She was chattering, unable to hide her nervousness, and as he looked out over the snow-covered lawns and beds Madden wondered what knowledge it was she was harbouring.
‘Oh, Lord — the fire! I’d clean forgotten!’
Clapping a hand to her head Mrs Spencer turned from the window and hurried to the fireplace, where the grate was already laid with twigs and other kindling and a basket stuffed with logs stood ready for use.
‘I meant to light it this morning. That friend of mine you met, Bess Brigstock, is coming to spend Christmas with us and I want this room to be warm by this evening so we can sit here. There’s a concert of carols on the BBC.’
While she fumbled with a box of matches, Madden turned back to gaze out of the window and found that the scene he’d been looking at moments before had changed. Two figures had appeared on the path at the bottom of the garden, one of them a small boy. They were moving towards the house, but only by stages, their progress slowed by the snowballs which the child was hurling at his companion, who was hampered by the burden she was carrying: Mrs Spencer’s Christmas pudding, no doubt. Finally she held up one arm in token of surrender and having submitted to a final volley from her attacker took hold of his hand and drew him along with her.
‘There they are now.’ Madden spoke in a quiet voice.
Mrs Spencer made as if to rise, then checked the movement and struck another match instead. ‘They’re quite useless these days,’ she muttered. ‘Not like they were before the war.’ She had already tried to light two, but both had fizzled and gone out. Now the third one, too, died in her fingers. ‘Bother!’
She glanced up at him.
‘I’m so relieved.’ She smiled guiltily. ‘You’ll be able to speak to Evie yourself in a minute. You’ll see why I couldn’t talk to you about it. It’s her story to tell.’
As he looked down at her crouched figure — at the way her fingers fumbled with the matchstick she was holding — a thought stirred in the back of his mind. Frowning, he returned his gaze to the two figures making their slow way up the snow-covered path. Both wore coats and gloves, but while the boy was bare-headed, the girl had something over her head, and when they came closer he saw it was a thick woollen shawl. The ends were tucked into the collar of her coat so that they seemed like almost one garment.
At that instant a shaft of memory almost physical in nature sent a shudder through him. Its genesis was an incident that had occurred many years before when he had been a young policeman and recently married. He had come home after a day’s work to find his then wife busy with household tasks, and as he saw her figure bent over an ironing board he had realized with the force of revelation that he did not love her as he had hoped he would; that he would never love her in that way and that equally he would never leave her or the daughter born to them a few weeks earlier. In the event, both had died within six months, victims of an influenza epidemic, but the memory of the pain he had experienced at that moment had never left him, and although their causes could not have been more different, it was the same feeling he felt now: the same sickening realization of a truth that could not be denied.
‘You say she has a story to tell?’
He turned from the scene outside to look at Mary Spencer again; at the burning match she was holding to the kindling in the grate; to the spent matches with their charred heads that lay on the stones beside her.
‘Yes, a quite extraordinary tale. Awful, really.’
‘Does it by any chance start in Paris?’
‘Good heavens!’ The match she was holding dropped from her nerveless fingers; she stared at him in astonishment. ‘So you knew all along-?’
He shook his head. ‘It was only a guess …’
He turned back to the window and watched as hand in hand the two figures mounted the steps to the terrace. The murmured words he spoke were for his ears alone.
‘Poor, poor Rosa …’
28
‘He killed the wrong girl, Angus. He had to decide quickly when they reached Waterloo. He saw two young women dressed much the same, and both with their heads covered, which made it hard to recognize their faces. They both had baskets of food, too, and the platform was crowded. When they got off the train he had to pick one to follow, and as luck would have it he chose wrong: he followed Rosa.’
With the receiver pressed to his ear, Madden stared out at the garden. The phone was kept on a small table by one of the windows, and as he stood there his gaze fell on the straggling line of footsteps which Eva and her charge had left in the snow when they had come up the path from the gate at the bottom of the garden.
‘I half guessed it when I saw her walking up to the house; she was wearing a coat with a shawl drawn over her head like Rosa’s hood. Then when I saw the matches it was clear to me.’
‘Did you say
‘The charred heads. Mrs Spencer was trying to light the fire and I remembered what Billy had said about finding spent matches around Rosa’s body. We thought her killer must have been searching for something. But it was Rosa’s face he was looking at. He had to be sure, and it was only then he knew he’d killed the wrong girl.’
‘How could anyone do such a thing?’ Sinclair was disbelieving. ‘Any normal human being would have checked first.’
‘We’re not dealing with a normal human being, Angus. What was one dead girl more or less to Raymond Ash?’
Even as he spoke, an image of Rosa’s face, with its veiled air of sorrow, returned to him with a pang, together with another face, hardly resembling hers in features — Eva Belka was red-haired and fair of complexion — but afflicted now with the same pain and remorse.
‘It cannot be so.’ Racked by sobs she had kept repeating the words after Madden had revealed to her what had happened to her friend after they had parted. ‘ cannot be so.’
Prior to that — and with the eagerness of one who had borne a burden for too long and wanted only to shed it — she had described her brush with a killer in Paris four years earlier, an encounter that had haunted her ever since. In English as fluent as Rosa’s, and marked by the same accent, she had poured out her story; still unaware of the tragic chain of events that had led to her compatriot’s murder. Judging it better to let her speak first, Madden had kept what he had to tell her until last. But as he listened to her stumbling story and watched as she sat twisting her fingers, her green eyes fixed on his, he had found himself wishing that the sad task had fallen to another.
Still wearing her coat, and with the same shawl covering her hair which had led to Ash’s fatal error, she had been ushered into the sitting-room by Mary Spencer, who, though aware of the ordeal facing the young woman and wanting to remain with her, had had her young son to think about. Since he could not be present, she had had to leave them alone, and had paused only to reassure Eva and to tell her she wasn’t to worry any longer; that all would be well once she had spoken to their visitor.
When they were done — and before Eva had left him to rejoin her mistress — Madden had made one final effort to comfort her.
‘ may seem hard to believe,’ he had said gently, but even if you had gone to the police earlier it would have made no difference. You and Rosa would still have been on that train together. Nothing would have changed that.’
But his words had gone unheeded; she had continued to weep.
‘I was so happy to see her,’ she had told him, her eyes filled with tears. ‘Sad and happy. I found she was like me, always thinking of the past, of her family. But at least we could talk about the old days. We could share our memories of Warsaw. Now all I wish is that we had never met.’
Once she had left him he had set about the problem of telephoning London, something that had now become a matter of urgency. Remembering the advice he’d received earlier that day, he had got the Liphook exchange to put him in touch with Leonard and had then asked the village bobby to use his authority to get through to the Yard.
