of her family, and of what must have happened to them, had affected her.’
Madden stirred in his chair. He was sitting across the fireplace from the chief inspector, his face half-hidden by the deepening shadows in the room.
‘There’s not much more we can tell you, Angus,’ he said. ‘The last time I saw Rosa was at the farm on Thursday, just before Helen arrived to drive her to the station. She was weighed down with her bag and a basket of food I’d given her to take up to her aunt, and she kept trying to thank me for them. She wasn’t a high-spirited girl. Reflective, rather, as Helen says. But she seemed cheerful enough that day; she was looking forward to seeing her aunt.’ He paused for a moment, then spoke again: ‘Tell us a little more about the murder itself. From what you said first, it sounded like a chance crime. Is that still your opinion?’
‘Yes and no. Which is to say, there’s now a question mark hanging over the case.’ The chief inspector grimaced. ‘It all revolves around the injury she suffered, the manner in which she was killed. But it’s a bit like trying to make bricks without straw. There just isn’t enough evidence to be certain, one way or the other. But I’ll lay it all out for you and you can tell me what you think. What you both think,’ he added, with a glance at Helen. ‘Just give me a moment to collect my thoughts.’
Though inured like all by now to the rigours of wartime travel, to the misery of unheated carriages, overcrowded compartments and the mingled smell of bodily odours and stale tobacco, he was still recovering from his trip down from London that afternoon when for two hours he had sat wedged in a window seat, gazing out at a countryside that offered little relief to eyes weary of the sight of dust and rubble, of the never-ending vista of ruined streets and bombed-out houses which the capital presented. Stripped to the bone by one of the coldest winters in recent memory, the fields and hedgerows through which they crawled had a lifeless air, while the sky above, grey as metal, had seemed to press on the barren earth. Scanning the paper he had bought at Waterloo, four pages of rationed newsprint filled mostly with war dispatches, his eye had lit on a single paragraph reporting the discovery of the body of a young Polish woman in Bloomsbury whose death was being treated by the police as suspicious. An account of the crime that Billy Styles had compiled and handed to him the day before was in his overnight case on the luggage rack above. The chief inspector had reviewed its contents a number of times without being able to come to any conclusion, an admission he had made to Madden when they had spoken on the telephone the previous evening.
‘It’s not exactly a puzzle, John,’ Sinclair had told his old partner. ‘To quote Styles, it’s more of a conundrum. I’ll tell you more when I come down tomorrow. I’m hoping you can help me with it.’
A frequent guest, the chief inspector’s visit had been arranged some time before, and he’d been looking forward not so much to the break from his duties it offered, which would be brief, but to the prospect of spending a few hours with friends who over the years had become dearer to him than any. The knowledge that his stay would now be overshadowed by a brutal crime, one to which they were connected, if only by circumstance, had darkened his mood, and it was not until his train was drawing into Highfield station and he glimpsed the familiar figure of his hostess waiting for him on the platform that his spirits had begun to recover.
‘Dear Angus …’
The disagreeable image he retained of the past two hours had evaporated with the kiss of greeting Helen had given him. Still slender, seemingly ageless, and with the movements and gestures of a woman on happy sensuous terms with her life, she had the gift of lending grace to any occasion, even one as commonplace as this — or so the chief inspector had always thought — and the whiff of jasmine he caught as her cheek touched his brought with it the memory of happier days in the past.
‘I’ve so many questions to ask you. But it’ll be better if we wait. I know it’s John you want to talk to about this.’
‘Not only him. I want your thoughts, too.’
‘Why, Angus, I’m flattered.’ Her teasing smile had lightened the moment between them. ‘I’m not used to being included in your old policemen’s confidences.’
Though quite baseless, the assertion, as intended, had brought a flush to Sinclair’s cheeks. John Madden’s decision to quit the force, made twenty years before, had come as a keen disappointment to him, and for a while at least he had found it difficult to overlook the role his colleague’s wife had played in bringing this about. Her remark now was an affectionate reminder of a time when they had not always seen eye to eye: his reaction to it a tacit acknowledgement of the power she continued to wield over him. A beauty in her day, and to Sinclair’s eyes still a woman of extraordinary appeal, she had always had the capacity to disturb his equanimity; to unsettle his sense of himself. It was a measure of their friendship and of the deep admiration he had for her that far from resenting this he took it as a sign that age and an increasing tendency towards crustiness had not yet reduced him to the status of old curmudgeon.
The train of recollection set off by her words had continued to occupy the chief inspector’s thoughts during the drive home. It had been a crime as bloody as any in the history of the Yard that had first brought him to Highfield, along with Madden, then an inspector, and his memory inevitably returned to that day as they drove past the high brick wall that hid from view the house where the outrage had occurred. Called Melling Lodge, it had lived under a curse ever since, or so it seemed to Sinclair. Though leased periodically to tenants, and used briefly to house evacuees at the start of the Blitz, it had more often stood empty, and the chief could seldom pass by the wrought-iron gates and the glimpsed garden beyond without a shudder. Today, however, the tremor he felt had more to do with the killing that had taken place in Bloomsbury two nights since and his concern for the effect it might have on the small community of which his friends were a part.
The early darkness of winter was drawing in by the time Helen turned into the long driveway lined with lime trees, bare of leaves now, but familiar to the chief inspector in all seasons, and drew up before the spacious, half- timbered house where she and Madden had lived since their marriage and which had belonged to her father; and his father before him. No lights were showing in the hall, but when they went inside they found Madden in the drawing-room with the curtains already pulled, kneeling on the hearth adding logs to the fire.
‘We’ve had one burning in your room all day, Angus.’ He had risen with a smile to greet their guest and shake his hand. ‘Be sure and keep it going or you’ll freeze.’
As he shed his coat and went closer to the blaze to warm his hands, Sinclair had cast a covert glance at his old friend, noting with envy his erect bearing and evident vigour. Unlike his wife’s clear face, Madden’s weathered features bore ample testimony to his age — he was past fifty — and to his past, as well, most notably in the shape of a jagged scar on his brow near the hairline that served as a reminder to those who knew his history of his time in the trenches.
Tall, and striking as much for his appearance as for his air of quiet authority, he was of all the colleagues the chief inspector had known during his long career at the Yard the most memorable.
And the one he had valued the most.
‘As I say, there’s no mystery about how she was killed, not according to the pathologist. Her neck was broken from behind. To be precise, whoever attacked her caught her in a headlock and snapped her spinal cord. She never had a chance to fight back. But that’s part of the problem.’
Refreshed by a sip of the whisky his hosts had offered him, a precious wartime commodity, Sinclair was ready to go on.
‘If the killer had an ulterior motive — rape, for example — it seems highly unlikely he would have seized hold of her that way. It’s true he might have tried to silence her, even render her semi-conscious, but not like that, surely. It’s far too dangerous.’
‘I agree.’ Helen interrupted him in a quiet voice. The crackling of the fire had died down in the last few minutes and as the flames diminished, the room, lit by a single table lamp, had grown darker. ‘That’s why boys are taught not to scrag each other when they fight. If he’d wanted to control her he’d more likely have squeezed her throat.’
‘Precisely.’ The chief inspector took another sip from his glass. ‘And that was the pathologist’s first guess. He examined the body by torchlight at the scene and guessed she’d been strangled. But there’s no doubt now as to what happened. It seems the murder was deliberate.’
Madden grunted, but when Sinclair glanced at him, inviting him to speak, he shook his head.
‘No, go on, Angus.’
Famous in his time at the Yard for his silences, for his practice, as Sinclair had once declared, in exasperation, many years before, of staying mum while others made fools of themselves, Madden’s reversion to old
