'He was trying to say she corrupted the boy, it sounds.'
'I believe so. On the day in question, the first he heard of the murder was when a local woman called Mrs Babcock arrived at his house in a state of hysterics and said she'd found Sadie Pike lying dead in her cottage. Hobbs rushed out there. On the way he encountered Ebenezer Pike with a bloody shirt-front and carrying his razor. He told the constable he'd killed his wife. When Hobbs reached their cottage he found the scene I've described.
'He sent for outside help immediately and a pair of detectives came from Nottingham. They made it clear they didn't require his assistance, but he went about making his own inquiries none the less. He discovered Pike had been with another keeper near the cottage shortly before the murder. This man couldn't say what time that was, but he remembered hearing the church bell ringing while they were talking.'
Sinclair cocked his head. 'Hobbs was intrigued.
He'd heard the bell himself and wondered why it was ringing — it was the middle of the afternoon and there seemed no reason for it. So he asked the vicar, who told him he'd had a new clapper installed and was trying it out. Hobbs went in search of Mrs Babcock again. He asked her if she remembered hearing the bell. Apparently she did. After finding Mrs Pike's body she'd gone outside into the backyard and thrown up. It was while she was being sick that she heard the bell ringing. She remembered particularly because she thought someone was sounding the alarm.'
The chief inspector was silent, musing.
'Ebenezer couldn't have been in two places at once.
His wife was dead before he ever got to the cottage.
Hobbs tried to explain this to the two detectives, but they wouldn't listen. They had their murderer — he'd already confessed. They didn't want to hear about bells ringing in the middle of the afternoon and new clappers. Two slick city lads, Hobbs called them. They must have thought him a yokel.'
Dr Blackwell sat with bowed head. 'She took him to bed and he killed her.'
'So it would seem.' The chief inspector sighed.
They sat in silence for a while. Then Sinclair spoke again: 'Madden met someone recently. Perhaps he told you. A Viennese doctor. He talked about blood rituals and early sexual experience. How patterns could be fixed for life. Those animals found in the woods, the cats… I've been wondering…' He grimaced. 'Interesting man, that doctor. I wish I'd met him myself.
We need to know more about these matters.'
He glanced at Helen Blackwell. She sat unmoving.
'Well, the boy grew up, but you don't leave that sort of thing behind, do you? It must have been in his mind all these years. I don't say on his mind. There's no sign his conscience ever troubled Amos Pike.'
She broke her silence, speaking softly: 'Poor child.
Poor man. Poor damned creature.'
He looked at her, astonished. 'Aye, there's that, too,' he conceded, after a moment.
Dr Blackwell rose and crossed the room to Madden's side. She bent over him, adjusting the bedclothes, smoothing the hair on his forehead. She kissed him once more. Sinclair again had the sense of her needing to touch him, to feel the assurance of his live presence.
He saw it was time to leave.
As they walked down the corridor to the entrance, the linoleum squeaking beneath their shoes, he remembered a commission he'd been charged with.
'There are many people asking after John. But one in particular wants his name mentioned. Detective Constable Styles. The young man is most insistent. Would you pass that on? John will be glad to hear it.'
'I'll tell him,' she promised.
When they reached the entrance lobby he turned to take his leave, but saw she had something more to say.
She was looking to one side and frowning, weighing her words it appeared. Finally she faced him. 'I'd better tell you now. You're not likely to get him back.'
The chief inspector found himself temporarily speechless.
'I mean to keep him here with me if I can. Lord Stratton's selling off some of his farms. Most of the big landowners are. They've had to retrench since the war. I've been thinking we might buy one. John always wanted to go back to the land. He'd be happy living in the country.'
It seemed to Sinclair's addled brain that he'd lost a battle before he knew he was fighting one. 'What does he say? Have you spoken to him?' He cast around for ground on which to make a stand. 'He's a damn fine copper, I'll have you know.'
'He's more than that,' she said simply.
The chief inspector took a moment to reflect on this. Then he bowed, accepting the truth. 'Aye, I'll not deny it.'
His reward was to see the smile he had waited for in vain all afternoon.
'Are you and he friends?' She looked at him with new eyes.
'I should hope so!' Angus Sinclair was affronted.
'Then I look forward to seeing you again, very often.' She shook his hand in her firm grip. 'Goodbye, Mr Sinclair.'
As he watched her walk away down the long corridor with urgent strides, the scowl faded from the chief inspector's face and a smile came to his lips.
He'd just had a thought that made him chuckle.
All evidence to the contrary, and present circumstances notwithstanding, his friend John Madden was a lucky dog!
Epilogue
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you'll never forget.
In the spring of the following year, John Madden took his wife to France. Landing at Calais, they hired a car and drove southwards to Arras and thence to Albert, skirting the great battlefields where so many young men had lost their lives in the summer of 1916.
Driving through the flat countryside, a watery world threaded by rivers and canals and criss-crossed by dykes overgrown with weeds and willows, he was surprised to find it at once so familiar and so changed.
The peasant women in black skirts and red kilted petticoats, their legs encased in thick stockings, were just as he remembered them. But the roofless farmhouses with smashed windows and blackened walls were now repaired or rebuilt and barns lofty as churches stood freshly painted, gleaming in the spring sunshine.
Signs of the recent conflict abounded. Albert, where they paused to eat lunch, was a town still struggling towards rebirth. Ceaselessly bombarded throughout the war, its population of several thousands had been reduced to little more than a hundred by the time the Armistice was declared. At the small restaurant where they ate — in a street still pitted with craters and where heaps of masonry marked the sites of ruined houses — they fell into conversation with a French Engineer officer. He told them he and his men were engaged in clearing the farms roundabout of mines and unexploded shells and grenades. (They had seen ample evidence of this in the small mountains of metal piled up at intervals along the roadside.) He said the work would go on for years, for decades, so great was the mass of iron lying buried beneath the seemingly unscarred earth. 'A century will not be enough to clear them,' he predicted.
A mantle of green covered the fields, which Madden remembered as dry and powdery. Driving through the level landscape, he recalled how different it had once looked to his eyes. Low ridges then appeared as impregnable bastions; a hillock might be reckoned to cost a thousand lives to take and hold.
