A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [123]
“Elizabeth? God, I hope she won’t come into this!”
“She has already. Dowling has found out that she lunched with you at the hotel one day and has been seen several times speaking to you.”
“They will say I used her, to buy respectability. Yes. All right, if you want me to swear I’m innocent, I shall. On my brother’s soul.”
His face was sober, the blue eyes intense in the lamplight.
Hamish pressed, “Do you believe him?”
Rutledge answered, “Does it matter?” Aloud, he added, “Tell me, does this cup of yours exist?”
“There are records in my family. Letters. I can probably prove it was with me during the first years of the war, if someone can track down the men serving under me. But that would lead to the truth that my brother died after the cup was taken from me. It gives me a reason for murdering ex-soldiers from Kent who were in the unit that captured me. Better to believe I was here searching my family connection with England.”
“You’ve made a tangle of your life.”
“So I have,” Hauser answered regretfully. “But then I expected to be gone in a few days. Find Ridger, demand the cup be returned, and home again. It seemed quite simple, when I borrowed my cousin’s papers.”
Rutledge turned back to the door. “Is there anything—anything at all you can tell me about these dead men?”
Hauser rubbed his jaw with the tips of his fingers, feeling the beard there. “I’ve thought of little else shut away in here. Elizabeth was right, you know. I should have taken the train to London and the next boat to Holland.”
“It would help if you’d seen something suspicious out there wandering around in the dark.”
“I couldn’t even identify the man who stabbed me! But think about this. If you offer a man a drink that is drugged, a drink he’s not accustomed to—this wine of yours—how would you go about it?”
“I’d have a drink first myself. To show the bottle was safe.”
“That’s because you’re aware that it’s drugged. No. You would offer him the wine to keep out the cold. You may have driven these roads, but you haven’t walked them long after dark, as I did. At first the exercise warms you, and then you begin to feel tired. Your shoulders ache, and then your face grows cold, and your hands. The feet last. You’d be glad of a drink by and by. I cursed myself for not bringing a flask with me.”
It was an interesting approach.
“All right. Anything else?”
Hauser yawned. “You’re the policeman. You’ll think of something.”
RUTLEDGE SLEPT HARD. When he awoke to a cold and raw Thursday morning, he lay in his bed, trying to bring his mind to bear on the day’s work ahead.
As he shaved he sorted through all the possible motives that he had uncovered—Hauser’s revenge for Ridger’s actions; guilt; compassion; and a pure and callous evil. Not the work of a madman, nor of a passionate man, but of a wary one.
What drove ordinary people to the point of murder?
He considered the three women who had been married to the victims.
Had there been some collusion among them? To rid themselves of a husband who had become a stranger and a burden they hadn’t bargained for in the glamorous, exciting days of sending a soldier off to fight the Hun?
If so, they had concealed it very well.
And yet Mrs. Taylor had called her husband a stranger. Mrs. Webber had confessed to Rutledge that her husband had been unfaithful in France. Mrs. Bartlett spoke of being afraid to be alone, but perhaps she preferred it in some objective and well-disguised corner of her mind.
How easy would it be to kill your own husband? Or had they drawn lots, each taking on the responsibility for a man not their own?
Was that why the deaths had occurred on a dark road at night? Was the wine a gamble that had sucked the victim into conspiring at his own death?
“Ye’re avoiding yon Crawford woman—”
“I’m doing what I have been sent here to do—”
“Oh, aye—”
“Then I’ll talk to Mrs. Crawford. I won’t destroy a friendship on a whim.”
AS IT HAPPENED, Rutledge