A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [11]
It was Philip Nettle who had stumbled on the connection that linked the three victims—the fact that each had at one time or another employed the services of the same carpenter when work needed to be done. A trusted man, a caring man, one who had trimmed the wicks of lamps, brought in coal for the fires, oiled locks on the doors, kept window sashes running smoothly, and generally made himself indispensable. And then betrayed their trust.
The discovery of the murderer had once more pitched Chief Inspector Bowles into the forefront of public attention. As Philip Nettle lay dying in hospital, Bowles had made half a dozen speeches that cleverly fostered the notion that it was his own intuition that had come up with the crimes’ solution. He had given interviews to magazines and newspapers. And he had delivered the eulogy at Philip Nettle’s funeral, praising the man rather than the police officer, kissing the grieving widow’s cheek with marked condescension. She had regarded him with bitterness, convinced that Bowles’s callous demands for results had prevented her husband from making a timely visit to his doctor.
Sergeant Gibson, reading the caption under yet another photograph in a newspaper, had said sourly within Rutledge’s hearing, “You’d bloody think the man was standing for Parliament!”
Sergeant Wilkerson had answered, “Aye, there’s hope he will, and leave the Yard for good!”
To order the Shaw file brought to his office on the heels of a visit by Mrs. Shaw would ring alarm bells at the Yard. Old Bowels would hear about it before the day was out, and send someone down the passage to ferret out what was going on. Hanged felons were finished business. Even if Mrs. Shaw found a hundred new pieces of evidence.
The Yard, like the Army, demanded obedience and rigorously followed the chain of command.
“Aye, it’s as guid an excuse as any,” Hamish taunted, “for doing nothing.”
“Or a damned good reason for exercising caution,” Rutledge countered, getting up from his chair.
He went himself to the vast cavern where records were kept and, after some hunting among dusty cabinets, located the folder he was after.
With his office door shut, and no one but Hamish to observe him, Rutledge opened the file and began to read.
At the end of it, he sat back in his chair and watched the reflection of pale November light from his windows as it played across the ugly walls.
The sheets of paper and notes and conclusions that had been meticulously written seemed—in the light of Mrs. Shaw’s discovery—to lack conviction now. And yet in 1912, they had rung with truth—
No one had questioned one Henry Cutter, or his wife—except in regard to the comings and goings of Ben Shaw, his reputation in the neighborhood, and whether he was capable of killing anyone. The residents on either side of the Shaw house had had very little to say about their neighbor. They hadn’t seen suspicious goings-on and they hadn’t noticed any changes in Ben Shaw’s manner after the first murder or the last.
Mrs. Cutter—her given name was Janet—had unexpectedly provided one important clue. The two Shaw children had been taken out of the local school and put into better ones, a small private school for the son, and an academy for the daughter. An inheritance, Mrs. Shaw had claimed, from Shaw’s late uncle. Records turned up no such inheritance—the uncle had died in debt twenty years before, leaving his young son no choice but to emigrate. It was not long before Inspector Nettle was digging deeper into Ben Shaw’s sudden financial windfall.
This had been the point on which the evidence had turned. The Shaws had been a struggling family until just after the first body was found. A Mrs. Winslow. Many of her belongings had been