A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [58]
“What did he mean by that, do you think?”
“I can’t say. I wasn’t interested in Jimsy Ridger. He was in Will’s company, and I never liked him very much.”
“Why?”
“He was something of a scoundrel, Jimsy was. Light-fingered, like. He never stole anything from us, that I know of, but he wasn’t someone I quite trusted. I was afraid he might be hanging about looking for money.”
“Where is Jimsy Ridger now?”
She looked out across the wet fields. “In hell, for all I know. He didn’t come back to Kent after the war. He’d been to Paris, and won money at cards. So it was said. Kent wasn’t for the likes of him, after that. But then who knows, with someone like Jimsy?”
RUTLEDGE TOOK HER to the small cottage she pointed out as hers. It was half-timbered, of a style popular in the late Victorian era. But the plaster between the black beams needed paint and the chimney sagged. She looked up at it.
“Will was going to find someone to repair the chimney. I suppose that’ll be up to me now.”
He came around to open the door for her and she stepped down into the wet grass that met the rutted road in an irregular verge.
“I’ll do my best to find your husband’s killer,” he said.
She had walked up the muddy walk before she turned. “I don’t know that it matters,” she answered him. “Will didn’t much want to live, anyway. Maybe the murderer did him a favor.”
MRS. TAYLOR’S VOICE lingered in Rutledge’s mind as he drove down the roads that led out of Marling and toward the nearest villages, then back again, forming a mental map of the ground where the three murders had occurred. As darkness fell, he could see the lights springing up in the windows of farms and cottages off to either side, none of them close enough to matter.
“They would ha’ been dark again, the occupants in their beds and sleeping soundly,” Hamish said, “when the killing was done. Country folk aren’t likely to keep late hours.”
Yet someone had.
He found himself wondering if Mrs. Bartlett and Mrs. Webber had felt as estranged from their husbands as Mrs. Taylor had done. It was hard to believe that one suicide had sparked two more as desperately tired men gave up trying.
He himself knew the fierce silent urge toward death, when there was no hope left.
But Hamish, always practical, said, “Where did they buy good wine?”
That was always the sticking point. The wine.
He drove in the early dusk toward Marling, his headlamps picking out the overgrown hedgerows and the dark pockets of thick grass between trees that sometimes marched in avenues for a little distance. Vistas that in summer were glorious with a patchwork of green were now brown and dry, and the long sweep of the land had lost much of its charm.
He was not more than a hundred yards from the first cottage marking the outskirts of the town when he saw someone quickly moving into a clump of trees edging a field. Moving as if afraid to be seen.
Pulling hard on the brake, Rutledge brought the car to a halt, and got out, running toward the faintly seen outline of a human form. The trees thinned almost at once as he plunged into them, and brought him out into another field. His feet sank heavily into the wet, plowed soil, where the summer’s crop had been turned under for the winter. Cursing, he tried to pick up his pace, but it was useless. Then the figure ahead of him stumbled and fell and swore harshly.
Rutledge reached him before he could flounder to his feet.
Hardly a murderer, he thought in disgust as the thick miasma of drunken breath hit him in the face before he could put out a hand to help the man to his feet.
“Leave me alone!” the man shouted, struggling to shake off his grip. “What’ve I done to you, to chase me off the road, then!”
He was standing now, a man with dark, sweaty hair and filthy work clothes. Rutledge realized that one shoulder was different from another, saw that the man had a useless left arm. It hung without life, clumsily and straight. Catching Rutledge’s glance, the man