by Rennie Airth
The very concept of mobile policing hadn’t taken hold in the Met until the early twenties. The first patrols had been restricted to bands of uniformed police who’d been ferried around the capital – stopping at prearranged points to telephone headquarters – in a pair of vans bought second hand from the RAF. Some wag had dubbed them the ‘Flying Squad’ and the name had stuck. Now a fleet of wireless-equipped cars roamed the streets of London day and night and the roof of Scotland Yard spouted a forest of aerials.
All that notwithstanding, the job Billy had been assigned wouldn’t normally have called for a car. He could just as easily have taken the train to Henley. But Chief Inspector Sinclair wanted him to have freedom of movement when he got there.
‘Don’t pay too much attention to what the local police tell you,’ he’d advised the sergeant. ‘They’ve got some explaining to do. Nose around on your own if you can. Bear in mind, if it’s the same man he would have had a car.’
The summons to report to the chief inspector’s office had come out of the blue, and Billy had responded to it with alacrity. After a dozen years with the Met he could look back on a varied career during which he’d been involved in a wide range of investigations.
None, however, had approached the drama of the Melling Lodge case, and Billy had never forgotten the nerve-racked weeks he had spent in the company of the then Inspector Madden as they’d searched for a savage murderer.
The inquiry had been conducted under Sinclair’s leadership, and, ever since, Billy had nursed the hope that the chief inspector might hold him in some special regard. Whenever they met, as they sometimes did, in one of the corridors at the Yard, the older man would pause for a word, and Billy retained the feeling, which dated from their very first meeting, of being perpetually weighed in the balance of Angus Sinclair’s steady flint-grey gaze.
His greeting when he’d arrived in Sinclair’s office the previous day had been warm.
‘Sergeant! It’s been a while. How are you?’ Sinclair had risen from behind his desk to shake Billy’s hand. ‘I spent last weekend with the Maddens. John was asking after you. I trust you keep in touch.’
‘Oh, yes, sir.’ Billy had taken the chair indicated. ‘I go down and see them quite often.’
Sometimes for a whole weekend, just like the chief inspector had done, he might have added, though on the first such occasion Billy had been so nervous at the prospect of a dinner party his host and hostess were giving that evening he’d barely found the courage to present himself in the drawing room beforehand, and it had taken all of Helen Madden’s skill in the art of gentle teasing to restore him to his usual cheery self.
‘You’re not married, are you?’ Sinclair had inquired. ‘Or am I mistaken?’
‘Not entirely, sir. Engaged, as it happens.’ Billy grinned.
‘Well, well! Congratulations.’ The chief inspector leaned forward and they shook hands formally. ‘What’s the young lady’s name?’
‘Elsie Osgood, sir. We met when I was posted to Clapham for a spell last year. She owns a small dress shop down there. We’re getting married next spring.’
‘I wish you both well.’ Sinclair regarded the younger man benignly. Then his expression changed. ‘You’ve heard about Madden finding that child’s body, I take it?’
‘The Brookham killing? Yes, sir. It was all round the Yard.’ Billy straightened in his chair. He guessed he was about to learn the reason for his summons. ‘And now there’s been another one, I see. Down Bognor Regis way.’
‘Quite right. That’s why you’re here. The cases are clearly linked and the Yard’s been called in. But there’s more to it than that. It’s possible the murderer has killed before. At Henley, three years ago. That’s where you’ll be going tomorrow.’
Billy felt a tingle of excitement. Mention of Madden’s name had reminded him of that day, far off, but still fresh in his memory, when the two of them had been sent flying to Waterloo station to catch a train bound for Highfield. He watched as the chief inspector picked up a buff-coloured folder from his desk, then paused before speaking again, as though to underline the importance of what he was about to say.
‘This is not only a serious matter, Sergeant. It’s one of particular urgency. As I’m sure you know, sexual criminals have a tendency to offend again, and that’s specially true when it comes to attacks involving children. The man we’re hunting is extremely dangerous. And violent. But what concerns me even more is that he may think he’s in the clear, that no one’s picked up his trail yet. You’ll grasp the implications of that, I’m sure.’
Billy nodded. ‘It means, likely as not, he’s already on the lookout for another victim.’
‘Precisely.’ The chief inspector hefted the file for a moment, then handed it across the desk to Billy. ‘Most of what we know is in there. Take it away and read it. Then come back in an hour and I’ll tell you what I want you to do.’
Henley police station was situated in a double-storey brick building in the middle of the town, a few minutes walk from the riverside. The desk sergeant was expecting Billy – he’d rung to let them know he was coming – and directed him to an office upstairs where he found a sour-faced plain-clothes man called Deacon awaiting his arrival.
‘You’ll want to see this, I suppose.’ Deacon tossed him a file across the desk, the papers spilling out as Billy clutched at it. Grey-haired and in his fifties, he seemed put out to discover that they were the same rank, both detective sergeants. Discontent sat lodged at the corners of his mouth, which was turned down in a sneer. ‘So they’re calling it murder now…’ His shrug was defiant.
‘You don’t agree?’ Billy held out his packet of cigarettes to Deacon, who shook his head. Noticing there was no ashtray on the desk between them, the younger man pocketed his fags. He wanted to keep this friendly.
‘I’ve got no opinion one way or the other.’ Deacon’s pale brown eyes were expressionless. ‘They can call it what they want. But I’d like to see anyone prove it was murder.’
‘The injuries to her face, though? Is there any way those could have been accidental?’ Leafing through the file, Billy realized he was familiar with much of its contents. Sinclair had obtained a summary from Oxford. He remembered Deacon’s name now as that of the CID officer who’d been in charge when Susan Barlow’s body had been recovered from the water two months earlier.
‘Yes, since you ask.’ Deacon sat forward, elbows on the desk. ‘She disappeared originally during the month of July. You probably don’t know what the river’s like in summer. Let me tell you, son. It’s chock-a-block with boats. After she drowned, the body wouldn’t have surfaced for several hours, probably at night. She could have got knocked about, been hit over and over, and without anyone even knowing it.’
And every time in the face? Come on! thought Billy, but he continued listening with the same friendly, slightly puzzled air as Deacon tried to justify himself. Tried to explain how he could have made such a basic error as to mark down Susan Barlow’s death as accidental without stopping to think.
It was the sort of mistake Billy no longer made himself, and if his older colleague had been more observant he might have noticed an inner stillness in this fresh-faced detective from London as he sat nodding, apparently agreeing with every word Deacon said, taking no exception to the Henley detective’s bored, dismissive manner.
Billy dated his coming-of-age from the brief time he’d spent working under Madden. The foundations of his career as an investigator had been well laid then, but by his own reckoning, the most valuable lesson he had learned from his superior was that the work they did could never be just a job. That it was necessary to care.
‘I noticed her body was found half a mile upstream from the town. Was that a surprise?’
Deacon’s eyebrows, though raised, suggested no such response on his part. Rather, they implied disbelief at what he was hearing.
‘Not to me, son. You’ve got to start from the premise that she fell into the water, but you can t
ake it from me there’s nothing unusual about that. Not hereabouts. Happens all the time, particularly with kids. The bank can be unstable… treacherous. You stray too close to it, or start reaching for something in the water, and next thing you know you’ve tumbled in and the current’s got hold of you.’
‘Yes, but that far upstream…’ Billy wanted to make his point. ‘The Barlow house was, what, less than a mile from the centre of Henley? Even supposing she walked back along the river and fell in somehow, wouldn’t her body have been swept down closer to the town itself, or even past it?’
Having gone through the file in London a couple of times, Billy had concluded there was little mystery about Susan Barlow’s movements that August day. All that was in question, really, was the route she’d taken to return home after running an errand for her mother, who had asked her to slip into Henley and buy some oranges; something she’d forgotten to do herself earlier. The house where the two of them lived – Mrs Barlow was a widow whose husband had been killed in the war – lay on a lane that followed the course of the Thames upstream, running quite close to it for a few miles before linking up with the main road to Reading. It was on the outskirts of the town and the walk to the shops would have taken the girl about fifteen minutes.
Her safe arrival there had been confirmed by the greengrocer who had sold her the oranges. She had left the shop well before half-past eleven with her purchase wrapped in a brown paper packet, having given no indication that she meant to do anything other than return home directly. When midday came and went with no sign of her daughter, Mrs Barlow had walked into Henley herself and spoken to the greengrocer, who confirmed the girl had been there recently. She had then wandered about the town for a little while, asking various friends and acquaintances if they had seen Susan, before returning home herself in the hope that her daughter had reappeared by now. Finding she had not, the distracted mother had finally rung the police and the wheels of an organized search had ground slowly into motion.
It was at that point that the question of how Susan had gone home, which route she might have taken, had become crucial. The quickest road back would have been the way she had come, along the lane, but she could also have walked further upstream along the river bank for anything up to a mile and then taken one of several footpaths, all of which connected with the lane, and so returned home by a roundabout route.
That she’d obviously chose this latter alternative was Deacon’s contention now. (It was also the answer the police had reluctantly come to three years earlier.) Somehow Susan Barlow must have stumbled into the river during her homeward walk and her body had been swept away by the strong current and failed to surface for some reason.
‘Like I say, she could easily have walked a mile up the river and then come across the fields and walked back down to her mum’s house. At least, that’s what she had in mind, only somewhere along the way she went into the river. After that, there’d be no telling what might have happened with the current. Sometimes bodies get brought down here, other times they get lodged in the bank, like this one did.’
‘She was spotted on that riverside path, was she?’ Billy still wasn’t clear on this point, despite having read Chief Inspector Sinclair’s file carefully, and Deacon’s reply did nothing to clear up his uncertainty.
‘Yes and no. There were witnesses who thought they’d seen her, or someone like her.’ He shrugged. ‘It was before my time here, but I know we had a description of what she was wearing from her mother. It was a pink dress. But have you any idea of how many young girls are running up and down that path all summer? And how many of them might be wearing pink dresses?’
Billy considered what he’d just heard. It made a difference.
‘I’ll hang on to this for a little while if I may.’ He tapped the folder on his knee. ‘But I’d like to go and have a look at the general area now. Would you care to come along?’
‘Couldn’t possibly, son. I’m due at the Magistrates’ Court in ten minutes. And I’m afraid my two detective constables are out.’
‘Never mind,’ Billy said, taking care to disguise his relief at the news, ‘I’ll manage on my own.’
‘Oh, we can’t have that. I’ve got a PC waiting to show you around. Name of Crawley.’ Deacon produced a thin smile. It was his first of the morning.
Billy took off his hat and wiped his perspiring face with a handkerchief. Although the October sun had lost much of its summer strength, his skin felt tender. The pale complexion he’d inherited from his mother, along with her reddish hair, made him prone to sunburn. ‘I’m not keeping company with a lobster,’ Elsie had murmured to him not long ago as she rubbed oil on his back and shoulders. They’d gone on a day trip to Brighton and were lying in their bathing costumes on the shingle beach. Recalling the softness of her fingers on his skin, Billy felt warmth of another kind flooding into his cheeks. He watched as a pair of swans floated by on the current.
‘Is that it, then, Sarge? Are we done?’
PC Crawley stood beside Billy with folded arms, his eyes busy beneath his helmet as a trio of young girls dressed in light rayon frocks, their arms and legs bare, went strolling by. Downy about the cheeks himself, he hardly looked old enough to be wearing a policeman’s uniform.
‘Not yet, Constable.’ Billy didn’t need to recall Deacon’s smile to realize he’d been handed a lemon. Even by the standards of the Henley plod this young copper was a dim bulb.
He let his gaze wander along the river bank. Close by, on their left, was the flagged terrace of a pub, its tables overlooking the bronze-coloured Thames. Just beyond it a bridge spanned the river, and past that, further downstream, lay the straight patch of water where the famous regatta was held each summer. Billy had come to watch it once with some pals a few years ago. They had spent the day drinking beer in one of the marquees erected for the occasion and cheering with the rest of the crowd as the narrow boats, propelled by flashing oars, shot through the water like arrows.
Most of the holiday activity was centred there, he noted. The regatta was long over, but there were still a few campers in the fields lower down, their tents easy to pick out against the green meadowgrass, while the river, though no longer ‘chock-a-block’, remained busy with pleasure craft and other waterborne traffic.
Upstream, in the opposite direction, the view was different. They were close to the outskirts of the town, standing on a section of paved path that soon petered out into a dirt footway which continued along the tree-clad river bank. For several miles, according to PC Crawley. Billy had already got the constable to show him the spot where Susan Barlow’s body had been taken from the water. He’d been able to do that, though not much more.
‘I only got posted here six months ago, Sarge,’ Crawley had explained defensively when Billy tried to find out how the original search had been conducted. He’d had to turn to the file for more, and discovered that the searchers had concentrated their efforts on the stretch of river below the bridge, which made sense. That was the direction a floating object would take, after all. It was pure chance alone that had brought Susan Barlow’s body to rest on the bank upstream.
Billy had spent some time studying the site, a small cove on an outer bend of the river. The log beneath which the remains of Susan’s body had been found was still there, drawn up on the bank now, a piece of rotting tree trunk, stripped of its bark. It was possible to imagine how the current, swinging around at that point, might have carried the body, semi-submerged, into this shallow inlet. Trapped beneath the log, half-buried in the mud, it would have remained unaffected by the subsequent rise and fall of the river. A belt of undergrowth, separating the cove from the path, screened it from sight on the landward side, and its presence there had not been noted until some weeks ago when a couple in a rowing boat had pulled in to the bank and been greeted by the grisly spectacle of the girl’s arm, or what was left of it, protruding from the mud.
Assuming it was a case of murder, how had she got there?
Not
the obvious way. Not by walking up the river on her own and encountering some stranger bent on rape and murder. Having examined the route carefully, Billy was certain of that now. Though hidden from the water by brush and overhanging branches, the path was mostly visible to the open fields it skirted on its inward side, and these all showed signs of having been used as camp sites during the summer. What was more, it was clearly a well-used footway. Even today, when the holiday season was over, they had encountered two families with small children and had passed a group of hikers camping out in one of the riverside meadows. Billy simply couldn’t picture the man – this careful killer – seizing hold of the girl in broad daylight, overpowering her and dragging her off to some secluded spot, all the while with the danger of discovery hanging over him.
No, it couldn’t have happened that way.
‘Come on, Crawley.’
Billy turned his back on the river and led the constable up a flight of shallow stone steps and across a small gravelled garden, bordered by flower beds, to the lane where he’d left his car. This was the same road Susan Barlow had taken when she’d walked into Henley to buy her packet of oranges; and the one she’d used to get home, too. Or so he believed now. Only she’d never got there.
He paused on the pavement, looking up and down the narrow lane. A picture was forming in his mind, and the image wasn’t pleasant. He saw the girl in her pink dress, with her brown paper packet clutched in her hand, walking in the shade along the grassed verge. He saw the car drawing up quietly behind her…
What words had he got prepared, the smooth-tongued stranger? What invitation had proved so irresistible that Susan Barlow had been persuaded to climb into the car and join him in the front seat? Billy scowled at the thought.
‘Are we going back to the station now?’ Crawley asked hopefully. ‘It’s getting on for lunch-time.’
An hour later the constable’s stomach was rumbling with hunger and Billy, too, was unsatisfied. He was beginning to think Deacon might be right. There was no way of proving that Susan Barlow’s death had resulted from murder.