Billy’s first reaction on seeing her had been to wonder whether she would be equal to the ordeal ahead of her. White-haired, thin to the point of emaciation, and with trembling hands, she had wandered about the small flat with slow steps, trying to get ready, but unable to remember where she had left her things. Watching her, he’d been put in mind of a wounded bird, one no longer able to fly, but dragging itself broken-winged along the ground. Her eyes, rheumed with age, seemed blind to the world around her. Until the moment of their departure, that was, when she had paused by a table where a number of framed photographs stood to direct her gaze at one in particular, a family group composed of a man and a woman with three children, two of them small boys and the third an older girl whom Billy had recognized as Rosa. The picture had been posed — it looked like a studio photograph, and the figures had something of the lifelessness of waxwork models about them. Mrs Laski had picked it up and, after studying it for a long moment, had pressed the glass front to her lips in a gesture of farewell.
‘Enough. Let us go.’
They were the first words she had spoken to him. And the last.
He’d escorted her down the stairs with a hand under her arm and the other ready to catch her in case she fell. Outside, in the road, Madden had already climbed out of the police car Billy had brought with him to assist her into the back seat beside Helen. Their greetings had been acknowledged by a lowering of her eyelids and a slight dip of her white head, but beyond taking Helen’s hand in hers and pressing it for a brief moment, she had shown no wish to speak or communicate. Rather, she had seemed lost in whatever world of pain she inhabited, and her frailty had been enough to excite Helen’s concern long before they reached Golders Green.
Finding that the shelter by the gates was furnished with wooden benches, she had persuaded the old lady to rest there with her until the arrival of the rabbi who was to conduct the burial service. The two men had continued on into the cemetery and waited now beside the main path, but some way off from the rest of the mourners gathered at the graveside.
Madden had said little in the interval, and Billy, too, had remained silent for the most part. But his thoughts had been occupied by what had occurred a little earlier that morning, before they had got to Mrs Laski’s flat, when they had stopped in Little Russell Street at the spot where Rosa Nowak had met her end.
It was Madden who had requested the detour, and Billy had been surprised. He’d already given the older man a brief account of the progress of the investigation carried out by the Bow Street CID during their drive up from Waterloo station and Madden had seemed satisfied. At all events he’d asked no questions.
‘They’ve managed to pin down her route up to Bloomsbury,’ he’d told him. ‘She came up from Waterloo by tube. A guard on the Underground at Tottenham Court Road reckons he saw her go through the ticket barrier there, which makes sense. From there she would have gone on foot. He remembers a girl with a basket in one hand and a bag in the other; that’s what Rosa was carrying. But the crowd was even thicker than usual, he said, because there’d been an alert just a few minutes earlier: the sirens had gone off. It turned out to be a false alarm, but a lot of people came down into the station from the street, they were milling about, and he only caught a glimpse of her as she went by.’
Madden had listened in silence, a frown grooving his brow, reviving Billy’s memories of the brief span of weeks they had spent working together twenty years before, a period unmatched in the intensity it had brought to his life then, and the realization which came later that thanks to the man into whose company he had been thrown by chance he had found his own centre of gravity, the place from which he could embark on his future with confidence. That Madden himself had chosen another way of life soon after had never affected Billy’s opinion of him. Even at that early age he had recognized qualities of character in the older man that set him apart from his colleagues: qualities that in time had become touchstones for Billy himself, standards against which he had come to measure himself.
But he’d made no comment during their journey in the car, and it was Helen who had taken up the conversation, pressing Billy for news of his family, chiding him in an affectionate manner for having been a stranger lately.
The warmth of her greeting and the kiss she had given him when they had met on the platform at Waterloo had brought a blush to Billy’s cheeks, just as if he were still the same green young detective-constable she had first known years ago.
‘But I’m cross with you,’ she had said, her smile belying her words. ‘It’s been so long since you and Elsie brought the children down to Surrey to see us. And Lucy was saying only the other day that it’s been nearly a year since she saw you last. You wouldn’t recognize her in her uniform. She’s grown up all at once.’
Billy had had to explain that his family had moved out of London temporarily. Elsie had taken their three children to stay with her mother in Bedford.
‘It’s these blasted doodlebugs,’ he told her. ‘They really put the wind up Elsie, and me too. You never know where they’re going to land next. We had one come down on a house by Clapham Common, near where we live, and it killed the whole family. Folks we knew. The worst of it is you can hear them coming, the buzz bombs anyway, and you find yourself wondering whether this is the one that’s got
The traffic had been light that morning — petrol rationing had all but put an end to private motoring — and the radio car that Billy had brought with him to Waterloo on the chief inspector’s instructions made rapid time through the bomb-damaged streets. But as they approached their destination — Mrs Laski’s flat was in Montague Street, near the British Museum — Madden had requested the detour.
‘I’d like to have a look at the spot, if you don’t mind.’
Billy himself had not been back to Little Russell Street since his first visit, and on their arrival there he noticed that the taped barrier sealing off the rubble-filled yard had been removed. There’d been no need to tell Madden what it signified. With nearly a week gone by since the murder had occurred and no lead having come to light, the chances of a successful outcome to the inquiry were dwindling rapidly.
Leaving Helen in the car with the driver, they had got out and, at Madden’s suggestion, walked to the spot near the end of the street where Rosa had paused to talk to the air-raid warden.
‘She’d come around the corner, then?’ Madden had asked, and Billy had confirmed it.
‘That’s what Cotter said. He’d been standing in this doorway here, out of the wind.’ Billy indicated the recess.
Madden had walked the last few steps to the corner and looked down Museum Street, eyes narrowed. ‘He might have waited there,’ he had muttered. ‘He would have heard them talking.’
‘Sir …?’ Billy didn’t understand what he was getting at, but as they walked back towards the car — and towards the spot where Rosa had been murdered — Madden had revealed what was troubling him.
‘I talked to Mr Sinclair about this, but I’m still not clear in my mind. Can you remember exactly what the warden said in his statement? Did Rosa seem uneasy when she spoke to him that night? She was obviously hurrying, not looking too carefully where she was going, and I wondered if it was because she thought someone might be after her.’
‘He said she seemed pleased to have run into him,’ Billy had replied, after a moment’s thought. ‘That was in his statement, I remember. He reckoned she might have been nervous walking through the blackout alone. But she couldn’t have been frightened, because when he offered to carry one of her bags and see her home she said it wouldn’t be necessary, she was almost there.’
Madden had grunted. ‘But she paused all the same for a minute or two, while they talked?’
‘At least that. Why? Is it important?’ Billy had cocked a curious eye at his old mentor.
‘I don’t know … but it might be.’ Madden had shrugged. They had reached the yard and he stood staring down at the rubble, frowning. Then he’d nodded. ‘All right, let’s agree she wasn’t frightened. She didn’t think she was being stalked. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t on edge. It would explain why the warden said she seemed relieved to have bumped into him. She may have wanted to reassure herself.’
‘Of what?’ Billy didn’t understand. ‘You’ve just said she wasn’t afraid.’
‘Afraid, no … but uneasy, perhaps.’ Madden gnawed his lip. ‘Look, there’s nothing strange about a young woman feeling nervous as she walks through the blackout; especially if she hears, or thinks she hears, footsteps behind her. It probably means nothing, but she’s still relieved to run into someone like an air-raid warden, a figure of authority, and to spend a few minutes chatting to him while she assures herself that the steps she thought she heard behind her were only imaginary. Or that whoever it was has taken some other route and isn’t on her heels any longer. At that point she’d be happy to go on alone.’
