Dead of Winter

by Rennie Airth

  ‘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walls now sported felt-backed boards thick with typed notices, while the maids and footmen of an earlier era had been replaced by white-veiled nurses.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.r />
  ‘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

  ‘EITHER 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.

  ‘None that he’s found. She was topped, that’s all. Just like the other one.’

  Florrie Desmoulins’s body had still been lying where it was found when Billy had arrived. Her flat was on the top floor of a narrow, three-storey house tucked into an alleyway called Cable Lane, off Dean Street, and he’d had to step over the corpse, which was curled in a foetal position in the narrow hallway and so close to the door it would only open a foot or two. The likelihood of a garrotte having been used had been mentioned in the report phoned from Bow Street, and when he crouched down Billy could see the red welt circling Florrie’s throat from which blood must have leaked earlier – there were streaks visible on her pale skin above the nightdress she was wearing. Her green eyes were wide and staring. He recalled her smile and the way she’d snapped her compact shut with a flourish.

  ‘Eh bien! C’est fini.’

  That the flat had also been her place of business was confirmed by her landlady – for so she claimed to be – a woman named Ackers, who’d been convicted twice of running a bawdy house. Reassured by Cook, the first detective on the scene, that she would not be prosecuted on the basis of anything she told them she’d admitted it was Florrie’s habit to pick up her customers in Soho Square, only a few minutes’ walk away, and bring them back to the flat.

  ‘Last night she wasn’t busy. Said it was too cold out and there weren’t any men about. She brought one back at about nine and he left half an hour later. Florrie came down and told me she wasn’t going out again. That’s the last time I talked to her.’

  Middle-aged and skeletal, with cropped brown hair, Mildred Ackers was being questioned by Cook on the cramped top-floor landing outside Florrie’s flat when Billy had tramped up the linoleum-covered stairs to join them. Wrapped in a brown cardigan that hung shapelessly about her, she had stood with folded arms staring into space.

  ‘A bit later Juanita came in with a man. He stayed for half an hour.’

  Juanita de Castro, the other tenant of the building, lived on the first floor, Lofty had told Billy.

  ‘Though if that’s her real name, I’m the Queen of Romania.’

  Juanita was lying down in her flat below at that moment, still recovering from shock – it was she who had let in the bobby sent by Bow Street to fetch Florrie that afternoon and had seen the body on the floor inside.

  ‘The girls had keys to each other’s flats. They sometimes worked as a team. Or so Madam Ackers says.’ Lofty had drawn Billy aside for a moment to bring him up to date. ‘Juanita’s bloke was a Yank airman. He took off about ten – we know that from her and from Ackers, who heard him leave.’ He took out a packet of cigarettes and offered one to Billy, who shook his head.

  ‘Ackers lives where? On the ground floor?’

  Lofty nodded.

  ‘Keeps an eye on the comings and goings, does she?’

  ‘No question.’ Cook put a match to his cigarette. ‘That’s what makes it strange. Whoever topped Florrie got in and out without being seen or heard. Normally anyone turning up here would ring the bell and Ackers would let them in. Besides the men they picked up, the girls had regulars, blokes who’d come round to see them by arrangement. But there were none last night.’

  Billy grunted. He looked at the woman, who was standing a step or two away from them. Her attitude hadn’t changed. She stood with folded arms, a vacant look in her eyes, waiting for this to be over so she could get on with whatever it was she called a life. Aware of his gaze she glanced up.

  ‘So you didn’t hear anything last night?’ Billy asked her.

  Ackers shook her head.

  ‘What about the stairs? They creak, I noticed.’

  The woman shrugged. I told you, I didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘Listening to the radio, were you?’

  She viewed him with a leaden gaze.

  ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘I had it on some of the time.’

  Billy turned back to Cook.

  ‘Better have the forensic boys look at the lock on the street door. He may have jimmied it. And this one, too …’

  He bent down to peer at the Yale lock on Florrie’s door. Lofty joined him.

  ‘I can see he might have crept in,’ he said. But how would he know which flat was Florrie�
�s?’

  ‘By watching outside?’ Billy suggested. He stood up straight. He could have followed her down from Soho Square and then waited in the alley to see which light went on. Even with blackout blinds you can tell. But he couldn’t go in at once. She had a bloke with her, and then Juanita came back and she had a feller, too. He would have had a long wait. But once the girls’ lights went out he could have slipped in. If Ackers had her radio on she wouldn’t have heard him.’

  ‘Still, she might easily have come out into the hall.’

  Billy shrugged. ‘Then he’d have done her too, this bloke.’

  ‘Hmmm …’ Lofty was still peering at the lock. ‘But once he got up here, couldn’t he have just knocked on Florrie’s door?’ he asked.

  ‘Perhaps. But would Florrie have let him in? She wasn’t expecting anyone. At the very least she’d have asked who it was. It’s more likely she heard him working on the lock and came to investigate. That would explain why the body’s where it is rather than in the bedroom.’

  At that point Billy had gone inside, slipping sideways through the door and stepping carefully over the corpse, which he’d bent to examine. Beyond, in the bedroom, he’d found Joe Grace busy with two detectives from the forensic squad. It was after five, already dark outside, and the men had drawn the curtains and switched on two red-shaded lamps whose glow was reflected in a gold-framed mirror above the dressing table. Grace had been going through a chest of drawers filled mostly with underclothes, judging by the pile of lacy garments on the floor at his feet.

  ‘Nothing so far,’ he’d told Billy. ‘She must have got up to go to the door.’ He indicated the double bed behind him where the pillow was dented and the bedclothes pushed back. ‘I’m not sure he ever got in here. There’s no sign of it. Just did what he came to do and buggered off.’

  Billy had looked about him. Hanging on the wall above the bed was a painting of a nude woman stretched out on a couch. Her cap of red hair suggested it might be an idealized version of Florrie herself, though Billy couldn’t see much resemblance. There was a second mirror, attached to the ceiling and positioned above the bed, and as he craned his neck to look up at it he heard Grace’s harsh cackle.