he asked. ‘Are you plainclothes now? Is that your surprise? Have they finally given in?’ He knew how long she’d been knocking on the door.
‘Nah … no such luck.’
Lily’s smile faded as her jaw set in the bulldog look that was so familiar to Fred. Just like Winnie’s, he was wont to remark, referring to the Prime Minister. Same cut of the jib. Same sort of determination, too.
‘But it’s CID business. And you’ll never guess who I’m working under.’ The light had come back into her eyes.
‘Chief Inspector Sinclair, no less.’
‘Crikey!’ Fred was impressed. ‘The old man himself? You’d better mind your Ps and Qs, girl. They say he’s hard to please.’
‘Oh, he’s all right.’ Lily spoke airily. ‘His bark’s worse than his bite. But he keeps me at it, I can tell you.’
‘At what, Lil?’ Peering at his niece, Fred saw her hesitate. ‘Look, I’m not prying, lass …’
‘No, it’s not that.’ Lily rubbed his hand. ‘It’s just it’s confidential for the moment. It hasn’t been put out. So keep it to yourself for now, that’s all.’
‘Message received and understood.’ He nodded solemnly.
‘It’s to do with the man who shot those blokes in the pub. They don’t know who he is. I mean, they haven’t got a clue, even. So I was told to read through the files, and that’s what I’ve been doing, going through them, one after another, file after file, till I was cross-eyed, looking for a name, someone with a record who might fit the bill. But there didn’t seem to be anyone. That is, till I got my hands on this foreign stuff …’
Lily explained about the IPC advisories. ‘It was in one of those. A report about a man who broke into a house in France before the war and topped the owner and his wife and daughter as well: three of them. Same modus operandi as at Wapping. Lots of similarities. Soon as I saw it I knew — this was the bloke. And Mr Sinclair agreed. He’s getting in touch with the police in Paris.’
Basking in the warmth of her uncle’s proud smile, Lily sat back.
‘Modus operandi, is it?’ Fred chuckled. ‘I knew you’d show them if you ever got the chance.’ He regarded her fondly. ‘But …’ He bit his lip. ‘Now don’t take this wrong, love, but how did you come to get this job? Why you?’
‘Ah, well, that’s another thing. I haven’t even told you about that yet.’ She paused, her glance teasing. ‘But aren’t you going to eat your pie, Uncle Fred?’ She nodded towards the unappetizing-looking object still lying untouched on the table between them. ‘It’s getting cold sitting there.’
Fred growled. ‘Never mind my pie,’ he said. ‘You bite into one of those things these days, you never know what you’ll find inside. Come on, lass. What haven’t you told me yet?’
Lily hesitated. ‘You remember that girl who was killed in Bloomsbury?’
‘When you were first at the scene?’
‘That’s right. Well, it seems this bloke they’re looking for topped her as well.
Fred nodded. He whistled in amazement.
‘Well, I had a hand in both cases. Mr Cook let me help. He’s a decent sort and I reckon he put in a word for me with this inspector from the Yard who’s taken over. Bloke called Styles. It was him who sent my name up.’
‘Well, good for both of them.’ Fred Poole thumped the table with his fist in approval. ‘And about time, too. But will it lead anywhere? Does it mean you’ll get a crack at plainclothes?’
‘Hard to say.’ She sucked at her teeth. ‘Depends what Mr Sinclair thinks. He’s the one I have to impress.’
‘Seems to me you’ve done a good job so far.’
‘So far …’ Lily echoed his words. Then her face brightened. ‘But the good news is, when I dug out the report about the murders in France I thought that’d be it. I’d be on my way back to Bow Street, directing traffic and playing nursemaid to tarts. But Mr Sinclair told me I could stay on for the time being. So I’ll be back at the Yard tomorrow first thing.’
‘That’s my girl.’ Fred didn’t hide his satisfaction. ‘Once they’ve had a good look at you they’ll see what they’ve been missing.’
‘Well, I don’t know about that …’ His niece blushed.
‘Still, from what you’ve told me, it’s a rum business. I can’t make head or tail of it.’ He scratched his head. ‘You’re saying the same fellow who did the Wapping job killed those two girls?’
‘That’s what they reckon. But it’s the first one that’s really puzzling. Seems he killed her for no reason. She’d been working as a land girl, living on a farm in Surrey, minding her own business. Didn’t have a boyfriend, never been in any trouble. There was nothing to explain it. Nothing about her that was unusual.’
Lily sat frowning.
‘Except she was foreign, of course,’ she added.
‘Well, maybe that was it,’ Fred responded, anxious to be of help. ‘Maybe that’s the reason. I remember you telling me now. Polish, wasn’t it?’
PART TWO
14
‘So he wasn’t a policeman at all?’ Mary Spencer said. She was standing at the sink, peeling potatoes and looking out of the window into the stable yard where her five-year-old son Freddy was pretending to be a Hurricane. Arms outstretched, he circled the cobbles, now and then emitting a high-pitched staccato noise meant to sound like a machine-gun.’ ‘Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh …’
‘Then what on earth was he doing here?’
‘That’s still a mystery,’ Bess Brigstock replied. Bess was a volunteer postal worker; she delivered mail to outlying farms and houses in the Liphook area and was an invaluable source of information and gossip. ‘Bob Leonard rang Petersfield in case they knew anything about it, but they didn’t. They certainly hadn’t sent anyone, and anyway they pointed out it wouldn’t have been a policeman enquiring about that sort of thing; it would have been someone from the Ministry of Agriculture, or the Board of Trade. They have their own inspectors.’
‘Yes, but he showed Evie a warrant card,’ Mary insisted. Tired of his circling, Freddy had zeroed in on Bess’s pony Pickles, who stood harnessed between the shafts of her trap in the middle of the yard. ‘Eh-eh-eh-eh …’ He swooped down on Pickles, who disappointingly showed no reaction but continued to chew thoughtfully on the contents of his nosebag. ‘He told her he was a detective.’
‘Annie MacGregor said the same.’ Bess frowned. ‘He turned up at Finch’s Farm before he came here and he flashed his card at her, too. She said he was a greasy little man.’
‘Evie couldn’t bear him. According to her he just pushed his way into the house.’
Mary brushed the pile of peelings off the edge of the sink into a bucket that already held discarded bits of leaf vegetables, some of them in the first stage of decay, as well as other food fragments, all of them destined for the porkers Hodge was fattening in the pigsty behind the stables. She wiped her brow with the back of her wrist.
‘They tell you to cook them in their skins,’ she murmured, peering at a well-thumbed booklet published by the Ministry of Food that was lying open by the sink. ‘It’s supposed to keep the goodness in. Too late now. Potatoes au gratin? We’ve still got some mousetrap. Freddy will hate it. But he hates potato soup even more.’
She turned to look at Bess, who was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea in front of her, taking comfort as always from her burly, reassuring figure, clad that day in a brown, hairy sweater that made Mary think of Mama Bear from the book of children’s stories she read to Freddy every evening. The cup of tea Bess was cradling in her large callused hands might easily have been a plate of porridge.
‘What did he say to Annie MacGregor, this man?’
‘The same as he told Evie, so far as I can gather.’ Bess’s face darkened. Heavy in the shoulders, and with thighs like oaks, her leathery complexion testified to a life lived out of doors. ‘That there’d been reports of illegal slaughtering of livestock in the area and what did she know about it. Annie said she’d never heard of such a thing and if he was trying to insinuate that she and Alec had been killing off their animals on the sly he must be out of his
