A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [74]
“Did you know George Peterson?” he asked then.
Margaret was surprised. “Hardly at all. He was grown up when I was a child, and I was rather afraid of him.”
“Because he was older?”
As if digging into her memory, she answered slowly, “He was a policeman, and Mama would threaten to call him to come and take us away if we were naughty.”
It was a common enough threat—in many households, the police had replaced the devil as a deterrent to bad behavior. Rutledge smiled.
Following her own train of thought, Margaret Shaw said, “I don’t know why Mrs. Cutter cared for Papa. He was whimsical. And I think she must have liked that.”
“How did Henry Cutter behave toward your mother?”
“Oh, he was always asking her advice. I think he admired Mama’s strength, and Papa liked Mrs. Cutter’s softness. She reminded him of growing up somewhere else, not Sansom Street. It was almost as if they’d all married the wrong people. I don’t expect to wed,” she added with a candidness that was a measure of her own lost childhood. “There’s too much heartache. It seldom comes out right!”
RUTLEDGE DROVE INSPECTOR Dowling back to Marling. Halfway there the inspector began, “We don’t see many murders in this part of the country. Not like some of the towns, where there’s an uncertain element. Maidstone, for instance. Or Rochester. Dover sees more trouble, being a port where all kinds mix. The last murder in Marling was just before the war, a son who killed his father before the old fool could marry again and change his will. I understand that kind of violence. The son felt he was being cheated out of his inheritance, and the father was bent on having a pretty young wife. She knew a good thing when she saw it, and if there was blame anywhere, it lay at her door. She was greedy, not to put too fine a point on it. She saw the father could give her more than the son. Without her stirring up the pair of them, that farmer would be alive today. But the courts can’t take such behavior into account. If they could, a jury would have hanged her along with the dead man’s son.”
It was, in some ways, the story of the Shaws. A wife wanting what she couldn’t have . . .
Rutledge said, “It’s straightforward, at least. I once had an investigation that hinged on a lamp. Where it had actually been placed before the crime. Through a window the murderer had seen something in the room that triggered an explosive anger, jealous anger. But only because the lamp’s light illuminated it in that position. Once the lamp was moved, we saw nothing out of the ordinary. There was nothing to give her away.”
Dowling glanced at Rutledge. “Where’s our lamp, then?” he asked. “I understand what you’re saying, but I can’t apply it to our situation.”
“The roads,” Rutledge answered. “Each of the dead men had a family at home. Other eyes to see whatever transpired. It put the men out of reach, in a sense. But they were always accessible along the road. The question is, what drew each of these victims into the killer’s net? Circumstance? Opportunity? Or trickery?”
Dowling turned his head to consider the road behind them. They had nearly reached the trees where one of the victims had been discovered. Taylor. The first . . .
“It can’t be theft,” the inspector said, ticking off the possibilities on his fingers. “These three had little worth stealing. No one stole what they did have. And no one stands to gain from their deaths, as far as I can tell. The murders took place on different roads, different nights. That’s a vote for opportunity, not circumstance. They had the war in common, of course.”
“And there’s Jimsy Ridger,” Rutledge said.
“If someone was looking for Jimsy, he wouldn’t have to kill a man to ask where to find him.”
“He might kill a man he thought would warn Ridger.”
“Then I think it’s time we found out where Ridger is, and what he knows about this business.”
18
IN THE EVENT, NEITHER DOWLING NOR RUTLEDGE HAD TO search far for the missing