Shaw’s discovery-to lack conviction now. And yet in 1912, they had rung with truth No one had questioned one Henry Cutter, or his wife-except in regard to the comings and goings of Ben Shaw, his reputation in the neighborhood, and whether he was capable of killing anyone. The residents on either side of the Shaw house had had very little to say about their neighbor. They hadn’t seen suspicious goings-on and they hadn’t noticed any changes in Ben Shaw’s manner after the first murder or the last.

Mrs. Cutter-her given name was Janet-had unexpectedly provided one important clue. The two Shaw children had been taken out of the local school and put into better ones, a small private school for the son, and an academy for the daughter. An inheritance, Mrs. Shaw had claimed, from Shaw’s late uncle. Records turned up no such inheritance-the uncle had died in debt twenty years before, leaving his young son no choice but to emigrate. It was not long before Inspector Nettle was digging deeper into Ben Shaw’s sudden financial windfall.

This had been the point on which the evidence had turned. The Shaws had been a struggling family until just after the first body was found. A Mrs. Winslow. Many of her belongings had been unaccounted for, but it was believed at the time of her death that most of these had been sold to enable her to continue to live independently in her own home. It was not until the second murder, of Mrs. Satterthwaite, that the police had begun to draw a wider net and stumbled on the Shaws. It was the third murder that had concentrated attention on Ben Shaw’s activities on the three nights in question.

Especially after Mrs. Cutter had provided the most important reason to concentrate there. But no one had wondered why she was so cooperative…

Could it have been to her advantage?

A shocking thought. That he could have sent an innocent man to the gallows on the basis of a woman’s perverted evidence. Rutledge closed his eyes against the pale light, looking back instead into the darkness of the past.