The Red Door

Satterthwaite replied, “Cobb said he never touched them. He had no reason to do it, and he couldn’t have taken them home with him. Teller must have put them in the boot. We’ll have to ask Larkin if he could see the boot of the motorcar from where he was.”

“No,” said Rutledge. “If she’d been alive, she would never have allowed that. Not her letters. She’d have fought him every step of the way.”

“Even if she was disillusioned?”

Satterthwaite scowled. “Then it was Cobb. Bound to have been. To hurt her more? Or maybe he wanted to read them. Who knows?”

“You said Cobb was in Thielwald?”

“I told you. I didn’t want him here. He’s safer there. And so am I.”

“I want to see him.”

“I know how much time you’ve given to this inquiry. I know how well you’d put together the case against Teller. I know how I’d said all along that no one here in Hobson would touch her. We were both wrong.”

Rutledge kept his cup, reached for the Thermos, uncapped it, and poured himself more tea. Then he said, “All right. I still must speak to Cobb. I want to judge him for myself. Let’s go.”

“Now? At this hour of the night?” Satterthwaite demanded as Rutledge drained his cup and handed back it to him.

“I have to be back in London as quickly as I can. There’s Teller’s death.”

They drove to Thielwald in an uncomfortable silence. Satterthwaite had said what he knew he must say. And Rutledge could think of no way to prove him wrong.

Hamish, a third in the motorcar, his voice at Rutledge’s ear, was trying to make himself heard, but Rutledge shut him out.

Concentrating on the dark winding road ahead, Rutledge tried to find holes in Satterthwaite’s arguments, weighing Teller against Cobb. He’d liked Cobb. He’d believed the man when he said that he couldn’t have killed Florence Teller. But then Teller himself had denied touching his wife. And that had rung true as well.

The sky was just brightening as the rain clouds scudded away, already thinning enough to offer the promise of sun to take their place.

Satterthwaite broke the silence. “A fair day . . .” And then his voice trailed off as Rutledge brought the motorcar to a halt in front of Thielwald’s police station. “I was thinking,” he went on as they got out. “If Cobb hadn’t walked out on her, I wonder if Betsy would have come to me. Even if she’d found a dozen bloody canes lying about in the barn. I think she’d have kept her mouth shut, and lived with a murderer, if it meant she could keep Cobb. After all, he’d rid her of her rival, whatever the reason behind it. Still, in the end, he’d have been brought under her thumb with the threat of exposure. That’s in her nature, to want to rule the roost. And he might have killed her then, to escape.”

“The only surprise is the fact that she didn’t wait longer than she did, on the off chance that he might come back. Now he’s out of reach for good.”

Rutledge went to the boot and took out the pieces of cane, wrapped in an oiled cloth. Changing his mind, he left them there and led the way to the door.

The sleepy constable on duty picked up the lamp on his desk and showed them to the cell where Cobb was sitting on the edge of his cot, his head in his hands. From the drained, empty look in his eyes as the door swung open and he saw Rutledge standing there, it was evident he’d not slept since he’d been arrested. He got slowly to his feet, and in the light from the constable’s lamp, Cobb’s eyes gleamed like those of a trapped animal.

Rutledge had seen that look before—nearly as often in the innocent as in the guilty. That fear of things getting out of hand, of wanting to fight back when flight was no longer an option, and that blindingly helpless feeling of knowing the odds are set against you because the evidence is overwhelming.

He was prepared for argument, for Cobb appealing to him over Satterthwaite’s head, expecting the man from London wouldn’t know Hobson or its people as well as the constable did.

Instead Cobb said, “Am I to be taken to London, then?” The words came out more harshly than the man intended.

Rutledge said, “That hasn’t been decided.”

“You’ll have to find another home for Jake, you know,” he went on, striving to conceal the anxiety that had kept him awake.

“He seems to prefer women.”

“There was no one else in the house with them year after year. It’s not surprising. I’d have had to win his trust. Or not. But I’d have kept him,” he added wistfully. Then with a spark of his old self, “He didn’t get along all that well with my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law heard him speaking once and swore I was in that house somewhere. Florence told me that.”

A thought struck Rutledge. Peter would have known the difference between Jake’s voice and his brothers’ . . .

“What do you have to say for yourself, Cobb? You swore to me you hadn’t killed her. You told me you wanted to get your hands on the man who did.”

“I never expected Betsy to turn against me,” he said. “Not that I blamed her. But it was a stab in the back, all the same.”

“You walked away from her and your marriage.”