A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [60]
Hamish reminded him, “Mrs. Shaw is a verra’ persuasive woman.”
That was true. The fact that she was unattractive in every sense, and that he had disliked her from the start, had perhaps shaped his view of her and of events. Then and now. But she had aroused such guilt in him—such a fierce doubt of his own abilities—that he was unable to see his earlier actions as clearly as he had done when Philip Nettle’s death had first thrust the affair into his hands.
Rutledge turned away from the window and fumbled for the lamp on the desk, watching the flame bloom and brighten his room. The brass bed gleamed, and the white china of the washstand pitchers reflected a golden light.
With Bowles baying for results, there had been unnatural pressure on the investigating officers. Results, results, results. They had worked nearly around the clock, interviewing, cataloging statements, going back again to ask other questions, trying to sort through the simple lives and the tangled activities of everyone who had had contact with the elderly victims for the previous two years. The dustman, the man who brought the coal, the grocer’s boy who delivered boxes of goods, the butcher’s boy, the woman who came to clean and to cook one meal a day, the man bringing the post, the visitors from charities and churches, nurses who came to see to bedsores or bathe their patients. The chimney sweep—It had been an endless task, sorting through the sheets of closely written notes collected from all the officers assigned to the murders.
And yet Shaw had slowly emerged, slowly been identified, his life probed, his activities examined, until the timing had damned him.
He had maintained that when he left, each of the women was still alive.
But coincidence could be stretched only so far. And Shaw’s way of life had been changed by the small pieces of jewelry and silver frames and bits of flatware that had been sold to men whose own livelihood lay in convenient memory loss and a rapid dispersal of questionable goods to other dealers.
Not one of them had described Ben Shaw. The man was forty. Young. Graying. Balding. A woman, they thought. Working-class. No better than she should be. Shabbily dressed and poor, but with a posh accent. Hard to trace, these remnants of a dead victim’s life, without help. But one or two had come to light in the windows of small shops, noticed by eagle-eyed young constables eager to make their mark. . . .
One of those constables had been Janet Cutter’s son by her first marriage. George Peterson. The suicide . . .
Rutledge paced the floor, his mind absorbed in the past.
Hamish scolded, “Ye canna’ solve the problem, gnawing at it like an auld dog wi’ a shinbone! There’s work to be done here. You canna’ ignore it!”
Rutledge recalled Mrs. Taylor’s weary face, and the uncertain future of young Peter Webber.
Hamish was right. This was not the first time he’d had to juggle cases, when there was heavy pressure for answers. There had been times before the war when he hardly slept at all. And one of those times was the Shaw case.
Where had that mourning locket spent the last six years?
He looked at his watch, decided Dowling might still be at his desk. Leaving the room, he ran lightly down the staircase in the main lobby, and strode out the door, turning toward the police station. The evening was beginning to clear, a sharp wind brushing out the rain. Brushing out the cobwebs as well? Hamish wanted to know.
Inspector Dowling was just turning to walk home. Rutledge called his name and the man stopped, looking around.
“I’m late for my tea,” he said, “and I’m tired.”
“Come to the hotel and have dinner with me. I need to talk to you, and this is as good a time as any.”
Torn between his obligations at home and the chance of a fair meal, Dowling stood there in the street, his face a picture of his struggle. “Yes, all right, then. I’ll meet you at The Plough. I ought to tell my wife I’ll be late.”
He walked on,