A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [12]
Especially after Mrs. Cutter had provided the most important reason to concentrate there. But no one had wondered why she was so cooperative. . . .
Could it have been to her advantage?
A shocking thought. That he could have sent an innocent man to the gallows on the basis of a woman’s perverted evidence. Rutledge closed his eyes against the pale light, looking back instead into the darkness of the past.
He had been so sure of his evidence and Nettle’s. So thoroughly convinced of the man’s guilt was he that his certainty was palpable in the courtroom. A well-thought-out investigation, the judge had applauded in his summation to the jury. For there had been no reason to connect the Cutters with the three women. Certainly, no evidence in that direction!
What could have been Henry Cutter’s motive for murder? His style of living hadn’t altered, but the Shaws’ had.
After the sudden death of Inspector Nettle, Rutledge had interviewed the neighbors again, including Henry and Janet Cutter. Nettle had been in increasingly severe pain for several days, covering it with wry humor and massive doses of cathartics. He often scrawled his notes in a shaking hand that was hard to follow. Rutledge had left nothing to chance. He had backtracked to substantiate each fact.
Mrs. Cutter had not had kind words to say for Mrs. Shaw (“a nosy and overbearing woman with few saving graces”), but she claimed that Mr. Shaw had never demonstrated any vicious tendencies that would account for his killing elderly women. “Kind to animals, and all that,” she’d said to Rutledge, bewildered. “A good father, too, and he put up with that wife of his when no one else would. Always after him to do better with his life, provide for his family. It doesn’t seem right that the smallest sign of wickedness didn’t show in his face or his ways! How are we to know, I ask you, if there’s no sign to warn us?”
And then she had added, almost as an afterthought, that last damning sentence. “And he did provide for his children. It hasn’t been six months since they were put in better schools, never mind the cost!” She had repeated it for Rutledge’s edification. “Not six months!”
The first murder had occurred just seven months before. . . .
Henry Cutter had described Ben Shaw as a man clever with his hands, always called on by his neighbors when something failed to work. “And I’ve never known him to take a ha’penny for what he done. Never saw him drunk, nor known him to strike his wife. It seems queer that he’d kill helpless old ladies for what he could scavenge in their houses. . . .”
“What he could scavenge” had been over a hundred pounds’ worth of jewelry and small, portable treasures that could, in the right quarter, be sold without questions asked.
But Henry Cutter, in the notes, had called Mrs. Shaw a kind and loving wife, “and Ben would have done anything for her, he cared that much for her.”
Kill and steal to give her the kind of life she goaded him into providing? Rutledge had, at the time, wondered if Mrs. Shaw wasn’t equally guilty for hounding her husband to desperate measures to keep her satisfied. But there was no law in English jurisprudence to cover that crime, even if she had.
Certainly their house had shown an influx of money that their combined income—his as a carpenter and hers as a shopkeeper’s assistant—couldn’t explain. But there were the small jobs that Ben Shaw did, for it seemed that he did charge when his services were sought by those well able to pay. He had never kept an accounting of what he’d earned in that fashion. His wife had probably spent most of it on clothes for the children, better schools, and certainly better food than their neighbors