by Rennie Airth
Madden awoke in tears to find her asleep beside him, her hair spread out over the pillow. Before undressing she had draped her red silk shawl over the bedside lamp and at the sight of her body, naked and glowing in the rosy light, his grief dissolved. As he drew up the sheet to cover them she reached out in her sleep and he moved quickly, easing himself into the circle of her arms, careful not to wake her.
5
Hefting his leather holdall, Amos Pike climbed over the stile, glancing back as he did so to make sure he wasn’t being followed. As always, he was taking a roundabout route to his destination. He had grown up on the edge of a wood where wild things lived—foxes and badgers and a range of smaller predators—and had learned early from his father how skilled most were at disguising their tracks.
When he came to a ditch separating two fields he stepped into it and continued on his way, unseen, walking with long springy strides in the shadow of a hawthorn hedge. Today was Tuesday, not a day he normally had off, but Mrs. Aylward had gone to visit her sister in Stevenage for the week, taking the train, and apart from chores in the garden his time was his own until Friday evening. Usually he could count on being free one weekend out of two, though Mrs. Aylward would occasionally change her plans at the last minute and when she did so he was expected to conform, cancelling his own arrangements. He did so without complaint. His job had advantages of a rare kind. Unlooked-for opportunities had come his way.
He was approaching a small hamlet, a group of cottages at a crossroads surrounded by fields and orchards, and he paused in the shade of the hedge for several minutes while he scanned the scene. It was nearly one o’clock. Those of the inhabitants who were home would most likely be eating lunch. He didn’t wish to be seen by anyone. Satisfied, he walked on and came to a narrow dirt track that led to a gate in the back fence of a small thatched cottage, separated from the rest of the village by an apple orchard and unploughed fields.
He unlatched the gate and went into the garden. Pausing to run his eye over the small patch of lawn and the bed of hollyhocks and sweet peas growing against the cottage wall, he decided to spend an hour later trimming the grass and weeding the bed. He made a practice of keeping the place tidy, reasoning that if he did so it would discourage others from offering the same service to the occupant of the cottage. Pike had no interest in the garden, or its owner. It was the long wooden shed at the side of the lawn that was of concern to him and he aimed by indirect means to keep others away from it.
Depositing the holdall on the ground beside the door of the shed, he unstrapped it and took out a brown-paper parcel, which he carried across the lawn to the kitchen door. He entered the house without knocking.
“Who’s there?” The husky quaver came from a room inside.
Pike didn’t reply, but he walked from the kitchen through a hallway into a small parlour at the front of the cottage where an old woman sat by the lace-netted window nursing a fat tabby.
“Is that you, Mr. Grail?” The eyes she turned towards him were covered with a greyish film. In spite of the heat she wore a woollen shawl tucked over the shoulders of her faded quilted gown. “I was expecting you last week.”
“I couldn’t come, Mrs. Troy,” Pike said in his cold voice. “I had to work.”
“I ran out of tea.” The timid voice held a note of apology. “I had to borrow some from Mrs. Church.”
Pike frowned. “You should have said you were short.” He saw her flinch at his words and tried to check the natural harshness of his tone. “I brought you a packet. Plus some shortbread. You asked for that.”
“Did you bring me any fish?” She spoke in a near-whisper, turning her face away, as though afraid of his response.
“No.” He was losing patience. Her existence meant nothing to him, beyond the fact that it should continue. “They don’t sell fish where I am,” he lied brutally. “I brought you eggs and bacon and ham. And bread and rice. I’ll put it away in the larder.”
A minute later he was outside again, crossing the lawn to the shed. Had Winifred Troy still possessed her sight she would hardly have recognised the structure. Pike had replaced the former roof with sheets of corrugated iron, boarded over the single window and fitted a new door equipped with a heavy padlock opened by a key, which he kept about his person at all times.
The shed dated from a time, some years before, when Mrs. Troy and her husband, who had since died, had let the cottage to an artist from the city. With their agreement he had built a studio in the small garden and had used the cottage as a weekend retreat and holiday home. By far the most radical alteration Pike had made was to knock down the end wall and install a pair of stable doors in its place. These opened on to the dirt track which ran through the fields and orchards for half a mile before joining a paved road.
Wrinkling his nose at the musty, airless smell, Pike latched the door shut behind him. It was dark in the shed and he lit a paraffin lamp at once. In the artist’s day there had been ample illumination from a pair of skylights in the roof, but these had gone. Amos Pike disliked the idea of being overlooked.
The space inside the shed was mainly given over to a large object, covered with a dust cloth, which stood in the middle of the cement floor. Pike removed the cloth with a flick of his wrist: a motorcycle and sidecar were revealed beneath.
The shed quickly grew hot, the radiation of the lamp combining with the hot sun on the corrugated-iron roof to turn the room into an oven. Pike took off his shirt. His heavily muscled body bore a number of scars, large and small. He put his holdall on a table and took from it a half-gallon tin of red paint and a pair of brushes. He had bought the paint in a hardware store that morning after having been assured by the salesman that it would adhere to metal. He prised off the lid of the tin with a chisel, spread a sheet of newspaper on the floor and sat down cross-legged. He began to paint over the black bodywork.
His movements were precise and, like all his physical actions, governed by a sense of economy and order. This pattern of behaviour had been acquired at an early age and was the result of an event in his life so catastrophic he had only been able to continue his existence by recourse to a system of interlocking disciplines that guaranteed him control over every waking moment.
Tormented for years by the terror and anguish of his dreams, he had lately found them diminished both in power and frequency. While he could not have framed such a thought himself, it was as though his subconscious had finally worn itself out and ceded the battlefield to his iron will.
Having lived with his grandparents for some years, he had gone for a soldier at the age of sixteen and found a way of life ideally suited to his needs, the strict demands of military practice fitting easily into his own more rigorous code. He had prospered to the extent of his capacities and by the time war broke out had already attained the rank of sergeant. For a while he had been employed as an instructor at a training depot, but when his battalion was posted to the front he had assumed his former position as a company sergeant.
Wounded on several occasions, he nevertheless managed to survive in the lottery of trench warfare, and the summer of 1917 had found him, now a company sergeant major, engaged with his battalion in the British offensive south of Ypres at the start of the months-long agony that would later be called Passchendaele.
During the bitter struggle for control of the Menin Road, Pike’s company had come under heavy fire from the German artillery. Crouched behind a tree-stump he saw a man’s head blown off as neatly as if it had been hewn with an axe, the trunk stumbling on for several paces before collapsing. Next moment he was flung high into the air by an exploding shell that buried itself in the ground a few yards away.
He awoke to find himself lying in a crater with the battle still raging around him. Concussed and barely conscious, he listened to the fluttering sound of shells as they streamed through the upper air overhead. A great cloud of smoke and dust hung over the battlefield. He saw men running past him on their way back to the lines, but when he opened h
is mouth to call to them no sound issued from his lips.
He slept for a few hours, but woke towards evening and realized for the first time that he had received a slight wound to his wrist. Although his limbs were undamaged he found he had no desire to move from where he was, lying on the slope of the crater, staring up at the violet sky. From habit he removed the field dressing sewn into the flap of his tunic and poured iodine into the cut on his wrist. He discovered he still had his water-bottle with him and he drank from it.
At that moment he became aware that he was not alone in the crater. A man from his own company named Hallett lay on the opposite slope, curled up on his side, hugging his bloodsoaked tunic. He was calling out faintly, begging for water. Pity had never stirred in the icy heart of Amos Pike; and he watched in silence as the man died.
During the night it began to rain, a hard, driving, relentless downpour, which turned the dry powdery dust of the battlefield into a quagmire. The battle resumed before dawn. German mortar shells whistled overhead. Smoking clods of earth were flung into the crater. By the blanching flare of a rocket Pike saw troops moving forward weighed down with rolls of wire and pigeon baskets, picks and shovels, but he made no attempt to attract their attention.
Morning came. The body of Hallett had vanished. He saw nothing but mud all around him. Mud and the stumps of trees, and bodies, or parts of bodies—nearby he spied a hand holding a mug, nothing more. The crater became a lake of liquified mud and when he dozed off he slid down the slope and had to claw his way back up, covered in clayey ooze. The rain had stopped and presently the sun came out. Pike slept again. When he awoke he discovered that the mud had formed a hard crust about his body. It would have been a simple matter to break it, but he found he was content to lie where he was, immobile, his limbs held fast in the mud’s embrace.
He began to review his life, and as he did so a strange image took shape in his mind. He saw himself wrapped in a winding sheet like an Egyptian mummy, unable to move, the prisoner of a rigid and unforgiving regime was slowly grinding his life to dust. He felt a fierce urge to break out, to burst his bonds. Yet the winding sheet spoke to him of death and he knew that if he decided to lie there, unmoving, he would presently die. And that that, too, would be a solution.
He endeavoured to fix his mind on the problem, to come to some kind of decision. As the mud continued to harden about him he heard a sucking sound and Hallett’s bloated body surfaced in the crater, coming to rest on the slope beneath his feet. One of the eyes had remained open and it settled on Pike with an accusing glare. He felt an urge to turn away, but found he couldn’t do so without cracking the shell of mud coating his neck and jaw. Part of him wished to stay as he was, stiff and unmoving; another part longed for release.
Early next morning a pair of stretcher-bearers found him and brought him back to the British lines, still encased in his suit of mud. He was put in the hands of a medical orderly, who freed him by tapping at the shell with a cook’s ladle as though he were cracking an egg, peeling off the covering a piece at a time.
“There!” he said. “Just like a new-hatched chick.”
The words had a powerful effect on Pike. All of a sudden he felt free. Reborn! A dark urge, like a dragon waking, stirred in his entrails.
The regimental officer pronounced him concussed and he was dispatched, via a casualty clearing station, to the base hospital at Boulogne where they kept him for a week and then returned him to his company.
Pike’s battalion had been withdrawn from the line and was resting in a rear area near a village in the midst of farming country, some of it still being worked by peasant families.
As soon as he got back he began to cast around.
6
At the end of the week, on Bennett’s orders, Sinclair and Madden drew up a report on the current state of the investigation.
The lengthy inquiry into the whereabouts of mental patients discharged from Army wards was nearly concluded. No likely suspects had been identified. Recent purchasers of Harley Davidson motorcycles living in the Home Counties had been interviewed and the investigation was being broadened to other regions. Second-hand dealers were also being questioned. A description of the man sought had been circulated to police authorities, and Sinclair had sent a separate message to stations in the south of England asking them to instruct rural constables to be on the lookout for motorcyclists travelling by back roads over the weekends. Where possible, they were to be stopped and questioned and a note made of their particulars. The constables were urged to exercise caution.
“Another Friday!” Sinclair stood at the window of his office and stared down at the sluggish tidal flow of the Thames. “And to think I used to look forward to the weekends! Now I sit waiting for the telephone to ring. I wonder what he’s up to, our friend with the size eleven boots.”
Madden had arrived at the office that morning to find the chief inspector glowering over a copy of the Daily Express , whose front page was covered with photographs and a story about the R38 airship, which had crashed into the Humber a few days before with the loss of more than forty lives.
“Thank God for all disasters great and small. Any other day it would have been us smeared all over the front page.”
He opened the paper and handed it to Madden who saw the headline: “Melling Lodge Mystery—Murders Still Unsolved—Disquiet at the Yard.”
“Sampson’s been talking to that stoat Ferris.”
The article began by summarizing the information already published about the case and noting that the police remained “baffled” by the mysterious killings. “In the opinion of some observers they are no closer now to solving the crime than they were at the start of the investigation.”
It went on: A measure of their desperation may be seen in the spreading rumours that certain officers are in favour of seeking help from outside sources.
While such a course has seldom brought benefits in the past—and is strongly opposed by experienced detectives—nevertheless voices are being raised in support of it by some of those most closely connected to the inquiry, which is being conducted by Chief Inspector Angus Sinclair.
“Sampson’s chosen his moment,” Sinclair conceded. “Bennett’s seeing the Assistant Commissioner this afternoon. Parkhurst will want to know what’s being done to advance the investigation. You can see the chief super’s game. He thinks he’s got us stymied. He’s waiting for the cry to go up: ‘Send for Sampson of the Yard!’ ”
“He’s not afraid of it any more?” Madden was surprised. “He thinks he can crack it?”
“Why not?” Sinclair shrugged. “Even with the rough description we have—that plus the motorcycle—we’ve got enough to identify him. Given a little luck.”
“And time,” Madden pointed out.
“Aye . . . time.” The chief inspector looked sombre. “But what if Sampson’s right? What if this man’s no more than a thief who lost his head? We could be on the wrong track. We’re still guessing. We don’t know anything.”
“How would you explain Bentham, then?”
“We don’t know that was him. We can only be sure about Highfield, and perhaps it’s as Sampson says. He tossed everything into the dugout in a panic after the killings and only thought later about coming back to collect it.”
It was the first time Madden had seen his superior look discouraged. “I don’t agree,” he said. “It’s something else. We both felt it at Melling Lodge. He didn’t go there to rob and steal, any more than he did at the Reynolds’ farm. I still think it’s the women.”
“But why? What does he want with them?”
Madden had no answer. But he did have an idea in mind.
Later that same day, the inspector took a rare, extended lunch-hour. Helen Blackwell had come up to London.
“I’m supposed to be shopping. We need new curtains for the drawing-room, but somehow I don’t think I’ll find the right material today.” She laughed and kissed him on the cheek. They had met at a restaurant off Picca
dilly. There wasn’t a table free immediately and they were sitting on a banquette in the crowded waiting area. On either side of them young women with bobbed hair and brightly painted faces chattered in high-pitched voices. Blood-red nails tipped ash from the ends of cigarettes mounted in long holders. Somewhere out of sight a pianist was playing ragtime. It was a new world to Madden.
“Don’t scowl. It makes you look like a policeman.”
He laughed, and she slipped her arm through his.
“I have to be back in Guildford by four. They’re short staffed at the hospital and I’m helping out. I wish we weren’t both so busy.”
She was wearing a dress of pleated cotton and a straw hat trimmed with cherries. Madden leaned closer to drink in the scent of jasmine. She examined his face with her clear gaze. “You’re not getting enough sleep. I’ll write you a prescription before I go.”
“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” he said. “I’ve got a favour to ask.”
“What is it?”
“Later.” He didn’t want to spoil the moment. He was happy just to be with her, to sit beside her and feel the pressure of her arm linked with his. Without meaning to, he spoke: “Christ, I miss you.”
She continued looking at him, holding his eyes in her steady glance. Then, not caring that they were in a public place, she leaned over and kissed him on the lips.
Madden felt his face grow warm. “Let’s forget this,” he urged. “Come back to my place.”
She stood up at once, drawing him with her. “I was hoping you’d say that.” She was laughing. “I was going to suggest it myself, but I’m afraid you already think I’m too bold.”