Henry Cutter had described Ben Shaw as a man clever with his hands, always called on by his neighbors when something failed to work. “And I’ve never known him to take a ha’penny for what he done. Never saw him drunk, nor known him to strike his wife. It seems queer that he’d kill helpless old ladies for what he could scavenge in their houses…”

“What he could scavenge” had been over a hundred pounds’ worth of jewelry and small, portable treasures that could, in the right quarter, be sold without questions asked.

But Henry Cutter, in the notes, had called Mrs. Shaw a kind and loving wife, “and Ben would have done anything for her, he cared that much for her.”

Kill and steal to give her the kind of life she goaded him into providing? Rutledge had, at the time, wondered if Mrs. Shaw wasn’t equally guilty for hounding her husband to desperate measures to keep her satisfied. But there was no law in English jurisprudence to cover that crime, even if she had.

Certainly their house had shown an influx of money that their combined income-his as a carpenter and hers as a shopkeeper’s assistant-couldn’t explain. But there were the small jobs that Ben Shaw did, for it seemed that he did charge when his services were sought by those well able to pay. He had never kept an accounting of what he’d earned in that fashion. His wife had probably spent most of it on clothes for the children, better schools, and certainly better food than their neighbors enjoyed.

Someone had told Rutledge-a neighbor two houses away-that she’d heard that Ben Shaw had come from better stock than his wife, who “had pulled him down, if you want the truth. Common, she is,” determined though she was to give her children opportunities to rise above their station. “I’ll say that for Nell Shaw, she never tried to hold either of them back, on her own account!”

Rutledge would have put his money on Mrs. Shaw as the killer, if there had been the slimmest chance of that. He hadn’t liked her, for one thing, and he’d felt some sympathy for her husband after enduring her sharp tongue in the early stages of the investigation. Nell Shaw had been angry, defending her family like an enraged tigress, accusing the police of failing at their own duty and having nothing better to do than badger a poor man into night terrors.