by Rennie Airth
Hollingsworth cleared his throat.
“What is it, Sergeant?”
“A lot of people use those woods, sir. Ramblers, botanists, Scout troops. They could be a help.”
“What we would do well to avoid at this juncture,” the chief inspector enunciated clearly, “is a massacre of Boy Scouts.”
“Yes, sir, but we could ask them to keep an eye open. Through local police stations. Any sign of fresh digging. All they need do is report it.”
Sinclair looked at Madden, who nodded.
“Good idea, Sergeant. We’ll get word out.”
Sinclair waited until Hollingsworth had left the office. Then he spoke: “I had lunch with Bennett. Nothing from the War Office as yet. He’s tried to give them a nudge, but they move at their own speed over there.”
Madden remained bent over the map. Sinclair studied him benignly. “Take this Sunday off, John. I’ll be at home.”
“Are you sure, sir?” Madden looked up. They had agreed that one or other should be within reach of a telephone during the weekends.
“I am. Consult Mrs. Sinclair, if you have any doubts. She will assure you that the garden requires my urgent attention.”
The chief inspector had noted an alteration in his colleague’s appearance of late, a lightening of the shadows. There seemed to him at least one possible explanation for it. “If I were you I’d get out of London,” he suggested with guileless innocence. “Treat yourself to some country air.”
11
She was waiting for him at the station. The red Wolseley two-seater was parked where he remembered it, in the shade under the plane tree. Her tanned forearms resting on the steering-wheel reminded him of the moment beside the stream when they had kissed.
“Father’s off shooting pheasants.” She took his hand and pressed it to her cheek. “We’ve got the whole day to ourselves.”
The tables outside the Rose and Crown were crowded with lunchtime customers. Heads turned as they drove by.
Helen laughed. “That’ll set tongues wagging.”
But her smile faded as they passed the locked gates of Melling Lodge. “I get so angry whenever I think about it. There was no reason why it should have happened. The vicar saw fit to preach to us last Sunday on the mysterious workings of Divine Providence. I asked him afterwards if he thought the murders were an Act of God. He hasn’t spoken to me since.”
Madden put his hand on hers. “No reason, perhaps. But there might be an explanation. Have you seen Dr. Weiss again?” It felt strange to play the role of comforter.
“Franz came down for lunch the day before he went home. He said you’d met, but he didn’t say what you’d talked about.”
“I asked him to be discreet. I was breaking the rules by going to him as it was.”
Later, when they reached the house, he gave her an account of his conversation with the psychiatrist, speaking freely, as he always did when they discussed his work, shedding the reserve he would normally have shown with an outsider. He had never felt the need to keep any knowledge from her; he could think of no fact from which she might shrink.
“It’s not what I imagined,” she admitted. “I thought it was blind chance that brought him to that house. If Franz is right, he must have seen Lucy earlier. Does that mean he was in Highfield?”
“Most probably. But we don’t know when. Or why he came here.”
They ate lunch in the arbour on the terrace, looking out over the sun-bruised lawn. The green leaves of the weeping beech were changing to russet, and beyond the orchard the rising wave of Upton Hanger showed tints of red and gold.
Later, she suggested going for a walk. “I want to see the place where you and Will were shot at. I asked him to show me, but he refused. He didn’t dare say it was no business of a woman’s, but I could see he was longing to.”
She waited until the maid had finished clearing the table and taken the tray inside. “I’ve given Mary the afternoon off. We’ll have the house to ourselves when we get back.”
Her eyes bore an unmistakable invitation and Madden felt the blood stir within him. He had never known a woman like her. One so open in her desire, so free of shame or pretence. When they set off down the lawn, she called to the dog. “It’s all right, Molly. You can come this time.” Laughing when she caught his eye.
They went through the orchard to the gate at the bottom of the garden. He paused, crossing the stream, to sniff the air. “We’ll have rain later.”
“Why, John Madden! I didn’t know you were a country man.” She grasped his hand and let him draw her up on to the bank.
“I grew up on a farm. I didn’t move to London until after my father died.” He realized how little he had told her of himself. How much she had taken on trust. “After Alice and the baby died I left the force. I couldn’t continue with the same life. I had an idea of going back to the land.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“The war came instead.”
“And afterwards . . . ?”
“It didn’t seem to matter any more.”
Nothing had, he might truthfully have said, until he had met her.
When they reached the circle of beeches with its bowl of dead leaves—deeper now with the fresh falls of autumn—he recalled the image that had come to him before, of treading on a mattress of dead bodies. At their last meeting she had urged him not to block out his memories of the war. “That’s why your dreams are so intense. You must try to bring all that back into your conscious mind.”
He thought she hadn’t understood and had tried to explain. All he wanted to do was put the past behind him.
“I know how you feel. It’s like Sophy not speaking about that night. She wants to pretend it never happened. But our minds won’t let us do that. We have to remember before we can forget.”
He owed her so much already. The anguish of the past was receding, the abyss no longer yawned at his feet. He didn’t know how the miracle had occurred, only that he had found it lying in her arms, and in the assurance of her measured glance. He wanted to tell her these things, but could find no words that would not make some fresh claim on her, a claim to which he felt he had no right. He still thought of himself as damaged. Not a whole man.
He showed her the spot on the path where he and Stackpole had been standing when the first shots were fired and pointed out the thicket on the slope above. “I think he recognized Will and knew he was a policeman. I was just bending down to look at the footprint when I heard him draw back the bolt of his rifle.”
“What was he doing up there?” She shaded her eyes, scanning the dark line of ilexes.
“We’re not sure. He might have returned to collect what he stole from the house. He’d already started digging.”
“He was mad to come back. He could so easily have been caught.”
“According to Dr. Weiss that wouldn’t have stopped him. He says he acts from compulsion.”
She looked at the beech tree where Madden had taken cover, sliding her fingers into the jagged hole gouged in the side of the trunk. When he asked if she wanted to climb up to where the dugout was, she shook her head quickly. “No, let’s get away from here.”
The rain he’d predicted arrived in a blustery squall and they turned for home. By the time they reached the bottom of the ridge and crossed the stream it had become a downpour. The orchard offered no cover and they ran hand in hand to the shelter of the weeping beech. Madden saw that the lights were switched on in the house. Helen had seen them, too.
“Oh, no! Father’s back already!”
Laughing, she clung to him under the drooping branches. They were both wet through. When he began to kiss her she responded at once, wrapping her arms about his neck, drawing him deeper into the semi-darkness. “Can you manage? Tell me what to do . . .”
The sound of their breathing was lost in the drumming of the rain on the leaves.
She was happy afterwards, laughing still, when they stood out of sight of the house and tried to bring s
ome order to their clothing. The rain had stopped.
“I don’t know what Father will think.”
He made her stand still while he picked the leaves and twigs from her hair. She stood in front of him with her head bowed.
“Do you remember doing this for Sophy?” she asked. “I was watching you from the terrace. You looked so solemn, so purposeful. I think I knew then we’d be lovers.”
He smiled in reply, but her words pierced his heart. The tie that bound them seemed fragile to him. Lovers they might be now; they could not be forever. Only chance had brought them together, and he feared a time would come when he would lose her.
During the war Madden had come to think of his existence as something that would not continue. He had learned to live a day, sometimes even an hour, at a time.
Now, once more, he feared to look ahead.
He could not imagine a future without her.
Part Three
O Love, be fed with apples while you may,
And feel the sun and go in royal array,
A smiling innocent on the heavenly causeway,
Though in what listening horror for the cry
That soars in outer blackness dismally,
The dumb blind beast, the paranoiac fury . . .
Robert Graves, “Sick Love”
1
White-haired and frail, but with a curiosity undimmed by age and failing health, Harriet Merrick paused by the pond to count the puffballs of yellow feathers paddling behind their broad-beamed mother. Six. Only the other day there had been eight. Either a fox had been busy, or one of the village cats was finding the water-meadow a happy hunting ground. The afternoon darkened as a cloud moved across the sun. Thunder rumbled close by.
Mrs. Merrick glanced at the sky. She debated whether to return to the house. The thought of the scolding awaiting her there brought a smile to her lips. Her habit of taking solitary walks was a matter of concern to her son and daughter-in-law. It had reached the point where she was obliged to slip out when they weren’t looking. Mrs. Merrick maintained her independence serenely.
She decided to walk on. She was wearing a cardigan over her dress and a sensible straw hat. When she felt the first drops of rain she quickened her pace, then checked and deliberately slowed. Dr. Fellows had advised her to take exercise in moderation. “Don’t overdo it,” had been his considered judgement, delivered after a lengthy study of her chart. He told her her heart was “good for years,” though he did not say how many. Harriet Merrick, who had little faith in doctors, thought she was in reasonably good health and might expect to live for a while yet. Unless Providence decreed otherwise.
She was planning to walk around Shooter’s Hill—the path she was following circled the wooded knob, a pleasant ramble taking no more than half an hour—but the sudden brisk downpour prompted her to seek shelter beneath the trees bordering the footway. The weather had changed in the last few days. The first showers after the long summer drought had dampened the dust and leaf-mould of the forest floor. Standing under the wide branches of a purple beech she breathed in the soft autumnal scents.
On an impulse she decided to climb the hill, taking the most indirect route she could find, walking back and forth across the slope, following a line of easy contours to the summit. It was something she had not done for two years. Dr. Fellows frowned on gradients—and she was pleased when she reached the top without either breathing hard or feeling the familiar warning flutter in her chest. Although it was still raining steadily, the dense canopy of leaves kept her dry. Near the summit she found a place to sit down on a leaf-covered bank beside the exposed roots of a giant beech.
There was a good view of Croft Manor from up here. The house had been in the Merrick family for nearly three hundred years. Her two sons had been born there: William, who had just passed his thirty-sixth birthday; whose withered arm had seemed like a curse, but had proved a blessing. And her darling Tom. On his last leave they had taken a walk in the woods together, the three of them. (Her husband, Richard Merrick, had died when the boys were barely grown.) Tom had made them laugh with his tales of a winter spent in the trenches before Arras. How the hot tea froze in minutes and the bully beef turned into chunks of red ice. When he described a night raid into no man’s land he made it sound like an adventure from Boy’s Own. Volunteers and blackened faces, knives and coshes.
A month later she had awaken in the middle of the night consumed by grief. The emotion was so profound—so far in excess of any nightmare’s backwash—that she had roused her elder son and he had tried to comfort her. She lived through the next two days in a state of shock and confusion, unable to equate the psychological disturbance she had suffered with any known reality. Fearful of contemplating what the unknown might hold. On the evening of the second day the telegram had arrived from the War Office. Her darling Tom.
She sat quietly, remembering. Grieving still. The patter of rain on the leaves overhead ceased, and presently the sun came out. Almost at once the glassed doors opened and the children slipped out and went hurrying down the yew alley towards the croquet lawn at the bottom of the garden. They had invented a game of their own, Mrs. Merrick had observed, a complicated affair in which the mallets had been discarded and the hoops set up in a seemingly random pattern that only its devisers understood. Before they had reached the end of the alley the figure of Enid Bradshaw, their nanny, appeared in the doorway. She called out to them, or so Mrs. Merrick judged, watching the dumb show from afar. The children paused and looked back. Words were exchanged, no doubt on the subject of wet feet, and then Miss Bradshaw retired into the house and the children continued on their way.
Alison, the elder, had Charlotte’s fair hair and already, at seven, her graceful gestures. She had never known her father, who had been killed in the first months of the war. William had married the young widow and together they had produced Robert, aged five. Harriet Merrick had watched her diffident son, always conscious of his handicap, grow into full manhood as he took on the responsibility of a dead man’s wife and made her his own.
She smiled suddenly. Another person had made her appearance on the lawn. She was dressed in a long skirt that might have seemed old-fashioned even before the war, and her thick grey hair was tied behind her head in a severe-looking bun. Her name was Annie McConnell and she had once been Mrs. Merrick’s maid when they were both young girls growing up in County Tyrone. Annie had accompanied her mistress to England when she got married and had remained with her ever since. For a while she had been Tom and William’s nanny, and after that had filled the post of housekeeper. Now she was simply Annie, part family retainer, part friend. Harriet Merrick loved her dearly.
She watched as Annie strode forthrightly down the yew alley towards the croquet lawn. From a distance her stiff black-skirted figure looked forbidding; to the children it seemed to have the opposite effect. They rushed across the lawn to greet her—Annie had been away for four days visiting her sister in Wellfleet—and threw themselves into her outstretched arms. Mrs. Merrick had once spent a whole day weeping in those arms.
She thought now with pleasure of the days they would soon be spending together. William and Charlotte were taking the children to Cornwall to stay with friends. The maids would be sent off. She and Annie would have the house to themselves. They would gossip and reminisce.
Meanwhile, Robert’s small hands had been busy in the deep pocket of Annie’s skirt. Whatever it was he found there seemed to give him pleasure, and Alison followed his example. Annie shot a guilty glance back in the direction of the house. Apparently contraband was being passed. Not wishing to spy further, Mrs. Merrick rose to her feet and dusted off her dress. A slight movement on the slope below caught her eye and she stood still and watched as a pair of red squirrels worked busily, gathering nuts from beneath a walnut tree.
She noticed something else as she started back down the hill: half a dozen cigarette stubs lying in a neat line on the ground near to where she had been sitting. It see
med someone else had found the bank a pleasant place to sit and meditate.
2
Five minutes after he arrived at his desk on Monday morning Sinclair received an urgent summons from Deputy Assistant Commissioner Bennett. He was gone half an hour and returned with a thick manila envelope on which the heavy red wax seals had been broken. “From the War Office,” he told Madden, as he tossed him the packet. He stuck his head into the adjoining office. “Sergeant, in here! You, too, Constable.”
Hollingsworth and Styles came in from their cubby-hole. Sinclair perched on the edge of his desk. There was a light in the chief inspector’s eye.
“A criminal attack very similar to the ones we’re investigating took place in Belgium in September 1917. A farmer and his wife and family were murdered in their home. The assault bears a remarkable resemblance to the Melling Lodge killings. The husband and his two sons were bayoneted. The wife had her throat cut.”
Billy’s whistle brought a glower of disapproval from Hollingsworth.
“An inquiry into the murders was conducted by the investigation branch of the Royal Military Police. From the file, it appears there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that the killer or killers were serving British soldiers. What the War Office has sent us is a record of the inquiry. It includes a detailed crime-scene report, a pathologist’s findings and a verbatim record of all interrogations.”
Madden frowned at the file cover he was holding. “The case is marked closed.”
“So it is.” Sinclair slid off his desk and began to pace up and down. “The chief investigating officer was a Captain Miller. In deciding to terminate the inquiry he wrote a memorandum to accompany the case files in which he explained his decision. It’s logged in the file index, but unfortunately it’s missing. Nothing sinister there, I’m told—the ministry’s snowed under with wartime records. They have a warehouse somewhere in London stacked to the ceiling. We’re lucky they were able to dig out what they did.”