A Fearsome Doubt

13

“Mrs. Shaw-” Rutledge 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.