JM01 - River of Darkness

by Rennie Airth

  “Where is she now?”

  “At the doctor’s house. It’s not far. I sent an officer over there.”

  “We must get her into hospital in Guildford.”

  Madden killed his cigarette on the sole of his shoe and put the stub in his pocket. Billy, watching, followed suit.

  “Any idea of time of death?”

  “Dr. Blackwell says between eight and ten last night—based on rigor. Couldn’t have been before seven. That’s when the cook left. Ann Dunn. She lives in the village. I’ve had a word with her, but she couldn’t tell us much. She fixed them a cold meal, then took herself off. Didn’t notice anything unusual. Didn’t see anyone hanging about.” Boyce glanced back towards the drive. “The gates were open. They could have driven in.”

  “They?”

  “Has to be more than one man.” Boyce looked at him. “Wait till you see inside. Most likely a gang. There’s stuff been taken. Silver. Jewellery. But why they had to—” He broke off, shaking his head.

  “How did they get into the house?”

  “They broke in from the garden side. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Boyce led the way to the front of the house, out of the shade on to the sunwashed terrace. It was late afternoon, past four o’clock but the cloudless summer sky held hours of daylight yet. Shallow steps led from the terrace to a lawn bordered by flower-beds with a fishpond in the middle. Further on another set of steps led to a lower level bordered by a shrubbery. Where the garden ended the woods of Upton Hanger began, rising like a green wave, filling the horizon.

  “See! They smashed in the french windows.” Boyce pointed. “They’re not cracksmen. Not professionals.”

  One of a pair of tall glassed doors at the front of the house had been knocked off its hinges. The empty frame lay across the doorway. Broken glass glittered in the sunlight. Madden crouched down to examine it. In the silence Billy heard the sound of flies buzzing. It came from inside the house. He wrinkled his nose at the rotten-sweet smell.

  “We can’t leave ’em there much longer,” Boyce observed. He watched Madden with narrowed eyes. “Not in this heat. There’s a mortuary wagon standing by in the village. Should I bring it up to the house?”

  “Better wait till Mr. Sinclair gets here.” Madden stood up. “You can begin fingerprinting, though. Start with the people who’ve been in the house.”

  A grin replaced the anxious frown on Boyce’s face. “Does that include the Lord Lieutenant and Lord Stratton?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Sir William told Mr. Norris they hadn’t touched anything.”

  “I’m sure he did. Print them both.”

  Madden glanced at Billy. “Constable?”

  “Sir?” Billy straightened automatically.

  “We’ll go inside now.”

  2

  As Billy stepped over the broken door frame into the house, the smell of decaying flesh triggered a rush of nausea and he had to dig his fingernails into the palms of his hands to stop himself retching.

  Eyes watering, he tried to block out the stench and concentrate on what was before him. They had entered the drawing-room, that much he could see. Madden was bending over the body of a young woman sprawled on the floor in the middle of the room. She lay on her side with her legs splayed like a runner in midstride, hands clutching at emptiness. Billy noted the black dress and frilled cuffs. This must be the maid, Sally Pepper, he told himself.

  His glance took in the tray and coffee things—silver pot and two small cups and saucers—strewn across a cream-coloured carpet edged with vine leaves. The spilt coffee had spread into the shape of a flower. Black petals for a funeral wreath.

  He knew the woman had been stabbed, Madden had told him earlier, but he couldn’t see where. Then he noticed the inspector examining a small tear in the maid’s uniform over her chest. It looked as if the black cloth had masked the flow of blood.

  Billy was struck by how little had been disturbed. Take away the smashed door and the pitiable figure on the carpet and the room was relatively untouched. Chairs and tables stood in their places. Nothing was disarranged. A cabinet where china was displayed remained shut, with the glass unbroken. Above the carved stone fireplace a pair of shepherdesses graced the mantel-piece beneath a painted portrait of a woman sitting on a sofa with two young children, a boy and a girl, on either side of her. All three were fair-haired.

  Billy was starting to sweat. If anything, the smell was getting worse. He saw Madden’s eyes were on him.

  “If you’re going to throw up, Constable, do it outside.”

  “I won’t, sir. Truly.”

  Madden’s glance implied disbelief. Billy gritted his teeth. He watched as the inspector started to move away from the body, then changed his mind and returned to it, this time to look at the back. He bent and peered at the area between the shoulder-blades. Billy wondered why. There was nothing to see there. He took a deep breath, then checked himself hurriedly as the surge of nausea returned.

  He couldn’t understand it. In three years on the force he’d seen his share of corpses, not all of them pretty. Week-old cadavers found in abandoned tenements. Floaters hauled from the Thames. Earlier that year he had worked on his first murder case since moving from the uniform branch to CID. An old pawnbroker battered to death in his shop in the Mile End Road. His skull had been reduced to a red pulp, yet Detective Constable Styles hadn’t turned a hair. Why now?

  Searching for an explanation, Billy was left with the feeling that it had something to do with the enormity of what had happened in this house. He had seen it in the faces of the villagers and of the men who waited outside. Even Madden’s grim features had registered a sense of disbelief as he recounted the bald details on their taxi ride to Victoria. It was something that shouldn’t have happened—that was the closest Billy could come to explaining it—not in the peaceful Surrey countryside, barely an hour’s train ride from London.

  Madden rose. Skirting the body, he went to an inner door that stood open and paused on the threshold. Billy joined him. In front of them was a hallway with a passage branching off it, running the length of the house. To their left, a trousered leg protruded from a doorway. Madden went towards it, walking in the middle of the carpeted passage, his eyes on the floor in front of him. Billy stayed on his heels.

  They came to the body of a middle-aged man lying on his stomach with his arms outstretched in the shape of a cross. His head was twisted to one side, the lips drawn back in a rictus of agony. A stab wound in the middle of his back had left a dark stain in the checked hacking jacket he wore. Some deep internal injury was signalled by the gush of blood from his mouth on to the surrounding floorboards. At the very edge of the pool of dried blood, a curved indentation was visible.

  “Do you see that?” Madden pointed. “Someone’s walked there.”

  “One of the killers, sir?” Billy peered over his shoulder.

  “I doubt it. The blood was already dry. Make a note for Mr. Sinclair.”

  Madden stepped carefully over the body. Billy followed, fumbling for his notepad. They were in an oak-panelled study, furnished with a desk and two stuffed-leather armchairs. The walls were hung with photographs, mostly of men in military uniform. Some showed them sitting on chairs, stiffly posed. Others were less formal. There were pictures of polo matches and clay-pigeon shooting. Madden seemed more interested in a pair of shotguns mounted on a wall rack.

  “Was he trying to reach one of those, I wonder?” He spoke the thought aloud.

  “Or the telephone, sir?” Billy seized on the chance to participate. He indicated the instrument standing on the desk.

  Madden grunted. He was still looking at the gun rack, frowning.

  “Something’s missing from the mantelpiece, sir.” Billy tried again. He was feeling better. The smell was less strong in here. “That mark on the wallpaper . . .”

  “A clock, most likely.” Madden spoke without turning. “There might have been other stuff up there. Silver cu
ps. The maid will know.”

  He led the way out and walked back along the passage, checking each room as he came to it. He paused at only one, the dining-room, where plates and cutlery from the previous night’s meal lay on the uncleared table.

  At the far end of the corridor was a swing door. The inspector pushed it open and went through. Billy, following on his heels, retched involuntarily and almost threw up as a pungent reek assailed his nostrils. They were in the kitchen. The afternoon sun poured through unshaded windows on to a table where the remains of a roast chicken rested on a platter beside a glistening ham. As Madden approached, a cloud of flies rose into the air and then settled on the food again. Beyond the table a chair had been knocked over on its back and directly behind it a woman’s body lay on the stone-flagged floor, half propped against the wall. Grey-haired, plump-featured, she was dressed in a blood-stained white blouse and an ankle-length skirt of dark blue material. Her face wore a surprised expression.

  “The nanny,” Madden murmured. He glanced at Billy, who had chosen that moment to shut his eyes while he tried to control his heaving stomach. “Give me your handkerchief, Constable.”

  “Sir?” Billy’s eyes shot open.

  “You’ve got one, haven’t you?”

  “Sir!” He gave it to Madden, who wet the cloth at the sink and handed it back to Billy.

  “Put that over your nose, son.”

  “Please, sir, I don’t need—”

  “Do as I say.”

  Without waiting to see if his order was carried out, the inspector crossed the room to where the body lay. Brushing aside the flies he bent down and unfastened the blouse, drawing it apart. From where he was standing Billy could see the wound, neat as a buttonhole, between the tops of the veined breasts. Madden stayed staring at it for a long time. When he rose his eyes had that unseeing “other-world” look, and Billy was relieved. The damp mask across his nose made the stench in the kitchen bearable, but the handkerchief felt like a badge of shame. As soon as they were back in the passage he tugged it off.

  They returned to the hallway and he followed Madden up the stairs to the floor above. When they came to a landing the inspector paused.

  “Do you see?” he asked, pointing.

  Billy peered into the shadows. Embedded in the pile of the wine-coloured stair carpet were tiny pinpricks of reflected light. “What are they, sir?” he asked.

  “Seed pearls. From a bracelet, I should think. They’ve been trodden in. Watch your step.”

  At the top of the stairs there was another passage, like the one below, running the length of the house.

  “Wait here,” Madden told Billy.

  He walked down the corridor to his right, checking the rooms, and then returned to the stairway. At the first doorway on the other side he paused.

  “Over here, Constable.”

  The inspector’s voice carried a note that gave Billy time to prepare himself. He walked the few steps to the door and followed Madden into the room. At first he could make nothing of the twilight gloom. The curtains, which must have been drawn the previous evening, still blocked out most of the daylight. Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the half-darkness, he saw the body. Mrs. Fletcher, Billy thought. The colonel’s lady. (The painting in the drawing-room was fresh in his mind.) She was lying on her back on the bed, flung across it, it seemed, with her legs parted and her arms spread out, the fingers clenched. A silk dressing-gown of oriental design, embroidered with red flowers and tied at the waist with a sash, was spread out on the bed on either side of her like a half-opened fan. Her legs and the bottom of her stomach were bare. The sight of her pubic hair made Billy blush and turn away. He couldn’t see her face—her head was hanging over the other side—but when he followed Madden around the foot of the bed he saw the fair hair cascading down.

  “Keep clear,” Madden warned him sharply. “There’ll be blood on the floor.”

  Billy was just wondering how the inspector knew that—could he see in the dark?—when the answer became clear. Staring down at the livid gash in the white column of flesh, he felt a sense of violation stronger than anything he had experienced that day.

  “Why’d they do that?” Billy couldn’t stop himself. “Why’d they have to cut her throat?”

  Boyce was waiting for them when they came out on to the terrace again. The sun was lower in the sky, the shadows lengthening.

  “Mr. Sinclair rang from Guildford,” he told Madden. “He’ll be here soon.”

  “You can start the men searching the gardens.” The inspector lit a cigarette. “But stay out of the woods for now.”

  Boyce wondered what Madden had made of the shambles inside the house. He searched in vain for any hint in the dark, withdrawn eyes.

  “You don’t think they came that way, do you?”

  The inspector shrugged. “If they drove in the front gates, why come round to this side to break in? They could have knocked on the door.” To Billy, he said, “Find that village bobby—what’s his name? Stackpole?”

  Billy returned in a few minutes with a tall moustached constable. Madden greeted him.

  “Do you know these woods?” he asked.

  “Well enough, sir.” Stackpole eyed him warily. Word had spread about the Scotland Yard inspector who’d told the Lord Lieutenant where to get off.

  “Come along, then. You too, Styles.”

  A gravel path through the shrubbery at the bottom of the garden led to a wooden gate. On the other side of the wall they found a uniformed constable patrolling a small expanse of meadow grass bordering a shallow stream. He was a young man, not much older than Billy himself, and with similar colouring—fair skin and reddish hair. His face was flushed by hours spent in the broiling sun.

  “Excuse me, sir.” He hurried over to them.

  “What is it, Constable?”

  Madden had paused to take off his hat and jacket and hang them on the gate. When he rolled up his sleeves Billy saw a random pattern of scars spread over his forearm the size and shape of sixpences.

  “A footprint, sir. Down by the stream. I noticed it earlier.”

  “Show me.”

  The constable led the way down the gently sloping bank. He pointed. “There, sir, next to the stepping-stones. Coming this way.”

  The stream, diminished by weeks of drought, had shrunk to half its normal size. The earlier course of the water was marked by a surface of smooth dried mud. It was on this that the faint imprint of a footmark showed beside one of a line of flat stones crossing the stream. Madden nodded his approval.

  “Well spotted, Constable.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Go up to the house. My compliments to Mr. Boyce and ask him to send a couple of men down here with some plaster-of-paris. Tell him the footprint’s shallow but well defined and if they’re careful they should get a good cast of it.”

  “Right away, sir.” The constable set off briskly.

  Madden went down on his haunches. Stackpole joined him, squinting at the stream bed.

  “He might have missed his footing, sir. Coming across last evening, just as it was getting dark.”

  “Big man.” The inspector frowned. “Size eleven, I should say. That looks like a boot mark.”

  Stackpole pursed his lips. “Course, it could be anyone’s.”

  Billy felt the prick of envy. First the young constable. Now the village bobby!

  Madden led them across the stepping-stones to the opposite bank. Almost at once they were in the wood, moving uphill through a stand of saplings that ended when they came to the tall beeches. A sea of fern and brush covered the ground on either side of the path, which was well used and easy to follow. The air was hot and still.

  “Do the villagers come up here often?” Madden spoke over his shoulder.

  “A fair bit, sir.” Stackpole kept pace with the inspector’s long stride. “Time was when the whole hanger was a shoot, but that was before the war. Now his lordship only has two keepers and they don’t c
ome over this way, except once in a while.”

  Panting at the rear, trying to keep up with them, Billy had to watch for branches whipping back in his face. When he caught the cuff of his jacket in a bramble thicket, the constable paused to help disentangle him. He was grinning under his helmet. “City boy,” he whispered.

  Billy flushed a deeper red. He saw Madden was watching them from above, hands on hips.

  The hill steepened as they neared the top of the ridge. Madden stopped. He sniffed the air. “Constable?”

  “Yes, sir. I smell it . . .”

  Stackpole cast about him with narrowed eyes. Billy caught a whiff of something. They were in the middle of a steeply sloping forest of pines. The carpet of ferns stretched unbroken on either side of them.

  “Can’t tell which way the wind’s blowing,” the constable complained.

  “Quiet!” Madden spoke sharply.

  They stood in silence. Billy heard a low rustle in the undergrowth away to their left. Madden picked up a stick and threw it. A raucous cry broke the stillness, followed by the flapping of black wings as a pair of crows rose from the ground and flew off, threading a path through the lofty pines.

  Madden and Stackpole looked at each other.

  “Let’s take a look,” the inspector said.

  Madden left the path and began wading through the waist-high ferns. Keeping his eye fixed on the spot where the crows had appeared, he worked his way up and across the slope. Stackpole stayed close behind. Billy, struggling in the rear as before, lost his footing on the steep slope and had to grab at a root to keep himself from sliding down. His hat fell off. He caught it with his other hand. For a moment he lay spreadeagled like a starfish on the hillside. The others paused and looked back.

  “It’s all right, sir,” Billy gasped. “I’m coming.” He could see Stackpole chuckling.

  By the time he caught up with them they had stopped and were standing with their backs to him looking down. Madden held out a hand to check Billy’s puffing uphill progress. The young constable saw they were at the edge of an area where the undergrowth had been flattened. The body of a small white dog lay on the ground in front of them. Beyond it was the corpse of a man, clad in a soiled cloth coat. He lay on his back with his head pointing down the slope. His hands, clutching at his chest, had torn apart his bloodsoaked shirt. Where his eyes had been there were only pits. Billy blenched at the sight of the sockets, filled with congealed blood.