more difficult to isolate, a sense of failure unrelated to her violent end — there was no way he could have foreseen the danger into which she was heading — but having to do with the time she had spent in his care when he had seen her distress and been powerless to ease it. The link his subconscious had made with the death of his baby daughter long ago — so disturbingly vivid in his dream — had not occurred to him until Helen had suggested it, but he understood now why the old pain had returned to haunt him. He’d been unable to help either. His daughter had expired beneath his gaze, her faint breaths failing, while Rosa had died unhealed, grief claiming her for its own.
The sky was already paling when he left the hall an hour later and set out for home. His route took him through the village, and as he walked down the main street, past the pub, he heard his name called out and looked round to see a familiar figure in police uniform emerging from the side door of the Rose and Crown. Highfield’s bobby for the past thirty years, and something of a law unto himself, Will Stackpole felt no shame at being caught slipping out of the pub at half-past four in the afternoon.
‘How are you, sir?’ He waved to Madden.
‘Will …!’ Checking his stride, Madden waited for the other man to catch him up. ‘Helen tells me you’ve heard from Ted.’
‘That’s right, sir.’ The constable crossed the road to join him and they walked on together. Almost as tall as Madden, he’d been putting on weight in recent years and now cut an imposing figure in his cape and conical helmet. ‘First letter in two months. We were starting to get worried, Ada and I.’ He was speaking of his oldest son. Captured during the fighting in North Africa, Ted Stackpole had been a prisoner-of-war in Germany for the past two years. ‘They know we’re winning the war, but they don’t know how long it’s going to take. Mind you, I couldn’t tell him that myself.’ Stackpole snorted. ‘You listen to the news and you think everything’s going well. We took Paris without much trouble, after all. But now our boys seem stuck. And those flying bombs keep coming over, don’t they? It makes you wonder what’s really happening.’
He stole a glance at Madden.
‘Ted asked about Rob, same as he always does. Have you had any word, sir?’
‘Not for a while, Will. But you know what it’s like. Once they put to sea we don’t hear anything.’
Acknowledging the constable’s concern, Madden gripped his arm. Their long friendship, which dated from the murder investigation that had first brought him to the village, had been inherited by their sons. The two boys, with only a year’s difference in age between them, and both taken with the natural world, had been inseparable in childhood. Together they had spent a string of summers exploring the woods and fields around Highfield, days which in Madden’s memory now seemed bathed in perpetual sunlight.
‘We’re just praying he’ll be home for Christmas.’
‘Ah — now that would be something.’
Stackpole laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. After a moment he spoke again.
‘Any word from the Yard, sir?’
‘Nothing of note, Will. Mr Sinclair rang me this morning. They’re working hard on the case, but they haven’t made any real progress yet.’
His words brought a grunt from the constable.
‘I’ve asked around like you suggested. But there’s nothing to get a hold of here. It seems Rosa didn’t have any close friends; she kept to herself. But everyone liked the lass, those that met her, and they keep asking me about her, wanting to know what’s been done.’
The main street with its shops was behind them now and presently they passed by the church, and the moss-walled cemetery beside it. Ahead was a row of cottages, one of which belonged to the constable and his wife, and when they got there they found Ada Stackpole in the front garden with the elder of their two daughters, both in smocks, and with their hair wrapped in scarves, busy digging up carrots from a flower-bed that before the war had held a display of roses that were Will Stackpole’s pride and joy. Pink from her exertions, Ada paused, leaning on her spade, to greet Madden and to inform him that he’d just missed Helen.
‘She’d been over to Craydon to see old George Parker. Dropped a brick on his toe, he did, and broke it. His toe, that is. Silly old coot.’ She chuckled. ‘She came in for a cup of tea. Can I get you one?’
‘No thanks, Ada, I have to get back.’ Turning to the constable, he added, ‘I’m expecting another call from Mr Sinclair. Do you remember me telling you about that streetwalker the police interviewed?’
‘The French woman?’
Madden nodded. ‘Bow Street are showing her some photographs from records. I’ll let you know if anything comes of it.’
Leaving the last of the cottages behind him, Madden walked on in the gathering dusk, and when he reached the high brick wall of Melling Lodge left the road and made his way through darkening fields to a footpath that ran alongside the stream at the foot of the valley and which, by a slightly longer route, would lead him home.
‘It was a way he loved to take, and treasured memories lay around him as he followed the winding path. The stream and its banks had been a favoured playground of his children, the wooded slopes above the scene of countless rambles with them. Not far from where he was now he had once sat unmoving with his young son by a badger sett for more than an hour before dawn so that they could catch a glimpse by torchlight of the dam with her cubs. Even closer, only a short way down the stream, was a patch of meadow grass hard by the bank and hidden by bushes which held a sweeter memory yet, one of which he never spoke but which still had the power to bring a warmth to his cheeks when he recalled it.
The afternoon light had all but faded as he unlatched the wooden gate at the bottom of the garden and walked up the long, sloping lawn to the house. The phone was ringing as he went in and he heard Helen answer it in the study. Thinking it might be Sinclair calling for him he went there and met her as she was coming out of the room into the passage.
‘John, darling. I didn’t know you were back.’
They kissed.
‘That wasn’t Angus, was it?’ Madden asked. She shook her head.
‘It was Gladys Porter. She says her Harold’s come over all queer. Considering how much time he spends in the Rose and Crown I’m not surprised, but I’d better go over there and have a look at him.’
He accompanied her to the hall where her coat hung.
‘Every time the phone rings now I think it might be Rob to say they’re back in port. Safe.’
He helped her into her coat then turned her gently about and put his arms around her.
‘It won’t be long now.’ He sought to reassure himself as much as her. ‘Any day.’
‘That’s what I tell myself,’ Helen said. ‘Any day. But the awful thing is the closer we come to the end of the war, the worse it gets. If anything were to happen to him now …’
Madden tightened his hold, drawing her closer to him.
‘I get so angry. It’s so easy to hate. Then I think of Franz and try not to feel what I feel.’
The man she was speaking of, an Austrian psychiatrist named Franz Weiss, had been a lifelong friend of hers. Having fled to England from Nazi Germany, he had been planning to join his son and daughter in New York when he’d suffered a stroke that had prevented him from travelling. Soon afterwards war had broken out and Helen had brought the frail old man down to Highfield to spend what turned out to be the last months of his life with them. Though the full extent of the tragedy unfolding in Europe would not be known for another two years, there were already inklings of it, and Weiss had confided to his hosts that he did not expect to see or hear again from those he had left behind, including two brothers and a sister. During the final weeks of his life when he had been confined to bed he had spent many hours playing music on a gramophone he had brought with him from London. Bach cantatas for the most part, they had been the works of German composers exclusively, and it was Helen who had divined that it was their old friend’s last wish to clear his mind of all bitterness and remember only what was dear to him.
‘Sometimes, too, I wonder what he might have said to Rosa if he’d still been with us. How he might have drawn her away from thoughts of death and back to life. And then I think … but to what purpose?’
They stood locked in one another’s arms for a moment longer. Then she kissed him again.
‘I must be off. Perhaps you’ll have heard from Angus by the time I get back. I hope so.’
