A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [69]
Mistaking his silence, Margaret Shaw turned to face Rutledge. “It will break Mama’s heart if you fail her. I don’t know what I’m to do then! Mama has always been that strong! How will my brother and I survive without her?” Her voice ended in a wail that made him flinch.
Rutledge swore to himself. He mustn’t—he couldn’t—afford to find himself entangled in the emotional turmoil of the Shaw family. His objectivity slipped with every encounter. The locket was damning—but where had it come from? That was the crux of his dilemma.
Where had the locket spent the last six years?
It couldn’t have been in the possession of Janet Cutter’s dead son. Unless he’d sent it to her in a final and desperate need to justify his suicide—
“It would be a tidy answer,” Hamish interjected sourly.
The whole case was revolving around Janet Cutter. And she was dead. . . .
Rutledge said, “Your mother means well, Margaret, but she’s living under the delusion that the police and a jury and a judge were wrong in their findings. And that doesn’t happen very often—”
“That’s what Mama said to us—‘It doesn’t happen very often—but they wronged your father, and they wronged me, and they wronged you—’ Mama was there in the courtroom. She could see that a jury believes what the lawyers tell them. What the police tell them. But Papa never said a word in his own defense. Who gave his side?”
The defense had put up the best arguments it could. But the most damning evidence had been Shaw’s refusal to deny his guilt when the police had questioned him.
Hamish said, “If Mrs. Cutter had told him what she told the lass, and he believed her lies—”
“—he would have taken his wife’s place in the dock, for the sake of the children. . . .” Rutledge completed the thought.
Miss Shaw was silent for a long breath. Then she said stoutly, “I never liked Mrs. Cutter. There was a slyness about her. She’d be very kind, offering tea cakes or hair ribbons. And then once I was lulled into accepting, she’d begin to pick and pry. She’d ask about my parents, about my father. I didn’t know how to stop her, or turn the questions. It was like being pinned, the way insects were in a museum display I saw once—”
“What sort of questions?”
“What Papa and Mama talked about together. If they had arguments. What my father had given my mother on her birthday. It was as if she couldn’t bear for them to be happy together.”
ON THE OUTSKIRTS of Seelyham oast houses lined the fields, like misshapen windmills lacking their sails. Miss Shaw asked about them, staring over her shoulder. “I was never much in the countryside,” she said artlessly. “I don’t know anything about flowers or trees. But I like them.”
Rutledge, thinking of the shabby, cheek-by-jowl houses of Sansom Street, replied, “I expect you do. You should consider going into service in the country.” If he’d been on better terms with Elizabeth Mayhew, he could have recommended this girl to her. But she was considering selling up, and there would be no place for Margaret Shaw, when new owners took over.
The pretty face turned to him, brightening. “I could, couldn’t I? If Mama doesn’t find a way to help us. I learn quickly, if I’m taught.”
Hamish said, Covenanter to the bone, “It’s no’ a very fine future, service.”
“For many girls with no other place to go, it provides a home,” Rutledge pointed out.
At that Hamish snapped, “And salves your conscience, aye.”
ON THE OUTSKIRTS of Seelyham was a huddle of half-timbered cottages with thatched roofs that led into a broadening of the road, a few side streets,