Madden’s face. He seemed to be hoping for some response from that quarter. ‘I can tell you how it might have come about,’ he went on. ‘This Beezy turns up yesterday looking to meet Topper, finds he has time on his hands, cuts that mark to show he’s been here, then goes off exploring. Remember, he hadn’t been to these parts before. Now you can get to the Craydon road from here easy. There’s a way off the main path that runs through the wood to the road and it comes out not far from where Alice Bridger was last seen.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not saying that’s proof of anything, but it’s possible opportunity. He could have come on her there, lost his head maybe and attacked her, knocked her out or choked her and then brought her back up here. There’s evidence she was carried-’
‘Evidence?’ Madden had been staring at the ground while he listened. Now his head came up.
‘Yes, sir, that bit of thread you noticed caught on a bramble.’ Wright seemed relieved to have heard him speak at last. ‘It came from her skirt. We matched it. Now, if you recall, it was about waist high on the bush, and that suggests to me she was being carried at that point, since it came from the lower part of her clothing, from her skirt.’
Madden nodded his agreement with this interpretation, but made no further comment.
‘Now, as I was saying, he could have brought her back here from the road, this Beezy – back to where he knew they wouldn’t be seen. And if that’s what happened, then I don’t reckon he would have been thinking of any mark he’d made on a tree earlier. That would have been the last thing on his mind. Like I said, you can’t expect rational behaviour with a crime of this type. Look what he did to her face, for pity’s sake! Isn’t that so, sir? You must have come across cases like this in the past.’ The confidence had begun to seep out of the inspector’s manner as he went on speaking and there was a hint of desperation about the appeal he flung out to Madden, who had resumed his former attitude and was standing with arms folded, eyes fixed to the ground, still giving no indication of what was in his mind.
Observing the Surrey policeman, Peter Galloway drew a measure of grim amusement from the spectacle of his discomfiture. He had known John Madden for a number of years and considered him a rare bird. To an air of natural authority, striking enough in itself, another quality was added that was even more disconcerting: a capacity for silence bordering on the inhuman. Once sunk into meditation, or reflection, he gave every appearance of being deaf to reason or argument. Confronted now by these twin phenomena, Wright was descending into garrulousness.
‘And then there’s something else you can’t ignore, sir, the fact he took off in a hurry-’
‘Did he?’ Once again Madden’s head jerked up. ‘How do you know that, Inspector?’
‘Well, from that old clasp knife of his we found-’
‘Clasp knife?’
‘Yes, didn’t you hear, sir? We picked it up last evening by the stream, not far from here.’ Wright’s expression changed as he realized he had told Madden something he didn’t know. ‘It was lying on the ground, wrapped in an old bandana. Must have fallen out of his bundle, or his pocket. Now I can’t see that happening unless he was in a hurry and not taking proper care. We showed them both to Topper this morning, the knife and the bandana, and he confirmed they belonged to Beezy.’
‘On the ground, you say?’ Madden seemed struck by the discovery. ‘I wonder how I missed them?’
‘Oh, it wasn’t the way you and the constable came.’ Wright was eager to explain. ‘It was the other direction.’ He pointed downstream. ‘He must have made off along the bank that way.’
‘Towards Brookham? That’s strange. The other way leads back to the fields.’
‘Well, if you ask me, he was in a panic by then and could easily have been confused.’ Wright shrugged. ‘But all he had to do was get back to the path, and you can do that either way, upstream or down. Once he’d reached it he could have doubled back and left the wood the same way he came in, by the fields.’ Wright pointed to the mass of tangled holly bushes on the opposite bank and drew an imaginary line along them with his finger.
Madden had been paying close attention to what he was saying and now he signalled his agreement. ‘Yes, that’s so,’ he conceded. ‘I see what you mean, Inspector. He must have done that.’
Sensing he’d finally made a breach, Wright pressed ahead.‘But what’s really suspicious, sir, is he’s disappeared. We’ve been searching the neighbourhood since last evening and no one’s seen hide or hair of him. There’s no doubt he’s made himself scarce, and you have to ask yourself why.’
Madden pondered the inspector’s meaning in silence. Then he nodded. ‘Yes, why? That’s the question.’
His sudden change of manner took both his listeners by surprise, and it was clear from Wright’s relieved expression that he felt he had won his point, that his line of reasoning had prevailed at last. Madden’s next words only served to strengthen that impression.
‘You’re right about the tramp, by the way. He must be found. And the sooner the better.’
Driving to the farm later that morning, Madden had much to occupy his mind, but little chance to explore it. On his return from Brookham he had called in at the house for a moment that nevertheless proved long enough for him to acquire a passenger before he departed again in the shape of his six-year-old daughter. Lucy had been left in the sole charge of Mrs Beck since breakfast and the Maddens’ cook was in sore need of relief.
‘Can I play with Belle today?’
Flaxen at birth, Lucy Madden’s hair now matched her mother’s honey-coloured shade. A tireless child, her fair skin had been golden brown all summer from hours spent playing in the open air.
‘I don’t know.’ Madden spoke over his shoulder to the restless presence in the back seat. ‘We’ll have to wait and see. She was still coughing on Saturday. She may not be allowed outside yet.’
‘Then I’ll ask May if we can play inside.’
‘Don’t you mean Mrs Burrows?’
Lucy’s last nanny had left them six weeks earlier after less than a year’s employment, citing urgent family reasons for returning home to Bradford. Helen had diagnosed a case of loss of nerve. No replacement for her had yet been found and the Maddens were wondering if they could manage their daughter on their own from now on with the help of the household staff. Lucy would be going to the village school soon, and when she started it would take some of the strain off them, Madden had pointed out. ‘Off us and on to poor Miss Tinsley,’ had been Helen’s pessimistic prediction.
‘Can we go and see the waggle-taggle gypsies?’
‘Raggle-taggle. And don’t call them that. They’re Mr and Mrs Goram to you.’ Her eyes, blue as sapphires, challenged his in the rear-view mirror. ‘Yes, we can,’ he said, after a moment. ‘They’re leaving soon, and I want to talk to Mr Goram before they go.’
‘What about?’
‘Never you mind.’
The dirt road to the farm sparkled with muddy puddles. The land on which it lay, overlooked by Upton Hanger, was little more than a mile from the Maddens’ house and less than three miles from Highfield itself. They had bought it from Lord Stratton, a local landowner, soon after their marriage, when Madden had quit his job at Scotland Yard to return to the life he had known as a boy.
Although the rain of the previous day had fallen heavily here, too, he was relieved to see no sign of damage to the lines of late tomatoes flanking the roadway. When he and Helen had acquired the property wheat had been its principal crop. Since then cheap grain from Canada and Australia had driven down prices and like many farmers in the area Madden was devoting more land each year to growing vegetables and fruit, which found a ready market.
As he drove past the brick-built, shingled farmhouse, May Burrows waved to them from the kitchen doorway. She had been May Birney when he first came to Highfield; her father owned the village store. Later, she had married George Burrows, a worker on the Stratton estate, and they had moved into the house which came with the farm, a primitive structure when the Maddens had bought it, but now, with the addition of two new rooms and the installation of indoor plumbing, a comfortable house for a young couple.
Madden had made George his farm manager, though not without a qualm. There had never been any thought that he and Helen might move from the house where they lived: a handsome, half-timbered dwelling, it had been in her family for three generations. But living away from his land, leaving it each evening in the hands of another man, made him feel at times like a gentleman farmer, and he was in the habit of assuaging these periodic bouts of guilt by engaging in the hardest manual work he could find – ditching and hedging, scything grass and baling hay – returning home on those evenings with blistered hands and aching muscles, exhausted but happy, to the raised eyebrows of his wife.
‘Mr Madden, sir! I was hoping to see you today.’
