Authors: Rennie Airth
Crossing the great forecourt in front of the house, Madden was hailed by a uniformed figure who had just climbed out of a khaki-coloured staff car.
‘Hello, John! What brings you to my lair?’
Although he was the commanding officer at Stratton Hall, with the rank of colonel, Brian Chadwick retained many of the attitudes of the country GP he’d once been, and on arriving at Highfield two years earlier had quickly formed a friendship with Helen which had later been extended to her husband.
‘Come to see his nibs, have you?’
He joined Madden and they walked on together across the cobbles.
‘By the way, have they caught the man yet?’
‘Which man, Brian?’
‘The one who killed that girl who was working for you?’
‘Not yet.’
Madden glanced at his companion. The expression on Chadwick’s face suggested there might be a reason for his question beyond simple curiosity.
‘I ask because one of my young chaps is concerned. Well, not concerned, exactly. Upset, rather.’ The colonel struggled with his vocabulary. He read a report on the inquest in
The Times
, just a paragraph or two. It was the first he’d heard of it and he got on to me at once.’
‘Got on to you? Isn’t he here?’
‘No, in Oxford.’ Chadwick frowned. On the short side, and thickset, he was constantly bemoaning the size of his waistline. Helen had told him, in all seriousness, doctor to doctor, that he should put himself on a diet and have his blood pressure checked regularly unless he wanted his chronic shortness of breath to develop into something more sinister. We sent him to a hospital there that specializes in plastic surgery. He had facial burns. Perhaps you’ve seen him around. A young pilot officer. Tyson’s his name.’
Madden shook his head.
‘He was shot down over the Channel and picked up. But his plane caught fire before he could bale out, hence the burns. He had other wounds, too, but they’ve healed and he was recuperating here before having his face seen to.’
Chadwick paused for a much-needed breather.
‘But why was he so concerned?’ Madden asked, his curiosity piqued. ‘Did he know her?’
‘Oh, no. Nothing like that.’ Chadwick dismissed the possibility with a wave of his hand. But he’d heard her play at the concert we had here – he’s musical – and he actually spoke to her the day she went up to London. He was on his way to Oxford himself. They were in the same compartment. But you can ask him about it yourself, if you like. He’ll be here in a few days.’
‘He’s coming back, is he?’ Madden asked.
Chadwick nodded. ‘He’s already had the operation. But he’ll need to convalesce for a while. Then it’ll be hey-ho and off to the wars again. Unless, by some miracle, the whole ghastly business is over by then.’
They parted, Chadwick going to his office in what had once been the butler’s pantry, Madden heading for the wing where Lord Stratton had his apartments. His way took him through the great entrance hall. Hung with armorial shields when he’d first known it a quarter of a century before, the panelled walls now sported felt-backed boards thick with typed notices, while the maids and footmen of an earlier era had been replaced by white-veiled nurses. Passing through the dimly lit hall, he recalled the concert that had taken place there recently, remembering, with a stab of pain, the slight, dark-haired figure of Rosa Nowak as she bent over the piano keys, her expression rapt, the sorrow that dwelt in her eyes banished; for a few minutes at least.
The anger he had felt on hearing of the girl’s death had not abated. But mixed with it was another emotion more difficult to isolate, a sense of failure unrelated to her violent end – there was no way he could have foreseen the danger into which she was heading – but having to do with the time she had spent in his care when he had seen her distress and been powerless to ease it. The link his subconscious had made with the death of his baby daughter long ago – so disturbingly vivid in his dream – had not occurred to him until Helen had suggested it, but he understood now why the old pain had returned to haunt him. He’d been unable to help either. His daughter had expired beneath his gaze, her faint breaths failing, while Rosa had died unhealed, grief claiming her for its own.
The sky was already paling when he left the hall an hour later and set out for home. His route took him through the village, and as he walked down the main street, past the pub, he heard his name called out and looked round to see a familiar figure in police uniform emerging from the side door of the Rose and Crown. Highfield’s bobby for the past thirty years, and something of a law unto himself, Will Stackpole felt no shame at being caught slipping out of the pub at half-past four in the afternoon.
‘How are you, sir?’ He waved to Madden.
‘Will … !’ Checking his stride, Madden waited for the other man to catch him up. ‘Helen tells me you’ve heard from Ted.’
‘That’s right, sir.’ The constable crossed the road to join him and they walked on together. Almost as tall as Madden, he’d been putting on weight in recent years and now cut an imposing figure in his cape and conical helmet. ‘First letter in two months. We were starting to get worried, Ada and I.’ He was speaking of his oldest son. Captured during the fighting in North Africa, Ted Stackpole had been a prisoner-of-war in Germany for the past two years. ‘They know we’re winning the war, but they don’t know how long it’s going to take. Mind you, I couldn’t tell him that myself.’ Stackpole snorted. ‘You listen to the news and you think everything’s going well. We took Paris without much trouble, after all. But now our boys seem stuck. And those flying bombs keep coming over, don’t they? It makes you wonder what’s really happening.’
He stole a glance at Madden.
‘Ted asked about Rob, same as he always does. Have you had any word, sir?’
‘Not for a while, Will. But you know what it’s like. Once they put to sea we don’t hear anything.’
Acknowledging the constable’s concern, Madden gripped his arm. Their long friendship, which dated from the murder investigation that had first brought him to the village, had been inherited by their sons. The two boys, with only a year’s difference in age between them, and both taken with the natural world, had been inseparable in childhood. Together they had spent a string of summers exploring the woods and fields around Highfield, days which in Madden’s memory now seemed bathed in perpetual sunlight.
‘We’re just praying he’ll be home for Christmas.’
‘Ah – now that would be something.’
Stackpole laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. After a moment he spoke again.
‘Any word from the Yard, sir?’
‘Nothing of note, Will. Mr Sinclair rang me this morning. They’re working hard on the case, but they haven’t made any real progress yet.’
His words brought a grunt from the constable.
‘I’ve asked around like you suggested. But there’s nothing to get a hold of here. It seems Rosa didn’t have any close friends; she kept to herself. But everyone liked the lass, those that met her, and they keep asking me about her, wanting to know what’s been done.’
The main street with its shops was behind them now and presently they passed by the church, and the moss-walled cemetery beside it. Ahead was a row of cottages, one of which belonged to the constable and his wife, and when they got there they found Ada Stackpole in the front garden with the elder of their two daughters, both in smocks, and with their hair wrapped in scarves, busy digging up carrots from a flower-bed that before the war had held a display of roses that were Will Stackpole’s pride and joy. Pink from her exertions, Ada paused, leaning on her spade, to greet Madden and to inform him that he’d just missed Helen.
‘She’d been over to Craydon to see old George Parker. Dropped a brick on his toe, he did, and broke it. His toe, that is. Silly old coot.’ She chuckled. ‘She came in for a cup of tea. Can I get you one?’
‘No thanks, Ada, I have to get back.’ Turning to the constable, he added, ‘I’m expecting another call from Mr Sinclair. Do you remember me telling you about that streetwalker the police interviewed?’
‘The French woman?’
Madden nodded. ‘Bow Street are showing her some photographs from records. I’ll let you know if anything comes of it.’
Leaving the last of the cottages behind him, Madden walked on in the gathering dusk, and when he reached the high brick wall of Melling Lodge left the road and made his way through darkening fields to a footpath that ran alongside the stream at the foot of the valley and which, by a slightly longer route, would lead him home.
‘It was a way he loved to take, and treasured memories lay around him as he followed the winding path. The stream and its banks had been a favoured playground of his children, the wooded slopes above the scene of countless rambles with them. Not far from where he was now he had once sat unmoving with his young son by a badger sett for more than an hour before dawn so that they could catch a glimpse by torchlight of the dam with her cubs. Even closer, only a short way down the stream, was a patch of meadow grass hard by the bank and hidden by bushes which held a sweeter memory yet, one of which he never spoke but which still had the power to bring a warmth to his cheeks when he recalled it.
The afternoon light had all but faded as he unlatched the wooden gate at the bottom of the garden and walked up the long, sloping lawn to the house. The phone was ringing as he went in and he heard Helen answer it in the study. Thinking it might be Sinclair calling for him he went there and met her as she was coming out of the room into the passage.
‘John, darling. I didn’t know you were back.’
They kissed.
‘That wasn’t Angus, was it?’ Madden asked. She shook her head.
‘It was Gladys Porter. She says her Harold’s come over all queer. Considering how much time he spends in the Rose and Crown I’m not surprised, but I’d better go over there and have a look at him.’
He accompanied her to the hall where her coat hung.
‘Every time the phone rings now I think it might be Rob to say they’re back in port. Safe.’
He helped her into her coat then turned her gently about and put his arms around her.
‘It won’t be long now.’ He sought to reassure himself as much as her. ‘Any day.’
‘That’s what I tell myself,’ Helen said. ‘Any day. But the awful thing is the closer we come to the end of the war, the worse it gets. If anything were to happen to him now …’
Madden tightened his hold, drawing her closer to him.
‘I get so angry. It’s so easy to hate. Then I think of Franz and try not to feel what I feel.’
The man she was speaking of, an Austrian psychiatrist named Franz Weiss, had been a lifelong friend of hers. Having fled to England from Nazi Germany, he had been planning to join his son and daughter in New York when he’d suffered a stroke that had prevented him from travelling. Soon afterwards war had broken out and Helen had brought the frail old man down to Highfield to spend what turned out to be the last months of his life with them. Though the full extent of the tragedy unfolding in Europe would not be known for another two years, there were already inklings of it, and Weiss had confided to his hosts that he did not expect to see or hear again from those he had left behind, including two brothers and a sister. During the final weeks of his life when he had been confined to bed he had spent many hours playing music on a gramophone he had brought with him from London. Bach cantatas for the most part, they had been the works of German composers exclusively, and it was Helen who had divined that it was their old friend’s last wish to clear his mind of all bitterness and remember only what was dear to him.
‘Sometimes, too, I wonder what he might have said to Rosa if he’d still been with us. How he might have drawn her away from thoughts of death and back to life. And then I think … but to what purpose?’
They stood locked in one another’s arms for a moment longer. Then she kissed him again.
‘I must be off. Perhaps you’ll have heard from Angus by the time I get back. I hope so.’
‘Strangled, you say … ?’
Madden stood stunned. He had heard the phone ringing from the drawing-room where he’d been laying the fire and had come to the study to answer it. As he picked up the receiver he had switched on a green-shaded lamp on the desk beside it, and now he found himself staring at his own reflection in the window, hardly able to comprehend what the chief inspector had just told him.
‘That’s correct. But not manually. The killer used a garrotte.’ Sinclair spoke in a weary tone. ‘I’m sorry, John. This is wretched news to be giving you …’
‘When did it happen?’
‘Some time overnight, it seems. She was due at Bow Street station this afternoon and when she didn’t turn up they sent an officer to her flat in Soho. There was no reply when he rang her bell, but someone let him in the house and he found her body on the floor inside her flat. That was less than an hour ago.’
The reflected image of himself Madden was staring at faded: in its place he saw Florrie Desmoulins’s lacquered red hair, her wide painted smile.
‘She told him she wouldn’t forget his face.’
‘I’m sorry?
‘When he went off. She yelled after him and he looked back. It’s in her statement.’
‘Yes … I see what you mean. But we can’t jump to conclusions. She was a prostitute, after all. It’s a hazardous profession.’
The chief inspector was silent. But the sound of a heavy sigh came faintly to Madden’s ears.
‘I’m waiting to hear more. Styles is at the murder scene now. Perhaps he’ll learn something. I’ll speak to you again later.’
8
‘E
ITHER PIANO WIRE
or a cheese-cutter. That’s what Ransom reckons. He cut right through the skin and into the flesh. Bloody nearly took her head off, Ransom says. He put her on the slab right away.’
Lofty Cook screwed his features into a grimace. He had just returned from the mortuary at St Mary’s where he’d accompanied the pathologist, leaving Billy behind at Florrie Desmoulins’s flat with Joe Grace and a forensic team.
‘And there were no other injuries?’ Billy asked. Alerted by a call from Sinclair, he’d left his desk at the Yard and hurried up to Soho.