A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [14]
“People are sometimes verra’ different under the skin. If he was clever enough to kill, he might ha’ been clever enough to have other secrets.”
“The same could be said of Mrs. Shaw—or the Cutters.”
Rutledge passed the house on Sansom Street without stopping. Fog was curling in off the river, wreathing roofs and sliding over chimneys, giving the house and its neighbors a sinister air.
He told himself he hadn’t yet formulated a strategy for his opening move. Like contemplating a chess game before touching the pieces, he thought to himself. It was very like that—he couldn’t afford to choose the wrong move.
Hamish was saying, “In the end, you must speak to Cutter.”
But how to go about that without arousing Bowles’s suspicions? The Chief Superintendent was a vindictive enemy, when aroused.
Rutledge wished Mrs. Shaw had had the sense to write to him instead of coming to the Yard in person. It would have drawn far less attention. But then he might have read the letter and done nothing, putting it down to a woman’s refusal to let go of the past. Her strong presence, tearful and demanding and fiercely certain, had affected him, as she must have guessed it would.
It might yet prove to be nothing more than that. A brooding that had consumed her to the point of believing in her own phantoms.
A widow whose husband had been hanged for murder must not have had an easy life. Nor her children. He had only to look around him to guess what privations they’d suffered.
Still, she’d survived. It showed in her toughness and her determination. He found it hard to blame her for being bitter and angry. And if she was right, if there had been a miscarriage of justice, he was as much to blame as Bowles and Philip Nettle. Perhaps more so, because he had brought the case to trial.
Everything hinged on that locket.
THE AUTUMN WEATHER was at its worst—the clear skies of Guy Fawkes Day had long since given way to a week of heavy clouds and a cold wind. Today, the breath-sucking fog seemed to follow Rutledge out of London, cloaking everything and everyone in a clinging, damp, choking vapor. It ran ahead of him toward the Downs, silent fingers reaching through the hedgerows and shrouding the trees.
He could barely see the verges of the road, and slowed for fear of running into a farm cart or lorry, invisible around the next curve. Hamish, a presence at his shoulder, was restless with the tension of driving.
“It wasna’ necessary to leave sae early! Ye’ll kill us both before this weather lifts!”
Rutledge wasn’t sure he would be sorry to wind up in a ditch, his neck broken. But his sister would mourn. And a handful of friends. And Jean, who had married her diplomat and sailed for Canada, would learn of his death on her wedding journey.
He smiled wryly at that. He had no illusions now about his former fiancée. Jean would read the news and sigh prettily, and say to her new husband, “My dear, I’ve just heard—a very dear friend has been killed on a road south of London. I—I must believe it’s a blessing. He was—he was never the same after the war, you know. I daresay—but no, that’s not fair. I should never wish to believe he’d found a way to end it—”
And the diplomat, not very diplomatically, would reply briskly, “You mustn’t blame yourself, my dear. It’s all in the past now.”
Hamish commented, his voice clear in the dim interior of the motorcar, “Aye, it’s no’ a bonny thing to say. But it might be true, nonetheless.”
Rutledge concentrated his attention on the road.
ELIZABETH MAYHEW GREETED him warmly, clucking her tongue over the weather, and saying, “I was afraid you might not come. That you’d be glad