but there had been a message from Scotland Yard to say the chief inspector would be delayed.
'Later, John.'
Sinclair nodded to Lord Stratton, who was with a small group of mourners making their way from the graveside. The sexton was already at work filling in the twin graves of Charles and Lucy Fletcher. A silent line of black-clad villagers filed through the churchyard gate.
'I've something to show you.' He hefted his briefcase.
Lord Stratton led one of the group aside, a lean, suntanned man with greying temples.
'That's Robert Fletcher, the colonel's brother,' Madden told the chief inspector. 'He and his wife came down from Edinburgh yesterday. They're going to leave things at Melling Lodge as they are for the time being. They want to get Sophy back with her brother as soon as possible.'
They watched as the two men crossed the churchyard to where a black-suited figure stood in the shade of a cedar tree. Madden recognized the florid features of Sir William Raikes, the Lord Lieutenant.
'I'd better go, too, and pay my respects to his nibs.'
Sinclair glanced at his companion. 'No need for you to trouble yourself, Inspector.'
Madden was glad to be left on his own. The funeral scene took him back to his youth. He'd been too young to remember his mother's death, but his father had perished in a barn fire when he was sixteen. The boy, home on holiday from the Taunton grammar school where he was a scholarship pupil, had helped to drag the body from the blazing timbers. The sight of the charred corpse, shocking to him then, now seemed like a foretaste of what had awaited him on the fields of northern France. His father had been buried in late summer. It had been a day like today.
Helen Blackwell's face, white beneath a veil, appeared before him. 'Inspector, I've come to say goodbye.' Her voice was strained. 'My father and I are going up to Yorkshire to stay with friends for a few weeks. I imagine you'll be gone by the time we return.'
Madden stared at her. Finally he spoke. 'Yes, we're moving out this weekend. The Surrey police will stay on for a time.'
'I hardly dare ask — have you made any progress?'
'Some…' He checked himself. He felt the need to be open with her. 'Hardly any, I'm afraid. It's a case where the answers aren't obvious.' He wanted to say more, to detain her further, but the words dried in him.
She smiled briefly and held out her hand. He felt her firm grip for the last time.
'Goodbye, then, Inspector.'
She rejoined her father. Madden followed her figure with his gaze as they left the churchyard together.
'It makes fascinating reading, doesn't it?'
Sinclair stood with his hands on his hips while Madden sat studying the typewritten pages. Both men had removed their jackets in the stifling heat of the snug bar.
'Good of Dr Tanner to let us know finally. A pity he couldn't have told us earlier. But, then, the government chemist is a busy man. It moves me to think that one day the police will have their own laboratory.
It moves me even more to know I haven't a hope in Hades of being alive to see it!'
'Tanner's sure about it being tobacco ash?' Madden asked.
'I put the same question to him. He said there's no doubt in his mind. He'll swear to it.'
'What made you look there?' Madden was curious, but not surprised. The chief inspector's meticulousness was legendary.
'The lavatory bowl was clean, but there seemed to be dust on the rim. Now that was strange, I thought.
The rest of the bathroom was spotless. So I took some scrapings and sent them off with the other stuff.'
'Colonel Fletcher didn't smoke, did he?'
'No, he gave up three years ago, on doctor's advice.
Nor did Mrs Fletcher.' Sinclair cocked his head. 'And somehow I couldn't see the upstairs maid sneaking a quick fag in the master's bathroom. No, it was our man, all right. He likes a cigarette now and again you'll see.'
' 'Traces of blood in the handbasin and on the hand towel…'' Madden was reading from the chemist's report. ' 'Blood group B…''
'We were lucky there. Mrs Fletcher was the only one in the household with that group. It's quite rare.
He cut her throat and then washed and dried his hands.' Sinclair began to pace up and down the small room. 'He was in hell's own hurry coming in, but afterwards he had the leisure for a wash and brush-up.
Time for a smoke, even.'
Madden looked up. 'The robbery was a blind, wasn't it?'
'It's starting to look that way,' Sinclair agreed. 'Mrs Fletcher's jewellery case was lying open on the dressing- table.
He grabbed a few pieces. The same downstairs.
A brace of candlesticks, that clock off the mantelpiece in the study, Colonel Fletcher's shooting cups. Anything that shone or looked fancy. He should have thought a little while he was doing that. Put himself in our shoes.'
'What's he done with the stuff, I wonder?'
'Thrown it away?' Sinclair shrugged. 'I'll wager it won't turn up at the pawnbroker's. Not unless he's careless or greedy, and I've a nasty feeling he's neither.'
The chief inspector took out his pipe and pouch. He pointed with the pipestem at the file. 'And now comes the really interesting part. Read on, Macduff.'
Madden bent over the report again. Sinclair filled his pipe. From the taproom next door the sound of voices signalled the arrival of opening time.
'My God!' Madden looked up. 'Can we be certain of these times?'
'Reasonably so — Tanner's own words. I spoke to him on the telephone.' The chief inspector lit his pipe.
'It's a question of the moisture content of the tobacco.
Three of the cigarette stubs found by Wiggins's body were recent, no more than forty-eight hours old. Four had been lying there longer — up to three weeks.
Tanner's sure about those. It's the other six he won't commit himself on, except to say the condition of the tobacco suggests a longer period still. I tried to press him, but he wouldn't be pinned down. They could be many weeks old, he said, even months.'
'Months?' Madden grasped the implication at once.
'He must have sat there and watched them,' he said.
'Long before he did anything. There's a good view of the house and garden from where Wiggins was killed.
He must have come back to the same spot over and over…'
'And watched them… as you say.' Sinclair took his pipe from his mouth. 'I've no idea what we're dealing with here,' he admitted. 'But I know this much — we'll have to think again.'
Promptly at ten o'clock the following Monday morning, Sinclair and Madden were shown into the office of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Wilfred Bennett at Scotland Yard. Office space at the Yard was assigned on the basis of seniority, in ascending order.
The lowest ranks worked at the top of the building where they had the most stairs to climb. Bennett occupied a comfortable corner suite on the first floor with a view of the Thames and the tree-lined Embankment.
He was speaking on the telephone when they went in, and he motioned them to an oak table lined with chairs that stood by the open window. London was still in the grip of a heatwave and no breeze stirred the white net curtains. Coming to work that morning, Madden had sat on the upper deck of an omnibus, but even there he had found the air humid and stifling.
He thought with regret of the quiet upstairs room in the Rose and Crown, which he had occupied for the past week. Waking from tortured dreams he had sensed the countryside breathing silently around him, the woods and fields stretched out like a sleeping giant under the starry sky.
As Bennett hung up, the door opened and Sampson entered. The chief superintendent was in his mid fifties, a heavy-set man with brilliantined hair and a muddy complexion. He greeted Sinclair and Madden warmly. 'Another
