A Fearsome Doubt (12 page)

The older woman was Nell Shaw. She had managed to track him down.

13

“M
RS.
S
HAW
—” R
UTLEDGE BEGAN, COMPLETELY UNPREPARED
to find Ben Shaw’s widow here in Marling. As out of place in Kent as a blackbird would be in a gilded cage.

“I went to the Yard yesterday and asked for you. A sergeant—Gibson, his name was—told me you’d gone down to Kent to look into a murder. I thought you was looking into my Ben’s murders!”

Rutledge said gently, “Mrs. Shaw, I must go where I’m sent—”

But she interrupted him again. “I’ve traveled all night. Well, nearly. We got a lift on a lorry from Covent Garden, and then from Maidstone came most of the way with a farmer carrying pig meat to the butcher shops hereabouts. And we walked from Helford. Why didn’t you come and tell me you was not in London anymore? We’ve been waiting for
word
!” Her voice was accusing, on the verge of tears.

The young woman beside her blushed and looked down at her shoes. Rutledge regarded her. Taller than Mrs. Shaw, with fairer hair and a very fine complexion, she seemed out of place in the older woman’s company.

Catching the shift in his attention, Mrs. Shaw added, “This is Margaret. Ben’s and my daughter. She’s of an age to be married, and what prospects do you think she’s got, the daughter of a hanged man? It’s not fair to burden her with what they say her father done. A wrong ought to be put right!”

The flush deepened, and Margaret Shaw bit her lip, as if wishing the floor might open and swallow her.

Rutledge said, “Sit down, Mrs. Shaw. Miss Shaw. I’ve done my best to look into the earlier investigation, as I promised I would.”

Seating themselves warily, they regarded him with doubtful eyes.

“There’s nothing I can point to so far that upholds your belief that your neighbor was somehow involved. There are a number of ways that Mrs. Cutter might have come by the locket—”

“Name one!” Mrs. Shaw demanded harshly.

He hesitated. “Your husband may have given it to her.”

“A
mourning
pendant? Inscribed for a man she didn’t even know? And his name all over it, and no way of hiding it? You must be right barmy to believe my Ben would have done such a stupid thing!”

“Yes, I know, Mrs. Shaw. I understand—”

“You don’t understand! You was like the rest of them, eager to see my Ben hang for what was done to the old ladies.
It was easier than digging out the truth!
”

He tried to keep his voice level. “As I told you earlier, there’s no proof,” he said, “that the locket was in your neighbor’s drawer. We have only your word for that.”

“Oh, yes? Because my husband was hanged, I’m a liar, am I? Well, let me tell you, if it had been in
my
house all this time, someone would have discovered it! And you searched the very rafters in the attic, didn’t you? Where do you think I might have hidden it away? In the teapot? Among
my
corsets?”

The young woman winced. “Mama—”

“No, I’m being honest, that’s what I’m doing! There’s no one else to speak for us, love, and we can’t sit back politely and hope for the
best
!”

“Mrs. Shaw,” Rutledge said, “please listen to me. I must have irrefutable proof in order to ask my superiors to reopen this investigation—”

She stared at him. “Can you sleep nights, with us on your conscience?” Her voice was hard, angry. “My Ben’s dead, and unjustly so. You gave evidence against him in that courtroom, and might as well have put the noose around his neck with your own hands. I’m telling you he was not guilty, and you tell
me
that there has to be proof! When God stands in judgment of you, will you tell
Him
that there was no proof?”

Hamish stirred into vicious life. “Ye’re burning in Hell already—and no’ just for Ben Shaw!”

Rutledge said, “Mrs. Shaw, I’m doing what I can within the limits of my power. No, listen to me! I have no authority to open this investigation. Do you understand me? But I have asked questions—”

“You’ve spoken to Henry Cutter?” It was accusing.

“Not yet—”

“Let him tell you that his wife had a stroke after Ben was hanged, and never got out of her bed again! Let him tell you that her own son by her first husband was the constable on one of them streets where the victims lived! And let him tell you that George Peterson left the police force months after the trial and two years later was found drowned in the sea off Lyme Regis, where he’d gone to drink himself blind!”

There had been nothing in Philip Nettle’s early reports of the Shaw investigation that had linked George Peterson with the Cutters. Nor had much official notice been taken of Peterson’s subsequent death. It had been Peterson’s duty to alert the Yard of any connection and he hadn’t informed anyone. Why?

Rutledge said, “Are you telling me that this man Peterson could have robbed and suffocated those women, not your husband?”

He tried to bring back to mind the young constable whose patch it had been. Tall, lanky, quiet. There had been some question around the Yard about his suitability to deal with the stark reality of murder . . . but no question about his family background had arisen. And wouldn’t have, if he’d used his father’s name.

Hamish said, “There was a lapse—”

Yes. Philip Nettle, ill and soon to die, had been as careful a man as any on the force, covering every possible aspect of any case. But somehow the constable had never come under suspicion. Never questioned, or it would have appeared in the files. He was the Law, and not investigated, one of the hunters, not the hunted.

Dear God—how many other oversights had there been?

Mrs. Shaw was saying, “I only know the one thing, that my husband wasn’t guilty, and we had no way of making anybody listen.”

“You yourself believed in his guilt. I saw you turn away at the sentencing.”

Mrs. Shaw sucked in a quick breath, as if the charge had been a physical blow, then said harshly. “You
made
a believer out of me. Then. I was tired and shocked and I had two children to care for all alone, and I didn’t know what to make of anything Ben said or the barristers said or the judge said. That K.C. with the white hair—he stood there quoting verse and precedents and Latin, like Moses handing down the Ten Commandments. And I couldn’t follow a word of it. All in a voice that would convince a saint that he was a sinner.”

Matthew Sunderland . . . for whom the law was a lofty profession.

“But also a pulpit?” Hamish wondered, derisively.

She looked ill, the strain of her obsession beginning to tell, and the long, tiring journey to Kent. “Don’t you think Constable Peterson would have protected his mother if
she
was the guilty party?”

“Mama?” Margaret said, leaning toward her mother almost protectively. “You’re not to distress yourself like this! We’ll manage, we always have.”

Nell Shaw ignored her, saying instead to Rutledge, “Look at the girl. She’s got her father’s blood in her, the looks and the height and the graces. She deserves better than to languish in some nasty workroom where she’ll be worn out at thirty and no one to care about her when I’m gone. It isn’t right, and you must open your eyes and see what you’re condemning her to!”

Rutledge said, “Mrs. Shaw—”

“No, I’m putting it bluntly. When you sent an innocent man to the gallows, you cursed his family, too. Where’s the guilt of
that,
on your shoulders? Tell me, where’s the guilt?”

She got up rather clumsily, her swollen feet heavy in her tightly laced shoes. “I’m going back to London where I belong. But if you’re half the man you ought to be, you’ll not sleep until you do something about my Ben. You’ll find out what’s behind this business, and whether there’s any hope for us. But you’d better do it soon. I can’t sleep nights anymore for thinking over what’s right and wrong. I’d rather end up in the river, and have it all over and done with!”

She marched to the door, Margaret trailing after her, apologetic and at the same time defensive. The girl cared about her termagant mother, and she was worried.

“Please, can’t you at least listen?” she seemed to say as she turned, her eyes pleading in place of her voice.

Rutledge said, “Let me make arrangements for your return—”

Mrs. Shaw wheeled to face him. “I mayn’t have much else, Inspector, but I have my pride. If you won’t help my Ben, I don’t want your charity!”

“I will help,” he heard himself saying. “But as one man, I can’t promise that I’ll accomplish miracles.”

“We aren’t looking for miracles. We’re looking for fairness.”

She walked away, her head high, her body chunky and compact. Her daughter followed after her, uncertain what to do, uncertain how to help. Watching her, Rutledge was reminded suddenly of her father. Ben Shaw had had that same lost-dog manner, that resigned acceptance of whatever fate had thrown at him, deserved or not. He had been afraid and wary and patient, as the law ground to its foregone conclusion of guilt, and he had not had the spirit to fight on.

Life—or years of marriage to a woman of a different class and upbringing—had defeated Shaw long before the judgment of the courts. Shaw was one of the victims, not one of the shapers of events. If he had killed those women, he had done it in desperation for the money his family needed. He had accepted the court’s decision with a crushed spirit that didn’t know where to turn for solace. And he had gone to his death a pale shadow of the man he could have been.

Ben Shaw had never fought. He had never tried to stem the march to the hangman in any way.

It had been seen as a sign of his guilt. His acceptance of the right of the Law to punish him for what he had done.

Hamish said, “Aye, a victim.” Then, echoing Mrs. Shaw, he asked, “How will ye sleep with Ben Shaw on your conscience? I canna’ follow you there—but he will.”

Rutledge closed the door of the sitting room behind him and walked through the foyer of the hotel. He was no longer hungry. Standing on the street outside, he tried to decide what to do. He was in the midst of one investigation, and bedeviled by another. He should be clearheaded and have his wits about him, and instead he was having to face himself in ways that he had never thought possible.

Mrs. Shaw was a master at one thing if nothing else—she knew the demon of guilt would be his undoing.

And the tenuous connection he had been trying to build for the Marling murders had slipped, unnoticed, from his mind.

14

I
N THE END,
R
UTLEDGE TRACKED DOWN THE
S
HAWS AND
drove them back to Sansom Street, himself. Mrs. Shaw had protested, but he had swept that aside and handed her daughter into the rear of the motorcar—to share the seat with a restless Hamish.

Mrs. Shaw was silent most of the way, her black hat and coat giving her the air of a lump of coal capriciously shaped in human form.

“This won’t change my mind,” she said once. “I won’t be cozened by a kindness into forgetting what’s due me and my family.”

“No one is trying to cozen you,” Rutledge replied. “I have business in London.”

But she made no answer to that, as if she didn’t believe him.

W
HEN THE
S
HAW
women had been returned to their home, Rutledge went in search of his sister Frances. She was dressing for a luncheon and called to him from her bedroom, “Ian, is it urgent?”

“In a way.” He went upstairs.

She came out of the dressing room wearing a very stylish suit and carrying a matching hat in her hand. Sitting down to brush her hair, she said, “You look tired, darling. What’s wrong?”

He took the chair by the pair of windows overlooking the square and the houses that stood around it. “Elizabeth Mayhew. Has she said anything to you about a new man in her life?”

Frances’s eyes met his in the dressing-table mirror. “Interesting! No, she hasn’t. She’s still mourning Richard, as far as I know—I’ve tried to talk her into coming to London for several weeks, but she doesn’t want to leave Kent.”

“For very different reasons, now. I think she’s involved with someone who might be somehow connected to a series of murders I’m working on.”

Frances put down her brush and turned to face him. “Are you sure of this, Ian? It’s rather sudden, her new interest. And who is the man? Anyone we know?” The English view of acceptable social contacts:
Anyone we know?

He shook his head. “I can’t tell you his name. I do know he’s from Northumberland. I have the word of Mrs. Crawford’s seamstress on that.” A brief smile touched his eyes and then faded. “But there’s something odd here. Hackles rising on the back of the neck.” He thought about that for a moment and then added, “Or jealousy, for Richard’s sake.”

“Your intuition is seldom wrong,” she told him.

“It may be colored, all the same. It’s not my place to ask questions, but if you could do it—quite casually—it might be a good thing.”

Frances considered him. “There’s something more here than Elizabeth Mayhew’s affairs of the heart.” Her eyes searching his face, she said again, “What’s wrong?”

Rutledge smiled wryly. What he would have liked to say was, “I may have seen a ghost. If I have, it’s no matter; I can live with ghosts,” and wait for her common sense to assure him that he had done nothing of the sort. Frances had little patience with nonsense. But her intuition was often as sharp as his own. When she jumped to conclusions, they most generally were the right ones. And the war was a part of his life he wanted very much to keep shut away from her.

Instead he answered, “There’s been a series of murders in the neighborhood of Marling. I’ve been working on the case for the Yard. No one, not even Melinda Crawford, knows who this man is that Elizabeth is attracted to. I think I’ve seen him once, from the back. Why is she keeping him a secret from her friends? Elizabeth could well be dragged into something unpleasant, if he’s using her in some fashion or isn’t quite—respectable.”

“Aren’t you overreacting just a little?” she asked, putting her jewelry on, her face hidden from him. “Is there any reason to think that this man could be involved in your murders? Have you good cause to believe he should be found and questioned?”

“Put like that,” he answered wryly, “I suppose I’m jumping to conclusions. It’s probably no more than coincidence. . . .”

Frances was settling her hat on her carefully groomed hair, adjusting it to a becoming angle that set off her face. She’s an extraordinarily attractive woman, Rutledge found himself thinking, with their mother’s perfect skin and cameo-cut profile, the slightly arched nose and the very intelligent eyes. Once, he’d wondered if she had been in love with Ross Trevor, his godfather David Trevor’s son. Or if there was some other man who had come into her life, and taken her heart away with him. She had never spoken of it.

Just as he never spoke of Hamish, or the war, or what loneliness was.

As if reading his mind, Frances said, her eyes not meeting his in the mirror, “You know, you could do worse than Elizabeth Mayhew. You and Richard were very close. He wouldn’t have minded you stepping into his shoes. Not that I’m matchmaking—”

“That’s the very reason I can’t,” Rutledge answered after a moment. “He’d always be there. Between us.”

“Like a ghost?” she asked lightly. “Well, it’s time for me to leave. Would you mind giving me a lift? We can talk on the way.”

But they didn’t. When they reached the Mayfair restaurant, she got out, saying, “Ian. Whatever is worrying you, it isn’t Elizabeth Mayhew, is it? There’s more on your mind than her affairs. Or the murders. I think there’s a sense of guilt somewhere. I think perhaps you feel you
ought
to step into Richard’s shoes, for his sake. And because you won’t, you’re afraid you’re letting him down by not preventing Elizabeth from getting hurt.”

He considered and then rejected the possibility. “I feel some sort of responsibility, for Richard’s sake. We were friends for years. But a sense of responsibility doesn’t go as far as marriage.”

“Then it was Armistice Day. It unsettled a good many people, you know. You aren’t alone there.” She was searching for clues, her father’s daughter. He had been a very fine lawyer, and he had had a strong intuitive streak that both his children had inherited.

Rutledge didn’t answer.

“All the same . . .” She hesitated for a moment. “We all live with devils of one kind or another. I don’t know how to exorcise them. Except by surviving. Somehow, against all the odds.”

It was far too close to the mark, and she must have read something in his face, for he heard a sharp intake of breath. As if she had finally guessed what was on his mind.

“My mistakes may go to the gallows,” he told her, “the innocent along with the guilty. And they are buried. And sometimes they are resurrected.” It was said in a rueful voice, as if laughing at himself.

“The truth doesn’t change,” she told him. “Father always believed that. Still, it’s easy to alter the trappings of truth.”

“I’ll remember that.”

As his sister stepped away from the side of the car, Rutledge added, “You won’t forget about Elizabeth?”

She blew him a kiss. “Darling, I won’t forget.”

He drove off, Hamish saying in the back of his mind, “She’s no’ the common-garden variety of sisters.”

“She’d have made a damned fine barrister. Better than I would have, if I’d followed in our father’s footsteps.”

“Aye.” There was a moment of silence as Rutledge threaded his way through the thick of midday traffic. Then Hamish followed up on his earlier thought. “It is no’ very surprising she’s no’ married.”

Rutledge, glancing at his watch, decided he had time for one more call before he left London.

H
ENRY
C
UTTER WORKED
at a shop where tools were designed and fabricated. His office, high above the floor where machines made any conversation impossible, was cluttered with invoices and paperwork, and there were ink stains on his fingers. A thin man with a long jaw and sunken eyes, he looked up as Rutledge entered the room, then frowned.

“I know you—” He broke off, squinting in an attempt to place the man before him.

“Rutledge. Inspector Rutledge from Scotland Yard.”

Surprise lifted his eyebrows. “That’s right! You’ve changed—” He stopped and said, instead of completing the thought, “We all have, to be blunt about it. Is there anything wrong?”

“I’ve come about an old matter. Ben Shaw’s conviction and hanging for murder. Mrs. Shaw worries about—er—a miscarriage of justice.”

Cutter sighed. “She’s got a very pretty daughter, and she’s determined for the girl to marry well. She’s asked me a dozen times in the last month what I remember about the police and all the questions we were asked. It’s as if she worries a raw wound, unable to leave it alone. Life hasn’t treated Nell kindly, you know. Still, she’s a woman who draws on hidden strength and faces up to what can’t be run from. I respect that.”

“What
do
you remember?” Rutledge asked, interested.

“I remember how upset my wife was,” Cutter answered. “She’d known the women. Well, not
known
them, if you follow me! But she’d called on them from time to time as a church visitor. Years before, when her health was better and she was more active.”

“Did she believe Shaw was guilty?”

“I never asked her.” Cutter looked away. “He was a very likeable man. Janet—Mrs. Cutter—was fond of him, in a manner of speaking.”

Rutledge found himself thinking that Cutter was not a man of grace or charm. Plainspoken and unimaginative, a plodder. He was beginning to understand why Cutter admired Nell Shaw’s strength. The question then became, was Cutter capable of murder? And why, if he had a reasonably comfortable life, should he be driven to it?

“I understand she had a son who died before she did.”

“Janet was married before. Peterson fell ill of diphtheria, when the boy was almost two years old. She was expecting another child, and she miscarried. The worst part of that was, she felt she’d let her husband down by being so ill herself. And she blamed herself that the boy had been left to the kindness of neighbors while his father was dying and his mother was miscarrying. As a result she was overly protective, to the point of smothering him. But in my opinion, he was weak from the start, was George. Never could settle to anything, and in the end, killed himself.” He stopped, surprised that he’d confided in this man who listened with an air of thoughtfulness that made confession easy, as if unjudged.

Mrs. Shaw had already answered his next question but Rutledge said quietly, “How did he die?”

He could feel Hamish stirring in the back of his mind.

“He drowned.” After a moment, looking down at his hands, Cutter added, “Lost his footing and fell into the sea while walking by the harbor one night. That was the official finding, accidental drowning. It saved his mother from the pain of learning it was suicide. According to the police, George had been drinking heavily, and there was a suspicion that he’d been despondent. At any rate, he was fully clothed, and it was after midnight. They put as good a face on it as they could. But I always felt Janet suspected the truth. She was never the same after that.”

“He was the first policeman on the scene of one of the Shaw murders.”

“Yes, that’s true. He came to his mother the night after Mrs. Winslow was found dead. Cried like a baby. Janet told me afterward that he had a horror of dead bodies. He didn’t like touching them.”

Hamish said, “It doesna’ ring true. He was a constable—”

As if he’d been a party to the conversation, Cutter went on, “I could never understand that—George had elected to go into the police force, he must have known what it involved!” He shifted the papers on his desk. “I could never understand
him,
for that matter. Janet told me he took after his father. She thought that might have something to do with it. But George and I never saw eye to eye.”

“Tell me about him.”

Cutter said sharply, “The man’s dead. You can’t be worried about anything he could have done!”

“I’m interested in the man who was constable when Mrs. Winslow was killed. I’ve only just discovered that he was related to neighbors of the Shaws.”

Taking a deep breath, Cutter replied, “Well. I don’t know that it makes any difference, now. He was the kind of child who ran headlong to do something he wanted to do, and only thought better of it later. He was never in serious trouble, but he was always unsettled and unpredictable. Never really good at anything. Janet thought the sun shone out of him, and that was that. I was glad when he left home. We had a happier life then.”

“Mrs. Shaw found a locket in a drawer belonging to Mrs. Cutter. Did she tell you that?”

“A locket? No, she never mentioned it. What kind of locket?” His eyes were suddenly wary. “Janet’s jewelry?”

“A piece of mourning jewelry, belonging to one of the dead women. It was missing at the time Shaw was arrested.” Husbands seldom rummaged in their wives’ lingerie, as Hamish was pointing out.

Cutter was saying, with rising alarm, “Here, she’s not trying to say my wife had anything to do with those deaths! I won’t believe that! Not of Nell! You’re trying to stir up trouble—”

“Nell Shaw brought the locket to me because it was missing evidence,” Rutledge replied without emphasis.

“I’d like to see it!”

“I’m sorry,” Rutledge answered, unwilling to tell Cutter that Mrs. Shaw had kept it. “I can’t show it to you.”

“Look. I can’t help but feel sorry for her, she’s had a rough deal. Shaw tried, but he wasn’t like us—he wasn’t used to hard work, his body wasn’t what you’d call strong. All the same, it’s far too late to save Ben or his family.”