River of Darkness jm-1

by Rennie Airth

  The chalk downland was bare of cover.

  'Shall we talk to him now?' Derry asked. He had just seen Reynolds appear from a fold of land below them. He had a young dog at his side. When it trotted away, he summoned it back, slapping his thigh, making the animal come to heel.

  'In a moment,' Madden replied.

  He walked round to the side of the house. Derry and Billy followed. They found him gazing up the hillside behind the farmhouse at the crest of the ridge, about half a mile away, where a small coppice of beeches stood.

  'There!' The inspector pointed. 'I want to have a look at that first.'

  As they walked up the cropped grass of the shallow incline Madden told the chief inspector about the dugout in the woods on Upton Hanger. 'We haven't made that public — we're being careful about what we put out. He used a rifle and bayonet for four of the five killings. And we think he was wearing a gas mask when he broke in.'

  Derry grunted. 'Sounds to me like you've got a weird one,' he commented.

  Billy, walking a respectful two paces behind them, thought that was putting it mildly.

  The coppice covered only an acre or two. The leaf carpeted ground beneath the trees showed no sign of having been disturbed. Madden stood in the shade at the edge of the treeline and looked down at the farmhouse. The barn behind it was set a little to one side, and from where he stood he had a clear view of the kitchen door and the backyard. Watching him, Derry saw the crease of frustration notched in his forehead.

  'This is the spot…' Madden glanced left and right along the bare crest of the ridge. 'We know he likes to watch them first.'

  He took off his hat and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. Derry noticed the ragged scar running along his hairline. The sense of familiarity he usually felt when he met another policeman was missing with Madden. He recognized that this grim-faced inspector was different.

  'Sir?' Styles's voice reached them from inside the wood. 'There's something here, sir. A cigarette tin, I think…'

  Madden spun on his heel and strode over to where the constable was standing behind a low bank. As he approached Billy went down on his haunches.

  'Don't touch it!'

  The two older men joined him. He pointed, and they saw the glint of metal in the deep shade beneath the bank. Madden crouched down.

  'You're right, Constable.'

  Taking a pencil from his jacket pocket he lifted the cylindrical cigarette tin off the ground and held it up.

  'No label,' Billy said regretfully. He felt he'd earned the right to make a comment.

  'The man we're after smokes Three Castles,' Madden explained.

  'If it's his it's been here since early April. You won't get a print off it now,' Derry remarked.

  'True. But we'll take it with us, anyway. Constable — handkerchief!'

  Billy reached into his pocket, recalling, as he did so, the shame he had felt the last time he'd been required to produce one. As Madden was passing the tin over to him, he paused and looked at it more closely, holding it up to the light. 'Do you see that burn mark?' he asked Derry, and the chief inspector nodded. The inside of the tin was blackened. 'I want to search this patch of ground. We're looking for a piece of cloth, probably burned or charred. Anything that would serve as wadding. This tin's been used as a Tommy cooker. You can brew a cup of tea on it if you haven't got a stove handy. The troops used to put wadding at the bottom and soak it in methylated spirits.'

  Billy, with the tin safely stowed in his pocket, was already examining the ground around him. Madden and Derry joined in the search. To Billy's chagrin, it was the chief inspector who found what they were looking for.

  'Isn't this what they call two-by-four?' Derry was down on his heels brushing away the dead leaves.

  Madden picked up the ball of charred cloth. A small square of flannel, unconsumed by the flames, was still visible. He took out his own handkerchief and wrapped it around the burned fragment. Then he returned to the spot where Billy had found the tin and got down on his knees. The other two watched as Madden laid his long body against the low bank in front of him and peered over the rim. They were a dozen yards from the edge of the coppice. Nevertheless, the inspector had a clear line of sight through the trees to the Reynolds's farmhouse below.

  'There… that's it!' Madden growled his satisfaction.

  When they went back down the hill Reynolds was nowhere to be seen. As before, his figure emerged suddenly from a hidden hollow in the slope. The dog was trotting at his heels. It stopped and pricked up its ears as they approached. Reynolds waited, hands in pockets, his face expressionless.

  Madden wasted no words. 'Can you remember what time it was, Mr Reynolds, when you left the house and when you returned? It matters to me how long you were absent.'

  Reynolds blinked. He swallowed. 'We left the house, Ben Tompkins and I, just after half past five and came down here looking for strays. We were back soon after half past six. Say twenty to seven at the latest.'

  'It was dark by then?'

  He nodded.

  'You were out of sight of the house all the time?'

  'Pretty well. We were further down.' Reynolds turned and pointed away. 'There's a dip in the land, it's not obvious from here.'

  'I know you didn't see anything,' Madden said.

  Billy was surprised again by his tone. His manner with Reynolds now was businesslike, impersonal. Yet Reynolds was responding readily to his questions. 'But did you hear anything? It's important.'

  'No, I already told the police.' For the first time he seemed eager to help.

  'Nothing at all? Think hard.'

  Reynolds frowned. 'What sort of thing?'

  Madden shook his head. 'I'm not going to say. I don't want to put it in your mind.'

  Reynolds stared at him. 'I know I didn't hear anything,' he said. 'But I remember Ben saying something 'What was that?' The inspector leaned closer.

  'We'd found a ewe caught by her leg in a cleft down by the stream. We were just easing her out when Ben looked up. I remember now…" He kept staring at Madden. 'He said, "Did you hear that? It sounded like a whistle."'

  It was after seven when Madden got back to the Yard.

  Sinclair was waiting in his office.

  'We're lucky Tom Derry's in charge at Maidstone.

  There aren't many who would have smelled a rat.'

  They stood together at the open window and watched as a pleasure-steamer, strung with coloured lights, moved slowly downriver. 'But is it our rat?'

  'I think it is, sir. The razor, the dogs, the whistle.'

  'And the fact she wasn't raped?'

  'Especially that.'

  The sounds of a jazz band drifted up to them through the gathering dusk.

  'No evidence of a bayonet this time,' the chief inspector remarked.

  'That doesn't mean he wasn't carrying one. You can't see the front door of the house from the coppice.

  He couldn't have known whether Reynolds was at home or not.'

  'So, assuming it was our man, he must have been ready to kill him, too, and he'd have wanted better than a razor for that. The razor's for the woman.'

  'It looks that way,' Madden agreed heavily.

  Sinclair turned from the window with a sigh and went to his desk. 'I must get home. Mrs Sinclair is threatening divorce on the grounds of desertion.' He eyed his colleague. 'And so should you, John. Get some rest.' The chief inspector viewed Madden's pale face and sunken eyes with concern. Did the man never sleep? 'There were differences, though.' Madden sat down at his desk and lit a cigarette. 'He was in more of a hurry than he was at Melling Lodge. He was in and out of that house in a matter of minutes. There was no sign of him when the gypsy arrived just after six.

  And there was none of the preparation. He must have poisoned the dogs on Friday night — Reynolds found them on Saturday morning. He killed Mrs Reynolds the same evening.'

  'He took his time at Highfield,' Sinclair agreed.

  'Perhaps he's getting a taste for it.'
He shuddered at the thought.

  'But it wasn't done on the spur of the moment,'

  Madden insisted. 'He knew the lie of the land. He lay up in the wood waiting for sunset. He must have picked out the coppice on an earlier visit.'

  'An earlier visit…' Sinclair echoed the words. 'But why did he go there in the first place? Or Highfield, come to that. And what was it that caught his eye?

  What brought him back?'

  He slid a pile of papers into an open drawer.

  'I keep telling myself it's the women. It must be the women. But he never touches them. So could it be something else?' He looked at Madden questioningly.

  The inspector shook his head. 'I don't know,' he said. 'I just don't know.'

  Madden left Scotland Yard in the early evening and walked along the Embankment to Westminster.

  With summer drawing to an end the city was filling again. Sitting on the upper deck of an omnibus bound for Bloomsbury he looked down on pavements crowded with young women, typists from government offices hurrying home at the close of the working day.

  He could remember a time before the war when the same sidewalks would have held only clerks in bowler hats and high stiff collars. He liked the change that had come about.

  Late that morning a telegram had been delivered to his desk by one of the commissionaires. It was from Helen Blackwell. can you meet me in London this evening query. She gave an address in Bloomsbury Square and a time: six o'clock.

  The two weeks were only just up and Madden hadn't dared to hope that he would hear from her so soon.

  Earlier, at the regular Monday conference in Bennett's office, he had given an account of his trip to Maidstone and the conclusions he and Sinclair had drawn from it.

  'We think it's the same man.'

  Chief Superintendent Sampson had responded with incredulity. 'Now look here, Madden, you've got a gypsy who hanged himself in police custody. That sounds like a pretty fair admission of guilt to me. And where's the connection with the Highfield murders? Granted a woman had her throat cut in each case. But the man who killed those people at Melling Lodge also robbed the house. We know that. The stuff taken from the farmhouse was lifted by the gypsy. You can't have it both ways.'

  'The Bentham case was reported in the newspapers,'

  Sinclair interjected. 'I believe our man might have read about the robbery and decided to do the same at Melling Lodge. I still think he was trying to mislead us.'

  'You think. You believe.' Sampson scratched his head.

  'The trouble with this inquiry is it's all guesswork.'

  'Nevertheless, we have to consider the possibility that these two cases are linked.' The chief inspector was insistent. 'And, if they prove to be, the implication is serious. Even chilling. It means we have a man committing murders, seemingly at random, for motives which are a mystery to us. I repeat, it may be necessary to look at fresh ways of approaching this investigation.'

  Watching Bennett's face, Madden couldn't gauge his reaction. The deputy assistant commissioner listened without comment.

  The address Madden had been given was that of a handsome Victorian house in Bloomsbury Square with a brass plate beside the door on which the words 'British Psycho-Analytical Society' were engraved. A receptionist was seated at a desk in the otherwise bare entrance hall.

  'I'm afraid you're a little late for Dr Weiss's address,' she told Madden. 'It must be almost over by now.'

  He explained his presence.

  'Dr Blackwell? Isn't she the fair-haired lady? You can wait for her down here if you like, or you could go up.' She pointed to the stairway behind her. 'Just slip in quietly, no one will mind.'

  Madden went up a flight of carpeted stairs lined with portraits of solemn-looking men in formal attire.

  When he reached the first floor he heard a voice coming from behind a closed door. He opened it quietly and found himself looking into a large room where perhaps forty people were seated in rows of chairs. Facing them was a short, dark-haired man who stood behind a table carpeted in green felt on which a jug of water and a glass rested beside a pile of notes.

  He was addressing the gathering.

  '… but since the issue of abnormality has been raised, may I say that I believe — and here I am quoting Professor Freud again — that the impulses of sexual life are among those which, even normally, are the least controlled by the higher functions of the mind. Generally speaking, we know that anyone who is abnormal mentally is abnormal in his sexual life.

  What is perhaps more interesting is that people whose behaviour in other respects corresponds to the norm can, under the tyranny of the sexual instinct, lose the capacity to direct or control their lives.'

  Madden saw Helen's fair head in the second row of chairs. There were some empty seats at the back of the room and he took one.

  "… something you said earlier. Does that mean you would sanction perversions?" A middle-aged man in the front row had risen to ask a question. Madden had missed the first part of it. 'More generally, it does seem to me and to others outside the profession that everything in the world of psychiatry revolves around sex. Or perhaps I've misunderstood you, Dr Weiss?'

  'It is more likely that I have misled you.' The speaker was smiling. 'My English is not as fluent as I would wish.' To Madden it seemed that he was fully at home in the language, although he spoke with a strong accent. 'But let me say first that, speaking as a psychiatrist, I would not normally use the word "perversion" as a term of reproach in the sexual sphere. To put it bluntly, most of us enjoy some degree of "perversion" from the norm.'

  An embarrassed ripple of laughter came from the audience. At that moment Helen Blackwell looked over her shoulder and her eyes met Madden's. His heartbeat quickened. For a moment her face seemed to register surprise. Then she smiled.

  'However' — Dr Weiss leaned forward, resting his hands on the table — 'on the more general question, while I would not agree that "everything" in our work has to do with sex, I cannot deny the central position occupied by this most imperious of instincts. Let me be plain. I regard human sexuality as the single most important force in our lives, both as individuals and as members of society. Consider only how it lies at the very root of our capacity to love human beings other than ourselves. Truly, the seed of our happiness.

  'But the tale does not end there, sad to say, and this is evident from much of the work being done in my profession. The sexual instinct flows like a river through our lives, and if, for many, it is a broad sunlit stream, for others it can be a source of pain and anguish. A river of darkness. Aphrodite appears to us in many aspects, some of them strange and terrible.

  We should regard her with awe.

  'In this connection, and to answer more fully your earlier question, I cannot do better than draw your attention once more to the writings of Professor Freud, whose work has figured so largely in our discussion this evening. As my old teacher has observed, even the most repulsive sexual acts can be transformed by the human mind into idealized creations. I will close with a quotation from Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, freely translated: "The omnipotence of love is never more strongly proved than in aberrations such as these.

  The highest and lowest are always closest to each other in the realm of sexuality."'

  The speaker smiled at his audience and bowed. A polite round of applause broke out as he began to collect his notes from the table in front of him. There was a shuffling of feet and chairs. Madden made his way to the front. Helen awaited him, her eyes meeting his when he was still some way off and then holding them in her steady glance as he approached.

  'John, dear…' She shook his hand. 'I was so afraid you wouldn't be able to come at such short notice.' As people milled about them she moved closer to him. 'I got back yesterday evening and found an invitation to this lecture waiting at the house, so I decided to take a chance and come up.'

  She was wearing a dark high-waisted dress with a matching velvet toque. A fringed shawl of red silk was
draped loosely about her shoulders. Her glance shifted and he became aware of a figure standing beside them.

  'Franz, how lovely to see you again.'

  'Helen, my dear…' Dr Weiss took her hands in his and kissed them, first one then the other. He was perhaps half a head shorter than she was and she smiled down at him.

  'This is my friend John Madden.'

  'Mr Madden.' Dr Weiss brought his heels together and executed a brief bow. His dark wavy hair was flecked with grey at the temples. His liquid brown eyes, crinkled at the corners by a smile, held a look of rueful intelligence.

  'Inspector Madden. John works at Scotland Yard.

  You must have read about those terrible murders in Highfield…'

  'Indeed. Our papers carried several reports.' He looked at Madden curiously.

  'I stayed with Franz and his family in Vienna before the war,' Helen told Madden. 'He and Father are old friends and I went there to study German.'

  'We still miss you.' Dr Weiss regarded her fondly.

  'Mina was devoured by envy at the thought that I might see you on this trip. Mina is my wife,' he explained to Madden. 'She was not alone. Jakob insists that he remembers you well and wants to know when you will return.'

  Helen laughed. 'Since Jakob was only three at the time, I find that hard to believe.'

  'Some memories we carry in our hearts.' Dr Weiss touched his chest.

  'Dear Franz… please give them both my love, and tell them I will come back and see you all again.'

  'But not yet, please!' Dr Weiss held up his hand.

  'Vienna is not a place one should choose to visit at present.'

  'Are things still so bad?'

  'Bad enough. Expressed in our currency, the modest fees I am receiving for these lectures will seem like a fortune.' The doctor smiled wryly. 'An illusory one.

  They say soon it will take a suitcase of banknotes to buy a loaf of bread.'

  'Oh, Franz!'

  'Still, we learn through suffering — isn't that what the Greeks have taught us?' He became animated.

  'Last winter we had to burn some of our furniture to keep warm. When patients came to the house I would wrap them in blankets and lay them out on the couch.