A Fearsome Doubt - Charles Todd [80]
Rutledge, still seething with anger, smiled and said, “I am a policeman, you know. It must be the first opportunity he has had to break bread with one. And it marks a dramatic change in his circumstances.”
“All the same—” Brereton began, and then went on, “I would have believed Raleigh Masters was guilty of murder before I would have believed what has become of him.”
He stumbled, catching his foot on the edge of the carpet in the hall, and swore. The loss of his eyesight, Rutledge realized, must be worse than Brereton admitted, even to himself.
They drank their tea dutifully, and kept the conversation bright and reasonably unforced. When a proper length of time had passed to do so gracefully, the guests took their leave and left.
Rutledge’s last glimpse of Bella Masters’s face as she closed the door herself on her departing guests caught the mask of civility slipping and a black despair behind it.
ELIZABETH SAID, AS they reached the road to Marling, “I was never so appalled in my life! Raleigh has been unbearable—but never insulting.”
“Don’t think about it,” Rutledge told her. “He will have to make amends to his wife, now. She’ll be hard pressed to find any dinner guest willing to put up with his temper.”
“I don’t think it’s temper,” Elizabeth responded, considering it. “It’s something else. I don’t know . . . death creeping up.”
“Enough to make any man despair,” Rutledge agreed.
But Hamish was saying from the rear seat, “I willna’ believe it. It’s no’ death. Nor the wasting. Something else.”
Rutledge tended to agree with him, and returned to the possibility that Chief Superintendent Bowles knew Masters—it wasn’t unlikely—and had dropped a hint of some sort. But that didn’t make sense, either.
Elizabeth was finishing a remark that he’d missed, ending with “—I shall have to invite Bella to tea. Without Raleigh. To let her know I’m not blaming her for her husband’s behavior. She’s never quite known how to cope with his moods, you know, but she adores him. There isn’t anything she wouldn’t do for him.”
He was reminded of what Margaret Shaw had said about marriage—that it seldom works out the way it ought to. “What is the medicine he takes in that glass? Laudanum?”
“I suspect it is. For pain initially, of course, but it helps with his—moods.”
Or created them?
Elizabeth sighed. “Why do so many people hurt each other?”
He had no answer to that question. And in the silence that followed he remembered the conversation about the house in Marling that had been sold to a wealthy merchant. “Tell me about the man you saw. At the train station in Helford.”
“There’s really nothing more to tell. He was exceedingly well dressed; you could almost smell expensive tailors. But his voice was overloud, and it grated. New money. That was my first thought.”
“Describe him physically.”
“I’m not sure I can. It was a nasty evening, and he was wearing a heavy coat and a hat. My guess is that he was fair.” She looked across at him. “Tallish, I’d say, but not as tall as you. A bit on the heavy side, perhaps, but with the coat it was difficult to tell. He came rushing into the waiting room, spoke to the stationmaster, and then went out again. I’d been standing inside, out of the weather, but Richard’s motorcar was waiting by the gate. He must have seen it! And so I turned away, for fear he might ask if I was driving in the direction of Marling.” She smiled ruefully. “He seemed to be the sort who might be—encroaching.”
It was inbred in an Englishman’s nature, this dread that someone casually met might brashly overstep the unwritten rules of acceptable behavior. It was, perhaps, at the root of Raleigh Masters’s abhorrence of a policeman in his house. . . .
A visit to the stationmaster then, tomorrow morning, to follow up on this man Elizabeth Mayhew had seen.
They had reached Elizabeth’s house and she was thanking him for driving her. He saw her to her door, and then turned to go.
She called, “Ian.”
He turned again. “Yes?”
But whatever it was she