'You were out of sight of the house all the time?'
'Pretty well. We were further down.' Reynolds turned and pointed away. 'There's a dip in the land, it's not obvious from here.'
'I know you didn't see anything,' Madden said.
Billy was surprised again by his tone. His manner with Reynolds now was businesslike, impersonal. Yet Reynolds was responding readily to his questions. 'But did you hear anything? It's important.'
'No, I already told the police.' For the first time he seemed eager to help.
'Nothing at all? Think hard.'
Reynolds frowned. 'What sort of thing?'
Madden shook his head. 'I'm not going to say. I don't want to put it in your mind.'
Reynolds stared at him. 'I know I didn't hear anything,' he said. 'But I remember Ben saying something 'What was that?' The inspector leaned closer.
'We'd found a ewe caught by her leg in a cleft down by the stream. We were just easing her out when Ben looked up. I remember now…' He kept staring at Madden. 'He said, 'Did you hear that? It sounded like a whistle.''
It was after seven when Madden got back to the Yard.
Sinclair was waiting in his office.
'We're lucky Tom Derry's in charge at Maidstone.
There aren't many who would have smelled a rat.'
They stood together at the open window and watched as a pleasure-steamer, strung with coloured lights, moved slowly downriver. 'But is it our rat?'
'I think it is, sir. The razor, the dogs, the whistle.'
'And the fact she wasn't raped?'
'Especially that.'
The sounds of a jazz band drifted up to them through the gathering dusk.
'No evidence of a bayonet this time,' the chief inspector remarked.
'That doesn't mean he wasn't carrying one. You can't see the front door of the house from the coppice.
He couldn't have known whether Reynolds was at home or not.'
'So, assuming it was our man, he must have been ready to kill him, too, and he'd have wanted better than a razor for that. The razor's for the woman.'
'It looks that way,' Madden agreed heavily.
Sinclair turned from the window with a sigh and went to his desk. 'I must get home. Mrs Sinclair is threatening divorce on the grounds of desertion.' He eyed his colleague. 'And so should you, John. Get some rest.' The chief inspector viewed Madden's pale face and sunken eyes with concern. Did the man never sleep? 'There were differences, though.' Madden sat down at his desk and lit a cigarette. 'He was in more of a hurry than he was at Melling Lodge. He was in and out of that house in a matter of minutes. There was no sign of him when the gypsy arrived just after six.
And there was none of the preparation. He must have poisoned the dogs on Friday night — Reynolds found them on Saturday morning. He killed Mrs Reynolds the same evening.'
'He took his time at Highfield,' Sinclair agreed.
'Perhaps he's getting a taste for it.' He shuddered at the thought.
'But it wasn't done on the spur of the moment,'
Madden insisted. 'He knew the lie of the land. He lay up in the wood waiting for sunset. He must have picked out the coppice on an earlier visit.'
'An earlier visit…' Sinclair echoed the words. 'But why did he go there in the first place? Or Highfield, come to that. And what was it that caught his eye?
What brought him back?'
He slid a pile of papers into an open drawer.
'I keep telling myself it's the women. It must be the women. But he never touches them. So could it be something else?' He looked at Madden questioningly.
The inspector shook his head. 'I don't know,' he said. 'I just don't know.'
Madden left Scotland Yard in the early evening and walked along the Embankment to Westminster.
With summer drawing to an end the city was filling again. Sitting on the upper deck of an omnibus bound for Bloomsbury he looked down on pavements crowded with young women, typists from government offices hurrying home at the close of the working day.
He could remember a time before the war when the same sidewalks would have held only clerks in bowler hats and high stiff collars. He liked the change that had come about.
Late that morning a telegram had been delivered to his desk by one of the commissionaires. It was from Helen Blackwell. can you meet me in London this evening query. She gave an address in Bloomsbury Square and a time: six o'clock.
The two weeks were only just up and Madden hadn't dared to hope that he would hear from her so soon.
Earlier, at the regular Monday conference in Bennett's office, he had given an account of his trip to Maidstone and the conclusions he and Sinclair had drawn from it.
'We think it's the same man.'
Chief Superintendent Sampson had responded with incredulity. 'Now look here, Madden, you've got a gypsy who hanged himself in police custody. That sounds like a pretty fair admission of guilt to me. And where's the connection with the Highfield murders? Granted a woman had her throat cut in each case. But the man who killed those people at Melling Lodge also robbed the house. We know that. The stuff taken from the farmhouse was lifted by the gypsy. You can't have it both ways.'
'The Bentham case was reported in the newspapers,'
Sinclair interjected. 'I believe our man might have read about the robbery and decided to do the same at Melling Lodge. I still think he was trying to mislead us.'
'You think. You believe.' Sampson scratched his head.
'The trouble with this inquiry is it's all guesswork.'
'Nevertheless, we have to consider the possibility that these two cases are linked.' The chief inspector was insistent. 'And, if they prove to be, the implication is serious. Even chilling. It means we have a man committing murders, seemingly at random, for motives which are a mystery to us. I repeat, it may be necessary to look at fresh ways of approaching this investigation.'
Watching Bennett's face, Madden couldn't gauge his reaction. The deputy assistant commissioner listened without comment.
The address Madden had been given was that of a handsome Victorian house in Bloomsbury Square with a brass plate beside the door on which the words 'British Psycho-Analytical Society' were engraved. A receptionist was seated at a desk in the otherwise bare entrance hall.
'I'm afraid you're a little late for Dr Weiss's address,' she told Madden. 'It must be almost over by now.'
He explained his presence.
'Dr Blackwell? Isn't she the fair-haired lady? You can wait for her down here if you like, or you could go up.' She pointed to the stairway behind her. 'Just slip in quietly, no one will mind.'
Madden went up a flight of carpeted stairs lined with portraits of solemn-looking men in formal attire.
When he reached the first floor he heard a voice coming from behind a closed door. He opened it quietly and found himself looking into a large room where perhaps forty people were seated in rows of chairs. Facing them was a short, dark-haired man who stood behind a table carpeted in green felt on which a jug of water and a glass rested beside a pile of notes.
He was addressing the gathering.
'… but since the issue of abnormality has been raised, may I say that I believe — and here I am quoting Professor Freud again — that the impulses of sexual life are among those which, even normally, are the least controlled by the higher functions of the mind. Generally speaking, we know that anyone who is abnormal mentally is abnormal in his sexual life.
