Authors: Rennie Airth
‘What now … ?’ Dorrie began in a petulant tone, but Lily cut her off with a fierce gesture.
‘What was that you said?’ she demanded, fixing her gaze on Molly’s upturned face, peering into her wide, tear-stained eyes.
‘Who
did he say he was looking for?’
Delayed by a breakdown in the Underground – he had sat fuming for half an hour stuck between St James’s Park and Westminster – Sinclair was late for his morning conference with the assistant commissioner. It was nearly ten o’clock by the time he limped down the corridor to Miss Ellis’s office with the crime report, and it was plain from the agitated look on Bennett’s secretary’s face when he opened the door that his absence had not gone unnoticed.
‘Oh, there you are, Chief Inspector.’
Middle-aged and fluttery, Millicent Ellis had been a fixture at the Yard for almost as long as Sinclair himself. A small woman with mouse-coloured hair cut to fit her head like a cap and wire-rimmed glasses, she had served as Bennett’s secretary for the past dozen years and was devoted to his well-being.
‘Sir Wilfred’s hoping to get away this morning.’ Her tone was accusing. ‘He wants to drive down to the country this afternoon with his family.’
Quelling an impulse to remark that it was all right for some – and a temptation to wonder aloud where the assistant commissioner had obtained the petrol for such an expedition – Sinclair had instead gained swift admission to the inner sanctum where, just as Miss Ellis had hinted, he found Bennett impatiently awaiting his arrival.
‘I won’t take up too much of your time, sir, but there are one or two items you might care to glance at. A V-2 came down in Stepney last night and the firemen had hardly left when the looters started picking through the rubble. Luckily our fellows were waiting for them. They nabbed half a dozen. They’ll be up in court this morning.’
‘Excellent.’ Bennett rubbed his hands.
‘And there was a murder over in Paddington. It happened the night before but wasn’t reported till yesterday. A private detective called Quill was the victim. I gather he was an unsavoury character. There’ll be more on that later.’
While he was speaking, the chief inspector had passed the typed sheets he was carrying across the desk and his superior scanned them in silence for a few moments.
‘And what are your plans for Christmas, Angus?’ Bennett looked up over the top of his spectacles.
‘I was hoping to join the Maddens down in Highfield for a couple of days. They’ve very kindly invited me. But I don’t like to leave London with this Ash business still hanging. I want to be on call.’
With a grunt, the assistant commissioner passed the report back to him.
‘So there’s been no more progress on that front?’
‘None as we speak. That photograph of him we published has drawn no response as yet and we’ve pretty well checked all hotels and boarding houses in the capital. There’s no trace of a Raymond Ash here, so I’ve ordered the hunt to be extended nationwide. Of course the fact that it’s Christmas doesn’t help. We’re already short-staffed and our men need some time off. But I don’t dare let up. He won’t.’
The chief inspector sat brooding.
‘This is probably the last major case I’ll ever handle, and I’d hate it to end in failure. But every day that passes means he’s slipping a little further from our grasp.’
Bennett coughed.
‘Well, now, I wouldn’t …’ he began, then stopped as the noise of argument sounded from the outer office. Miss Ellis’s voice could be heard raised in indignation.
‘Now just one moment…’
Before either man could react, the door was flung open and Lily Poole stumbled in.
‘Good God!’ Sinclair stared at her, speechless.
‘What on earth-?’
Out of uniform, wearing a coat of singular design, and with a woollen cap tugged down over her ears, the young policewoman was barely recognizable.
‘Sir …’ Lily gasped out the word as she came to a halt and from habit stood to attention. ‘Sir …’
It was the only word she managed to utter. Hard on her heels, Miss Ellis appeared brandishing an object wrapped in greaseproof paper in both hands, red in the face and furious.
‘Sir, I don’t know who this young woman is or how she got up here but she forced her way in … sir, I’m sorry …’
‘Calm down, Miss Ellis, calm down …’
Seeing his secretary’s distress, Bennett rose from behind his desk, patting the air with his hands to soothe her.
‘What’s that you’ve got there?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’ Miss Ellis’s throat had turned red and swollen like a turkey cock’s. ‘This young woman just dumped it on my desk.’
‘Remove it if you would.’ Bennett spoke gently. ‘I’ll deal with this.’
He waited until she had gone out, shutting the door behind her, then turned to Lily.
‘Now who are you, miss? And what the devil are you doing here?’
‘Sir, this is Officer Poole.’ Sinclair found his tongue at
last.
‘Officer Poole … !’ Bennett gazed at her in seeming wonder. Then, with a shake of his head, he resumed his seat.
‘Explain yourself, Constable.’ Sinclair had risen to his feet. He confronted the young woman. ‘What do you mean by bursting in like this?’ He gestured at her attire. ‘You’re not even on duty.’
‘Sir, I’m sorry, sir, but I had to speak to you right away.’ Overcome by what she’d done, Lily had been temporarily struck dumb. ‘I tried ringing you from Paddington but they said you hadn’t got in yet, and then I tried Inspector Styles but his desk didn’t answer so I thought I’d better come down to the Yard myself, but when I got here I found you were in with the assistant commissioner and I didn’t know how long you’d be.’ She paused to take breath. ‘But I knew this was something you had to know and right away so I—’
‘Had
to know? What did I have to know?’ Sinclair glared at her. The sight of Bennett, whom he was able to glimpse out of the corner of his eye, trying not to smile, only lent fuel to his anger.
‘What this bloke was doing that was topped over in Paddington two nights ago, a private detective called Quill—’
‘I know all about Quill.’ The chief inspector’s bark made Lily jump. ‘It’s in the crime report.’
‘Yes, sir, but not what he was doing before he was topped. I know ’cos I got it from his tart only half an hour ago and she hadn’t been interviewed yet…’
Lily stopped, realizing what she’d just said. Sinclair’s gaze had hardened.
‘Are you telling me you’ve interfered with a CID investigation?’
Lily stood abashed.
‘Have you taken leave of your senses, Constable—?’
‘Chief Inspector …’ Bennett coughed theatrically. ‘I’m sure a reprimand is in order, but let’s hear what this officer has to say, shall we?’
He turned to Lily, who was still standing to attention.
‘I trust you didn’t force your way in here without good reason. Just what is it you have to tell us?’
Lily took a deep breath. ‘Sir, Molly Minter – she was Quill’s tart – she told me he’d been on a job these past few weeks, being paid good money, too, looking for a girl which this client of his wanted found. She knew he was due to meet this bloke that had hired him soon and that he was going to try and get some more money out of him.’
‘And why do we have to know that?’ Bennett frowned. ‘Why is it so important?’
‘Because it wasn’t just any girl he was looking for, sir.’ Lily looked from Bennett to the chief inspector and back again. ‘It was a
Polish
girl.’
25
‘I’
M NOT SURE
this is very wise of me, Will,’ Madden confessed as they stood together beneath the station awning, taking shelter from the snow that had started falling again a few minutes earlier. ‘It seemed a better idea last night. If this girl doesn’t know about Rosa being murdered, she won’t thank me for telling her now.’
‘She’ll have to know some time, sir.’ Stackpole offered his verdict. ‘And if you don’t tell her, then it’ll be some policeman knocking on her door, and she might like that even less.’
‘We’re sure it’s her, are we?’ Madden blew on his fingers. ‘The same girl who was on the train with Rosa?’
‘No question, sir. Not to my mind. I talked twice to Bob Leonard. He said she came to Liphook, this Eva Belka, about six months ago with a lady from London. A Mrs Spencer. I’ve spoken to all the bobbies, as far down the line as Petersfield, and none of them has a Polish lass registered who fits the description except Bob. And she definitely went up to London about a month ago, this Eva Belka did. Took the train, I mean. I asked Bob to check and he had a word with the station-master there, who confirmed it. He said he spoke to Mrs Spencer herself that day and another lady. They’d brought the girl to the station and they wanted to be sure she’d reach Waterloo in time to make her connection. And the station-master remembers she had a basket with her as well as a suitcase, which is what that pilot told you.’
Madden grunted. He still wasn’t altogether happy.
‘Of course, if you wanted to be sure, you could try telephoning this Mrs Spencer. I got a number from Bob …’
Stackpole looked questioningly at him, but Madden shook his head.
‘What I have to ask this girl – what I have to tell her – can’t be done on the phone. I just wish it wasn’t Christmas Eve.’
‘Why not put it off then, sir? Wait till after the holidays.’
‘I thought of that. But with Ash still at large it’s not something we can drag our heels on. It sounds as though Rosa may have recognized him that day, and we don’t know what she might have said to this girl. Or given her, perhaps.’
‘
Given
her, sir?’ The constable was perplexed.
‘It’s just a thought. There’s still an aspect of Rosa’s murder that’s unexplained. Apparently Ash was searching for something after he killed her; there were charred matches found all around the body. We still don’t know exactly what happened in Paris that evening. All we know for sure is that Rosa fled the scene. So whatever passed between her and this other girl could be relevant to the investigation. As things stand the police haven’t much of a case against Ash. With no corroborating witnesses, what can they charge him with? So every lead matters. At the very least I’m hoping this girl will remember what happened on their journey up to London that day: the incident Tyson told me about. If she could recognize Ash again – if she could place him on the train – it would at least be a link in the chain of evidence.’
‘Well, you’ll know soon enough.’ Stackpole stamped his feet to restore circulation to his frozen toes. They’d been standing there for ten minutes waiting for the train to arrive. ‘What’s it to Liphook? Half an hour at the most, I’d say.’
It was the closeness of the Hampshire village to Highfield that had persuaded Madden in the end to make the journey after the constable had rung him shortly after breakfast with the information he was seeking.
‘It was no trouble, sir, just like I said. Bob Leonard was the second bloke I rang, and after I’d checked with the others I got back to him. This is our lass, all right.’
According to the Liphook bobby, Eva Belka was married to a young Pole serving with the Allied forces in France, Stackpole told him. Recently he’d been wounded, though not seriously, and she had gone up to Norwich for a few days to visit him in hospital. Her employer was a woman called Mary Spencer, whose home in London had been destroyed by a V-bomb, forcing her to seek alternative accommodation for herself and her young son. Together with Eva, the boy’s nanny, they had come down to Liphook six months earlier and taken up residence in a house called the Grange not far from the village.
‘Liphook’s only taxi has broken down, but you can walk out there easily, Bob said. You’ll need a good pair of boots, though, with all this snow.’
Still hesitant about making the expedition – Rob was due to arrive in the late afternoon from London and Madden didn’t want to miss his son’s return after the anxious weeks he and his wife had passed – he had consulted Helen, who, somewhat to his surprise, had urged him to go.
‘Lucy and I will be spending most of the afternoon in the kitchen with Mary,’ she had told him after he’d spoken to Stackpole. ‘ is, if firstly I can get her out of bed and secondly keep her out of the clutches of her various admirers, who’ve been ringing up since breakfast asking for her. All that dancing last night seems to have done wonders for the walking wounded. If you’re going to go, you might as well do it today. At least you won’t have it weighing on your mind over Christmas.’
‘I’m sorry, my dear, I’ve been caught up in this long enough, I know.’ Madden had been contrite. ‘But I have to be sure I’ve done all I can. Followed up every lead. I can’t explain it exactly, but I feel we owe it to Rosa. To her memory.’
‘And so do I.’ Helen’s kiss had served as a seal on her words. ‘But don’t be too late back. I want us all to be together this evening.’
Soon afterwards she had dropped him at the station on her way to her surgery and Madden had found Stackpole waiting for him on the platform, with the welcome news that extra trains would be running to cope with the flood of travellers expected over the Christmas period and he would have no difficulty getting back to Highfield once his selfimposed duty was done.
Another figure in a police constable’s uniform was waiting on the platform at Liphook when Madden’s train arrived, this one considerably shorter in stature than Will Stackpole, but no less portly.
‘Bob Leonard, sir.’ The bobby touched his helmet. Well past middle age, he sported a grey toothbrush moustache and veined red cheeks. ‘We’ve not met, Mr Madden, but I know you by name. Weren’t you with the Yard once?’
‘I didn’t think there was anyone left who remembered that.’ Madden laughed as they shook hands.
‘Ah, well, when you’ve been in this job as long as I have …’ Leonard chuckled. ‘I was due to put my feet up four years ago, but then the war came along and there was no one else to do it.’ He nodded at the train from which Madden had just alighted and which was still disgorging passengers. ‘You might have picked a better day. Don’t think I’ve ever seen ‘er so full.’
The same thought had come to Madden as he’d sat wedged in a corner seat while they’d crawled along at a snail’s pace. Despite the cramped conditions the holiday spirit had been well in evidence and the sound of a sing-song had reached his ears from another compartment a little way down the corridor in the antique carriage. Reprieved by the needs of wartime from the junkyard perhaps, it had been decorated by photographs of straw-hatted girls walking arm-in-arm along a seaside promenade with young men clad in white flannels. Phantoms from another age.