River of Darkness jm-1

by Rennie Airth

  'Thank God Stackpole was with you,' Sinclair observed. 'But I wondered why he didn't go into the house when you did? Why he stayed outside?'

  'He was opening up the dicky,' she explained. 'He was going to have to sit there on the way to the station. Poor Will, it's a terrible squeeze for him.' She looked away. 'We owe him our lives, John and I. You won't forget that, will you?'

  The chief inspector assured her that indeed he would not.

  'You mentioned Pike's mother…' Dr Blackwell resettled herself. "I read in the paper his father murdered her and was hanged for it.' "The press have got on to that," Sinclair acknowledged.

  He'd been half hoping she'd forgotten his dropped remark. 'They're digging around for the rest.

  I dare say it'll all come out in the end.'

  He paused. His superiors at the Yard had decreed that some of the facts of the case should be kept from the general public. But he didn't believe the prohibition should apply to her.

  'Ebenezer Pike confessed to the killing. He said he'd found his wife in bed with another man. He made the admission in open court. The trial didn't last long. All the same, I was surprised when I read the police file to find no mention of the man caught with Mrs Pike. Not even his name. The implication seemed to be that he'd run off and not been found.'

  Dr Blackwell nodded, as though comprehending 'It was their son, wasn't it? That's who he found her with.'

  The chief inspector gazed at her in admiration.

  He'd made the same deduction himself, though not quite so quickly.

  'Yes, his father acknowledged it. But only on condition it wasn't included in his confession. He was adamant on that point, and in the end they had to take what he gave them. I spoke to an inspector who'd worked on the case. He said the boy had been found in the bedroom covered with blood, sitting crouched in a corner. He was naked, like his mother. She was stretched over the bed with her hair hanging down and her throat cut. It was one of those cases nobody likes to think about. The boy was packed off to live with his grandparents. A few years later he went for a soldier-'

  Sinclair broke off to stare at the floor. When he lifted his eyes he found that the doctor's forehead was creased with a questioning frown. 'That's not the end of the story, is it?'

  He wondered how she had guessed. Or was this an example of so-called women's intuition? A revolutionary thought occurred to the chief inspector: he wouldn't half mind having a Helen Blackwell or two working beside him on the force! 'I read through the file several times, but I wasn't satisfied. Don't ask me why.' He was prepared to claim a modicum of intuition on his own account. 'I took a day off and went down to Nottingham and then out to the village where the Pikes had lived. It's called Dorton. Their cottage was a mile or so away on a big estate where Ebenezer Pike was head gamekeeper. I spoke to the local bobby. The murder was before his time, but he put me on to his predecessor who was still living there, retired."

  Sinclair smiled. 'George Hobbs is his name. He's over seventy, full of rheumatism, but bright as a button. He remembered the case only too well. In fact, he's still in a huff about it.' 'A huff? 'He was the first policeman on the scene. He knew all the characters involved. He was the one they ought to have turned to to get it sorted out. That was George Hobbs's opinion then, and nothing has occurred since to alter it!" Sinclair's smile broadened. 'A wonderful institution, the village bobby. I pray we never lose him.'

  The quick glance Dr Blackwell directed towards Madden, who was muttering in his sleep, contrived to suggest impatience without expressing it.

  'Hobbs was able to flesh out the picture for me.

  First, about the Pikes as a family. Ebenezer, the father, was a cold, hard man, he said. He married the daughter of a local farmer, Sadie Grail was her name, and that was interesting. Grail was the name Pike used at the village where he kept his motorcycle. Now, according to Hobbs, Miss Grail was by way of being damaged goods. The young lady had already achieved a certain reputation in the countryside and it seems that marriage by no means curtailed her activities.'

  The chief inspector caught Helen Blackwell's eye and shrugged. 'Anyway, they had a son together, Amos Pike, but Hobbs said he had no end of trouble from them. Pike gave his wife a beating on several occasions. She ran away twice. Once she assaulted him with a kitchen knife. Meanwhile, young Amos was growing up — and making of it all, who knows what? He was becoming a problem, too.'

  'A problem?'

  'According to Hobbs, strange things had been found in the woods, small animals sliced up, some hanging from branches. Two cats from the village were killed… in unpleasant ways. The finger pointed towards Amos Pike, but no one had caught him at it.

  He was growing up fast, Hobbs said. A big lad, even before he was in his teens. And there was something else, something between him and his mother, that seems to have upset the constable.'

  'What was that?' The doctor's eyes had taken on a distanced look.

  'The way she treated him, even in public' Sinclair made a gesture of distaste. 'I can only tell you what Hobbs told me. She'd run her hands over him, he said.

  "Not in a good way" — that was how he put it. He thought she did it partly to anger her husband. But there was more to it than that, he reckoned. He called her "a dangerous woman". One has to form one's own picture, I think.'

  The chief inspector felt momentarily embarrassed until he realized that Dr Blackwell wasn't similarly affected.

  'He was trying to say she corrupted the boy, it sounds.'

  'I believe so. On the day in question, the first he heard of the murder was when a local woman called Mrs Babcock arrived at his house in a state of hysterics and said she'd found Sadie Pike lying dead in her cottage. Hobbs rushed out there. On the way he encountered Ebenezer Pike with a bloody shirt-front and carrying his razor. He told the constable he'd killed his wife. When Hobbs reached their cottage he found the scene I've described.

  'He sent for outside help immediately and a pair of detectives came from Nottingham. They made it clear they didn't require his assistance, but he went about making his own inquiries none the less. He discovered Pike had been with another keeper near the cottage shortly before the murder. This man couldn't say what time that was, but he remembered hearing the church bell ringing while they were talking.'

  Sinclair cocked his head. 'Hobbs was intrigued.

  He'd heard the bell himself and wondered why it was ringing — it was the middle of the afternoon and there seemed no reason for it. So he asked the vicar, who told him he'd had a new clapper installed and was trying it out. Hobbs went in search of Mrs Babcock again. He asked her if she remembered hearing the bell. Apparently she did. After finding Mrs Pike's body she'd gone outside into the backyard and thrown up. It was while she was being sick that she heard the bell ringing. She remembered particularly because she thought someone was sounding the alarm.'

  The chief inspector was silent, musing.

  'Ebenezer couldn't have been in two places at once.

  His wife was dead before he ever got to the cottage.

  Hobbs tried to explain this to the two detectives, but they wouldn't listen. They had their murderer — he'd already confessed. They didn't want to hear about bells ringing in the middle of the afternoon and new clappers. Two slick city lads, Hobbs called them. They must have thought him a yokel.'

  Dr Blackwell sat with bowed head. 'She took him to bed and he killed her.'

  'So it would seem.' The chief inspector sighed.

  They sat in silence for a while. Then Sinclair spoke again: 'Madden met someone recently. Perhaps he told you. A Viennese doctor. He talked about blood rituals and early sexual experience. How patterns could be fixed for life. Those animals found in the woods, the cats… I've been wondering…' He grimaced. 'Interesting man, that doctor. I wish I'd met him myself.

  We need to know more about these matters.'

  He glanced at Helen Blackwell. She sat unmoving.

  'Well, the boy grew up, but you don't leave that sort of th
ing behind, do you? It must have been in his mind all these years. I don't say on his mind. There's no sign his conscience ever troubled Amos Pike.'

  She broke her silence, speaking softly: 'Poor child.

  Poor man. Poor damned creature.'

  He looked at her, astonished. 'Aye, there's that, too,' he conceded, after a moment.

  Dr Blackwell rose and crossed the room to Madden's side. She bent over him, adjusting the bedclothes, smoothing the hair on his forehead. She kissed him once more. Sinclair again had the sense of her needing to touch him, to feel the assurance of his live presence.

  He saw it was time to leave.

  As they walked down the corridor to the entrance, the linoleum squeaking beneath their shoes, he remembered a commission he'd been charged with.

  'There are many people asking after John. But one in particular wants his name mentioned. Detective Constable Styles. The young man is most insistent. Would you pass that on? John will be glad to hear it.'

  'I'll tell him,' she promised.

  When they reached the entrance lobby he turned to take his leave, but saw she had something more to say.

  She was looking to one side and frowning, weighing her words it appeared. Finally she faced him. 'I'd better tell you now. You're not likely to get him back.'

  The chief inspector found himself temporarily speechless.

  'I mean to keep him here with me if I can. Lord Stratton's selling off some of his farms. Most of the big landowners are. They've had to retrench since the war. I've been thinking we might buy one. John always wanted to go back to the land. He'd be happy living in the country.'

  It seemed to Sinclair's addled brain that he'd lost a battle before he knew he was fighting one. 'What does he say? Have you spoken to him?' He cast around for ground on which to make a stand. 'He's a damn fine copper, I'll have you know.'

  'He's more than that,' she said simply.

  The chief inspector took a moment to reflect on this. Then he bowed, accepting the truth. 'Aye, I'll not deny it."

  His reward was to see the smile he had waited for in vain all afternoon.

  'Are you and he friends?' She looked at him with new eyes.

  'I should hope so!' Angus Sinclair was affronted.

  'Then I look forward to seeing you again, very often.' She shook his hand in her firm grip. 'Goodbye, Mr Sinclair.'

  As he watched her walk away down the long corridor with urgent strides, the scowl faded from the chief inspector's face and a smile came to his lips.

  He'd just had a thought that made him chuckle.

  All evidence to the contrary, and present circumstances notwithstanding, his friend John Madden was a lucky dog!

  Epilogue

  Have you forgotten yet?…

  Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you'll never forget.

  Siegfried Sassoon, Aftermath'

  In the spring of the following year, John Madden took his wife to France. Landing at Calais, they hired a car and drove southwards to Arras and thence to Albert, skirting the great battlefields where so many young men had lost their lives in the summer of 1916.

  Driving through the flat countryside, a watery world threaded by rivers and canals and criss-crossed by dykes overgrown with weeds and willows, he was surprised to find it at once so familiar and so changed.

  The peasant women in black skirts and red kilted petticoats, their legs encased in thick stockings, were just as he remembered them. But the roofless farmhouses with smashed windows and blackened walls were now repaired or rebuilt and barns lofty as churches stood freshly painted, gleaming in the spring sunshine.

  Signs of the recent conflict abounded. Albert, where they paused to eat lunch, was a town still struggling towards rebirth. Ceaselessly bombarded throughout the war, its population of several thousands had been reduced to little more than a hundred by the time the Armistice was declared. At the small restaurant where they ate — in a street still pitted with craters and where heaps of masonry marked the sites of ruined houses — they fell into conversation with a French Engineer officer. He told them he and his men were engaged in clearing the farms roundabout of mines and unexploded shells and grenades. (They had seen ample evidence of this in the small mountains of metal piled up at intervals along the roadside.) He said the work would go on for years, for decades, so great was the mass of iron lying buried beneath the seemingly unscarred earth. 'A century will not be enough to clear them,' he predicted.

  A mantle of green covered the fields, which Madden remembered as dry and powdery. Driving through the level landscape, he recalled how different it had once looked to his eyes. Low ridges then appeared as impregnable bastions; a hillock might be reckoned to cost a thousand lives to take and hold.

  No longer blinded by deliberate forgetfulness, his memories roamed freely over the hours that led up to that summer dawn when the world had changed for him. He remembered the pale gleam of moonpennies by the roadside and the shuffle of boots on duckboards as the men moved up the trench line. The sound of the Allied bombardment echoed again in his ears, a night-long inferno of noise and uproar when the earth had shaken and the air had quivered with terrible hammer blows. Most of all, he recalled the gladness he had felt to be there with the other men, the sense of comradeship they had shared in the face of death. It was never to come again.

  They had paused at the village of Hamel the previous afternoon so that he could look across at the sinister hill of Thiepval where his own battalion had come to grief. Standing arm in arm with Helen he pointed out where the forward trench had been and told her how he and the other members of his platoon had waited in the pale dawn light for the signal to attack.

  He spoke the names of some of them: Bob Wilson, Ben Tryon, Charlie Feather, the Crown and Anchor man; the Greig twins, colliers from Kent, their white cheeks seamed with blue coal dust; Billy Baxter and his cousin Fred, both barrow-boys from Whitechapel.

  Jamie Wallace with his sweet tenor voice.

  He never saw them again. They had vanished, all of them, that morning, advancing into a cloud of smoke and dust as though entering the mouth of hell. But he kept the memory of them warmly in his heart, and they came to him no more in dreams.

  It was Helen Madden, rather than her husband, who had wanted to make the trip, and who had felt that now was the time to do so before domestic priorities rendered any thought of foreign travel out of the question, at least for a while.

  The previous year she had visited the graves of her elder brother and her first husband, who were both buried in Belgium. Now she wished to do the same for David, her younger brother, whose body lay near Fricourt in one of the chain of Allied cemeteries that peppered the killing ground of the Somme river basin.

  Some six months earlier the War Office had handed over care of all military graveyards to the Imperial War Graves Commission. Work had begun at once on turning the cemeteries into places of beauty and pilgrimage and the Maddens found a team of gardeners labouring in newly dug flower-beds bordering the wide unfenced field where the neat lines of wooden crosses were half hidden by early-morning mist. The crosses would soon disappear, to be replaced by white headstones.

  Leaving her husband seated on a bench by the warden's hut, where a map of the cemetery was available for consultation, Helen went alone to her brother's grave. She had brought a bunch of white roses flecked with blood-red poppies and she knelt down to lay it on the grassed mound.

  Try as she might she could only remember David as a schoolboy, pink-cheeked, full of boyish slang, a noisy presence in the house at holiday time. He had gone straight from school to officers' training camp, but even the sight of him in his awkwardly fitting uniform had not persuaded her of his adult status. She mourned now for his lost manhood, all the sweetness of life denied him at its outset.

  When plans for maintaining the cemeteries had first been mooted, voices had been raised in favour of reorganizing them by rank, of separating officers from men. They had been silenced by the near-unanimous
wish, expressed at every level of society, that the fallen should be left to lie where fate and circumstance had placed them. In death's great democracy Second Lieu- tenant David Collingwood had for companions a gunner of the Royal Artillery and a lance-corporal of the Middlesex Regiment. His sister laid a flower on each.

  Getting carefully to her feet, Helen Madden looked back to where her husband was waiting. The last of the ground mist had dissolved and the bench where he sat was bathed in silvery sunshine. Although his wound had healed completely and his vigour was almost fully restored, she continued to keep a watchful eye on him. She liked to know he was near at hand.

  For his part Madden malingered happily. He'd felt well for some time now, but he enjoyed the many attentions his wife showered on him and thought he might let her cosset him for a little while longer.

  Returning to France for the first time since the end of the war, he'd expected to be overwhelmed by memories — the memories she had taught him not to turn from. But although all that past was still fresh in his mind, he could feel it receding, ebbing like a wave that might return from time to time to wash on his shores, but would bring no terrors in its wake.

  As to the future, he saw it approaching, noting with pleasure the continued alteration in her tall slender figure as it filled out week by week with the child she was carrying. Her eyes captured his while she was still some distance off, and he rose and waited for her, recalling as he did that it was her glance that had first struck him when they met. How it seemed to express the depths of her character.

  Blue, unswerving, magnetic. True north.

  The sunlight was bright on her hair as she drew near. She was smiling as she reached to take his arm.