A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [54]
Burke instructed Rutledge to stop the motorcar just ahead of the boy.
“You’re wet through, lad,” he called. “Mr. Rutledge here will give you a lift home,” Burke said, getting out to open the rear passenger door. “Come along, then, and mind you don’t set your muddy feet on the seat!”
With alacrity the boy did as he was told. It wasn’t often he was offered an opportunity to ride in a motorcar. He settled quickly in the seat, but leaned forward (as Hamish seemed to do from time to time), his eyes fixed on the instrument panel.
“Could you blow the horn, then?” he asked, bubbling with excitement.
“Could you blow the horn, please, sir?” Burke chided him.
“Please, sir?” Peter repeated shyly, and laughed with glee as Rutledge squeezed the rubber bulb.
Rutledge thought, Ben Shaw’s son was this age when his father was hanged. . . .
There was something about the boy, the fineness of his hands and skin, that spoke of better breeding than a laborer’s child. In that lay the similarity—
Burke said, “Your mum getting on all right, is she? Enough food on the table?” He quietly gestured to Rutledge to stop the car at the next house.
Peter answered, “We’re faring well enough.” But he had the thinness of a growing child who was always hungry.
“Mr. Rutledge here is interested to know more about your pa, hoping to help us find the devil that did it. Did anyone come looking for him, do you think, before he died?”
The boy squirmed a little in his seat. “I don’t remember!”
“Yes, you do, Peter. It won’t go any further, I promise you. But it might do some good. Tell us, then.”
After a short silence the boy said, “I never saw him before.”
“There’s a start,” Burke said, encouraging. “Not from Marling, then, do you suppose?”
“No. At least, no one I’d know by sight.”
“What else can you remember?”
“Not very much.” As if the lengthening silence urged him to say more, Peter added, “He wasn’t as heavy as you are. But tall, like the vicar.” After a moment, consideringly, “He wore a greatcoat. Like a soldier. But he wasn’t a soldier.”
“I’d say the vicar is five foot eleven,” Burke said in an aside to Rutledge. And to Peter, “What was his coloring, then?”
Peter shrugged, fingering the back of Rutledge’s seat, his hands busy and his eyes on them. “He was fair. He took off his hat as he stood talking to me, smoothing back his hair. That was after I’d told him Pa wasn’t at home.”
“What did he want with your father? Did he say?”
“No.” And then, “He just asked where he’d fought in the war, and with what regiment. As if he was looking for someone, and Pa might have known the man.”
“I see. And his age, Peter, what would you say that was?”
“He was Pa’s age. Thereabouts. Could you please blow the horn again, sir? My little sister’s looking out the window!”
Rutledge obliged. Peter laughed again, but it wasn’t as carefree as the first time. He made a movement to leave the car, but Burke sat where he was.
“Anything that set this man’s face apart, that you remember? A large nose? A cleft in the chin? Eyes too close together?”
Peter shook his head and turned to see if his sister was still watching. The house was a small cottage on the edge of Marling, with a rough garden in the front and a roof that needed rethatching. Chickens and geese scratched in the muddy earth in a large pen behind the cottage. Peter began fumbling with the door, unsure how to let himself out.
Burke said, “All right, Peter, answer my question, and you can go in to your tea.”
“There’s nothing about his face,” Peter protested. “I don’t remember his face. Just his voice.”
“What about his voice?”
“He sounded strange. As if he come from Liverpool, or maybe Cornwall. Different.” He was fidgeting with anxiety, eager to be gone.
“Not like a Londoner, then?”
The boy shook his head. “I know what Londoners sound like! They come for the hop picking.”
“So they do.” Burke got out in the rain and let the boy down. “Well done, Peter. You needn’t talk about it to anyone