A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [34]
“What I found most unusual about the crimes was that anyone had killed the three women at all. Why not just randomly take what you like? A silver spoon here, a man’s pocket watch there.”
“They would have missed something—”
“Yes, but who can say when they missed that spoon just how long it had been gone? We’ve had cases where men come to the door with apparently respectable intent—selling mousetraps or books of household hints. And then finding no one at home, they break in and take what they like. Easier to do when the inhabitants are elderly, ill women asleep in their beds.”
He’d looked into that himself. Chance burglaries, an easy way to add a few pounds to a door-to-door seller’s pocket. There had been no reports of any such burglaries in this part of London for a year before the murders. . . .
Hamish, intent and interested, said, “But if they complained, the auld women, and the thief had taken fright—”
Rutledge finished the thought in his head aloud. “If Mrs. Cutter had found herself on the verge of being caught and hanged, would Ben Shaw have volunteered to go back and speak to the old women—and when they refused to be silent, silenced them forever?”
Mrs. Bailey set her loaf in the waiting pan. “It’s a shocking suggestion, Inspector. Not one that I care to contemplate, to tell you the truth. Is there anything else you wish to know?”
Still—it made sense. It would explain how a man like Shaw had gotten himself involved with murder. . . .
Mrs. Bailey had been more helpful than she knew.
But Rutledge realized as he drove across the Thames back to the Yard that he might also have underestimated the rector’s wife. . . .
In a parish where there were no garden tea parties or Sunday luncheons with the gentry, the rector and his wife had learned how people lived with the small degradations of little money, poor health, hard work, and not much beauty. The Baileys would have had few illusions about their neighbors and over the years acquired a rather pragmatic view of their flock. They had ministered in the truest sense, without judgment.
At what cost to themselves? he wondered.
11
THERE WAS A MESSAGE WAITING FOR RUTLEDGE WHEN HE arrived at the Yard.
Chief Superintendent Bowles wanted to see him.
Braced for an angry confrontation, Rutledge went along to Bowles’s office.
Anything but angry, Bowles greeted him with his usual cold stare and brief command to sit down, sit down.
There were papers all over his desk, and he hunched over them with frowning intensity before saying to Rutledge, “You’ve been in Kent, have you?”
“Yes. To visit friends.”
“Hmmm. What’s your opinion of these murders?”
“I have none. I don’t know anything beyond the fact that there have been more than one.”
“Looks bad, damned bad. The Chief Constable is not happy, and his people haven’t found anything to be going on with. Incapable lot, apparently.” Bowles had never held a high opinion of police work outside London. “No, that’s not kind. Mainly it’s out of their line of experience. You served in the war. You’ll have a better sense of what’s happening. I’m sending you down to have a look. Be quick about it, if you can. The Chief Constable has friends in high places. Needn’t say more on that score.”
He passed a sheaf of papers across to Rutledge, who began to scan them as he suggested, “I should think Devereaux would be the best man—”
But Bowles paid no heed. “. . . Some bloody foreigner to blame, most likely . . .”
Unexpectedly Rutledge was reminded of the face at the bonfire—in the headlamps of his motorcar. As if in warning.
Rutledge looked up into the yellow eyes of his superior. They were staring at him. Speculative. Watchful.
Deliberately taking a different tack to test the waters, Rutledge replied, “The hop-picking season is over. The extra workers have gone back to London or Maidenhead, wherever they came from. I could deal with that