A Fearsome Doubt

31

Rutledge stayed where he was, listening. His hearing had of necessity been acute on the battlefield, where sound was a betrayer. And Hamish had always heard what he could not.

He asked, into the silence of his head, “Where?”

“On the ground floor…” came the reply after a moment.

And as Rutledge held his breath for an instant, to listen more intently, he heard it again.

– thump

At first it sounded as if someone had bumped into a chair in the dark-as he himself had done in the kitchen. And then as his brain processed the nature of the noise, identified it, documented and explained it, he was not prepared to believe it.

His first reaction was “No-!”

And yet-it made a dreadful sense. Here was the hidden killer, the murderer seemingly with no motive. One not driven by familiar emotions-not guilt nor compassion nor greed nor vengeance. A hidden face, turned inward toward a grief that had no means of expression. And how in the scheme of things, had that grief turned to murder?

Hamish pressed, “Are ye verra’ sure?”

“It has to be. There’s no other answer,” Rutledge responded grimly. “We looked at the wine, and not the laudanum. We looked for any connection with victims, and there was none. We looked for opportunity, and didn’t see how it could be accomplished. We told ourselves it was the darkness that mattered-we told ourselves it was the road-we believed it had to do with men who’d fought together. And in the end it was none of these things. It all came back to dying.. . ”

The sound came again. A footfall, too heavy to be concealed, echoing through the silent house and rising up the open stairwell.

“In the hall, then,”

“Yes.”

“Aye.”

Rutledge stayed where he was, furiously thinking through his experiences in Marling.

Chief Superintendent Bowles had been aware of his revived interest in the Shaw case-and had laid his plans accordingly. He’d used the Chief Constable and Raleigh Masters to keep his eye on Rutledge, and he’d isolated his troublesome inspector in Kent, where he could do no harm. But it had backfired, this stirring up of passions and fears.. .

Raleigh Masters, whose own obsession was Matthew Sunderland, had been primed to dislike and distrust the man sent down from London. And he’d had no qualms about showing it publicly.

But the fear that drove Raleigh Masters had nothing to do with Matthew Sunderland.

Raleigh Masters had already suspected who the killer was, and had done his best to throw Rutledge off the scent. A subtle legal mind’s misdirection…

It had succeeded admirably, because Rutledge had been thoroughly blinded by Nell Shaw’s vehement determination, driven and cornered and harangued into half believing her web of lies. He’d been distracted by Gunter Hauser and Elizabeth Mayhew. By that sudden return of a missing part of his memory and the truth about the end of his own war. He had been vulnerable, and Masters, the wily barrister, had recognized that.

But what had Raleigh Masters seen that he hadn’t?

A multitude of small signs, the first withering of the spirit, eyes that looked away, a silence where there had been conversation, an empty bed, the sound of a motorcar in the night… Little wonder that Rutledge had missed them: He hadn’t been privy to them. And whenever there was a chance that he might see too much, he’d been passionately attacked by Masters, driving him out.

He set the lamp down in the room nearest him, where the door was still ajar, and with great care he closed it behind him, shutting off the light.

Walking with the quiet tread of a soldier accustomed to the stealth of night attacks, Rutledge went down the passage and then descended the flight of stairs to the first floor.

The darkness seemed absolute after the brightness of the lamp.

And he could feel, like pressing ghosts, the presence of someone else, standing below him, looking up toward him from the hall.

“Rutledge?”

The voice was pitched to carry.

“I’m here.”

“So you are.” There was an inflection of satisfaction. “Odd place to find you, I couldn’t think why you’d come here. But it suited me well enough, too.”

“Did you follow me?”

“With great difficulty, I’m afraid. Yes. And I’d seen you outside the gates before this, if you remember. The grass was beaten down.”

Rutledge began to descend the stairs. “Do you know where Brereton is?”

“It’s my blood, not his, flung around the sitting room. If that’s what you’re asking. I believe he went up to London on a private matter. Last week he’d mentioned something to that effect. It had slipped my mind.”

“Where is she?”

“I’d like you to see for yourself. What did you do with the lamp? I could follow it through the windows.”

“It’s in a room upstairs. A delaying tactic, if you will.”

“Leave it then. You must drive. I’ve done all that I can this day.”

Rutledge came down the last half dozen steps. In the darkness, the face of Raleigh Masters was shadowed with grief and pain, a caricature of the man who had ruled courtrooms like his predecessor, Sunderland.

They walked together through the hall, into the kitchen passage, and out into the night. Masters was limping heavily, leaning on his cane, as if in great pain.

The night air smelled of damp, as if rain was on the way. Underfoot the scurrying of mice rustled the leaves. There was no wind; the trees were stark against the black sky.

Rutledge cranked the motorcar, while Masters heaved himself with difficulty into the passenger’s seat, drawing his bad leg in after him.

The other vehicle stood halfway down the drive, where Masters had left it, and Rutledge was forced onto the lawns to drive around it.

“Did she use the motorcar, offering them a lift? And a little wine to keep out the cold? I didn’t know she could drive. You always had someone do that.”

“She learned, when my leg first began to trouble me. Porter, the chauffeur, is half senile. We use him only when there’s no one else.”

They had turned out of the stone gates, passing the tree where Will Taylor had been found.

Neither man spoke of it.

After a time Raleigh Masters said, “I would like very much to kill you, you know. It’s strange to admit, after years of serving the law, that I could so easily break the most weighty of them.”

“It’s all too easy to kill,” Rutledge answered, remembering Hamish.

“That was the war. It’s not the same.”

Rutledge didn’t argue.

Silence followed them the rest of the way. At the Brereton cottage, a lonely constable stood guard, touching his hat as he recognized Rutledge’s car. Somewhere among the trees the search for Brereton must be continuing, but there was no sign of lights or men. A mile or so farther on, as he turned into the drive that led up to Raleigh Masters’s house, Rutledge said, “Tell me about Brereton.”

“She went to kill him, you know, but he wasn’t at home. She believed, after you’d called on him, that he must surely have witnessed her coming and going. The wine was there on the table, the first glass poured, when I walked in. She’d just sat there, waiting. She looked so tired. We argued, and when I reached for the wine, to pour it out, her face seemed to fall apart, like shattered porcelain. It was rather horrible. I tried to calm her down, and instead she fought me, like a tigress. As if taking her fear and her grief and her anger out on me. I was hardly her match. And I really thought she intended to kill me there and then. I fell twice, and the last time I lay on the floor as still as I could, until she’d gone.”

The scene, violent and shocking, was vivid in Rutledge’s mind.

Masters took a deep, shuddering breath. “I suspected. I didn’t know. But I suspected-”

“It was a practice for death.”

“Yes. She thought-God forgive her-she thought that it would be easier, when they removed the rest of my leg, just to end it. But she wasn’t sure how to go about that. It took her two attempts before she got the mixture right. The first man, Taylor, was hours dying-she told me this afternoon. It must have been dreadful to watch. And I had a nurse-she dared not risk arousing the woman’s suspicions by making me unexpectedly ill. Webber was easier, but to make absolutely certain, she tried again. Bartlett, that was. She chose men who were suffering. As I was. Not someone who was healthy-until Brereton. But there was his blindness, you see. It would have masked the real reason for killing him.”

He stopped.

Hamish demanded, “Do you believe him then?”

Rutledge silently answered him. “I’ll see what his wife has to say first. If she’s coherent. Please God, Dr. Pugh is still at Brereton’s cottage!”

“Aye.”

As the motorcar drew up in front of the house, Rutledge asked Masters, “Where are the servants? Is someone with her?”

“They were given the day off, early on. She didn’t want them to see her walking down the drive to Brereton’s cottage. Since Porter-our chauffeur-was gone as well, I had to drive myself there. Which meant I had to put on this damned false foot! And even so it was unbelievably difficult.”

Raleigh refused help getting out of the car. His heel rang heavily against the metal frame as he tried to manage the long step to the ground. Swearing, he stood there grimacing against the pain, and then walked steadily up to the door of the house.

In the light from the hall, shining through the narrow lancet windows by the door, Rutledge could see Masters’s hands clearly for the first time. They were cut and bruised, where he had tried to stave off blows. His face was bloody from a head wound that was still oozing from under his hat and dripping down his temple to soak into his torn collar. A slit cheek had swollen grotesquely.

Acknowledging his stare, Masters said impassively, “She used my cane. She took it from me and broke my grip with it, when I tried to hold her.”

Rutledge said again, “Where is she?”

“Go on,” he replied wearily. “Go in and see your handiwork. I wish to God you’d never set foot in Kent! ”

He slumped against the doorframe, his back to the house, looking ready to drop. There was no color in his skin, except for the ugly streaks of blood. But he watched with venomously cold eyes as Rutledge opened and stepped through the door.

“’Ware!” Hamish warned.

The staircase ran up the center of the hall as it always had. The glass cases of Venetian splendor stood where they had always stood. A beautiful room, lighted with candles and lamps.

But as he looked up, Rutledge could see, swinging slowly from a carefully fashioned noose, the dead body of Bella Masters. She had used the upper balustrade as her gallows, and was hanging free in the stairwell. Her face, shielded by her disheveled hair, was turned away from him, but her neck was broken. The angle of her head seemed obscenely coquettish.

“Murderers hang…” The words ran through his mind like an epitaph.

It shook him as few things ever had.

For several minutes he stood there, Hamish silent at his shoulder, simply looking up, watching the pendulumlike motion of Raleigh Masters’s wife.

Aloud, he asked, “Did you do this?” It was hard to keep the anger out of his voice.

“No. While I was at Brereton’s, trying to collect my wits, she came back here. She did what she had to do.” Then he said with difficulty, “My enemies would have enjoyed prosecuting her.”

“Did she want you dead so very much?”

“I don’t think it was that. It was just that she knew me so very well, and she was terrified, at the end, that it would be up to her-deciding when it would happen. And so she tried to accustom herself to death, and perfect the means of death. She didn’t want me to suffer. Instead, she suffered for me…”

His voice broke. Masters added after a moment, “It wasn’t pity. I don’t think it was pity. In her own way, she saw it as love.” But there was doubt behind the tentative words.

He pushed himself away from the wall and started to walk awkwardly toward the motorcar. “For God’s sake, shut this door and leave her. For tonight. Take me somewhere where no one knows me.”

“I can’t. I must report this.”

“Take me to Melinda Crawford, then. While they do what must be done here.”

Rutledge forced himself to look away from Bella Masters. The sight was already seared in his mind.

This was how Ben Shaw had looked. And so many others… But without the terrible indignity of the hangman and the warden and the witnesses.

“I’m sorry.” It was all he could find to say. He wasn’t certain whether the apology was to Bella Masters, or her husband. He walked out of the hall, and closed the door behind him.

Masters said, “It doesn’t matter, you know. The doctor told me the last time I was in London that the infection is moving quite rapidly. I won’t live to see Christmas, even if they cut off my leg. It’s taken hold, the gangrene.”

“Brereton told me you were improved-”

“He wasn’t in the room during the consultation. And I lied to him afterward. I didn’t want Bella to travel to London with me, you see. I didn’t want Bella to know the truth. Not yet. Not until I’d made peace with it myself. I was afraid.”

Rutledge, grateful for the blessed darkness of the drive, asked, “Why didn’t you stop her? If you knew what was happening, in God’s name, why did you let it continue! ”

Raleigh Masters turned to face him across the bonnet of the motorcar. “I didn’t know in the beginning, not until Webber was already dead. The second victim. She came up late to bed that night, smelling of wine-depressed, on the verge of tears. And then-suddenly I didn’t want to know. I didn’t have the courage. I told myself the time might come when I would be glad to drink wine by the fire and go to sleep forever. But the time has come, you see. And it’s too late. She was right. I could never kill myself.”

He opened the passenger door. “If there’s any mercy left in you, get me out of here!”

But the lights from the hall seemed to pursue them down the drive until the trees finally blotted them out. And still they blazed brightly behind each man’s eyes.