A Fearsome Doubt by Charles Todd Page A

and over the years, you hear things.” She dropped her voice a level and said in a brusque tone, “ ‘I fear Mrs. Shaw isn’t herself this week. She complained fiercely about my cabbages. I ask you, have you ever had reason to doubt my cabbages?’ It’s a way tradesmen have, to play one customer against another, and if I say, ‘Your cabbages have always been quite lovely,’ then the rest of his route hears that Mrs. Bailey at the rectory is particularly fond of his cabbages.”
    “What did Ben Shaw think about Mrs. Cutter?”
    “Ah, interesting you should ask that,” she murmured, giving the bread dough a good thumping. “I think —think, mind you, there’s no proof—that when he was younger and drinking more heavily, Henry Cutter was not above striking his wife when in his cups. Ben Shaw was not used to the world he married into and came to live in. He was sentimental, and rather nice. He would have been the knight in shining armor, if Janet Cutter had cried on his shoulder. Ready to take on her battles, but not to move into her bed, if you follow me.”
    “And yet he was accused of smothering three elderly women,” Rutledge gently reminded her.
    “As a policeman,” she reminded him in turn, “you are not easily fooled. Well, after nearly fifty years dealing with a church, one comes to understand politics, human nature, and human frailty in unexpected ways. The infirm are not always pleasant and clean and defenseless. They can be ill-tempered, nasty, and terribly cruel. Their rooms often smell of urine-soaked bedding, dirty bodies, and bits of stale food. They have bedsores and bad breath and suspicious natures. Their caretakers often abuse them, because they’re helpless, and because patience wears thin. The knight in shining armor come to nail up shingles and repair windows doesn’t last long, even if the first time he’d arrived in full array. This doesn’t excuse Ben Shaw, you understand—but it is important to realize how easily such a thing might have happened.”
    Rutledge had not walked into the scenes of the crimes—Philip Nettle had done that. The women had long since been removed to the morgue, thin and small under their sheets, defenseless and pathetic. “You’re telling me,” he said slowly, “that anyone might have killed them. A man. A woman. Not a monster.”
    “What I found most unusual about the crimes was that anyone had killed the three women at all. Why not just randomly take what you like? A silver spoon here, a man’s pocket watch there.”
    “They would have missed something—”
    “Yes, but who can say when they missed that spoon just how long it had been gone? We’ve had cases where men come to the door with apparently respectable intent—selling mousetraps or books of household hints. And then finding no one at home, they break in and take what they like. Easier to do when the inhabitants are elderly, ill women asleep in their beds.”
    He’d looked into that himself. Chance burglaries, an easy way to add a few pounds to a door-to-door seller’s pocket. There had been no reports of any such burglaries in this part of London for a year before the murders. . . .
    Hamish, intent and interested, said, “But if they complained, the auld women, and the thief had taken fright—”
    Rutledge finished the thought in his head aloud. “If Mrs. Cutter had found herself on the verge of being caught and hanged, would Ben Shaw have volunteered to go back and speak to the old women—and when they refused to be silent, silenced them forever?”
    Mrs. Bailey set her loaf in the waiting pan. “It’s a shocking suggestion, Inspector. Not one that I care to contemplate, to tell you the truth. Is there anything else you wish to know?”
    Still—it made sense. It would explain how a man like Shaw had gotten himself involved with murder. . . .
    Mrs. Bailey had been more helpful than she knew.
    But Rutledge realized as he drove across the Thames back to the Yard that he might