anything for granted.
'Yes, please. I haven't eaten all day.' She looked directly at him. 'Then could we go back to your place?
I'm staying with a girlfriend in Kensington. I'd like to take you there, but she's terribly strait-laced and I simply haven't the courage.'
She smiled into his eyes and he smiled back, his heart lifting. He found it hard to believe there was anything in the world for which she did not have the courage.
They sat across from each other in the restaurant.
Candlelight brought out the glint of gold in her hair.
She told him about her marriage.
'I met Guy when we were students, but he gave up medicine and decided to read law instead. He was still doing that when the war began. Each time he came home on leave it was harder. I had to try to remember why I'd married him, why I'd loved him. When he was killed, all I could think was that I'd failed him and now I'd never have a chance to make it right.'
Madden's wife had been a schoolteacher. They had been shy with each other, still strangers after two years of marriage. He had difficulty now recalling her features, or those of their baby daughter who had died at the age of six months, within days of her mother.
During the war he had come almost to forget them, as though their deaths had ceased to matter in the great slaughter going on around him. Later he had tried to recover his feelings, to mourn afresh, but they remained dim in his memory and he never spoke of them now.
Instead, he talked to her about the case. He told her about the murder of the farmer's wife at Bentham.
'We haven't put it out, but we think it was done by the same man. We don't understand his reasons for killing. We can't find a motive that makes sense.'
She wanted to know what had happened to him and Will Stackpole in the woods at Highfield. Lord Stratton had told them little about the ambush and she was shocked when she heard the details. 'You could have been killed, both of you. Was it terrifying, being trapped like that? Were you very afraid?'
'Not really. Not enough-' He stopped, conscious of what he had said. When he didn't go on, she asked, 'Was that how you felt in the war?'
He nodded. He found it hard to speak. 'Towards the end, yes. There seemed no point in being afraid any more. Either you survived or you didn't. But when I felt the same thing up in the woods, it was as though I'd never escaped from it — that feeling that nothing mattered any longer.'
She took his hand in hers.
The past two weeks had not been easy ones for Helen Blackwell. The problem of fitting an affair into her busy, tightly structured life had occupied her mind at length. But she had also found herself wondering whether she was wise, after all, to involve herself with a man so clearly suffering from inner torments.
Her wartime work had taught her much about the effects of prolonged exposure to trench warfare. Everywhere in the land there were men who woke each morning unable to control their trembling limbs and eyelids, who started at the sound of a door being slammed and dived for cover when a car backfired. She knew what mental efforts were required by those who remained active and in command of their lives.
Returning to London, she had not been surprised to feel a renewal of physical desire when they met. The mysterious bonds of sexual attraction drew her to this silent man. There was no wishing them away. What she was unprepared for was the sudden rush of tenderness that had filled her when she glanced over her shoulder and found his anxious, troubled eyes searching for hers.
Later, he took her to his rooms off the Bayswater Road. To rhe shame of peeling paint and stained wallpaper and the sour smell of rented furniture. Here was a truth he could not hide from her: that he had ceased to care how he lived. A photograph of his dead wife and child, standing on a side table, was all he had salvaged from his past. She asked him their names and he told her. Alice and Margaret. Margaret after his mother, who had died when he was a boy.
When he began to speak, to make some apology for the place he had brought her to, she stopped his lips with hers. 'Come.' She took his hand and led him into the bedroom.
At the sight of her naked body, white and gold and rose-tipped, he started to tremble, and when they lay down together he continued to shake helplessly. She held him in her strong arms, saying nothing, pressing his body to hers, her cheek to his. After a while she began to kiss him, first on his face and throat, then on his chest, her breath warm on his skin. His body was marked by wounds: one shaped like a star under his breastbone, the legacy of a bullet that had passed clean through him, somehow missing his heart, the other a jagged ridge of tissue on his hip from the same shrapnel blast that had torn his arm. Her lips moved freely over his scarred body, until he could bear it no longer. When he reached for her she was ready.
'I've thought about this every day.'
He was inside her in a moment, but this time she checked him. Slowed him. 'It's so lovely… let's make it last.'
Even so, for him it was over too soon. Too soon.
But she kissed him and held him to her and he heard her soft laugh again.
'What was it Franz was saying?' Breathless beneath him.
He fell asleep and dreamed of a youth named Jamie Wallace who had once been a student at the Guildhall in London. One of the young men with whom Madden had enlisted and trained, he'd been the possessor of a sweet tenor voice and had often entertained the other men with ballads of the day. On the first morning of the Somme he and Madden had found themselves side by side in the forward trench. All night the artillery bombardment had sounded. At sunrise it ceased and a small miracle had occurred. Larks arose from the blasted fields and canals all around and the sky had been full of the sound of them. 'Do you hear that?'
Jamie Wallace had asked, his face lighting up. In Madden's dream his lips framed the same silent question. Do you hear that? A moment later the whistle had sounded for the start of the attack and the men had gone up the ladders into the lark-filled morning.
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.
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 rracks.
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-
