her basket of pine cones, ready to catch the package if it fell.
‘Hodge, thank you for all this lovely wood.’ Mary turned to the old man, who had climbed down from his seat and was starting to unload the logs from the back of the cart. Here, let me help you with those.’
‘Oh, don’t you worry, Missus. I can manage.’
Gnarled and gnome-like though he was — Mary could only guess at his age, but she thought he must be seventy at least — Ezra Hodge still possessed surprising strength, and it took him only a few minutes to haul the logs he’d brought out of the cart and carry them to the stall that served as a woodshed. Bess, meanwhile, had jumped down from the trap and she shooed Mary back towards the house.
‘You’ll catch your death of cold standing out here without a coat.’
‘It’s freezing, isn’t it.’ Mary hugged her elbows as she obeyed, turning to go back to the kitchen. ‘But I love it here in the country. I’m so pleased we’re not in London. It’s going to be a wonderful Christmas. I feel it in my bones.’
And just then, as she spoke, she felt a touch light as a feather on her cheek, and looking up she saw that the air was filled with spiralling shapes, countless numbers of them, drifting down in their hundreds from the low clouds above.
‘Freddie … Freddie …’ She called to her son. ‘Come outside. It’s starting to snow.’
20
‘Damn it!’
Bennett stood with his hands thrust in his pockets looking out of his office window over the Embankment and the muddy Thames beyond. Not that there was much to see. Snow had been falling since early that morning and the spiralling flakes blurred the buildings on the farther bank to faint outlines in the gathering dusk.
‘It’s frustrating, isn’t it? I thought after Madden’s stroke of good fortune we’d get on to him quickly. So did the commissioner. He asked this morning whether we were doing everything we could. Pointed out that the newspapers were asking the same question, though less politely. And they only know about Wapping.’
He looked over his shoulder.
‘Well, Angus — what should I tell him?’
Sinclair muttered to himself. He shifted in his chair, wincing. His gout was playing up again and he was beginning to suspect there might be a psychological element to his malady. The pain in his toe seemed to wax and wane according to the progress being made in the investigation, and that day it was feeling particularly tender.
‘Firstly, it’s kind of you to call it a stroke of good fortune, sir. But as I’ve already admitted, John made a connection I should have made myself. Right from the start we were looking for a link between Alfie Meeks and this killer, and his father’s death was the one event in his past that might have explained it. If I’d realized that myself and acted sooner we might have had Ash in custody by now. By all means pass that along to the commissioner. If he wants a sacrificial victim I’m ready to offer him my head. To tell the truth, I’m beginning to think I’m too old for this job.’
‘Now, now, Angus …’ Bennett spoke soothingly. ‘There’s no need to take this personally.’
Billy Styles, who was sitting in a chair beside Sinclair, eyed his chief with concern. He and Cook had been invited to join in what amounted to a council-of-war in the assistant commissioner’s office, and he could see from Lofty’s expression that he, too, didn’t like the turn the conversation had taken.
‘It’s no more than the truth, sir. To use a sporting metaphor, I took my eye off the ball and we’ve paid for it as a result.’
The chief inspector’s regret was heartfelt. The discoveries made in the past thirty-six hours — the span of time that had elapsed since Madden had rung him late in the evening to recount what he’d learned from Nelly Stover’s lips — had left him burdened with a sense of what might have been had he acted sooner.
The search, begun in earnest the following morning, had seemed at first to promise success. Although a man of Ash’s age would have been too old for military call-up — Sinclair calculated their quarry must be in his late forties by now — he would still have been liable for national service of some kind, and the chief inspector had ordered a check made of all Civil Defence rolls in the capital, his reasoning being that if Ash’s aim on returning to Britain had been to avoid notice he almost certainly would have abided by the rules and regulations.
‘He’d have been a fool not to volunteer for something, and we know he’s no fool,’ he had told Billy on issuing his orders. ‘If you draw a blank there try the Fire Brigade and the railways. They would all have been taking on older men at the start of the war. Filling the gaps.’
In the event, Ash’s name had come to light in less than an hour. Billy, with both Cook and Grace in tow, had brought the news to the chief inspector’s office.
‘His name’s on the list of fire-watchers in Wandsworth. He was one of a team of volunteers that stood duty in the Blitz and through 1942 on top of a waterworks near the river, and he stayed on their reserve roll when the service was reduced. They’ve got his home address. It’s a street off Wandsworth Common.’
‘Are we sure he’s our man?’ Sinclair had asked. ‘The Raymond Ash we want.’
‘It sounds like it, sir,’ Billy had told him. ‘I rang the Civil Defence headquarters there and spoke to someone who told me that the Ash he had known spoke French. They’d had to get him to interpret once when they had a Frenchy who’d volunteered for duty but couldn’t speak English.’
‘Anything else?’
‘He said he remembered the blokes who served with this Ash saying that although they usually went for a drink after their spell of duty he never would. He’d buzz off home once they were done. Never talked much to anyone.’
‘That’s good enough for me.’ Sinclair had hesitated no longer. ‘Unless or until proved otherwise, we’ll assume it’s him. Find out if he has a job. I want him picked up at once. We can’t charge him as yet, but we’ll detain him on suspicion. I’ll arrange for a search warrant. I want his flat or wherever he lives turned upside down. Look for the tools of his trade; a gun perhaps, or a length of wire. I doubt we’ll get much by questioning him, but if we find those diamonds we can hold him for the Sobel robbery while we build a case against him over here.’
It was an aspect of the investigation he had not given much thought to previously, but one that now increasingly occupied his mind, as he confessed to Bennett when he went to the assistant commissioner’s office later for their morning conference.
‘We’ve been so bent on finding this man we’ve forgotten how difficult it’s going to be to bring him to court. Grotesque though it seems, we’ve no evidence against him. There’s not a single witness living who can place him at the scene of any crime, either here or in France. As things stand, the most we could come up with is hearsay evidence twice removed that he once claimed to have topped a villain called Jonah Meeks thirty years ago. Some case that would make.’
‘Isn’t it curious though how he boasted about that?’ The assistant commissioner had been listening closely. It seems out of character.’
‘I’m not sure “boasting” is the right word, sir.’ Sinclair was dubious. If Nelly Stover’s story is to be believed, he had to convince Slattery of what he’d done before he could collect the reward. And it was the only time he spoke out of turn, so far as we know. But you’ve got a point: that may have been one of the reasons he never returned to England after the war. He’d left himself at risk with that little prank. There was no saying it might not come back to haunt him one day. As indeed it has. He may have decided at that early stage to make his career elsewhere, and under another name.’
‘His career …’ Bennett had brooded on the words. ‘So you think he actually chose his profession? Sat down one day and said to himself: “This is what I’m best at?”’
The chief inspector shrugged. ‘Who knows? Perhaps he fell into it by chance. But he seems to have opted for a criminal life early on. I’m not talking of Jonah Meeks now. You might just argue that was an aberration. I’m thinking of the curriculum vitae the French sent us. What took him to the Balkans, do you imagine? Could it possibly have been because law and order had broken down there and he saw a chance to exercise his talents? And why would that gang have taken him on unless he had something special to offer? He was always a killer, if you want my opinion, and I think Nelly Stover would say the same.’
