‘Not usual at all,’ Madden had agreed solemnly, leaving his questioner scratching his head, disgruntled, but none the wiser.
‘I thought for a moment he was going to clap you in irons, John.’ Silver-haired and in his sixties, Chief Superintendent Boyce, head of the Guildford CID, buttonholed Madden in the street outside afterwards. They were old acquaintances. ‘Six months to my pension and we’re landed with a case like this! Mind you, at least it’s straightforward.’
He waited for a response, but none was forthcoming.
‘You don’t agree?’ Boyce cocked an eyebrow, then turned aside to doff his hat and bow. ‘Dr Madden!’
‘Mr Boyce… how are you?’ Helen shook his hand. She had come from talking to Mrs Bridger, the murdered girl’s mother, who was standing by the steps to the courthouse in a circle of Brookham villagers, clinging to her husband’s arm as though she required its support to remain upright. Bridger himself, white-faced and with a glazed expression, was hardly more steady on his feet. Molly Henshaw hovered in attendance on them both.
‘They’re close to collapse, the pair of them,’ Helen said, taking refuge in her dispassionate doctor’s voice. ‘He won’t like it, but I’m going to write a note to Dr Rowley. He really must take proper care of them.’
During the court proceedings, Madden had noticed Fred Bridger sitting two rows from the front in the public seats. Their eyes had met for an instant and he had felt the force of the other man’s anguish as he listened to the flat accounts offered by various witnesses of the circumstances surrounding his child’s last agonized moments on earth.
‘This man you’re searching for,’ Helen said to Boyce. ‘Is he the mysterious Beezy?’
‘He is, and I don’t know why we haven’t laid hands on him yet.’ The Surrey police chief looked glum. ‘These tramps know how to lie low, mind you – they’ve places to hide where we wouldn’t think of looking. But all the same, he must show himself soon. He’ll need to find food, if nothing else.’
Madden had seen the description circulated by the Surrey police. It had been sent not only to village bobbies in the district but to farmers and gamekeepers as well, and Will Stackpole had brought him a copy of the poster.
Beezy was described as being of middle age, bearded and dressed in rough clothes – words that could be applied to a good many vagrants, as the constable had pointed out. However, he had one distinguishing feature noted by the farmer he’d worked for recently at Dorking: the lobe of his right ear was missing.
‘And we haven’t seen any sign of Topper either since we let him go,’ Boyce complained. ‘Wright had to strike his name off the witness list today. I wonder where he’s got to.’
The suspicious glance he directed at Helen as he spoke these words provoked no reaction, beyond the amused smile it brought to her lips.
‘Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong,’ she declared. ‘I haven’t set eyes on him since that evening in Brookham, and I haven’t the faintest idea where he is now.’
Both statements were true, Madden reflected, though, as an old policeman, he might have been tempted to charge his wife with being less than entirely frank. The previous day their gardener, Tom Cooper, had found a bunch of rose hips and old man’s beard bound in a willow branch lying on the grass outside the gate at the foot of the orchard. He’d been somewhat put out to discover, in addition, a crude design scratched on the green paint of the wooden gate – it showed a cross with a circle round it – and had been for taking a brush and a tin of paint down and repairing the damage, until Helen had stopped him. ‘Let it stay there,’ she’d decreed.
Madden had found the tramp’s gesture mystifying until his wife explained it to him.
‘He’s lying low,’ she said. ‘He knows the police will be looking for him again. They should have hung on to him while they had the chance.’
‘Yes, but since he was here, why didn’t he come in and see you?’
‘Because then we would have had to decide what to do – whether to inform the police or not – and he didn’t want to put us in that position. Mrs Beck was right. He’s a proper gentleman, my Topper. But I do worry about him. He’s getting too old to be wandering about.’
Boyce, meanwhile, had turned his attention to Madden. ‘To get back to what I was saying, John – the girl’s injuries aside, do you think there’s something unusual about this killing?’
Listening to the Surrey policeman, Helen felt a twinge of unease. Well aware of the regard in which her husband had once been held by his colleagues – and not only those at the Yard – she knew that his views would be eagerly sought, particularly in a case as grave as this one. But watching it happen now, she was filled with misgivings.
‘Oh, it’s shocking, I grant you,’ Boyce went on, having failed to elicit an immediate response. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that poor child’s face. But ten to one this Beezy will turn out to be the man we want. Or someone very like him.’
‘A tramp, you mean?’ Madden sounded surprised.
‘Well, yes, I suppose I do. That sort of man.’ The chief superintendent pursed his lips. ‘Look, it’s not inconceivable, living the life they do… tramps… vagrants… they lack so much… they’ve no opportunity…’ He directed an embarrassed glance at Helen, who’d divined the source of his discomfiture.
‘You’re implying they’re sexually deprived,’ she said.
‘Well, yes. Since you put it that way.’ The Guildford chief sought refuge in his handkerchief. He blew his nose loudly. ‘And that sort of feeling can build up, can it not? You get pressure, more and more pressure, and when the dam finally breaks, well, it can be sudden and savage. That’s what happened here, I think. Whoever killed that girl lost control of himself.’
‘Are you certain of that?’ Madden’s quiet interjection took both his listeners by surprise. Boyce stared at him.
‘What are you saying, John?’ he asked. ‘What are you suggesting?’
‘I’m not sure, exactly.’ Scowling, Madden seemed suddenly a prey to doubts himself. ‘I don’t want to burden you with half-baked ideas.’
‘Never mind that.’ Boyce frowned in turn. ‘Just tell me what you think.’ And when Madden remained silent. ‘Are you saying I should call in the Yard?’
Helen saw that her husband had been expecting the question. But his reply was not what she had thought it would be.
‘I don’t see how you can,’ Madden said. ‘Not yet. You could be right about the tramp. And in any case he has to be found. But I’d make sure the Yard was informed about this.’ He spoke more confidently now; his mind was made up. ‘And I wouldn’t waste any time, either, Jim, if I were you. I’d get in touch with them right away.’
The drive back to Highfield was a silent one. Madden’s habit of withdrawing into himself when preoccupied was deeply engrained, and Helen had learned from experience to be patient with him.
It had taken her many weeks when they’d first met to learn the details of his past. To draw from him the story of the young wife and baby daughter he had watched die in an influenza epidemic before the war: to hear from his own lips of his subsequent descent into the hell of the trenches, an experience from which he’d emerged so injured in spirit that, until fate cast him into her arms, he had ceased to have any hope or belief in his future.
Long dispelled, these shadows no longer troubled their lives. What concerned Helen now was the irrational fear she had felt at the sight of her husband being drawn once more into a police investigation after so long an absence from the profession. His decision to quit his job and start a new life with her had not been taken lightly. Nor was it one he had ever regretted. If he was allowing himself to become involved now it could only be in response to some deep anxiety, and this realization kept the pulse of uneasiness throbbing inside her.
The happy years they had spent together had been born out of tragedy, something she could never forget. Indeed, the thought was fresh in her mind as they drove through the village, past the green and the moss-walled churchyard and along the straggling line of cottages that led to the high brick wall surrounding Melling Lodge. Leased by a succession of tenants in recent years, it was empty at present and the locked gates and dark, elm-lined drive lent it a mournful air.
Time had dulled the pain of that summer morning more than a decade past when an urgent summons from Will Stackpole had brought her, the village doctor, speeding through those same gates to confront the unimaginable reality of a household brutally slain; her dearest friend among the victims. When she drove by now it was of her husband she was thinking.
Yet the two were inextricably linked. It was the subsequent police investigation that had brought them
