A Fearsome Doubt

17

Returning to bed was useless; it wouldn’t bring sleep. Rutledge bathed and shaved and then dressed, his mind occupied with murder in this quiet part of Kent.

Sitting in a chair by the window, he waited patiently for the hotel to rouse from the night, and then went down to breakfast at the appointed time. The dining room was empty, and a yawning girl was just opening the drapes that shut off the view of the street.

She looked up, smiled, and said, “I expect you’d like your tea.”

“I’d be grateful,” he said, returning the smile. She blushed and looked away, hurrying to the door that led through to the kitchen.

As he turned to the window, he saw a man driving a familiar motorcar pulling up at the hotel. The man, too, was familiar.

It was Tom Brereton, whom he’d met at Lawrence Hamilton’s dinner party. A guest brought by Raleigh and Bella Masters. The man whom Melinda Crawford was thinking of including in her will.

Brereton came striding into the dining room, and didn’t at first recognize Rutledge. His eyes were on the kitchen door, and when the girl serving tables came through with Rutledge’s tea, he called, “Do you suppose you could manage toast and a pot of that for me as well?”

She led him to the table just beyond Rutledge’s, and it was then that Brereton peered at the man from London and paused, as if trying to place him.

Rutledge greeted him by name, and reminded him of the dinner party.

Brereton nodded. “Yes, that’s right. The policeman from Scotland Yard. What brings you back to Kent? The murders here, I suppose. Do you mind?” He gestured to the other chair at Rutledge’s table.

“No, please join me.” Brereton nodded to the girl and she went off to fetch his tea.

“I’m half asleep,” Brereton said, sitting down. “Bella was worried that Raleigh had finished his drops and finally sent one of the servants down to my cottage to ask if I’d mind coming in this morning to ask the doctor for a new supply.”

“For his pain?”

Brereton grimaced. “It’s more for his moodiness. They’ve given him a new foot, you know, and it hurts like the devil. Both physically and psychologically. If he could manage it, he’d have his ravaged one back.”

“I expect that giving up his practice would weigh heavily on a man like Masters.”

“Yes, that’s probably more true than we know. He lived for the law, and he’s at sixes and sevens now.”

His tea and a plate of toast arrived, and Brereton added as he poured hot milk into the cup, “I don’t suppose Masters has ever been easy to live with. He’s a remarkably clever man. Nothing else has ever touched him the way the law did, and he’s having trouble filling all those empty hours. Bella fusses, which doesn’t help. But then she’s worried sick about him. They end up aggravating each other to the point of scenes.” He shook his head. “It’s rather sad.”

“He’s not likely to take up growing vegetable marrows,” Rutledge agreed, smiling. “I’m surprised that he hasn’t thought of writing about his career. At the Hamiltons’ dinner party he spoke warmly of Matthew Sunderland. He must have known or worked with a number of famous men.”

“Interesting possibility! I ought to drop a hint along those lines. Sunderland was Raleigh’s mentor and his standard. You’d think the man walked on water, the way Raleigh extols his virtues. I wonder if he could be objective-Sunderland made his share of mistakes, from what I’ve heard!”

Rutledge said, “Did he!”

“There was a famous case just at the turn of the century. Hushed up, of course, but Sunderland was reportedly too-er-fond of the wife of the man he was prosecuting. There was an odor of vengeance about the proceedings, as if he’d gladly see the man punished not for the alleged crime but for marrying the woman Sunderland had fancied for himself. Naturally I’ve never asked Raleigh if there was another side of the story.”

“Where did you hear this?”

“It was during the war, I had taken a train back to hospital after leave, and I found myself seated with an elderly barrister. We talked about the law for most of the journey. And he made a comment about the famous Mr. Sunderland having feet of clay. Apparently there was a lampoon that showed the Q.C.-as he was then!-as David, sending Bathsheba’s husband not to the forefront of battle but to prison for life. In any event the jury decided otherwise, for whatever reasons, and it was one of the few cases that Sunderland ever lost.”

Hamish added dryly, “I canna’ see him taking a fancy to yon harridan.”

“I saw Sunderland in top form during the Shaw trial. He was impressive.”

“Shaw? Oh, yes, the man hanged for murdering women in their beds. It was another trial that created a good deal of publicity. Sunderland died within the year, I think.” Brereton smiled wryly. “Bella tells me Raleigh all but went into a decline.”

“There was no suggestion of illness or impairment in the courtroom.”

“According to Raleigh, it was a sudden death. Sunderland’s heart simply stopped. He was sitting at his desk dictating letters to his clerk, and between one word and the next, he was gone.” Brereton took out his watch and peered at it intently, as if having trouble reading it. “Another half hour before the doctor’s likely to be up!” He put the watch away carefully. “The truth is, the man you saw at the dinner party is a far cry from what he once was. Raleigh has lost the edge that made him a superb barrister. He probably wishes he could die as swiftly as Sunderland did. In all likelihood, he won’t live out the winter.”

“It’s sad to watch a man deteriorate,” Rutledge agreed.

“It’s Bella I worry about. She’s going to wear herself into illness if she isn’t careful. And he doesn’t seem to notice. Or to care.”

“There’s a self-centeredness in dying,” Rutledge pointed out.

Brereton looked up at him. “So there is in blindness, too. The difference is in age. And perspective. I’ve still much of my life ahead of me, and I don’t fancy spending it tapping along the pavement with a cane!” He said restively, “I must go. Bella-Mrs. Masters-will be anxious. I may be able to persuade Dr. Pugh to let me in.”

He stood and looked around for the girl who had served him, then went to the kitchen door to call to her. After settling his account, he came back to the table. “I live in the cottage just down the road from the Masterses’ house. If you find yourself in the neighborhood, stop and have a drink with me.”

Rutledge thanked him and, after Brereton had gone, finished his own tea. But it was still too early to call on Elizabeth Mayhew, and when the serving girl came back to clear the table, he ordered his usual breakfast.

By that time the other guests in the hotel began to arrive, and the room took on new life as voices filled the spaces. He sat by the window, watching the street come to life as well, as carts moved among the shops, bringing in chickens and cabbages and beets and loaves of bread fresh from the bakery. A small cart filled with baskets of apples rolled past, the farmer’s cheeks as round and red as his wares, his bald pate gleaming in the first rays of the late-rising sun. Through the glass, Rutledge could hear the clock in the church tower strike the hour faintly. Brereton, driving out of Marling, was hunched over the wheel, intent on avoiding an accident.

How had Brereton felt about the murdered ex-soldiers? Rutledge wondered. Had he understood their suffering better than most, and felt the irony of their death in a peaceful country finished with war? Or had he secretly envied them their quiet and painless end?

Hamish said, “He isna’ blind yet. Ask him in five years.”

Which was more to the point.

His breakfast finished, Rutledge set out to do what had been on his mind since dawn.

Elizabeth Mayhew was surprised to see him at this hour, but he apologized with the reminder that he was in Marling on Yard business.

“You’ve lived here since well before the war,” he said as he followed her into the small reception room off the entry hall. “Do you remember hearing of a Jimsy Ridger?”

She frowned. “The name isn’t familiar at all. Richard would have known. He knew better than most what went on. He had deep roots here. People talked to him, confided in him.” She looked around her at the comfortable room, her home since her marriage. “I’m considering selling up. There are no children to inherit. I might as well let the house go to someone who can keep it as Richard would have wished.”

Startled, he said, “But it’s been in his family for-what? Seven generations, at the least!”

“I know. There’s a cousin somewhere. Out in Kenya, I think, if he’s still alive. A remittance man. I’m not sure Richard would have liked the idea of his inheriting.”

Black sheep in a family were sometimes paid handsomely to take themselves out of England, with a monthly stipend to smooth their road and nip in the bud any fond thoughts of returning home uninvited.

Elizabeth smiled wryly. “If you’d married Jean, you’d have been looking for a country place, wouldn’t you? This house would have suited you-and that would have suited Richard. But we seldom know how our lives will turn out, do we?”

“Where would you go?” Rutledge asked, keeping to the main point. “To London?”

“I had thought about traveling-” she said vaguely.

“Europe is in a shambles. And I don’t quite picture you in the wilds of America or the missions of China. Like Melinda Crawford.”

One of the puppies, awakened by their voices, yipped from the other room, and Elizabeth turned the subject by saying quickly, “Oh, you must come and see how they’ve grown!”

Which in fact they had. But Rutledge was not to be distracted.

As she handed him one of the puppies to hold, kneeling by the box on the cold hearth, Elizabeth said, “Canada, perhaps.” And then caught herself as she remembered too late that Jean, too, had gone to Canada.

Rutledge pretended he’d made no such connection and admired the puppies. Then he said, “Will you do something for me? You know the Masters family better than I do. Can you ask-skirting the reason why-what Mrs. Masters recalls of a case in London before the war?” He described the Shaw murders for Elizabeth, and the brilliant prosecution that Matthew Sunderland had mounted.

“What in particular do you want to know?” she asked, confused. “This has nothing to do with the murders here, does it?”

“It’s an old case,” he said lightly. “But one I was assigned to when I was young and far from wise. I’d like to know if Sunderland described it to his friends. Or if Raleigh Masters ever discussed it with his wife. At the time it attracted considerable attention-it would be natural to relive it.”

Elizabeth nodded. “Oh-yes. Weren’t you about to ask Raleigh when he had one of his spells? I’ll try to see what I can learn.” It was as if she was grateful that the request was impersonal. “But I don’t know that Bella can tell me much, if it wasn’t Raleigh’s case-”

“I understand that. A shot in the dark, if you will.”

Her eyes probed his face. Then she said, unexpectedly, “Ian, is something about this case worrying you? You haven’t been quite the same since you were here the last time, you know. I shall do this, of course I shall, but if there’s a reason you aren’t telling me, I want you to know that you can trust me-”

He could have told her that she was the one who had changed. Not he.

Hamish said, “Aye, but who planted the seeds of doubt in your head?”

It had been Melinda Crawford…

“It’s not the case itself,” he answered Elizabeth now. “It’s the people who were involved. I’ve been reading through their statements again.”

And as he left the house, he thought they’d come to a sad pass, he and Richard’s widow-lying to each other as they never had before.

Dowling had left a message for him at The Plough. Rutledge walked on to the police station and learned from Sergeant Burke that the Marling inspector was already on his way to Seelyham.

Rutledge asked, “Has anything happened? Am I to follow him?”

Burke shook his head. “I doubt there’s any new development, sir, or I’d have heard it as soon as I came on duty. Constable Smith informed me that Inspector Grimes over in Seelyham had sent a man along to fetch Inspector Dowling, but there mustn’t been any urgency, sir. The inspector waited half an hour at the hotel for you before setting out. I expect it’s no more than a meeting to consider next steps, and Inspector Dowling included you as a courtesy.”

“You shouldna’ have lingered on your ain business,” Hamish scolded. “It’s no’ right to muddle the past wi’ the present.”

When in Rome- Rutledge thought, but this was Marling…

And it was an opportunity to meet Grimes, in Seelyham.

He thanked Burke and was gone.

But he’d no more than turned the crank and started the engine when a young woman stepped out of the hotel’s side door and paused, as if waiting for him to drive on. It wasn’t until he’d climbed behind the wheel that Rutledge, his thoughts far from London, realized he knew her.

It was Nell Shaw’s daughter.

She simply stood there, prepared for rejection.

“Miss Shaw?” he said tentatively. He dredged his memory for a name, and somewhere in the mists of the past, he remembered that she was called Margaret.

Her face, clouded with uncertainty, cleared as he recognized her. “It’s my mother,” she said hurriedly. “I’m so terribly worried about her.”

With a repressed sigh, he asked, “Is she ill? Shall I ask the doctor to come to the hotel?” Nell Shaw was, he thought, a better tactician than half the generals at the Front-But then, as Hamish was pointing out, perhaps she had a better cause. After all, Rutledge was the man who had brought her husband to judgment-and thus to his death. Shifting the burden of his self-doubt to her shoulders, blaming her for demanding what she perceived as justice, was shirking his duty to himself and to the Law.

“I’m sorry-No, she’s in London. I came down alone.”

Thanking God for small mercies, he said more sharply than he’d intended, “I must drive to Seelyham. My business there can’t wait. I’ll have to take you with me. We can talk on the way.”

She hesitated, as if half afraid of him, gnawing her lip like a child.

“Margaret,” he said more gently. “Would you prefer to wait here until I come back? I can’t promise how long it will be. On the other hand, if you drive with me, there won’t be any distractions or interruptions. We can discuss what’s wrong with your mother along the way, and I’ll see you safely home from Seelyham.”

Flushing with embarrassment and gratitude, she nodded, and Rutledge handed her into the passenger’s seat before turning toward the main road out of the village.

As they passed the ironmonger’s, a man leaning wearily against the wall stared blearily at them. Rutledge recognized the drunk, Holcomb, from the night before. Belching heavily, the man turned on his heel and shambled on.

Rutledge wondered if the man was sober enough to make any better sense now. But he couldn’t stop.

Picking up the thread of Margaret Shaw’s earlier remark, he asked, “Why are you worried about your mother?”

“It’s like an obsession,” Miss Shaw told him earnestly, as if relieved to find someone who would listen. She was not as hard as her mother, nor as intelligent, he thought. Sheltered-by choice or by circumstances-she was not worldly, in the true sense. And he wondered if she really understood why her mother was so adamant that the past be expunged.

“Clearing your father’s name?” He glanced toward her.

Her face reddened again. She had that kind of fair complexion that registered shifts in emotion easily. “She’s convinced Papa didn’t kill anyone… she can’t sleep, she can’t eat-it’s all she thinks about!”

“How long has this been going on? All these years? Or since she found the locket?”

“She’s always railed against the jury. But since the locket she’s been like a madwoman.”

“Tell me about finding the locket.”

“There’s nothing to tell. She went next door to help Mr. Cutter as he’d asked, and when she came home she looked sick, as if she was about to lose her dinner. She was that upset, she locked herself in her room. I’ve only known her to do that twice before. The day Papa was taken away, and the day the letter came.”

“What letter?”

“I never saw it. But after she read it, she cried for hours. Then she came out of her room and was herself again.”

“A letter your father had written?”

She frowned. “I don’t see how it could be. It only came this autumn. But I overheard her tell Mr. Cutter that a cousin was dying. She said, ‘Everyone is gone. There’s no one left.’?”

“And what has been your feeling all these years? About your father’s guilt?” he asked quietly, without judgment.

She shook her head. “I never cared whether Papa was guilty or not. It didn’t matter. When they took him away, I wept all night. I hated the police, I hated you. He was my father- I didn’t know how we were to get along without him! And indeed, it’s been the hardest thing we’ve ever had to face. Nobody understands!”

Hamish said, “She would ha’ been at an age where she doted on him.”

It was true. Rutledge recalled the stricken, white-faced child standing in the doorway, staring up at her father, waiting for him to tell her it was all a mistake, that he’d be home by the morning. And Shaw had looked at her, pain in his eyes, and said nothing.

The boy, her brother Ben, had been belligerent, beating his fists against the young constable escorting his father, crying out to let him go, he’d done nothing. But the girl had been unable to speak, crushed by events, not even coming forward to kiss her father as he turned a last time on the road and looked back at her.

“It’s important to realize that your mother may be wrong. That she’s going to be disappointed,” Rutledge began, slowing in the wake of a lorry. “I know she’s desperate and afraid and clinging to hope. But what if there is none? So far I’ve found nothing, no real proof to support her belief that this new evidence-”

“That’s no’ true!” Hamish thundered. “It’s no’ the truth!”

Rutledge silently defended himself. “I will not give her false hope! It won’t help her mother, and it won’t serve her!” he said adamantly. “Nothing is black and white-it’s more often shades of gray!”

Hamish replied defiantly, “Aye, so you say!” His upbringing in a barren, harsh land, compounded by his rigid faith, had always set out the lines of battle cleanly. One faced and dealt with life, and if necessary, with death. It was what had led him to refuse a direct order in the field, this stubborn, suicidal belief that compromise was unacceptable. Hedged in by exhaustion and disgust and grief, he had had nowhere to go. And so had chosen execution rather than lead even one more man to his death in the teeth of the German guns…

“-evidence,” Rutledge went on, overriding the protest, “is sufficient to satisfy either the police or the Home Office that this file should be reopened.”

“But there’s the locket! Mama says you haven’t spoken to anyone-that you’ve come here about other murders, and forgotten us.” The girl bit her lip again, and turned to look out at the fields. “Mama says-” She broke off as her voice quivered. Pride forbade her to cry in his presence.

“I know what your mother says,” he told her, more gently. “And I have spoken to people who remember your father and his trial.”

“And nobody wished to help,” she said forlornly. “I’m not surprised.”

“Who else could have killed those women?”

There was a long silence.

He hadn’t expected an answer. He said, finally, “I can understand why your mother took the locket from that drawer-it was human nature, it was vindication, and she didn’t think beyond that possibility. Still, Mrs. Cutter is dead. We can’t question her about how it came into her possession.”

“But I don’t think Mrs. Cutter intended to harm Papa, when she told the police about the change in our circumstances. I think when George-that was Mrs. Cutter’s son from her first marriage-told her about the murders, she saw a way to make trouble for Mama. Because she wanted Papa to come to her for help.”

“Your father worked in the victims’ houses, not your mother.”

“But Mama was always after Papa to ask pay for what he did. And he wouldn’t hear of it. Mrs. Cutter told me one afternoon that Mama would go round to the houses herself and say that we were desperate for whatever they could spare. Mrs. Cutter told me that Mama would ask to be remembered in their wills, if the old ladies couldn’t pay much.”

Nothing in the original testimony suggested that Mrs. Shaw had had any contact with the victims. Was this the truth? Or a fabrication?

“How did Mrs. Cutter know these things?”

“I don’t know. I was afraid to ask her!”

Her son George?

“Did you ever speak to your parents about her accusations?”

Margaret shook her head vigorously. “Oh, no. It was shameful to think of Mama begging.”

Which might have scuttled Janet Cutter’s intentions.

He drove with only half his mind on the road. It would be easy to believe that Mrs. Cutter had simply used the killings to her own advantage-except for that locket. The locket put an entirely different complexion on the interactions between the Shaws and the Cutters. Would Janet Cutter have asked her son George to bring her a small token, some property of the dead that she could use in her persecution of Nell Shaw? And instead the police had taken her literally and investigated the husband, not the wife! She’d have buried the locket away, then, for fear it would condemn the wrong Shaw Mistaking his silence, Margaret Shaw turned to face Rutledge. “It will break Mama’s heart if you fail her. I don’t know what I’m to do then! Mama has always been that strong! How will my brother and I survive without her?” Her voice ended in a wail that made him flinch.

Rutledge swore to himself. He mustn’t-he couldn’t-afford to find himself entangled in the emotional turmoil of the Shaw family. His objectivity slipped with every encounter. The locket was damning-but where had it come from? That was the crux of his dilemma.

Where had the locket spent the last six years?

It couldn’t have been in the possession of Janet Cutter’s dead son. Unless he’d sent it to her in a final and desperate need to justify his suicide “It would be a tidy answer,” Hamish interjected sourly.

The whole case was revolving around Janet Cutter. And she was dead…

Rutledge said, “Your mother means well, Margaret, but she’s living under the delusion that the police and a jury and a judge were wrong in their findings. And that doesn’t happen very often-”

“That’s what Mama said to us-‘It doesn’t happen very often-but they wronged your father, and they wronged me, and they wronged you-’ Mama was there in the courtroom. She could see that a jury believes what the lawyers tell them. What the police tell them. But Papa never said a word in his own defense. Who gave his side?”

The defense had put up the best arguments it could. But the most damning evidence had been Shaw’s refusal to deny his guilt when the police had questioned him.

Hamish said, “If Mrs. Cutter had told him what she told the lass, and he believed her lies-”

“-he would have taken his wife’s place in the dock, for the sake of the children…” Rutledge completed the thought.

Miss Shaw was silent for a long breath. Then she said stoutly, “I never liked Mrs. Cutter. There was a slyness about her. She’d be very kind, offering tea cakes or hair ribbons. And then once I was lulled into accepting, she’d begin to pick and pry. She’d ask about my parents, about my father. I didn’t know how to stop her, or turn the questions. It was like being pinned, the way insects were in a museum display I saw once-”

“What sort of questions?”

“What Papa and Mama talked about together. If they had arguments. What my father had given my mother on her birthday. It was as if she couldn’t bear for them to be happy together.”

On the outskirts of Seelyham oast houses lined the fields, like misshapen windmills lacking their sails. Miss Shaw asked about them, staring over her shoulder. “I was never much in the countryside,” she said artlessly. “I don’t know anything about flowers or trees. But I like them.”

Rutledge, thinking of the shabby, cheek-by-jowl houses of Sansom Street, replied, “I expect you do. You should consider going into service in the country.” If he’d been on better terms with Elizabeth Mayhew, he could have recommended this girl to her. But she was considering selling up, and there would be no place for Margaret Shaw, when new owners took over.

The pretty face turned to him, brightening. “I could, couldn’t I? If Mama doesn’t find a way to help us. I learn quickly, if I’m taught.”

Hamish said, Covenanter to the bone, “It’s no’ a very fine future, service.”

“For many girls with no other place to go, it provides a home,” Rutledge pointed out.

At that Hamish snapped, “And salves your conscience, aye.”

On the outskirts of Seelyham was a huddle of half-timbered cottages with thatched roofs that led into a broadening of the road, a few side streets, and a small green with two- and three-story brick buildings on either side, one of them half covered with ivy and sporting a sign identifying it as the Seelyham Arms. Around the corner stood a small public house with a pair of benches on either side of the door. The church was set on higher ground where a lane branched to the right, and the churchyard wall ran along the lane for some distance beyond, sharing it on the other side with a rather shabby house that rambled into three wings, its plaster faded to a soft cream and the pointed windows reflecting the church tower. The police station, a farmer walking his dog informed Rutledge, was just beyond the pub.

Rutledge left Miss Shaw in the parlor of the Seelyham Arms, ordering tea and sandwiches for her, before walking along to the station. It was crammed between a pair of shops, one with meats hanging in the window and the other a bakery displaying an array of cakes and bread.

He found Dowling talking with a heavyset, red-faced man who was introduced as Grimes, the local man on the scene. The small office, stuffy with the heat of bodies and the smell of stale food, was almost claustrophobic in atmosphere. Rutledge quickly found himself wanting to leave the outer door standing wide.

Gruff and to the point, Grimes declared, “I’ve just been acquainting Mr. Dowling here with the names of men who’d be included on any list of possible victims if our murderer widens his range. Seemed to be a good idea to say something to each man, and we’ve just done that.”

Rutledge wondered how many able-bodied men had gone marching off to war out of the village’s tiny population. He sat down in the chair offered him and replied, “I take it that they served with the Marling men?”

Grimes looked him over, the height, the thinness of the face, the haunted eyes. But something in Rutledge’s appearance made up his mind for him. “That’s right. Except for two that went to sea.” He sighed. “The farmers got used to their being away, managing somehow. But it’s not the same-never will be. And no money to mechanize.”

“What did these men have to say?” Rutledge asked.

“Not what you’d call helpful information. Dowling sat there and watched them, and he’s of the same mind: Nobody seems to know anything we don’t.” Grimes passed a list to Rutledge, who scanned it quickly. None of the names were familiar. “What’s more, I’d already spoken with the rector. Comparing impressions, you might say. He knows Seelyham as well as or better than I do. And there’s been no indication of secrets or trouble that he’s aware of.” He stirred in his chair, glancing briefly at Dowling. “All the same, the men and their families are worried. You could see it in their faces.”

Hamish said, “If there’s trouble, they’re no’ likely to confide in either priest or police.”

And Hamish was right. Men who had stood shoulder to shoulder in the terrifying bombardments, leaning against the slick mud of the trench walls as they waited for the signal to go over the top, were as close as brothers. What passed between them was kept to themselves, and they looked out for each other. The Scots under Rutledge were as feuding a lot as he’d ever come across in civilian life, but they’d close ranks before an officer, turning bland faces his way and swearing that all was well.

Admirable in some ways, this silence, and infuriating in others.

It could well turn out to be deadly now.

Grimes was saying, “I’ve asked about strangers as well. Not one of these men has seen someone hanging about.”

“There was a boy who came down with the hop pickers. A Jimsy Ridger. Has someone from their ranks been searching for him?” Rutledge asked. “Ridger might not be viewed as a stranger if they’d served with him.”

“If there was, no one spoke up. I recall Ridger, as a matter of fact. An unlikely lad to settle down to a decent living. To my knowledge, he hasn’t been around since the war ended a year ago.” Grimes picked up the thread of his discussion. “But the women, now, they’re a different story. And that’s where we were heading when you walked through the door. If you want to come along, I’d ask only that you let me do the talking.”

Taking acceptance of the invitation for granted, Grimes got heavily to his feet, and Dowling said diffidently, “Ought I to wait here? Too much officialdom-”

“No, you might as well hear what’s said.”

The three men walked briskly in the direction of the brick cottages that stood in a cluster where the High Street ran into the Marling Road. For the most part the homes were well kept, sedate with white curtains at the windows and pots of flowers set in the sunny doorways.

“Mrs. Parker lives here,” Grimes was saying, indicating one of them. “You can see how that pair of windows in the front room overlooks the street.” He tapped lightly on the door, and stood back.

An elderly woman opened it a crack and peered out at them. “Now, then, Mrs. Parker,” Grimes said with gruff affability, “I’ve brought Mr. Dowling and Mr. Rutledge here to listen to what you told me you saw the other night. If you’d not mind repeating it for us.”

She was swathed in shawls, stooped and breathing with noticeable difficulty. She didn’t offer to invite her visitors in; she stood her ground in the doorway, clutching the frame and the edge of the door as if to support herself. A brief gust of wind stirred her thin gray hair and she stepped back into the shelter of the entry. She spoke to them from there, like a frail ghost of the woman she must once have been, her large frame shrunken with illness and age.

“I don’t rest of a night, as you know very well, Bill Grimes! I sit by my windows”-a gnarled finger pointed out the one he’d indicated earlier-“and sleep in my chair when I sleep at all. It was last Tuesday night, I think it was. There was someone walking by, and I leaned forward to tap on the glass.”

“Did you know who it was?”

“Well, I thought I did. I thought it was Tommy Jacobs, and one of the twins had taken ill.”

“And was it?”

She glared at him. “You know very well it wasn’t. You went straight to his door after you left here, and asked him yourself!”

“I know, Mrs. Parker,” Grimes answered patiently. “But these gentlemen don’t.”

“If it’ud been Tommy, he’d have stopped and told me what he was doing out at that hour. Instead he crossed the road there, head down, and hurried off, as if he hadn’t heard me.”

“And how would you describe him?”

She pressed her lips together, trying for breath. “He looked like Tommy Jacobs,” she said after a moment. “Tall. Good shoulders. He had on a heavy coat and his hat. It was cold that night. That’s all I saw.”

“I’ll let you step in out of the wind, then, Mrs. Parker. Kind of you to talk to us, I appreciate it.” Grimes tipped his hat again.

She looked from him to Dowling, then to Rutledge. “I’ve seen him before,” she said, indicating the inspector from Marling. “But not him. ”

“Mr. Rutledge has come down from London,” Grimes informed her.

She gave Rutledge a toothless grin, her bright blue eyes suddenly dancing. “From London, is it? Mr. Parker was from London. I always fancied London men!”

With that she shut her door firmly, and left them standing on the street.

“Do you believe her?” Rutledge asked Grimes.

“I think I do. She’s not well, but her eyesight is keen enough, and so is her mind.”

Dowling said, “Her windows are near enough to the street for a clear look at the man.”

They considered the story for a moment longer before walking on.

“If her testimony was the only one we had, I’d be more chary of taking it seriously,” Grimes said. “The next woman in a way corroborates what Mrs. Parker saw. But before we walk on, notice the direction of the church from here.”

Rutledge and Dowling turned to observe that the church was closer into town.

“Now, look down there, the house set back from the road in the trees.”

It was on the outskirts of Seelyham, a good fifty yards away, and rather finer than the cottages. Rutledge thought it might have been at one time a Dower House, judging by the low brick wall in front and a handsome portico.

Grimes set off with determination, explaining as he went.

“Miss Judson and her father live in that house. It’s called The Swallows, and it’s too far off the road to see who’s coming and going. But that same Tuesday night, Miss Judson went out to fetch the rector to her father. He isn’t well, and sometimes he takes a bad turn and wants to make his peace with God. She does what she can to keep his spirits up.”

Rutledge said, “They live together, then.”

“Oh, yes. Miss Judson is what you might describe as a mature lady. I’d guess Mr. Judson is well past his three score years and ten.”

They had reached the property and were walking up the drive when a woman with a dog came out of the house, went down the stone steps, and stopped to stare at them with interest before moving in their direction.

“Inspector Grimes,” she said, nodding to Dowling and Rutledge. A tall, angular woman in her forties, with clear gray eyes and a no-nonsense manner, she waited with composure for Grimes to explain himself.

“I’ve brought Inspector Dowling from Marling to speak with you, and Inspector Rutledge, from London. I’d like them to hear what you told me.”

Frowning, Miss Judson said, “You attach more importance to it than I do.”

“I daresay we do,” Grimes agreed affably. “But in police work, it’s the small things that sometimes loom large in the end.”

She faced the other two men and explained in her abrupt fashion, “I had gone to fetch the rector to my father. As I walked down the drive and turned toward the rectory, I passed a man coming out of Seelyham. It was late, and I didn’t expect to find anyone else on the road. I nodded as I passed him, and went on to knock on Mr. Sawyers’s door. When the two of us walked back, the man was nowhere to be seen.”

“Did you recognize him?” Rutledge asked.

“Indeed not.”

“How was he dressed?”

“Well enough to be a gentleman. Certainly not shabby enough to be a beggar, even though he was on foot. We’re the last house, you see, and I thought perhaps he might have been staying at The Arms and couldn’t sleep. I suggested as much to Inspector Grimes, here.”

“Could you see his face or judge his coloring?”

She smiled. “There was no moon, Inspector-Rutledge, is it? I wouldn’t know him again if he came to tea. Except that he had a good bearing. I thought perhaps he’d been in the war.”

They thanked her and took their leave. As Grimes walked back to the main road he told them, “I asked at The Arms. There was no one who might have taken it in his head to try the air well after midnight. Two ladies visiting a cousin, and a pair of travelers too drunk after their dinner to have made it down the stairs again without breaking their necks.”

“Then we have a man walking out of Seelyham on a Tuesday night. No one was murdered on a Tuesday,” Rutledge pointed out.

“But there was on a Saturday,” Grimes reminded him. “And here’s the other bit of the puzzle. Another woman was walking through the churchyard around nine o’clock Saturday evening. She was coming home from sitting up with a child with croup. Rounding the corner by the church she walked straight into a man coming out of the bushes. He was living rough, she thought, and she didn’t care for that. She walked on, and came to find me. But by the time I reached the churchyard, he’d taken the hint and moved on.”

“She spoke to him?”

Grimes laughed. “Miss Whelkin would ask the devil who he was roasting over the fires of hell. If we’d sent her to fight the Kaiser, the war would have been over in two years.”

Rutledge smiled. Such women were the bane of ordinary villagers, and the delight of policemen.

“She stopped stock-still and wanted to know if he was waiting for someone. There’s a young girl here in Seelyham who is no better than she ought to be, and Miss Whelkin was of the opinion the man was loitering for a chance to meet her. She asked him outright, and he answered that he’d come a long way and was tired. He’d fallen asleep when he went into the church to pray. She was fairly certain he was from Cornwall.”

“Has she visited Cornwall?”

“My guess is that she hasn’t,” Grimes replied sourly. “But she swore he could pass for Tristan. Whoever he might be when he’s at home.”

Rutledge, who had been studying the churchyard, turned to look sharply at Grimes.

Tristan…

His first thought was the opera. But he doubted Miss Whelkin had ever set foot in a London theater. She was not likely, from Grimes’s description, to be a lover of foreign works.

“How old is she, this Miss Whelkin?”

“Fifty-five if she’s a day,” Grimes declared. “Her father was schoolmaster here for most of her life.”

“Then she’d have known the Idylls of the King- ” Tennyson’s romantic series of poems about Arthur and his Court. They had brought the Round Table knights back into fashion, and all things Gothic. Tristan…

Grimes’s face cleared. “Tennyson,” he nodded, recalling his school days. “I had to learn a good bit of his poems by heart.”

Dowling was talking to Grimes, and Rutledge shut out their voices as he dredged his memory. There had been a painting just before the war, very popular with Londoners. C. Tarrant’s portrait of a young, fair man on a narrow, grubby back street of a Midlands town, staring up at an aeroplane overhead. Ignoring the signs of poverty all around him, the young man’s eyes were fixed in wonder on the miracle of flying. Earthbound, he longed for the skies. Like a Grail Knight blind to the misery of the world in his vainglorious search for the miraculous Cup. And the artist had called it Tristan.

There had been two schools of thought on the intent of the portrait, and much had been written about it. The show had been a triumph. Much later, Rutledge had met the man who might have posed for that knightly figure…

Miss Whelkin would probably have agreed with the artist about the depiction of Tristan. There had been reproductions of the painting in bookshops, and she might even have seen one of them. But why had she connected that Tristan with a stranger from Cornwall?

Hamish said, “You canna’ be sure she did!”

Rutledge said aloud, “I think we ought to speak to Miss Whelkin.”

“You’ll have to come back, then. She’s off to her sister’s in Canterbury for the week. Miss Whelkin visits her every November, like clockwork. They don’t get on together. It’s a trial for both of them. But she’s bent and determined to do her duty by her kin.”

Dowling wistfully suggested luncheon at the hotel before returning to Marling, but Rutledge still had to address the problem of Nell Shaw’s daughter. Grimes and Dowling set off toward the police station, where Dowling had left his bicycle, and Rutledge walked on to the Seelyham Arms.

Margaret Shaw had managed to reach Marling on her own, but it was necessary to find her safe transportation back to London. With promises that he would not forget her mother and would visit her as soon as possible, Rutledge handed her into the carriage of an elderly and respectable greengrocer driving to London to see his dentist. He also gave her fare for a cab to take her across the river from Charing Cross.

There was trepidation in her face as she asked, “But what must I do about Mama? I can’t go home and tell her there’s nothing new, and watch her worry herself into one of her blinding headaches! She’ll be fit to be tied, if I come back empty-handed!”

Rutledge said, “Did she send you to me?”

The girl shook her head. “No, but she’d want to know where I’ve been and who I saw. She’s that strict! I’ll have to tell her-if I lie, she catches me out, and it’s all the worse. Last night she sat on the side of my bed and told me she was at her wit’s end. She had that pinched look about her eyes, as if the lamp was too bright.” She stared around her at the village of Seelyham, her gaze wandering to the stone church tower, green with moss, and the hummocky ground of the ancient churchyard. “Do you believe Papa killed those women? Truly believe it?”

As her eyes swung back to his face, she read the uncertainty there before he could control the doubt that had plagued him since the day her mother had walked back into his life.

“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” he said wearily.

The key to this muddle was very likely the stroke Janet Cutter had had shortly after Shaw’s sentencing-and shortly after her son’s suicide, come to that. But which piece of news had destroyed her? If the truth were known…

“Did you know George Peterson?” he asked then.

Margaret was surprised. “Hardly at all. He was grown up when I was a child, and I was rather afraid of him.”

“Because he was older?”

As if digging into her memory, she answered slowly, “He was a policeman, and Mama would threaten to call him to come and take us away if we were naughty.”

It was a common enough threat-in many households, the police had replaced the devil as a deterrent to bad behavior. Rutledge smiled.

Following her own train of thought, Margaret Shaw said, “I don’t know why Mrs. Cutter cared for Papa. He was whimsical. And I think she must have liked that.”

“How did Henry Cutter behave toward your mother?”

“Oh, he was always asking her advice. I think he admired Mama’s strength, and Papa liked Mrs. Cutter’s softness. She reminded him of growing up somewhere else, not Sansom Street. It was almost as if they’d all married the wrong people. I don’t expect to wed,” she added with a candidness that was a measure of her own lost childhood. “There’s too much heartache. It seldom comes out right!”

Rutledge drove inspector Dowling back to Marling. Halfway there the inspector began, “We don’t see many murders in this part of the country. Not like some of the towns, where there’s an uncertain element. Maidstone, for instance. Or Rochester. Dover sees more trouble, being a port where all kinds mix. The last murder in Marling was just before the war, a son who killed his father before the old fool could marry again and change his will. I understand that kind of violence. The son felt he was being cheated out of his inheritance, and the father was bent on having a pretty young wife. She knew a good thing when she saw it, and if there was blame anywhere, it lay at her door. She was greedy, not to put too fine a point on it. She saw the father could give her more than the son. Without her stirring up the pair of them, that farmer would be alive today. But the courts can’t take such behavior into account. If they could, a jury would have hanged her along with the dead man’s son.”

It was, in some ways, the story of the Shaws. A wife wanting what she couldn’t have…

Rutledge said, “It’s straightforward, at least. I once had an investigation that hinged on a lamp. Where it had actually been placed before the crime. Through a window the murderer had seen something in the room that triggered an explosive anger, jealous anger. But only because the lamp’s light illuminated it in that position. Once the lamp was moved, we saw nothing out of the ordinary. There was nothing to give her away.”

Dowling glanced at Rutledge. “Where’s our lamp, then?” he asked. “I understand what you’re saying, but I can’t apply it to our situation.”

“The roads,” Rutledge answered. “Each of the dead men had a family at home. Other eyes to see whatever transpired. It put the men out of reach, in a sense. But they were always accessible along the road. The question is, what drew each of these victims into the killer’s net? Circumstance? Opportunity? Or trickery?”

Dowling turned his head to consider the road behind them. They had nearly reached the trees where one of the victims had been discovered. Taylor. The first…

“It can’t be theft,” the inspector said, ticking off the possibilities on his fingers. “These three had little worth stealing. No one stole what they did have. And no one stands to gain from their deaths, as far as I can tell. The murders took place on different roads, different nights. That’s a vote for opportunity, not circumstance. They had the war in common, of course.”

“And there’s Jimsy Ridger,” Rutledge said.

“If someone was looking for Jimsy, he wouldn’t have to kill a man to ask where to find him.”

“He might kill a man he thought would warn Ridger.”

“Then I think it’s time we found out where Ridger is, and what he knows about this business.”