by Rennie Airth
The last part of Dr. Blackwell’s statement, an account of her urgent summons to the house on Monday morning, was given in cold medical language. She had examined each of the victims in turn and pronounced them dead. Rigor was starting to recede and she had estimated the time of death at a little over twelve hours earlier. She said “something” had made her look under the bed in the nursery. She employed the same phrase as she had used with Madden to describe Sophy’s condition when she found her. “Profound shock.”
The question of strangers in the village over the weekend was dealt with in several of the statements. Frederick Poole, the landlord of the Rose and Crown, reported a bus load of passengers in a Samuelson motor coach stopping at the pub for lunch on Saturday. The company had alerted him ahead of time. As far as he knew, all those who alighted from the bus had boarded the vehicle again later. Apart from that, there had been upward of a score of motorists and cyclists who had called in at the pub on Saturday and Sunday. None had stuck in his mind. All had continued their journeys.
Freda Birney, the wife of the owner of the village shop, Alf Birney, reported seeing two hikers picnicking by the stream between the outskirts of the village and Melling Lodge on Sunday just before twelve o’clock. She had been taking the dog for a walk before preparing lunch for her family. Madden made a note to have the hikers traced and questioned.
Running his eye over the next statement in the pile, he paused, went back and reread it carefully, checked the name of the interviewing officer, and then put it to one side.
Billy Styles pushed the form across the table, watched the man sign it, said, “Thank you, sir, that’ll be all for now,” then leaned back in his chair and stretched. His tenth interview of the day. Harold Toombs, the village sexton. Billy had had to fight to keep a straight face as he wrote it down. Toombs had spent the weekend working in his garden. He had neither seen nor heard anything out of the ordinary.
It was a matter of amazement to Billy that he was still part of the investigation. After his experiences of the day before he had expected to find himself back in the CID pool at Scotland Yard.
Detective Sergeant Hollingsworth, who’d brought him the news, seemed equally surprised. A stocky, nut-faced man with twenty years on the force, he affected to find Billy’s presence among them a source of wonder. “Can’t think what the guv’nor has in mind. No bloodhounds in your family tree, are there, Detective Constable Styles? No hidden talents we’re not apprised of?”
On receiving word, Billy had experienced a moment of elation, quickly followed by one of foreboding as he contemplated the prospect of spending another day under the dark glance of Inspector Madden.
But thus far, beyond a polite, “Good morning, sir,” from Billy, and a distracted nod in response from the inspector, they hadn’t exchanged a word, and Billy had found himself mildly bored as he recorded the villagers’ bald accounts of the long, sun-drenched weekend.
Now he saw Madden, sitting in the corner of the hall, beckon to him. He rose from the table and went over. “Sir?”
Madden held out a statement form. “Yours, I think?”
Billy glanced at it. “Yes, sir. May Birney. Her father owns the village store.”
The inspector eyed him. “Well, did she, or didn’t she, Constable?” he asked.
“Sir, she wasn’t sure.” Billy shuffled nervously. “First she said she did, then she changed her mind. Said she must have been mistaken.”
“Why did she do that? Change her mind?”
“Sir . . . sir, I don’t know.”
Madden stood up so abruptly Billy had to spring backwards. “Let’s see if we can find out, shall we?” With a nod to Boyce he strode from the hall. Billy hurried after him.
The village store, a few minutes’ walk away down Highfield’s only paved road, was situated between the pub and the post office. Alf Birney, plump, with a fringe of grey hair like a monk’s tonsure, came from behind the counter to show them into a curtained-off room at the back of the shop.
“It’s not right this should have happened,” he muttered. “Not to a lady like Mrs. Fletcher. Not to any of them.” He shifted a carton of custard powder off a chair to make room for Madden. “I can remember when she was a child. She used to come to the shop every Saturday to buy her sweets. Little Lucy . . .”
He left them there, and a minute later his daughter came in. May Birney was no more than sixteen. She was dressed in a dun-coloured work smock, her bobbed hair cut in a fringe across her pale forehead.
“Get it straight in your mind now, girl.” Her father’s voice came from beyond the curtain. “Tell the inspector exactly what you heard.”
Miss Birney stood before them, nervously twisting her fingers. Madden looked at Billy and nodded. Taken by surprise—he’d assumed the inspector would handle the questioning—Billy cleared his throat. “It’s about this business of the whistle you say you heard. Or didn’t hear.” He spoke loudly, and watched her flush and steal a glance at Madden who was seated at a table in the middle of the room.
“You were out walking the dog, you said,” Billy prompted her.
May Birney stared at her feet.
“Tell us again what happened.”
The girl said something inaudible.
“What?” Billy heard himself almost shouting. “I didn’t hear. What did you say?”
“I said I told you before but you said I was imagining it.” She spoke very quickly looking down.
“I never said that—” Billy checked himself. “I asked you if you were sure you’d heard a police whistle and you said, no, you weren’t—”
“I said like a police whistle.”
“All right, like a police whistle, but then you said perhaps you’d been mistaken and you hadn’t heard it at all. Do you remember saying that?”
The girl fell silent again.
Billy stepped nearer. He felt Madden’s eyes on him. “Now listen to me, May Birney. This is a serious matter. I don’t need to remind you what happened at Melling Lodge on Sunday night. Stop saying you’re not sure or you don’t remember. Either you heard something or you didn’t. And if you’re making all this up . . . !”
The girl turned bright red.
Madden spoke. “Would you like to sit down, May?” He drew up another chair for her. After a moment’s hesitation, the girl complied. “Now let’s see, I’m a little puzzled, what time did this happen?”
“Around nine o’clock, sir. Might have been a little later.”
“Was it still light?”
“Just getting dark.”
“You were walking the dog?”
“Yes, sir, Bessie. She’s getting old, you see, and needs to be taken, but if you put her outside, she just flops down, so Mum and me, we take her down to the stream and make her walk a bit.” She kept her eyes on Madden’s face.
“Then you heard what sounded like a police whistle?”
“Yes, sir, like that. The same sort of sound.”
“Just once?”
May Birney hesitated. Her brow creased in concentration. “Well, sir, it was like I said.” She shot a glance at Billy. “First it was there, then it sort of faded away, and then it came back just for a moment.”
Madden’s brow creased. “Was there a breeze blowing?” he asked.
The girl’s face lit up. “Yes, sir, that was it. That’s what happened. It came and went on the wind. I heard it twice. But it was so faint . . .”
“You wondered if you’d heard it at all?”
She nodded vigorously. Shooting another defiant glance at Billy, she said, “I just wasn’t sure.”
“But you are now?” Madden leaned forward. “Take your time, May. Think about it.”
But she paused for only a moment. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Now I’m sure. Positive.”
On their way back to the church hall, Madden paused outside the Rose and Crown. A low brick wall enclosed the cobbled yard in front of the pub and he sat down on it and took out his packet of cigarettes. “I belie
ve you smoke, Constable?”
“Thank you, sir.” Surprised and pleased, Billy fumbled with his matches. Madden accepted a light.
“This job we have,” he drew on his cigarette, “it gives us a lot of power in small ways.”
“Sir?” Billy didn’t understand.
“It’s tempting to use it, particularly with people who . . . who don’t know how to defend themselves.”
Billy was silent.
“Do you understand what I’m saying, Constable?”
He shook his head.
“Don’t take the easy way, son.” Madden looked at him now. “Don’t become a bully.”
The cigarette in Billy’s mouth had turned to gall.
“Now go and see if Mr. Boyce has something for you to do.”
9
The following morning the inspector went from cottage to cottage on the Melling Lodge side of Highfield, inquiring whether any of the occupants had heard a whistle on Sunday evening.
The third door he knocked on was opened by Stackpole. The village bobby, still in his shirtsleeves, carried a small curly-haired girl in the crook of his arm whom he introduced as “our Amy.”
“Can’t help you, sir,” he told Madden. “It wasn’t me that whistled, that’s for certain. Sunday evening the wife and I were over having supper with her parents. They live on the other side of the green.”
A tow-haired boy peered out of a doorway behind him. Madden heard a baby’s wail.
“Pardon me for saying so, sir, but young May Birney isn’t what I’d call a reliable witness. Got her head in the clouds half the time, that young lady. She’s sweet on a lad who works for one of Lord Stratton’s tenants, but her parents are dead set against him. I’ve seen her down by the stream, mooning about.”
Madden smiled. Like all good village bobbies, Stackpole made everyone else’s business his own. “In the end, she seemed quite sure she’d heard it,” he said.
“Could have been something else,” the constable suggested. “Jimmy Wiggins whistling up his bitch. Or one of his lordship’s keepers.”
“Perhaps.”
The inspector gave an account of his visit to Oakley the day before. “I didn’t take to Wellings. He didn’t strike me as being truthful.”
“I’m not surprised,” Stackpole observed. “Lies as he breathes, that one.”
“Gates said he handles stolen goods.”
“You weren’t thinking . . . ?” The constable raised an eyebrow.
“The stuff taken from Melling Lodge?” Madden shrugged. “It did cross my mind. What’s your view?”
Stackpole shifted the little girl to his other arm. “I’d say if someone offered Sid Wellings a set of silver candlesticks, or a piece of jewellery, he’d snap it up. But by the time you talked to him he must have known what happened at the Lodge and if he had any connection with it, even by chance, he’d have been wetting himself.”
Madden nodded. “All the same, next time you’re over there, speak to him. Ask him the same questions. What was he doing over the weekend? Who did he see passing through the village? Let him know we’re not satisfied with his answers.”
Stackpole looked at the inspector curiously. “Do you still think he came through Oakley, sir?” And then, after a pause: “It is ‘he’ we’re looking for, isn’t it? Not some gang?”
“We believe it’s one man,” Madden confirmed. “But keep that to yourself for now. About Oakley, I’m not sure. He had to have some kind of transport. We think he was carrying a rifle, and when he left he must have had what he took from the Lodge. I don’t think he could have come into the area on foot, even through the fields, without someone spotting him.”
“A rifle, sir?”
“He killed them with a rifle and bayonet—we’re fairly sure of that. All except Mrs. Fletcher.”
“Is he a soldier then?” Stackpole scowled.
“I doubt it. There’s no military camp anywhere near. An ex-soldier, more like it.”
“Plenty of them about.” The constable pressed Madden to come in for a cup of tea, but he declined the offer. Stackpole himself was due at Melling Lodge to join the party searching the woods, “Between you and me, sir, it’s a waste of time. Even with Lord Stratton’s keepers helping. Most of these lads are town bred. They’ll more likely step on something than see it.”
An hour later Madden was back at the church hall. He had found no one to confirm May Birney’s story of the whistle. Sergeant Hollingsworth was seated at the table where Boyce had been the day before. The Guildford inspector was supervising a check of all boots in the village.
“He’s got a fingerprint team with him, too, sir. They’ll take the prints of anyone who called regularly at the Lodge.”
“Anything else?” Madden began leafing through the pile of statements on the table.
“Only the lady doctor, sir. She came by, asking for you. It’s to do with the little girl.”
“What about her?” Madden looked up quickly. “Is something the matter?”
“Not that I know of, sir.” Hollingsworth scratched his head. “Dr. Blackwell just wants a word with you. But she said it was important.”
Madden broke the police seal on the front door of Melling Lodge and went inside. The house lay in semi-darkness, with the curtains pulled. The metallic smell of blood was still strong in the hot, musty air.
Standing in the flagged hall, he pictured the scene as it must have happened. The man with the rifle bursting into the drawing-room from the terrace, glass and wood splintering, the maid with the coffee tray turning, mouth open, ready to scream—
In! Out! On guard!
The commands he’d once been taught came back to him, accompanied by a sickening image.
The killer had caught Colonel Fletcher before he could reach the guns in the study, then the nanny in the kitchen, running from room to room down the long passage.
In! Out! On guard!
Why such haste? Madden wondered. What was driving him?
Racing up the stairs he had encountered Lucy Fletcher, dropped his weapon and seized her by the upper arms. He was big and strong, judging by the size of the footprint in the stream bed, if it was his. Madden saw him picking up the woman by the arms and holding her clear of the floor—they had found no heel marks dragged across the carpet—carrying her into the bedroom and flinging her across the bed like . . . Lord Stratton’s words returned to him, like a sacrifice.
He saw the white throat hideously slashed, the cascade of golden hair . . .
The nursery, papered with daffodils and bluebells, was at the end of the passage upstairs. It contained two beds, one unmade. Dolls and stuffed toys sat in a row on a wooden shelf. A model aeroplane hung from the ceiling. Madden took a laundry bag off its hook behind the door, emptied it and put in fresh clothes from the cupboard and two pairs of girls’ shoes retrieved from a foot locker. Other items went into a brown paper bag he found on top of the cupboard.
A uniformed officer had been posted in the forecourt outside. At Madden’s direction he made a list of everything taken from the nursery, which the inspector signed.
“I’m removing these articles from the house,” he told the constable. “My compliments to Mr. Boyce and see that he’s informed.”
The avenue of limes led to a pleasant half-timbered house with a garage on one side where a red Wolseley two-seater was parked. The maid whom Madden had seen upstairs on his previous visit answered the doorbell. She led him straight through the drawing-room out into the garden. Dr. Blackwell was seated in an arbour at one end of the terrace with a little girl beside her—Sophy Fletcher had waist-length fair hair. She was dressed in a blue muslin frock belted with a yellow sash.
At the sight of the inspector she sprang from her chair and threw herself on to the doctor’s lap, burying her face in her shoulder.
Shocked, Madden halted. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to alarm her.”
He turned to go back inside the house, but Helen Blackwell called out to him, “Don�
��t go, please.”
To the child, she said, “Sophy, this is Inspector Madden. He’s a policeman.”
The little girl, her face still hidden, gave no response. Madden could see her body trembling.
“Come and sit down,” the doctor urged him. “I want Sophy to get used to being with strangers again.” Privately she wondered if it wasn’t the inspector’s grim aspect that had upset the child. She saw that Madden was carrying a bag in each hand.
“You’ll have some lemonade with us, won’t you?” She sought to lighten the deep frown with a smile. “Mary, pour the inspector a glass, would you?” A jug and glasses stood on the table in front of them.
Madden tugged open the laundry bag. “I brought some of Sophy’s clothes from the Lodge,” he explained.
“How very kind of you.” She was touched by his gesture. “I was going to ask about that. This is something Mary ran up. She patted the blue muslin back. “Luckily Sophy left a pair of shoes here on her last visit.”
“You wanted to talk to us?”
“Yes, please. Later?” She glanced down at the fair head. “Could you stay a little while?” He nodded. “I have a patient to see in the village, but I shan’t be long.”
She watched as he sat down and began emptying the brown-paper packet he had brought. He took out several dolls and a teddy bear and began arranging them in a circle on the grassed flagstones in front of him. Mary hovered. The inspector looked up. “Do you have any old tea-cups?” he asked. “The more chipped the better. And perhaps a jug of water?”
Dr. Blackwell nodded to the maid, who went into the house.
“Sophy . . .” She nudged the small figure on her lap. “Look what the inspector’s brought.”
The child didn’t move. Her face stayed sealed to the doctor’s shoulder.
The maid returned with a tray bearing an array of china. She put it on the ground beside Madden. He began to lay out the crockery, rattling the cups and saucers as he did so. Helen Blackwell felt a small movement. The child had turned her head. She was watching out of the corner of her eye.