A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [114]
“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