The Blood-Dimmed Tide jm-2

by Rennie Airth

  ‘Look – there’s Rob.’ Madden gestured with his coffee cup. ‘Has he been up in the woods?’

  ‘He left the house when I did.’ Turning in her chair, Helen followed the direction of her husband’s gaze across the sunlit terrace, down the long lawn to the orchard at the foot of the garden, where their ten-year-old son, clad in shorts, was just then emerging from the trees, swinging a policeman’s lamp in his hand. ‘He told me Ted Stackpole was going to show him a badger’s sett he’d discovered. The boys thought if they got there before dawn they might see the cubs.’

  Madden grunted. He watched as the small figure made its plodding way up the lawn. ‘They’ll have to stop doing that for the time being.’ He spoke regretfully. ‘We can’t have them wandering off into the woods alone. Not for the moment.’ He caught Helen’s eye. ‘I’ll tell Rob about the murder when he comes in. And Lucy, too. There’s bound to be talk in the village. Better they hear it first from me.’

  5

  Although Brookham was only five miles distant, the drive along narrow country lanes busy with farm traffic was a slow one and it took Madden the best part of twenty-five minutes to reach his destination. An unmarked police car parked on the grassed verge by the line of cottages signalled the presence of detectives in the hamlet. They would likely be there for some time. Unless established procedures had changed much since his day, Madden knew that with a crime of this nature all the inhabitants would have to be questioned. The police would want to know their movements and to discover whether any strangers had been seen in the vicinity.

  His own return to Brookham was unplanned; a surprise, even to himself. Although he had talked only briefly with the CID men sent from Guildford the day before, he had promised them a statement, and already that morning, before breakfast, had written out a full account of all he had seen and done from the moment he and Will Stackpole had set foot in Capel Wood. That completed, there was no reason for him to go back. The statement could have been forwarded to Surrey police headquarters.

  But enough of the old policeman still dwelt in John Madden to ensure that he wouldn’t rest satisfied. A nagging sense of duty, the feeling of a job half done, had dogged him since leaving Brookham and he’d spent sleepless hours reviewing the facts surrounding the girl’s disappearance and recalling to memory every detail of the murder scene.

  Morning had brought no relief and he’d risen saddled with a feeling of guilt which initially he’d put down to his failure to make proper sense of the evidence that had been presented to him at first hand. Some instinct, honed in past years, no doubt, but still lively, told him there was more to be learned from the murder site than he had so far managed to deduce. But troubling though this realization was, it did not measure up fully to the sense of unease he felt, which seemed to spring from deeper roots and was linked to the hideous image he bore of Alice Bridger’s ruined face.

  Still, he’d had no plan to involve himself further in what was now a police matter, nor to alter his routine, and had meant to spend the morning at the farm, as he usually did. It was only after Helen had left the house to go to her surgery and he was setting out himself that a sudden impulse had prompted him to change direction and take the road that led across the long wooded ridge called Upton Hanger, beneath which Highfield nestled, and make his way by twisting, hedgerowed lanes to Brookham once again.

  Watched by Madden, Galloway fished up a sizeable stone from the stream bed and examined it closely, peering over the top of his horn-rimmed spectacles. Portly, and now red-faced from his exertions, he stood shin-deep in the fast-moving current, wearing fisherman’s waders.

  ‘I thought myself he might have used a stone,’ Madden remarked from the bank above. ‘But then I wondered…’

  ‘Wondered what, John?’ Peter Galloway glanced up quizzically. He was the senior pathologist attached to the hospital in Guildford. Madden knew him socially through Helen.

  ‘He did such a thorough job on her face I thought he might have used a tool of some kind. A hammer, perhaps?’ It was the first time Madden had put into words the thought that had tormented him during the long night: the barely believable notion that the killer might actually have brought with him the means for demolishing a human face.

  ‘As it happens, I think you may be right.’ Breathing heavily, Galloway tossed aside the stone he was carrying and then bent down, searching the stream for another. His rumpled tweed suit looked as though it had been slept in. ‘I was up half the night trying to decide that very point, based on the available evidence, the pulped flesh, I mean. I could come to no conclusion. So, having first photographed it, I left an assistant with instructions to remove said flesh while I came out here. When I return I mean to examine the bone structure, or what’s left of it, to see if I can reach a more precise verdict. Such are the joys of a pathologist’s life. Would you mind?’ Wearied of his search, he reached out a hand and, with Madden’s help, hauled his heavy bulk up on to the bank, where he stood, swaying awkwardly in his hip-high boots, blowing hard. ‘I might add, it’s the worst case of its kind I’ve ever come across,’ he continued, having caught his breath. ‘There was nothing left of her features. Thank God, those injuries were post-mortem.’

  ‘I was told she was strangled. That’s so, is it?’ Madden needed to be reassured, and the other man nodded.

  ‘The cause of death was asphyxiation. Mind you, he broke her neck as well. At the same time, perhaps. Hard to be sure. Rigor was quite well advanced when the body reached me. I would estimate she died between twelve and two, but not later.’ Galloway controlled a yawn. ‘Since I was coming out here anyway, I thought I’d inspect a few rocks at the site. There appears to be a shape to some of the blows. But my instinct tells me that’s a blind alley. A hammer’s more likely.’

  Madden looked about him. He had come back to Capel Wood to find Topper’s secluded camp site a scene of antlike activity with no fewer than four plain-clothes men scouring the small rectangle of sodden grass which he and Stackpole had attempted to cover the evening before and examining the far bank where the body had been concealed. Their labours, directed by Galloway, were overseen by a fifth detective, the senior CID man in charge of the case, who had hailed his arrival.

  ‘Mr Madden, sir! I was hoping you’d come by. Wright’s the name. Detective Inspector.’

  The two shook hands. They hadn’t met before, but Madden’s name and face were well known to members of the Surrey force; the other men, too, had paused in their work to greet him, doffing their hats in respectful recognition. They included the two young detectives he’d encountered the previous evening and guided to the murder site.

  ‘There are some details I need to go over with you, sir.’ Wright had a confident, bustling air. He was in his early forties, a thin, wiry man with a receding hairline. ‘How the body was lying when you found it, for example. Before you and the constable had to shift it. Stuff I’ll need for my report and for the inquest. I expect you know what I mean.’

  By way of reply Madden had handed him the written statement, which he’d brought with him. ‘It’s all in there, Inspector. I put down everything I saw before the storm hit us. It’ll save time if you read it first. Then, if you have any more questions, I’m at your disposal.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. I’ll do that now, if I may.’

  Leaving him to read the statement, Madden turned his attention to the scene around him. He had left his car parked by the haystacks, where two police vehicles stood nose to tail, and made his way through the wood, quitting the path at the same place as he had the day before and following the now much-trampled trail through the undergrowth to the murder scene. He still felt there was more to be learned from this spot, though its appearance had changed strikingly in the space of only a few hours. Vanished were the foaming torrent and dark, rain-streaked sky of yesterday. Now the gurgle of the stream hardly reached his ears, drowned out by the joyous clamour of birdsong echoing from the woods all around. The bushes, too, were still, unmoved by the faint
breeze that was stirring the tops of the trees.

  His gaze came to rest on a leather case that lay open on the ground near his feet. It was half filled with labelled glass jars, the fruits of the detectives’ efforts that morning, he supposed. Galloway, catching the direction of his glance, gestured.

  ‘You did a good job with that piece of canvas, John. You and the bobby. Thanks to you both, we can say for certain the assault was carried out here, on this very spot. I’ve plenty of blood samples from the grass. They’ll have to be tested, of course, but I’ve no doubt they’re from the girl’s body. Pieces of bone, too. And I’ve had them collecting pocketfuls of soil’ – he pointed out several holes dug in the rectangle of turf – ‘they’ll go to the government chemist for analysis. She must have lost a lot of blood, and most of it probably soaked into the ground.’

  Madden’s thoughts had been moving on a parallel course. ‘He’d have needed a spot like this, wouldn’t he? Secluded, I mean?’ For a moment he was distracted by the sudden appearance of a kingfisher which shot by like a blue streak, close to the water, leaving its characteristic chee-chee call echoing in its wake.

  Galloway, meanwhile, seemed to find the image conjured up by the other man’s words distasteful. He grimaced. ‘Given what he had in mind, I’d have to agree,’ he said. ‘Rape. Murder. Plus what he did to her face afterwards. No, he wouldn’t have wanted an audience for that.’

  ‘I was thinking the same thing, sir.’ Wright glanced up from the statement he was reading. ‘He already knew about this spot, didn’t he?’

  Madden looked at him inquiringly.

  ‘That tramp, sir. Beezy. We can place him here earlier, before the other one found the body… what’s his name… Topper? That mark on the tree…’ He gestured towards the birch growing by the bank. ‘We’ve got you to thank for that, Mr Madden. I’m not sure any one of us would have spotted it. Or known what it meant if we had.’

  Unmoved by the accolade, Madden frowned. ‘You’re treating Beezy as a suspect, then, are you?’

  ‘Well, yes, sir… until otherwise demonstrated. He’s the obvious one. We’ve had no word yet of any other strangers seen in the area, just motorists driving through the village, the usual Sunday traffic. And though we can’t exclude it was someone local, I’m inclined to doubt that possibility. Being a Sunday, I think you’ll find most of them were at home, and able to prove it.’

  ‘So if there were any strangers about, it’s unlikely they were seen.’ Galloway made the point.

  Wright shrugged. He seemed more interested in Madden’s opinion, which so far had not been offered.

  Galloway persisted. ‘Don’t you find it peculiar that he’d try to conceal a body at a spot where he’d already left his mark?’

  ‘Yes, I do, sir.’ Wright turned to him. ‘And, what’s more, a place where he was expecting to meet another tramp later. But that’s looking at it rationally, and this sort of crime doesn’t happen that way.’ His eyes returned to Madden’s face. He seemed to be hoping for some response from that quarter. ‘I can tell you how it might have come about,’ he went on. ‘This Beezy turns up yesterday looking to meet Topper, finds he has time on his hands, cuts that mark to show he’s been here, then goes off exploring. Remember, he hadn’t been to these parts before. Now you can get to the Craydon road from here easy. There’s a way off the main path that runs through the wood to the road and it comes out not far from where Alice Bridger was last seen.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not saying that’s proof of anything, but it’s possible opportunity. He could have come on her there, lost his head maybe and attacked her, knocked her out or choked her and then brought her back up here. There’s evidence she was carried-’

  ‘Evidence?’ Madden had been staring at the ground while he listened. Now his head came up.

  ‘Yes, sir, that bit of thread you noticed caught on a bramble.’ Wright seemed relieved to have heard him speak at last. ‘It came from her skirt. We matched it. Now, if you recall, it was about waist high on the bush, and that suggests to me she was being carried at that point, since it came from the lower part of her clothing, from her skirt.’

  Madden nodded his agreement with this interpretation, but made no further comment.

  ‘Now, as I was saying, he could have brought her back here from the road, this Beezy – back to where he knew they wouldn’t be seen. And if that’s what happened, then I don’t reckon he would have been thinking of any mark he’d made on a tree earlier. That would have been the last thing on his mind. Like I said, you can’t expect rational behaviour with a crime of this type. Look what he did to her face, for pity’s sake! Isn’t that so, sir? You must have come across cases like this in the past.’ The confidence had begun to seep out of the inspector’s manner as he went on speaking and there was a hint of desperation about the appeal he flung out to Madden, who had resumed his former attitude and was standing with arms folded, eyes fixed to the ground, still giving no indication of what was in his mind.

  Observing the Surrey policeman, Peter Galloway drew a measure of grim amusement from the spectacle of his discomfiture. He had known John Madden for a number of years and considered him a rare bird. To an air of natural authority, striking enough in itself, another quality was added that was even more disconcerting: a capacity for silence bordering on the inhuman. Once sunk into meditation, or reflection, he gave every appearance of being deaf to reason or argument. Confronted now by these twin phenomena, Wright was descending into garrulousness.

  ‘And then there’s something else you can’t ignore, sir, the fact he took off in a hurry-’

  ‘Did he?’ Once again Madden’s head jerked up. ‘How do you know that, Inspector?’

  ‘Well, from that old clasp knife of his we found-’

  ‘Clasp knife?’

  ‘Yes, didn’t you hear, sir? We picked it up last evening by the stream, not far from here.’ Wright’s expression changed as he realized he had told Madden something he didn’t know. ‘It was lying on the ground, wrapped in an old bandana. Must have fallen out of his bundle, or his pocket. Now I can’t see that happening unless he was in a hurry and not taking proper care. We showed them both to Topper this morning, the knife and the bandana, and he confirmed they belonged to Beezy.’

  ‘On the ground, you say?’ Madden seemed struck by the discovery. ‘I wonder how I missed them?’

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t the way you and the constable came.’ Wright was eager to explain. ‘It was the other direction.’ He pointed downstream. ‘He must have made off along the bank that way.’

  ‘Towards Brookham? That’s strange. The other way leads back to the fields.’

  ‘Well, if you ask me, he was in a panic by then and could easily have been confused.’ Wright shrugged. ‘But all he had to do was get back to the path, and you can do that either way, upstream or down. Once he’d reached it he could have doubled back and left the wood the same way he came in, by the fields.’ Wright pointed to the mass of tangled holly bushes on the opposite bank and drew an imaginary line along them with his finger.

  Madden had been paying close attention to what he was saying and now he signalled his agreement. ‘Yes, that’s so,’ he conceded. ‘I see what you mean, Inspector. He must have done that.’

  Sensing he’d finally made a breach, Wright pressed ahead.‘But what’s really suspicious, sir, is he’s disappeared. We’ve been searching the neighbourhood since last evening and no one’s seen hide or hair of him. There’s no doubt he’s made himself scarce, and you have to ask yourself why.’

  Madden pondered the inspector’s meaning in silence. Then he nodded. ‘Yes, why? That’s the question.’

  His sudden change of manner took both his listeners by surprise, and it was clear from Wright’s relieved expression that he felt he had won his point, that his line of reasoning had prevailed at last. Madden’s next words only served to strengthen that impression.

  ‘You’re right about the tramp, by the way. He must be found. And the sooner the better.’
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  Driving to the farm later that morning, Madden had much to occupy his mind, but little chance to explore it. On his return from Brookham he had called in at the house for a moment that nevertheless proved long enough for him to acquire a passenger before he departed again in the shape of his six-year-old daughter. Lucy had been left in the sole charge of Mrs Beck since breakfast and the Maddens’ cook was in sore need of relief.

  ‘Can I play with Belle today?’

  Flaxen at birth, Lucy Madden’s hair now matched her mother’s honey-coloured shade. A tireless child, her fair skin had been golden brown all summer from hours spent playing in the open air.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Madden spoke over his shoulder to the restless presence in the back seat. ‘We’ll have to wait and see. She was still coughing on Saturday. She may not be allowed outside yet.’

  ‘Then I’ll ask May if we can play inside.’

  ‘Don’t you mean Mrs Burrows?’

  Lucy’s last nanny had left them six weeks earlier after less than a year’s employment, citing urgent family reasons for returning home to Bradford. Helen had diagnosed a case of loss of nerve. No replacement for her had yet been found and the Maddens were wondering if they could manage their daughter on their own from now on with the help of the household staff. Lucy would be going to the village school soon, and when she started it would take some of the strain off them, Madden had pointed out. ‘Off us and on to poor Miss Tinsley,’ had been Helen’s pessimistic prediction.

  ‘Can we go and see the waggle-taggle gypsies?’

  ‘Raggle-taggle. And don’t call them that. They’re Mr and Mrs Goram to you.’ Her eyes, blue as sapphires, challenged his in the rear-view mirror. ‘Yes, we can,’ he said, after a moment. ‘They’re leaving soon, and I want to talk to Mr Goram before they go.’

  ‘What about?’