The Blood-Dimmed Tide jm-2

by Rennie Airth

  ‘Not something you’d want to show your maiden aunt, is it?’ Sinclair’s lip had curled in disgust at the grisly sight. ‘But a comfort to some, I dare say. No chance of him turning up in the dock.’

  Billy had told him what he’d learned from Madden. ‘Lang tried to kill them both.’

  Sinclair had absorbed this information without comment. Then he’d shrugged. ‘I wonder how he came to end up here. I mean at this particular spot.’

  The answer hadn’t been long in coming. Presently Sergeant Cole had approached them. The Sussex detective reported that he’d been speaking to Sam Watkin, the man found stabbed in the garden, who had information he’d wanted to communicate.

  ‘He says he heard the girl scream and ran to help. Lang was waiting for him just inside the garden wall. He hit him with a hammer and then stabbed him. But the point is he reckons he’d seen him before hanging around the farm, trying to get into the barn, fiddling with the tap outside to see if it worked. And when you consider that this same girl, Nell Ramsay, comes home from school every day at the same time, and by the same route… and that Lang’s been living not more than a mile away…’

  Cole had gestured wordlessly.

  ‘But there’s more. The reason Watkin was over here this afternoon was to look for a pal of his who’s gone missing. A bloke called Eddie Noyes. He was part of that road gang. Watkin works for an estate agent in Midhurst. He’d fixed for Noyes to sleep in the barn and he’d asked him only the other day to keep an eye out for any stranger he saw nosing about and to tell him to shove off.’

  ‘So it’s possible they ran into each other and Lang disposed of him. That would have been in character, all right.’ The chief inspector grimaced. ‘He wouldn’t have wanted his pitch queered. Not if he had the girl in his sights.’ He was silent for some moments, reflecting. Then he’d sighed. ‘There’s a fire engine coming, I take it?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I sent a man down to Oak Green to ring for one.’

  ‘Tell them to search what’s left of the barn carefully. Likely as not they’ll find another body in there.’

  ‘America, sir. Baltimore, in fact. That’s where he was bound. He’d booked passage on a freighter due to sail from Southampton tomorrow. One of the fellows at Midhurst told me. They broke into his car and found his ticket and a lot of other stuff in a briefcase.

  Billy could tell from Madden’s expression that he was having trouble following all this. His old chief’s eyes were on matchsticks, as the saying went, and his head was nodding. It was odds on that any moment he would lay it on the kitchen table in front of him and go quietly to sleep.

  ‘By freighter, you say…’ Madden frowned with the effort of trying to keep up. ‘Not one of the liners. It sounds as though he was taking precautions. Did they find a passport?’

  ‘Yes, they did, sir. French. In the name of Victor Lasalle. There was a file of business correspondence, too, letters and invoices. They made out this Lasalle was an art dealer. Some of the letters were from galleries and the like with fancy letterheads. All forged, most likely, which may explain that package he was expecting. Why it took so long to arrive.’

  Billy glanced over his shoulder at the door. He was wondering when Helen would appear. He’d arrived himself ten minutes before, walking down the darkened driveway to the house, where he’d seen Madden’s car standing by the front door, and felt relief for the second time that day. The fear that the other man might have suffered some mishap on the way back from Midhurst – that he wasn’t in a fit state to drive – had made the sergeant’s own journey an anxious one.

  Seeing the entrance hall dark, Billy had walked round the side of the house to the kitchen where a light was burning and found Madden sitting at the table before the remains of a meal, alone and nodding.

  ‘Come in, Billy, come in…’ Blinking, he had half risen. The sergeant couldn’t imagine why he was still up. ‘Helen’s on the phone

  … she’s trying to find out for me about that girl… if she’s all right. And the man who was stabbed, too. I should have stayed, I know. But I had to get home.’

  Billy had been grateful for the chance to reassure him. Grinning, he’d described the eventual arrival of the ambulance, which had occurred just as he was leaving.

  ‘It took a while to get there. There’s a road to the farm, but it’s in bad condition; hasn’t been used for ages. Someone had gone down to Oak Green to fetch the child’s mother, and you can imagine the state the poor woman was in. But the girl herself was fine. She’d woken up by then and was more worried about the bloke who was stabbed, Sam Watkin, than anything else. Him and his dog. Turns out they all know each other. So when the ambulance arrived, Nell said she wouldn’t get in unless the dog came too. And she stuck to her guns, what’s more. They had to give in.’ Billy had chuckled. ‘She’s a fine girl, sir, full of spirit. She won’t be put down by what happened to her. You’ll see.’

  Billy added these last words to his account, knowing they would please his old mentor, and heard Madden grunt in approbation. Then he seemed to hesitate.

  ‘You’ll find Helen’s upset,’ he said, touching the lump on his temple. The size of a pigeon’s egg now, and tinted with iodine, it gave Madden’s face a lopsided look ‘She caught Rob down here, trying to find out what had been going on, and gave him a fearful ticking off. Just bear with her, if you would?’

  It was a remark the like of which Billy had never heard coming from Madden’s lips before, and he was still wondering what to make of it when he heard the sound of quick footsteps approaching in the passage outside.

  ‘They went to Petersfield, not Chichester…’ Helen began speaking even before she had pushed the swing door into the kitchen open. ‘I spoke to the doctor who examined the girl. She’s quite unharmed. A mild case of shock, nothing more. They’ll keep her in overnight…’

  As she swept into the kitchen her eye fell on Billy and she paused. He’d already risen to his feet, but the words of greeting he’d been about to utter died on his lips when he saw the high colour in her cheeks and the anger in her eyes.

  ‘The man’s stab wound is quite serious – he’s lost a lot of blood – but it wasn’t deep enough to damage any vital organs.’ Ignoring Billy, Helen went on speaking to Madden. ‘He’s also got a fracture of the skull. But the doctor said he’s fit and strong and should recover well.’

  She stood by the table looking down at her husband. After a moment she reached out, turning his head a little to one side so she could examine the lump on his temple.

  ‘Do you know, I can’t remember how that happened?’ Madden spoke to Billy through the crook of Helen’s arm. ‘It might have been something falling from the roof when we were coming out of the barn. But I simply don’t remember.’

  It came to Billy that what Madden was trying to do was alert him. That his casual tone was an attempt to defuse a bomb that was about to go off. Helen’s silence, her refusal even to look at him had left the sergeant puzzled and wondering. Too late he saw what was about to happen.

  ‘How could you do it?’ Without warning she turned on him. ‘How could you let this happen?’

  Billy was struck speechless.

  ‘I spoke to you only this morning. I begged you to take care of him.’

  ‘My dear-’ Madden tried to check her, but she brushed his hand aside.

  ‘You had no right to put him in danger. He should never have been allowed to get near this man. Yet you let it happen.’

  It made no difference that her charges were unfair. Fairness didn’t come into it. Billy saw that. Her distress, the fury she’d felt on learning of what had befallen her husband, was its own justification. The situation called for a sacrificial lamb, and there were no other candidates present. But he was cut to the quick by her words. Her good opinion had always mattered to him and he knew that the loss of it would leave him forever the poorer.

  ‘I thought I could trust you. I believed he’d be safe as long as he was with you. So tell me, how could th
is have happened?’ She demanded an answer, peering into his face, refusing to release him from her gaze. ‘You, Billy… I’m asking you. How could you have -’

  ‘Stop it, Mummy.’

  Cut short by the child’s cry, Helen turned. She saw her daughter standing by the door. Lucy’s tear-filled eyes had the puffy look of one just aroused from sleep. The cord of her blue dressing gown trailed on the floor behind her.

  ‘Why are you being so horrid to Billy?’

  ‘Lucinda Madden!’ Knocked off balance, Helen struggled to recover. ‘Go to bed this instant.’

  ‘No.’

  Defiant, the little girl came forward into the kitchen. She took up a position in front of the sergeant. Pale with the enormity of her rebellion, she faced her mother. ‘Not till you promise,’ she declared, her voice quavering.

  ‘Promise what?’

  ‘That you won’t be horrid to him any more.’

  ‘And why should I do that?’

  ‘Because he’s our friend.’

  Helen stared back at her daughter. She seemed in shock, and Billy saw, with a flash of insight, that her anger had been only a disguise, something to cling to. That knowing how close Madden had come to death that afternoon had thrown her emotions into turmoil, pushing her to the edge of collapse. It was with an enormous effort that she gathered herself now and spoke.

  ‘Because he’s our friend?’ She looked down at the small figure before her, as though in puzzlement. Then a smile came to her lips. ‘But of course he is. And thank you for reminding me, my darling. I promise not to be horrid again.’

  She stooped and kissed the little girl.

  As she straightened, Billy saw that tears had begun to stream down her cheeks. Madden had already risen and he came to her side at once. Taking her in his arms, he drew her away from the table and they stood together, not speaking, but holding each other so closely they might have been one.

  Wide-eyed, Lucy looked at Billy for an explanation. The sergeant put a finger to his lips.

  ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ he whispered in her ear, and hand in hand they tiptoed out together.

  Epilogue

  It was not until spring of the following year that Angus Sinclair finally closed the file on Gaston Lang and his many aliases. Despite weeks of patient digging little more had emerged to flesh out the figure whose shadowy past, like the single grainy snapshot supplied to the police by Philip Vane, offered no more than an impression of the man behind the mask.

  ‘We’ve found out all we ever will about him, sir. I think it’s time to write finis to the case.’

  Sinclair had offered his verdict to the assistant commissioner after Bennett had summoned him to his office, along with Chief Superintendent Holly, so that he could inform them of the contents of a letter which he’d received from Berlin.

  ‘It’s full of assurances… inquiries proceeding, and so forth

  … but nothing beyond what they’ve already told us. “Many difficulties have arisen in the course of this investigation and the full truth may never be known.” I think Nebe’s warning us not to hold our breath.’

  Bennett passed the letter across his desk to Sinclair who studied it for a moment.

  ‘Reichskriminaldirektor.’ The syllables tripped lightly off the chief inspector’s tongue. ‘There’s a mouthful for you, Arthur.’ He handed the letter on to the chief super, who was sitting beside him. ‘It seems at least one of our Berlin brethren knows which side his bread is buttered. No surprise there, by the way, sir.’ He addressed himself to Bennett. ‘There’s a good reason why they won’t pursue this matter. I’ve received a letter myself on the same subject. I’ll get to it in a moment. But first, let me sum up what we’ve gathered in the way of information. It’s been accumulating somewhat in my absence.’

  The chief inspector had only recently returned from Manchester where he’d been engaged for some time in a complicated case of company fraud.

  ‘The Swiss police have delved a little deeper into Lang’s background and come up with one rather chilling detail. It certainly made my hair stand on end when I read it.’ Sinclair grimaced. ‘You’ll recall what we learned from them earlier. That he was born a bastard. His mother was a domestic servant in a village not far from Geneva and if she knew who the father of her child was she never said. In any event, she died soon after he was born and Lang was taken in by the village pastor and his wife who gave him their name and raised him as a son along with their own baby daughter.’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’ Bennett sipped at a cup of tea. He’d had a tray sent in. ‘But later they dispatched him to an orphanage. We wondered why.’

  Holly rumbled in accord. ‘They were still making inquiries, as I recall.’

  ‘Yes, the problem was they’d lost track of the pastor. Lang, of course, his name was. His wife had died and he’d disappeared from the village. More than that: it turned out he was no longer a churchman; he’d left the ministry.’

  ‘What about his daughter?’ Holly frowned. ‘She must have known something.’

  The chief inspector grunted. He was staring into the cup of tea which he held balanced on his knee.

  ‘That’s part of what I have to tell you.’ He looked up. ‘It’s what the Swiss police learned after they’d tracked down Lang. The pastor, I mean. He was living in another part of Switzerland, in a village in the mountains, near Davos. He’d become a recluse, and at first was unwilling to respond to their questions. In particular, he didn’t wish to hear any mention of the boy: of the child he and his wife had raised.’ Sinclair shrugged. ‘However, by degrees they broke down his resistance and in the end he told them the story.’

  The chief inspector paused. He appeared to be choosing his words.

  ‘It seems clear to me, reading between the lines, that they didn’t understand what it was they had burdened themselves with. The pastor and his wife, I mean. What affliction they had brought into their lives. As the boy grew older they realized he was not like others: that he had neither the desire nor the capacity to make those connections necessary in human society: that he was quite alone in the world and content to be so. But the picture was darker than that. Quite early on they detected a strain of deliberate cruelty in him. He had to be kept away from domestic pets, which he was prone to torture, and also had to be watched when in the company of other small children.’

  Sinclair shook his head. ‘This is a theme we’re familiar with. It crops up time and again in cases involving violent offenders, particularly sexual criminals. Childhood experience is sometimes held to account for this sort of extreme anti-social behaviour. But it’s by no means the rule, and would seem to have been absent in this case, where the boy was shown nothing but kindness by his foster parents. Did something happen to him earlier, you may ask – during the months he was with his mother?’ The chief inspector shrugged. ‘I’ve no answer to that. In fact, I’ve no explanation to offer beyond the somewhat chilling observation that as a species we seem to possess a capacity for savagery that defies reason. That these seeds must lie in all of us. And that it’s a lesson history teaches us over and over, and which we never seem to learn.’

  The chief inspector coughed to cover up his embarrassment. He wasn’t sure why he’d said what he’d just said, except that in some way it was related to the talk he had had with Franz Weiss at Highfield, and beyond that to some broader comprehension of which he had not, until that moment, been aware.

  ‘Forgive me. I’m digressing. To return to the earlier point, the pattern of behaviour I’ve described continued throughout the boy’s childhood, which was marked, in particular, by a growing hostility towards his stepsister. There seemed no reason for this, other than the fact that they were thrown together, and not surprisingly, the girl came in time to return the sentiment, and as she grew older made common cause with the other village children, who seem to have been united in their dislike of the boy. He himself, while still quite young, began to pursue a solitary pattern of life, and having developed an
interest in birds took to wandering in the countryside, spending long hours away from home.’

  The chief inspector sighed. He eyed his two listeners.

  ‘One can only pity the parents in their attempts to deal with this catastrophe that had befallen them. No doubt things would have been different these days. They might have been able to seek help from competent medical authorities. But they lived a simple rural existence and Pastor Lang was apparently of a disposition to treat whatever trials came his way as an expression of God’s will; a test of his faith. It seems he was determined to do right by the child. However, a point was reached where the situation became untenable. The boy was twelve and increasingly difficult to control. Perhaps he sensed weakness in his foster parent; a lack of resolution. At all events the Langs decided he would have to go and the pastor arranged for him to be taken in by a church-run institution, an orphanage of sorts, in Geneva. He informed the boy accordingly.

  ‘“He looked at me with his pale eyes and said nothing.” ’

  The change in the chief inspector’s tone caught his listeners off guard.

  ‘It’s a line from the report the Swiss police sent us. I find it sticks in the memory.’ Sinclair glanced at them both. ‘His departure was set for two weeks hence. He was assured he would return home for holidays at regular intervals. Still he had shown no reaction. A few days before he was due to go his stepsister went missing. A search was organized and her body was found in a gully not far away. It seemed she’d had a fall and broken her neck. There was some damage to her face: her nose had been broken and her features disfigured.’

  ‘Good God!’ Holly was dumbstruck. ‘And the boy did it? Is that what you’re saying? But why, man, why?’

  ‘For spite? For pleasure?’ Sinclair shrugged. ‘No one can answer that question, Arthur. No one but Lang. And he took his secrets with him.’

  Bennett stared at the blotter on his desk. ‘Was the boy questioned about it?’ he asked. ‘Was he a suspect?’

  ‘Apparently not. He’d wandered off as he often did earlier and returned to be told the news. Or so he made out. Although the police were called in they concluded it was an accident. The girl appeared to have fallen from a height and to have rolled down the gully. There was no evidence of an assault, sexual or otherwise, and no reports of any strangers being seen in the vicinity.’