A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [8]
“Mrs. Shaw,” he said, forcing himself to think clearly, “I have only your word that this locket was found among the belongings of Mrs. Cutter. You should have left it there—”
“And risk having him find it? I’m not stupid, Inspector. If he killed those women and not my Ben, what’s to stop him from killing me, if I let on what I’d done? As it was, I had to pretend to a faintness, to get out of that house.”
“We spoke with the Cutters—”
“Yes, and so you did. Did you expect him to say, ‘You’ve got it all wrong, Inspector, it wasn’t Ben, it was me!’?” Her rough mimicry of a man’s voice mocked him.
Rutledge said reasonably, “If you are right, why would Mrs. Cutter have kept this piece of jewelry? She must have realized that it was dangerous, given the fact that her husband may have been a murderer.”
“Because she was sickly, that’s why, and didn’t want to be left alone! Better to sleep with a murderer than to sleep alone, and not have bread on the table when you wake up! It was the only bit he couldn’t sell, wasn’t it? Maybe it was her hold over her husband. And as long as he didn’t know what had become of it, she was safe.”
“It’s not a very sound theory,” he argued.
Mrs. Shaw looked him over, weighing up the clothes he wore as if she knew their value to a penny. “You’ve never known want, have you? Never worried at night where the rent was coming from or how you would pay the butcher, and what you was going to do about worn-out boots. I can tell you what happens to a woman on her own!”
And he could see for himself the suffering in her face.
But how much of what she’d told him about the Cutters was her need to find absolution for her husband?
The truth was, he didn’t want to believe her. The bedrock of his emotional stability, the only thing that had brought him back to sanity after France, was the Yard, and the career he’d built there before the war. By 1914, his reputation had been shaped through solid achievement, unlike his undeserved glory in the war, where he had been driven half mad and shaken to the core by endless slaughter. To lose his career now—
He had never been a hero. But he’d been a damned good detective.
Hamish mocked, “Aye, so ye say. You’re no’ sae perfect, none of us is—”
“You weren’t there; you don’t know anything about this case!” Rutledge retorted in anger. “You weren’t there!”
Mistaking the direction of his sudden flare of anger, Mrs. Shaw prodded defiantly, “If you killed my Ben wrongly, you owe me restitution. My children have gone hungry without him, and I’ve had nothing to give them, no way to offer any life at all. It’s my children I’m defending. It’s too late now for Ben.”
Struggling with his own vulnerability just now when the war seemed to have returned with unexpected and extraordinary force, and against his will already half convinced by the intensity of the widow’s determination, Rutledge made an effort to explain how the Yard would see her demands. He said, “We can’t reopen a case—”
“You can!” she told him, interrupting. “Here’s a wrongful death, and I have the proof. What’s to become of me, and my children? Why should Henry Cutter go scot-free while we suffer for what he did?”
The locket lay between them, tearing his life apart as well as hers.
It couldn’t be true. He’d been careful. So had Philip Nettle.
How could he destroy the past, when that was all he had?
And yet . . . and yet if he had failed Ben Shaw, what then? Why should his past be sacred? Untouchable?
Nell Shaw got to her feet, a middle-aged woman with nothing to be gained by coming to him, except relief from her personal tragedy. An unattractive woman with no graces, who would always provoke dislike and even loathing.
“I’ve a daughter of marrying age. I’ve a son looking to be apprenticed. I’ve done for them the best I could these last years. But there’s no money to see them right. I barely kept food on the table. And no one’s willing to lift a finger for them—not for the offspring of gallows’