A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [47]
Hamish stirred into vicious life. “Ye’re burning in Hell already—and no’ just for Ben Shaw!”
Rutledge said, “Mrs. Shaw, I’m doing what I can within the limits of my power. No, listen to me! I have no authority to open this investigation. Do you understand me? But I have asked questions—”
“You’ve spoken to Henry Cutter?” It was accusing.
“Not yet—”
“Let him tell you that his wife had a stroke after Ben was hanged, and never got out of her bed again! Let him tell you that her own son by her first husband was the constable on one of them streets where the victims lived! And let him tell you that George Peterson left the police force months after the trial and two years later was found drowned in the sea off Lyme Regis, where he’d gone to drink himself blind!”
There had been nothing in Philip Nettle’s early reports of the Shaw investigation that had linked George Peterson with the Cutters. Nor had much official notice been taken of Peterson’s subsequent death. It had been Peterson’s duty to alert the Yard of any connection and he hadn’t informed anyone. Why?
Rutledge said, “Are you telling me that this man Peterson could have robbed and suffocated those women, not your husband?”
He tried to bring back to mind the young constable whose patch it had been. Tall, lanky, quiet. There had been some question around the Yard about his suitability to deal with the stark reality of murder . . . but no question about his family background had arisen. And wouldn’t have, if he’d used his father’s name.
Hamish said, “There was a lapse—”
Yes. Philip Nettle, ill and soon to die, had been as careful a man as any on the force, covering every possible aspect of any case. But somehow the constable had never come under suspicion. Never questioned, or it would have appeared in the files. He was the Law, and not investigated, one of the hunters, not the hunted.
Dear God—how many other oversights had there been?
Mrs. Shaw was saying, “I only know the one thing, that my husband wasn’t guilty, and we had no way of making anybody listen.”
“You yourself believed in his guilt. I saw you turn away at the sentencing.”
Mrs. Shaw sucked in a quick breath, as if the charge had been a physical blow, then said harshly. “You made a believer out of me. Then. I was tired and shocked and I had two children to care for all alone, and I didn’t know what to make of anything Ben said or the barristers said or the judge said. That K.C. with the white hair—he stood there quoting verse and precedents and Latin, like Moses handing down the Ten Commandments. And I couldn’t follow a word of it. All in a voice that would convince a saint that he was a sinner.”
Matthew Sunderland . . . for whom the law was a lofty profession.
“But also a pulpit?” Hamish wondered, derisively.
She looked ill, the strain of her obsession beginning to tell, and the long, tiring journey to Kent. “Don’t you think Constable Peterson would have protected his mother if she was the guilty party?”
“Mama?” Margaret said, leaning toward her mother almost protectively. “You’re not to distress yourself like this! We’ll manage, we always have.”
Nell Shaw ignored her, saying instead to Rutledge, “Look at the girl. She’s got her father’s blood in her, the looks and the height and the graces. She deserves better than to languish in some nasty workroom where she’ll be worn out at thirty and no one to care about her when I’m gone. It isn’t right, and you must open your eyes and see what you’re condemning her to!”
Rutledge said, “Mrs. Shaw—”
“No, I’m putting it bluntly. When you sent an innocent man to the gallows, you cursed his family, too. Where’s the guilt of that, on your shoulders? Tell me, where’s the guilt?”
She got up rather clumsily, her swollen feet heavy in her tightly laced shoes. “I’m going back to London where I belong. But if you’re half the man you ought to be, you’ll not sleep until you do something about my Ben. You’ll find out what