by Rennie Airth
‘Never you mind.’
The dirt road to the farm sparkled with muddy puddles. The land on which it lay, overlooked by Upton Hanger, was little more than a mile from the Maddens’ house and less than three miles from Highfield itself. They had bought it from Lord Stratton, a local landowner, soon after their marriage, when Madden had quit his job at Scotland Yard to return to the life he had known as a boy.
Although the rain of the previous day had fallen heavily here, too, he was relieved to see no sign of damage to the lines of late tomatoes flanking the roadway. When he and Helen had acquired the property wheat had been its principal crop. Since then cheap grain from Canada and Australia had driven down prices and like many farmers in the area Madden was devoting more land each year to growing vegetables and fruit, which found a ready market.
As he drove past the brick-built, shingled farmhouse, May Burrows waved to them from the kitchen doorway. She had been May Birney when he first came to Highfield; her father owned the village store. Later, she had married George Burrows, a worker on the Stratton estate, and they had moved into the house which came with the farm, a primitive structure when the Maddens had bought it, but now, with the addition of two new rooms and the installation of indoor plumbing, a comfortable house for a young couple.
Madden had made George his farm manager, though not without a qualm. There had never been any thought that he and Helen might move from the house where they lived: a handsome, half-timbered dwelling, it had been in her family for three generations. But living away from his land, leaving it each evening in the hands of another man, made him feel at times like a gentleman farmer, and he was in the habit of assuaging these periodic bouts of guilt by engaging in the hardest manual work he could find – ditching and hedging, scything grass and baling hay – returning home on those evenings with blistered hands and aching muscles, exhausted but happy, to the raised eyebrows of his wife.
‘Mr Madden, sir! I was hoping to see you today.’
Joe Goram called out from the steps of one of his caravans as Madden rode into the encampment. A burly, dark-haired man with unshaven cheeks, his face bore a scowl that seemed permanently fixed until he caught sight of Lucy, who was wearing a blue dress with a ribbon in her hair, riding perched on the saddle in front of her father. The gypsies’ camp lay at the bottom of the farm beside the stream that ran along the foot of Upton Hanger. Madden had parked his car at the stable yard and ridden down.
‘Good morning to you, young missy.’ Waving to her, he came down the steps. His broad grin showed he had several teeth missing.
‘Hullo, Mr Goram.’ She gave him a dazzling smile. ‘May I see the puppies, please?’
‘Of course, m’dear. They’re tied up over there, behind the caravan.’
The little girl slid to the ground and ran off.
‘Don’t offer her one, Joe, I beg you,’ Madden said hastily. ‘We’ve two dogs at home, and one of them’s just had puppies herself.’
Dismounting, he shook hands with the gypsy and passed him the reins of the old mare he used for getting about the farm and which Goram inspected with his usual disparaging eye. He’d several times offered to replace it with a better animal from his own string, but Madden, no horseman, had suggested instead that he look out for a suitable mount for Lucy at some unspecified date in the future.
‘And don’t mention the pony, either. Please. We’ll talk about that next time you’re here.’
Goram didn’t hide his disappointment. ‘There’s no harm in spoiling them while they’re young,’ he ventured.
Since this was an argument Madden used himself on occasion, and one on which Helen poured particular scorn, he thought it best not to respond.
Instead, he gazed about him, taking note of the signs of bustle and activity in the encampment. The various members of Joe Goram’s family – his wife and two sons, his daughter and son-in-law – were all busy collecting and stowing items in the trio of caravans that were parked at the edge of the clearing in the shade of a beech tree. One young grandson, eyes fixed to the ground, was quartering the area, picking up bits of paper and other rubbish and depositing them in a sack.
‘You were hoping to see me, you said?’
‘Yes, Mr Madden, sir. We’ll be pulling out first thing tomorrow and I wanted to thank you again for letting us stay.’
The gypsies had first appeared four summers before. Joe Goram had presented himself to Madden, greasy cap in hand, and asked for permission to park his caravans on a patch of tree-shaded land by the stream and to graze his horses in the lower paddock, which he must have seen was empty. Over strong objections from George Burrows – gypsies had a well-deserved reputation for being light-fingered, he’d argued, it was asking for trouble to allow them on your land – Madden had agreed to let them remain. In spite of his policeman’s conditioning, he clung to the belief he’d grown up with: that people, by and large, behaved according to how they were treated.
In the course of the next few days two bridles and a set of stirrups had vanished from the stables and George had found one of his scythes missing. At the end of the week they had miraculously reappeared in the places where they had been before, and Joe Goram had dragged his elder son, Sam, by the collar into the yard and made him apologize to Madden in front of Burrows and the other two farmhands. Sam, sporting a black eye and a loose tooth, had sworn it would never happen again.
The family had returned every year since, accepting the hospitality that was offered and in return mending pots and pans, sharpening knives and doing other odd jobs about the farm. Madden had grown used to seeing the smoke from their fires drifting up through the screen of oak and beech and to catching the scent of strange spices and aromas wafting his way from their blackened cooking pots.
‘There’s something you ought to know, Joe. A young girl was murdered over at Brookham yesterday.’
‘I heard about it, sir. Mr Burrows told us this morning. Poor lass
…’ The gypsy watched Madden’s face closely.
‘The police will be questioning people in the area. Tramps in particular, but travellers, too. You may be stopped on the road.’
Joe nodded. His face was impassive.
‘I understand you were at the farm all day yesterday?’
‘That’s right, Mr Madden. I took my boys up to say goodbye to Mrs Burrows. She gave us a cup of tea.’
‘Good. I’m glad. You’ll have no trouble with the police, then. But if you do, refer them to us. To Mr Burrows or myself.’
‘Thank you, sir. I’ll do that if I may.’ Joe Goram twisted his cap in his fingers. He could think of no way to repay this man who had shown him such special favour. Who shook hands with him when they met.
‘There’s something else, Joe…’ Frowning, Madden watched as one of Goram’s sons dismantled a clothes line, thrusting the poles into a rack beneath a caravan. ‘Have you ever come across a man called Beezy? He’s a tramp, a friend of Topper’s?’
Goram shook his head. ‘I’ve not heard the name, sir. Beezy, you say?’
‘It’s a nickname, I expect. He was in the Brookham area yesterday, near where the child’s body was found.’
‘Are the police looking for him, then?’ Goram’s face was expressionless.
‘Yes, they are. They think he might have done it.’ Madden paused, considering how to frame his next remark. ‘You might hear of his whereabouts,’ he suggested.
The gypsy’s swarthy features darkened still further. He stared down at his feet. Madden studied him in silence. He had more than an inkling of what was going on in the other man’s mind.
‘There’s no need to go to the police,’ he remarked, after a moment. ‘Just get word to me.’
Goram’s face cleared. He looked up. ‘Oh, I’ll do that, if you want, sir.’ Vastly relieved, he made bold to offer his own hand to Madden, who took it at once. ‘Anything I hear, you’ll hear. You have my word on it.’
6
The coroner’s inquest into the deat
h of Alice Bridger, held at Guildford the following Friday, was quickly concluded. As officer in charge of the case, Inspector Wright baldly described the murder scene and outlined the measures already taken by the Surrey constabulary at the start of their investigation. Apart from routine questioning, these were mainly concerned with tracking down strangers seen in the vicinity of Brookham that day.
The presence of a number of vagrants in the general area had been reported and some of them had been identified and questioned, so far without result. The search for the rest was being extended.
‘I am authorized to inform the court that we are looking for one man in particular,’ Wright stated. ‘We expect to trace him and to be able to question him in the very near future.’
Dr Galloway was equally terse. Attaching to Alice Bridger’s rape the single adjective ‘brutal’, the pathologist briefly detailed the injuries, internal and external, that she had suffered in the course of the assault, reading from a prepared statement, not looking up, aware perhaps of the presence of Alice’s parents in court. The girl had been strangled subsequently and from the amount of water found in her lungs it was likely the killer had also held her submerged in the stream. Her face had been ‘badly battered’, Galloway said, but provided no further description.
‘I’m giving the London press as little as possible to feed on,’ he’d told Madden and Helen, encountering them outside the courtroom before the proceedings opened. ‘They keep an eye on inquests.’
One of the first witnesses, Madden had testified at some length to the discovery of the body beside the stream. The coroner, a recent appointee, was plainly puzzled by his involvement in the affair.
‘Why exactly were you there, Mr Madden?’ he inquired.
‘I gave Constable Stackpole a lift from Brookham. He felt the wood should be searched without delay, rather than wait for the arrival of the detectives from Guildford.’
‘Yes, but why were you involved in the search? Surely it’s not usual for a member of the public to be engaged to that degree in a police investigation?’
‘Not usual at all,’ Madden had agreed solemnly, leaving his questioner scratching his head, disgruntled, but none the wiser.
‘I thought for a moment he was going to clap you in irons, John.’ Silver-haired and in his sixties, Chief Superintendent Boyce, head of the Guildford CID, buttonholed Madden in the street outside afterwards. They were old acquaintances. ‘Six months to my pension and we’re landed with a case like this! Mind you, at least it’s straightforward.’
He waited for a response, but none was forthcoming.
‘You don’t agree?’ Boyce cocked an eyebrow, then turned aside to doff his hat and bow. ‘Dr Madden!’
‘Mr Boyce… how are you?’ Helen shook his hand. She had come from talking to Mrs Bridger, the murdered girl’s mother, who was standing by the steps to the courthouse in a circle of Brookham villagers, clinging to her husband’s arm as though she required its support to remain upright. Bridger himself, white-faced and with a glazed expression, was hardly more steady on his feet. Molly Henshaw hovered in attendance on them both.
‘They’re close to collapse, the pair of them,’ Helen said, taking refuge in her dispassionate doctor’s voice. ‘He won’t like it, but I’m going to write a note to Dr Rowley. He really must take proper care of them.’
During the court proceedings, Madden had noticed Fred Bridger sitting two rows from the front in the public seats. Their eyes had met for an instant and he had felt the force of the other man’s anguish as he listened to the flat accounts offered by various witnesses of the circumstances surrounding his child’s last agonized moments on earth.
‘This man you’re searching for,’ Helen said to Boyce. ‘Is he the mysterious Beezy?’
‘He is, and I don’t know why we haven’t laid hands on him yet.’ The Surrey police chief looked glum. ‘These tramps know how to lie low, mind you – they’ve places to hide where we wouldn’t think of looking. But all the same, he must show himself soon. He’ll need to find food, if nothing else.’
Madden had seen the description circulated by the Surrey police. It had been sent not only to village bobbies in the district but to farmers and gamekeepers as well, and Will Stackpole had brought him a copy of the poster.
Beezy was described as being of middle age, bearded and dressed in rough clothes – words that could be applied to a good many vagrants, as the constable had pointed out. However, he had one distinguishing feature noted by the farmer he’d worked for recently at Dorking: the lobe of his right ear was missing.
‘And we haven’t seen any sign of Topper either since we let him go,’ Boyce complained. ‘Wright had to strike his name off the witness list today. I wonder where he’s got to.’
The suspicious glance he directed at Helen as he spoke these words provoked no reaction, beyond the amused smile it brought to her lips.
‘Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong,’ she declared. ‘I haven’t set eyes on him since that evening in Brookham, and I haven’t the faintest idea where he is now.’
Both statements were true, Madden reflected, though, as an old policeman, he might have been tempted to charge his wife with being less than entirely frank. The previous day their gardener, Tom Cooper, had found a bunch of rose hips and old man’s beard bound in a willow branch lying on the grass outside the gate at the foot of the orchard. He’d been somewhat put out to discover, in addition, a crude design scratched on the green paint of the wooden gate – it showed a cross with a circle round it – and had been for taking a brush and a tin of paint down and repairing the damage, until Helen had stopped him. ‘Let it stay there,’ she’d decreed.
Madden had found the tramp’s gesture mystifying until his wife explained it to him.
‘He’s lying low,’ she said. ‘He knows the police will be looking for him again. They should have hung on to him while they had the chance.’
‘Yes, but since he was here, why didn’t he come in and see you?’
‘Because then we would have had to decide what to do – whether to inform the police or not – and he didn’t want to put us in that position. Mrs Beck was right. He’s a proper gentleman, my Topper. But I do worry about him. He’s getting too old to be wandering about.’
Boyce, meanwhile, had turned his attention to Madden. ‘To get back to what I was saying, John – the girl’s injuries aside, do you think there’s something unusual about this killing?’
Listening to the Surrey policeman, Helen felt a twinge of unease. Well aware of the regard in which her husband had once been held by his colleagues – and not only those at the Yard – she knew that his views would be eagerly sought, particularly in a case as grave as this one. But watching it happen now, she was filled with misgivings.
‘Oh, it’s shocking, I grant you,’ Boyce went on, having failed to elicit an immediate response. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that poor child’s face. But ten to one this Beezy will turn out to be the man we want. Or someone very like him.’
‘A tramp, you mean?’ Madden sounded surprised.
‘Well, yes, I suppose I do. That sort of man.’ The chief superintendent pursed his lips. ‘Look, it’s not inconceivable, living the life they do… tramps… vagrants… they lack so much… they’ve no opportunity…’ He directed an embarrassed glance at Helen, who’d divined the source of his discomfiture.
‘You’re implying they’re sexually deprived,’ she said.
‘Well, yes. Since you put it that way.’ The Guildford chief sought refuge in his handkerchief. He blew his nose loudly. ‘And that sort of feeling can build up, can it not? You get pressure, more and more pressure, and when the dam finally breaks, well, it can be sudden and savage. That’s what happened here, I think. Whoever killed that girl lost control of himself.’
‘Are you certain of that?’ Madden’s quiet interjection took both his listeners by surprise. Boyce stared at him.
‘What are you saying, John?’ he asked. ‘What are yo
u suggesting?’
‘I’m not sure, exactly.’ Scowling, Madden seemed suddenly a prey to doubts himself. ‘I don’t want to burden you with half-baked ideas.’
‘Never mind that.’ Boyce frowned in turn. ‘Just tell me what you think.’ And when Madden remained silent. ‘Are you saying I should call in the Yard?’
Helen saw that her husband had been expecting the question. But his reply was not what she had thought it would be.
‘I don’t see how you can,’ Madden said. ‘Not yet. You could be right about the tramp. And in any case he has to be found. But I’d make sure the Yard was informed about this.’ He spoke more confidently now; his mind was made up. ‘And I wouldn’t waste any time, either, Jim, if I were you. I’d get in touch with them right away.’
The drive back to Highfield was a silent one. Madden’s habit of withdrawing into himself when preoccupied was deeply engrained, and Helen had learned from experience to be patient with him.
It had taken her many weeks when they’d first met to learn the details of his past. To draw from him the story of the young wife and baby daughter he had watched die in an influenza epidemic before the war: to hear from his own lips of his subsequent descent into the hell of the trenches, an experience from which he’d emerged so injured in spirit that, until fate cast him into her arms, he had ceased to have any hope or belief in his future.
Long dispelled, these shadows no longer troubled their lives. What concerned Helen now was the irrational fear she had felt at the sight of her husband being drawn once more into a police investigation after so long an absence from the profession. His decision to quit his job and start a new life with her had not been taken lightly. Nor was it one he had ever regretted. If he was allowing himself to become involved now it could only be in response to some deep anxiety, and this realization kept the pulse of uneasiness throbbing inside her.
The happy years they had spent together had been born out of tragedy, something she could never forget. Indeed, the thought was fresh in her mind as they drove through the village, past the green and the moss-walled churchyard and along the straggling line of cottages that led to the high brick wall surrounding Melling Lodge. Leased by a succession of tenants in recent years, it was empty at present and the locked gates and dark, elm-lined drive lent it a mournful air.