the subcontinent since then, and now there were rumblings of a movement for independence.

“It will come,” Mrs. Crawford said. “In time. But what will happen then is not to be thought of. I’m glad I won’t be here to see it. Civil war is always the bloodiest. And this Mr. Wilson in America has pushed through the self-determination clause he was so bent on having. It will bear bitter fruit, mark me. Well-intentioned people are often blind to the results of their good deeds.”

Rutledge said, “Germany is broken. And under the heel of heavy war reparations. From what I hear, people are starving in the towns, and there’s no money to buy food or fuel.”

“Yes. If I were a German, I would get out. Try my luck in Argentina or Chile. Sell up, beg, borrow, or steal the money for my passage, and go.”

“If the best people leave, how will she rebuild? Or more to the point, how will she be
rebuilt
? In what form? I think I’d stay and fight.”

“Of course you would.” She nodded. “And in the end be shot for your pains. Germany isn’t ready for democracy. India is better suited for change than Germany because they’ve learned from us how a country is run. They’d inherit our infrastructure, the railroads and the communications systems, the trained bureaucracy and so on. It’s the religious issue that will tear India apart. In Germany it will be the vacuum of leadership.”

Hamish said, intrigued, “My ain granny never traveled more than thirty miles in any direction. The glen was her home. She never fancied telling her menfolk how to run the world.”

Rutledge answered, “Your grandmother never had the opportunities that came this woman’s way.”

As if she’d been a party to the exchange between Rutledge and Hamish, Mrs. Crawford smiled and added, “Politicians never heed old ladies. It’s more than time we women had the vote and showed them a thing or two.”

Rutledge laughed. “You’d make a superb prime minister.”

“Don’t be silly,” she retorted. “Mr. Churchill already has his eye on filling those shoes. Gallipoli was a setback, it’s true, but he won’t languish forgotten for long!”

A
FTER SEEING MRS.
Crawford to her motorcar and placing her safely in the hands of her driver, Rutledge went back into the hotel and asked for a telephone. He knew Elizabeth Mayhew was on the exchange, but there was no answer to his call. The operator told him after ten rings, “There appears to be no one at home.”

But there were servants in the house.

He found himself worrying about Elizabeth and unable to sleep. As the bells in the clock tower struck the hour of one, Hamish said, “It willna’ matter what you want. It’s her life, and no’ your own.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
as Rutledge stood shaving in front of the framed mirror above his washstand, he began to feel a stirring of intuition as he reviewed what he had seen and heard about the three men who had been killed near Marling. A stirring that was just out of reach in his mind, a pattern that was on the edge of consciousness. He had felt this kind of thing before, when he was working on what seemed at first to be disconnected events and facts. For there was always a key, in murder—a logical progression of circumstance that led to the destruction of another human being.

He knew what had brought these men out into the night, to walk a lonely road home. It was the wine that was incongruous. How was it offered? And where? Under what pretense? What had happened then? Had the men been left to die on the roadside? Or had the killer watched each die, before abandoning the body? That was a macabre thought. . . .

Walking down the stairs to his breakfast, Rutledge tried to re-create the scene in his mind. Instead, he found himself intercepted by the elderly desk clerk, who had been standing behind the reception desk as if waiting for someone. For him, it appeared—

“Good morning, Inspector! There are—um—two persons who asked for you. I’ve put them in the small sitting room.”

Two
persons.
Someone, then, not acceptable in the eyes of the hotel staff. Rutledge cast about in his memory. Elizabeth’s servants, perhaps? He remembered she hadn’t been at home last night when Melinda Crawford had telephoned.

“I’ll see them.”

He followed the man’s directions to the small sitting room, usually dark and unused at this hour. But watery sunlight poured in now, and the two women sitting on the edges of the chintz-covered chairs by the hearth looked up nervously as he opened the door.

One of them rose to her feet, her red face tired and drawn. The unbecoming black hat she wore matched the threadbare black coat, giving her an air of poverty and depression. The younger woman accompanying her stood up more slowly, her eyes anxious as they scanned Rutledge’s face. Her blue coat, ill-fitting in the shoulders, was a slightly different shade from the blue hat she wore with a surprising degree of grace.