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narrow the field. You could ask wine merchants in the larger towns who
purchased it. No, what intrigues me is the merciful death.
 It s a chilling idea, Rutledge agreed. He wondered where
a fearsome doubt 245
Brereton was taking his discussion. At first it had seemed no more than
an intellectual exercise. Now. . .
 Is it? Chilling, I mean. We re looking at it from our own viewpoint,
aren t we? The murderer may see it entirely differently.
 Raleigh Masters has lost part of a limb. He s very likely to lose the
rest of his leg. He d have a better understanding than most of what
Taylor, Webber, and Bartlett were suffering.
Brereton laughed.  Raleigh doesn t have compassion to spare for
his own wife. I doubt he d give much thought to ex-soldiers struggling
to scratch a living.
 There s your blindness . . .
 Yes, well, it won t ease my suffering to kill blind men. However
much I may sympathize. I ll tell you what started me down this road,
though. Mrs. Crawford once remarked that as a child during the
Lucknow siege, she learned what deprivation was. For a very long time
afterward she felt terribly guilty about wasting even a scrap of food or
a drop of water. If she couldn t eat a crust of bread, she d feed it to the
birds the ants even the monkeys that sometimes came into her
mother s garden. Later, she was sure this obsession must have driven
her mother to distraction, but the point is, she had to deal with this guilt
in her own fashion. What other kinds of guilt are there, and what other
ways have people found to work through them?
 Mrs. Crawford is not a likely suspect, Rutledge answered.
 No, of course not. But she proves a point, in a way. What if some-
one can t bear to watch these men hobbling down a road, and finally de-
cides to put an end to it?
She had given Peter Webber s father a lift home, in her mo-
torcar. . . .
Brereton said,  For the sake of argument, how do you feel as you
stand over a murder victim? You can t be objective; you have to feel
something. Passion, possibly. Anger? Disgust? Vengefulness?
 A policeman can t afford to feel, Rutledge answered slowly.  He
mustn t let emotion cloud his observations. First impressions are im-
portant.
 All right, bad example. Let s take interviewing suspects, then. You
pry into the deepest, darkest corners of their lives. And what you learn is
246 charles todd
disturbing. But it turns out neither they nor their secrets have any bear-
ing on the case you re working on. How do you walk away from that?
 It isn t always possible, Rutledge conceded, picking up his glass
and drinking from it.
 And if you ve learned something that could be set right, even
though you betrayed a secret, would you do it?
 No. I m not God. I can bring the guilty to justice, or try to. I can t
go around righting wrongs.
Brereton smiled.  But there must be a great many people who don t
have that discipline. It must be tempting after a while, to play God.
 And you think someone is doing that, in Marling?
 I don t know, Brereton answered.  But it s an interesting thought.
Isn t it?
After the claustrophobic atmosphere of the cottage, Rutledge
was glad to drive away. The cold air swept past his face and he felt he
could breathe more easily.
It had been an odd conversation.
Hamish said,  Ye noted the bicycle leaning against yon garden wall.
He had. It provided all the transportation that Brereton needed to
go where and when he pleased.
It was possible that Brereton was confessing, after a fashion. . . .
Was it likely?
Rutledge couldn t find in the man s background anything that
would translate to murder. But London could tell him more about that.
Tired, he turned at the crossroads for Marling.
Halfway there, he stopped by the trees where Will Taylor had
been found and got out again to stand and look at them.
He had been here in the dark. He d been here during the day. And
there was nothing he could learn from this place. Where had these men
died? Where they d been found or somewhere else?
Even if Brereton was right, and these were merciful deaths, there
was no dignity in lying in a ditch to be found by some passerby. . . . Why
a fearsome doubt 247
had the murderer cared about the man but had no qualms about
abandoning the corpse?
This, Rutledge thought, was the major problem with Brereton s
theory.
A motorcar approached from Marling, a last errant ray of sun
catching the windscreen and flashing across the trees in a bright glare.
Uncertain whether the driver had seen him, Rutledge stepped nearer
the verge of the road, waiting for him to pass. Instead, the vehicle
slowed, and stopped; after a moment, a man got out, retrieved his
crutches, and with difficulty walked toward the Londoner.
Rutledge could see that Bella Masters was in the rear seat, a dark
shape whose hat was all that betrayed her gender. She stayed where she
was, behind the chauffeur.
As Raleigh approached him, Rutledge waited to see how the man
would open the conversation.
Instead, Masters paused to look at the stone columns and the flat-
tened grass of the drive.
 Someone s been here, he said.  The New Zealander, I expect.
Someone s taken over a whole floor at The Plough. With that kind of
money he won t think much of the Mortons estate.
 You ve met him? Rutledge asked, curious.  I thought he was from
Leeds.
 Leeds? That could be. The staff was atwitter when we stopped at
the hotel for tea. You d have thought God Himself had arrived. Service
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