A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [39]
For the glow on her face was telling. Rutledge had seen it before.
Hamish said, “There’s no accounting for the heart.”
But surely, Rutledge countered, a love like theirs lasted?
“The man is dead,” Hamish reminded him. “There’s wee comfort in memories when the other side of the bed is cold and empty.”
Rutledge’s own fiancée had deserted him. But the woman who had loved Hamish mourned still. His last word as he lay dying had been her name. Fiona was more faithful than Jean, who had preferred to put the war behind her.
The man walked on, passing the Cavalier’s statue without looking back. Elizabeth followed him with her eyes, standing stock-still where he’d left her. Then, lifting the black bowl of her umbrella, she moved on with a spring in her step, as if the rain had vanished.
Rutledge felt an extraordinarily strong sweep of loneliness, as if here in the window of the hotel dining room he was cut off from the quiet voices and soft laughter that filled the room on the other side of him. And cut off, too, from the villagers going about their business in the weather. An observer with no role in the reality of life . . . He lived with the dead, in more ways than one.
Hamish said, “Ye’ll never know better. It’s the price of what ye are.”
12
INSPECTOR DOWLING WAS A THIN MAN WITH A NOSE TOO LARGE for his face. Its weight seemed to pull him forward, stooping his shoulders. But the brown eyes on either side were warm and friendly, like a dog’s.
Shaking hands with Rutledge, he said, “I’m glad you’re here. Sergeant Burke should have sent for me.”
“He was kind enough to suggest it, but I took the opportunity to have my own meal.”
“At the hotel? Good food there, is it?” Dowling said almost wistfully. “My wife, dear heart that she is, has never mastered the culinary arts.”
Rutledge smothered his smile.
Dowling shuffled papers on his desk with a sigh. “Well, then, on to this business of the murders. Each of the victims lived within a twenty-mile radius of Marling. All were ex-soldiers, men with perfectly sound reputations. The last victim was found close by Marling, but the others were discovered along the road coming in from the south. There were no signs of violence—no wounds, no bruises. You’d have thought, looking at them, that they’d stepped off the road for a brief rest.”
“How did they die, if there was no violence?”
“An overdose of laudanum, but in suspicious circumstances. I’m told by the local doctor that amputations often leave behind a residual pain, as if the limb’s still there and hurting from whatever it was that made removing it necessary—in these cases, machine-gun fire or shrapnel, and the infection that followed. Amputees, each of them got about on crutches.” He shook his head. “Myself, I don’t know how I’d deal with that. Thank God, I’ve never had to find out.”
“Suicide, then?” Machine-gun fire and shrapnel tore at a limb, making it nearly impossible to save. Rutledge had seen the aid stations with the bloody remains piled high under a tarpaulin, waiting for disposal.
“It’s not likely, for two very good reasons: Each was the sole support of his family, and his pension ended if he died. I don’t think any man in his right mind would leave his family destitute, if he could still feed them and clothe them. However bad the pain got.”
Hamish quietly agreed.
Rutledge was thinking instead of Raleigh Masters, who resented his lost foot with a bitter passion. And yet he clung to his life as if only to make those around him suffer through the blight of his own.
He wondered if there was a similarity, if these victims had also made life wretched for those around them. That might explain one murder. Not three.
Dowling was saying, “Moreover, I’ve spoken with each of the widows. They absolutely refuse to consider suicide.”
But wives and widows—witness Nell