A Fearsome Doubt

26

Rutledge went to the police station after driving Melinda Crawford back to her house.

Gunter Hauser was sleeping, but he heard the door to his cell open. Without opening his eyes, he said, “The doctor praised your handiwork. And asked me repeatedly who had seen to the wound. Should I tell him?”

“Elizabeth expected you to take the train to London.”

“Yes, well, she’ll be very disappointed.” He opened his eyes and sat up stiffly. “A bargain, Mr. Rutledge. We both have secrets, you and I. I would be very happy to keep yours, if you keep mine.”

“Early days to decide that.” There was a single chair in the room, and Rutledge hooked it with his foot, then sat down.

“I asked Dowling. He says there’s been no progress on finding your attacker.”

“You can hardly think I wounded myself!”

“Hardly. No, I’m of the opinion he’s not going to surface. He’s no fool; he can’t be sure who he slashed.”

“Yon drunk you questioned,” Hamish pointed out, “is a verra’ strong possibility. In the dark, he may have mistaken Hauser for you.”

“He doesn’t fit Hauser’s description-”

“Aye, well, you canna’ be sure o’ that!”

Rutledge concentrated his attention on Hauser. “At a guess, you didn’t tell Dowling how long you’d lived rough at the manor house.”

“It is one thing to confess. Another to confess everything. I learned that in the war, you know. There’s no certainty that others will see a situation quite as you do.”

Rutledge got up to leave.

“Elizabeth will blame you,” the German said. “But there’s not much either of us can do about it.”

“I’m not in love with her, if that’s what you’re asking.” It was true.

“No, but you feel a Cavalier’s responsibility. Elizabeth is stronger than you think.”

Rutledge went out the door without responding.

Tired and in no mood to talk to Dowling or anyone else in Marling, Rutledge found himself driving toward the small cottage where Tom Brereton lived.

It was old, a half-timbered yeoman’s house with a crooked roof beam and a massive wisteria twining up the porch and into the thatch. Boasting only a few rooms upstairs and down, land enough around it for a pretty cottage garden, and an atmosphere of sturdiness that belied its age, it was ideal for a man living alone. At the gate a small sign next to a bicycle identified it as Rover’s End.

He left the motorcar on the grassy verge and went up the short walk to the door.

Brereton opened it, surprise in his face when he saw who had come to call.

“I’d offer you a warm welcome, but from the look of you, whisky would be more acceptable.”

“I expect it would.”

Rutledge had to bend his head to step through the door, and inside, the beams were hardly more than an inch or two above him. The room was small, but there were windows at either end, and a fire on the hearth. Bookshelves, chairs, tables, and chests were crowded in upon each other, as if Brereton had crammed the contents of two houses into this tiny space.

“For a man going blind, it isna’ a verra’ safe place to walk.”

Rutledge found a chair by the hearth and watched a gray cat rise up from it, yawning with arched back. It blinked at him and then leapt to the floor, tail high, as if reminding him that his use of the chair was at most temporary.

“That’s Lucinda. She came with the furniture. Both inherited. But I don’t mind, she’s company of a sort. Sit down.”

Brereton poured two small whiskies and handed one to Rutledge. “It’s prewar. I inherited that, too. An aunt raised me, and she detested sherry. Like the late Queen Victoria, she preferred the smoky flavor. What brings you here?”

Rutledge sat and stretched his legs out to the fire. “What do you know about these murders?”

“What do I know?” Brereton sounded surprised. “Only what I hear. And that’s generally what gossip considers worthwhile passing on. Are you looking for information?”

“No. Peace.”

Brereton chuckled. “You’ll find that in plenty out here. The only house near Rover’s End belongs to Raleigh Masters. And as neighbors go, he’s invisible. I can step out into my garden of an evening and hear nothing but birdsong or the cry of an owl. I like it. Most people would find it daunting.”

Most people, Rutledge thought, would find approaching blindness daunting. But as Hamish was pointing out, what was the alternative?

“How is your neighbor, by the way?”

“He just went up to London, to visit his doctor. I drove him. Bella-Mrs. Masters-didn’t accompany him. There’s no change in his condition. But colder weather won’t help his circulation. Six years ago he might have considered the south of France during the winter. Not now, not so soon after the war.” Changing the subject, Brereton added, “How are Elizabeth’s puppies faring? I ought to go see for myself, I suppose.”

Something in his voice, the way he looked away, caught Rutledge’s attention. A yearning. Was there an attraction there, carefully concealed?

“Thriving,” Rutledge replied. “What will Lucinda make of a dog joining the household?”

“She’ll whip him into shape, just as she did me.”

A comfortable silence lengthened.

Rutledge toyed with his whisky, watching the firelight in the swirls of amber liquid. He thought, If I gave up the Yard, I could live like this-but for how long? How long would I be content?

“Of an evening lately, I’ve been thinking about your murders,” Brereton said after a time. “And I’ve come to a possible answer.”

Rutledge set his glass down on the table at his elbow, and said with interest, “I’d like to hear it.”

“Yes, well, I’m no policeman. But it was a gentle death, was it not? As murders go, I mean.”

“Suicide? Is that what you’re thinking?”

Brereton frowned. “Not exactly. But an-easing-into what the murderer might see as a better world.”

Unbidden, the image of Melinda Crawford’s face rose in Rutledge’s mind. “How does he choose his victims?”

“I don’t know. So far his compassion extends only to ex-soldiers. It may be that he was one himself.”

Hamish was pointing out that Melinda Crawford had nursed wounded men during the Mutiny. Rutledge shut the voice away.

Remembering Mrs. Parker struggling for breath and sleeping upright in her chair by her window, he said, “Then you’re suggesting that he doesn’t have a wide circle to choose from. Or that he’s wary of approaching people in their houses. For example, Bob Nester, who died of burned-out lungs.”

The logs shifted on the hearth, throwing Brereton’s face into the shadows. “Or your presence in Marling has deterred him before he could widen his net.”

“All right. We’ll accept that. Why does he use wine, do you think?”

“The wine doesn’t worry me. For all we know, it’s what our man prefers anyway. If you’d found an empty bottle, now, that might help narrow the field. You could ask wine merchants in the larger towns who purchased it. No, what intrigues me is the merciful death.”

“It’s a chilling idea,” Rutledge agreed. He wondered where Brereton was taking his discussion. At first it had seemed no more than an intellectual exercise. Now…

“Is it? Chilling, I mean. We’re looking at it from our own viewpoint, aren’t we? The murderer may see it entirely differently.”

“Raleigh Masters has lost part of a limb. He’s very likely to lose the rest of his leg. He’d have a better understanding than most of what Taylor, Webber, and Bartlett were suffering.”

Brereton laughed. “Raleigh doesn’t have compassion to spare for his own wife. I doubt he’d give much thought to ex-soldiers struggling to scratch a living.”

“There’s your blindness…”

“Yes, well, it won’t ease my suffering to kill blind men. However much I may sympathize. I’ll tell you what started me down this road, though. Mrs. Crawford once remarked that as a child during the Lucknow siege, she learned what deprivation was. For a very long time afterward she felt terribly guilty about wasting even a scrap of food or a drop of water. If she couldn’t eat a crust of bread, she’d feed it to the birds-the ants-even the monkeys that sometimes came into her mother’s garden. Later, she was sure this obsession must have driven her mother to distraction, but the point is, she had to deal with this guilt in her own fashion. What other kinds of guilt are there, and what other ways have people found to work through them?”

“Mrs. Crawford is not a likely suspect,” Rutledge answered.

“No, of course not. But she proves a point, in a way. What if someone can’t bear to watch these men hobbling down a road, and finally decides to put an end to it?”

She had given Peter Webber’s father a lift home, in her motorcar.

…

Brereton said, “For the sake of argument, how do you feel as you stand over a murder victim? You can’t be objective; you have to feel something. Passion, possibly. Anger? Disgust? Vengefulness?”

“A policeman can’t afford to feel,” Rutledge answered slowly. “He mustn’t let emotion cloud his observations. First impressions are important.”

“All right, bad example. Let’s take interviewing suspects, then. You pry into the deepest, darkest corners of their lives. And what you learn is disturbing. But it turns out neither they nor their secrets have any bearing on the case you’re working on. How do you walk away from that?”

“It isn’t always possible,” Rutledge conceded, picking up his glass and drinking from it.

“And if you’ve learned something that could be set right, even though you betrayed a secret, would you do it?”

“No. I’m not God. I can bring the guilty to justice, or try to. I can’t go around righting wrongs.”

Brereton smiled. “But there must be a great many people who don’t have that discipline. It must be tempting after a while, to play God.”

“And you think someone is doing that, in Marling?”

“I don’t know,” Brereton answered. “But it’s an interesting thought. Isn’t it?”

After the claustrophobic atmosphere of the cottage, Rutledge was glad to drive away. The cold air swept past his face and he felt he could breathe more easily.

It had been an odd conversation.

Hamish said, “Ye noted the bicycle leaning against yon garden wall.”

He had. It provided all the transportation that Brereton needed to go where and when he pleased.

It was possible that Brereton was confessing, after a fashion… .

Was it likely?

Rutledge couldn’t find in the man’s background anything that would translate to murder. But London could tell him more about that.

Tired, he turned at the crossroads for Marling.

Halfway there, he stopped by the trees where Will Taylor had been found and got out again to stand and look at them.

He had been here in the dark. He’d been here during the day. And there was nothing he could learn from this place. Where had these men died? Where they’d been found-or somewhere else?

Even if Brereton was right, and these were merciful deaths, there was no dignity in lying in a ditch to be found by some passerby… Why had the murderer cared about the man-but had no qualms about abandoning the corpse?

This, Rutledge thought, was the major problem with Brereton’s theory.

A motorcar approached from Marling, a last errant ray of sun catching the windscreen and flashing across the trees in a bright glare. Uncertain whether the driver had seen him, Rutledge stepped nearer the verge of the road, waiting for him to pass. Instead, the vehicle slowed, and stopped; after a moment, a man got out, retrieved his crutches, and with difficulty walked toward the Londoner.

Rutledge could see that Bella Masters was in the rear seat, a dark shape whose hat was all that betrayed her gender. She stayed where she was, behind the chauffeur.

As Raleigh approached him, Rutledge waited to see how the man would open the conversation.

Instead, Masters paused to look at the stone columns and the flattened grass of the drive.

“Someone’s been here,” he said. “The New Zealander, I expect. Someone’s taken over a whole floor at The Plough. With that kind of money he won’t think much of the Mortons’ estate.”

“You’ve met him?” Rutledge asked, curious. “I thought he was from Leeds.”

“Leeds? That could be. The staff was atwitter when we stopped at the hotel for tea. You’d have thought God Himself had arrived. Service was terrible.”

“I saw the luggage,” Rutledge said. “He’s here to stay, at a guess.”

“Yes, well, it’s a wonderful facade, all this fuss, isn’t it? Even if he’s poor as a church mouse. An entrance, an actor once told me, is half the play.”

There was a silence. Masters moved nearer Rutledge and regarded him thoughtfully.

“Why are you so fascinated by Matthew Sunderland?”

“I’ve told you. I was one of the men assigned to the Shaw case.”

“And that was disposed of. Six years ago.”

“So it was,” Rutledge answered neutrally. “It was an interesting trial. I should think it would be one that Sunderland himself would have talked about from time to time.”

Raleigh stared at him, the flush of anger mottling his face like a change of skin.

“Damn you! You know as well as I do that he barely finished the trial before he was taken ill! That was the last case he’d have enjoyed discussing with anyone!”

Stunned, Rutledge said, “I didn’t-he showed no sign of ill health. It was a classic performance!”

“You didn’t know him! You didn’t have any concept of what he was capable of. How could you judge a man like that? You weren’t fit to wipe his boots-”

“Perhaps you’re more sensitive to his problems because you did know him well. And therefore saw lapses the rest of us-”

Masters cut him short. “Are you trying to overturn the Shaw decision? It won’t do you much good. The villain’s dead. Leave him to rot!”

“I’m trying to get at the truth,” Rutledge told him bluntly. “I’d like to know whether the evidence is as strong in hindsight as it was at the time.”

He thought Masters was going to have an apoplexy. “He was my mentor, the man I admired more than any other. I won’t stand by and watch you destroy his reputation for the sake of some”-he fumbled for a word- “some modern desire to cleanse the conscience-”

“Hardly that-” Or was it? “What if there is new evidence?”

“ New evidence? Are you mad? How could there be any new evidence!”

“A locket has turned up. One that was included in the list of Mrs. Satterthwaite’s possessions but was never found.”

Masters was silenced. The color began to drain from his face, leaving him white and shaken.

“I won’t let you do this, do you understand? You’re easily broken, and I shall take pleasure in arranging it.”

“Break me if you like,” Rutledge answered. “Will that change the truth?”

Raleigh walked several steps away, his crutches stabbing the earth, then turned back. “It was a fair and just verdict.”

“I’m sure it was. With the information available. What if that’s changed? Would you rather Sunderland’s reputation stand undeservedly?”

“You don’t know what he went through, you don’t know anything about the pain and the courage and the sheer will that carried him through the last year of his life!”

Hamish said, “It’s no use. His mind’s made up.”

“I don’t want to destroy Sunderland. I want to find out if we misjudged Ben Shaw.”

“How very considerate of you. How very enlightened.” The words were chill and offensive.

“We aren’t going to solve this,” Rutledge replied. “If you like, I’ll sit down with you and present my findings. And you can be the judge.”

“No.”

“If you tell me that I’m wrong-”

“No.”

“Then I’m afraid there’s nothing more to discuss.”

Rutledge turned to walk back to his own motorcar.

Masters said, “Don’t walk away from me, Inspector.” It was a warning.

Rutledge half turned. “We have no common ground. It will do no good to savage each other.”

He walked on.

Masters said, “I know about your sister.” His voice was low, pitched not to carry beyond Rutledge’s ears.

Rutledge stopped, not sure he’d heard correctly.

He faced Raleigh Masters again. “You don’t even know my sister.”

“That’s true. I don’t know her. But she and your dear friend Richard Mayhew had an affair just before the war. They were very much in love. Mayhew betrayed his wife for her. And would have gone on betraying her, if the war hadn’t sent him to France.”

Rutledge, cold with anger, said, “You’re lying.”

“Am I? Richard Mayhew, alas, is dead. You must ask your sister, if you want the truth. If you dare. Or-perhaps you’d rather spend the rest of your life wondering…” Masters smiled. “Now you know how it feels to see your idol stripped of his honor.”