Dead of Winter (7 page)

‘Or following her, surely?’

Madden’s intervention brought the chief inspector up short.

‘Well, yes … I suppose so … technically.’ Sinclair frowned. ‘But there’s no indication of that. They stood there talking for a minute or two and according to the warden there was no one else about.’

Madden sat pondering.

‘Yet you say they bumped into each other in the darkness?’ he went on after a moment. ‘Did she seem to be hurrying? Was she nervous, perhaps?’

‘Because she thought someone was following her? John, I’ve just said there was no suggestion of that.’ The chief inspector’s puzzlement showed on his face. ‘It wasn’t only that the warden didn’t see anyone. He didn’t hear any footsteps either. The Bow Street detectives asked him. Mind you, that could be explained by the fact there was a strong wind blowing.’

‘Or because the killer heard him speaking to Rosa and stopped.’

‘Around the corner, you mean? In Museum Street? Out of sight?’

Sinclair stared at him, and as he watched, Madden got to his feet. The fire had burned down to a bank of smouldering embers and he stirred it, adding fresh logs to revive the blaze.

‘Yes, but if he was following her with the intention of killing her, doesn’t that suggest it was someone she knew?’

Sinclair resumed speaking, but this time his companion made no reply.

‘And didn’t we agree that the odds were against that?’

‘True … But there’s another possibility.’

Madden put down the poker and straightened, his tall figure casting a long shadow across the hearth. He looked down at the chief inspector.

‘What if
he
knew
her
?’ he said.

‘John and I have decided. We’re going up to London for the funeral. Do you know when it will be, Angus? Have the police released Rosa’s body yet?’

Helen Madden sat back on her heels. She brushed a strand of fair hair from her eyes and regarded Sinclair, who was seated on a tombstone. Seeking to fill in time before the chief inspector’s train departed, they had stopped at the churchyard, where Helen had a task to perform.

‘I’m not certain,’ Sinclair said. ‘But I can find out for you. In any case, it won’t be long. There’s no reason for it to be held back. The pathologist has done his work.’ He reflected for a moment. ‘If you let me know what train you’re catching I’ll send your friend Billy Styles with a police car to Waterloo. The funeral will be at Golders Green, I expect. He can run you up there and collect Mrs Laski on the way. I dare say she’d be grateful for a lift.’

‘That would be kind, Angus.’ She smiled her thanks. ‘And it means we can take Rosa’s things with us and return them to her aunt. I know you looked through them today, but will the police in London still want to see them?’

The chief inspector considered the question. He had been watching while his hostess busied herself attending to her family’s plot in the moss-walled cemetery, sweeping it free of dead leaves and branches and trimming the uncut grass with a pair of garden shears. The chore was a necessary one, Helen had explained. Highfield had been without a sexton since the death of the last incumbent the previous summer, and it was unlikely the post would be filled until the war was over. Buried side by side in the square plot were her parents and grandparents. But not her two brothers. Both casualties of the First World War, their bodies lay in cemeteries across the Channel, in what had been, until recently, enemy-held territory; one in France, the other in Belgium. The spot where they might have been interred was occupied by a relatively new gravestone, little weathered as yet, and inscribed simply with the name ‘Topper’ and beneath it the words ‘Mourned by his many friends’. It marked the final resting place of an old tramp whose true name no one had ever discovered but who had been deeply attached to Helen and her husband and cared for by them in his last years.

‘I’ll have a word with the detective handling the case,’ Sinclair replied, after an interval. He’d been remembering the old vagrant, and Helen’s determination in particular that he should not end his days in solitude, abandoned by some path or hedgerow. ‘But I don’t believe so. There’s a diary among her stuff, but it’s in Polish, and the best thing would be for Mrs Laski to look through it and see if it contains anything unusual.’

The book in question, leather-bound and inscribed with its owner’s name, had been among the effects which the chief inspector had examined earlier at Madden’s farm. They had gone there in the late morning, and May Burrows, the manager’s wife, had shown him up to the room where Rosa Nowak had slept. In her thirties now, May had been little more than a child herself when Sinclair had first come to Highfield. With her that morning had been her daughter, Belle, home on a weekend pass from an ATS barracks in Southampton, and with a dimpled face and a head of dark curls that had reminded the chief inspector of her mother twenty years before.

‘Such an easy girl,’ May had told him when she took him upstairs. ‘Good-hearted, too. No trouble, ever. She’d do anything she was asked, and always with a smile. So different from the others we had before her.’

This last had been said with a knowing look and a shake of the head, and referred beyond doubt to at least two of the three land girls Madden had employed earlier in the war, both of whom had contrived to become pregnant during their time at Highfield. Of them, and their paramours, two signallers from a temporary training camp set up near the village, Helen had remarked that it was worse than trying to keep foxes out of a henhouse. The third, a wan creature from the London suburb of Ealing, had given up her job as a secretary to join the Land Army, seduced perhaps by the vision displayed by a poster put up early in the war in which a smiling girl stood beckoning, a sheaf of golden corn beneath her arm. ‘You are needed in the fields,’ the poster proclaimed, but made no mention of the work involved; of the grinding physical effort farm labour demanded, the backbreaking toil from dawn till dusk. The young woman in question had lasted less than two months before wilting under the strain and being shipped back to London. Thereafter, Madden had managed with the labour he had until the demands of the dairy, which fell more and more on May, had obliged him to look for outside help once more.

May’s evident fondness for Rosa had been echoed later by her husband, George, when Madden and Sinclair found him in the tack room off the stable yard.

‘She never said much, not even to us, but she had a sweet nature,’ Burrows told them. He’d been busy repairing a broken harness: winter was a time for make and mend on the farm. ‘Just ask our Tommy. She used to help him with his homework, though it wasn’t part of her job. But she liked kids, you could tell. She was going to be a teacher one day, she said. Tom was in tears when he heard what had happened to her.’

Though not expected to appear that day – it was Sunday – the two farmhands Madden employed, a pair of middle-aged brothers named Thorp, had walked over from the cottage they shared a mile away to ask whether the grim news they had heard from other sources was true. And each, it turned out, had his own special memory of the young girl and the brief time she had spent among them.

‘She were a worker, that one,’ Fred Thorp, the older of the two, wistfully recalled when they came upon the two brothers drinking tea with May and her daughter in the farmhouse kitchen. ‘You never had to go looking for her. After she’d finished with the cows she’d be there asking what she could do next. Once I caught her muck-knocking …’ He chuckled. ‘It were pouring rain and we’d all given up for the day, but then I spotted her down there – ’he gestured in the direction of the fields – ‘still at it, soaked to the skin. So I told her, “Now you stop that”, and I made her come in with me. Took her by the hand, I did, thought I might have to drag her, she was that set on staying.’

His younger brother Seth had a more personal souvenir which he proudly showed to Madden and his guest.

‘She made this shirt for me, Rosa did.’ He’d patted the well-ironed garment he was wearing under his patched tweed jacket. ‘And another like it from a piece of material I had off our cousin Mabel when she went to Australia before the war. I’d never known what to do with it till Rosa said to leave it with her. It’s a crying shame, sir. I hope you catch that bastard soon. Hanging’s too good for him.’

The subject of Rosa’s skill as a seamstress had come up again when the chief inspector examined the girl’s belongings in what had been her bedroom. With Madden at his elbow, Sinclair had gone quickly through her clothes, few in number, but including one of the two embroidered silk blouses Helen had told him about and which he remarked on to his host.

‘Oh, she could do wonders with a needle and thread.’ Overhearing his remark, May commented from the doorway where she was waiting for them to complete their business. ‘There was also that coat she made for herself, Mr Madden, do you remember? She was wearing it the day she went to London.’

Helen, too, had recalled the garment when she arrived at the farm later to collect the chief inspector, having spent the morning visiting patients in the area who for one reason or another were unable to get to her surgery during the week.

‘It was an old coat of Rob’s which he’d discarded,’ she told him, referring to their son, who was a naval lieutenant. ‘I was amazed when I took her to the station that day. She’d made a hood from some of the material left over after she’d shortened it. And not only that, she’d changed the whole cut. I hardly recognized it.’

With his precious weekend all but over, Sinclair had taken his leave then of Madden, who was committed to driving the tractor he’d been using for the past fortnight over to a neighbouring farm which had an urgent need for it.

‘We’re all sharing machinery now,’ he’d remarked. ‘And everyone’s behind with the autumn ploughing as a result. But ours is done, thank God. We’ll have a chance to catch our breath. Winter’s usually a quiet time.’

The chief inspector had long ceased to wonder at the ease with which his old partner had been able to turn his back on the profession where he had found such distinction and settle into the life of a farmer. A countryman by birth, it had needed only the accident of his meeting with Helen and their subsequent decision to marry to provide the impulse necessary to return to his roots. But that morning Sinclair had sensed a change in the other man, an uncharacteristic tension in his manner, which had shown itself during a stroll they had taken in the garden together after breakfast.

Professing a wish to examine what damage had been done by the recent wind to his fruit trees, Madden had led the way down the long lawn in front of the house to the orchard that bordered a stream at the bottom of the garden. Beyond the brook lay a wooded ridge called Upton Hanger, which in summer glowed deep green but whose great oaks and beeches, stripped of their leaves, stood stark as skeletons in the leaden morning light.

‘She worked mainly with the cows, you know, Angus.’ Madden had spoken without preamble, taking the chief inspector by surprise. His attention had seemed to be fixed on the broken branch of a plum tree which he’d picked up from the ground and was examining. ‘She had a gift for it. I’d hear her talking to them while she was milking. In Polish, I imagine. She called them by their names. I think she was happy here. Or less unhappy. I’ll have to find someone local to take her place. May needs help in the dairy, but I can’t face asking for another land girl. Not till this is settled.’

He had looked at Sinclair then.

‘You will keep me informed, won’t you, Angus?’

Though spoken in a quiet tone, the demand had brooked no refusal, and the chief inspector had been swift to reassure his friend. But he’d been struck as much by the depth of feeling evident in Madden’s voice as by the look in his eye, which had seemed to reflect a stronger emotion; one, though, he was not used to seeing there: a cold, controlled anger.

‘John’s furious, though he tries not to show it,’ Helen told him later that day when they were driving to the station. ‘He never thought of Rosa as an employee. He saw the sadness in her from the first. The grieving. To him she was someone who needed help and comfort, as much a casualty of war as any wounded soldier. And now she’s gone and there’s nothing he can do about it.’

They had continued in silence for a few moments. Then she had spoken again:

‘And something else. It’s reawakened an old pain in him. Not that he’s said so in so many words, but I can tell. The daughter he lost … you remember that?’

She was referring to an episode in Madden’s life before he’d met her, an earlier marriage, which had ended in tragedy. A young detective at the time, he and his wife had had a daughter, but soon after her birth, the two of them had contracted influenza and died. Madden had witnessed the last hours of his child as she struggled for life, and the experience had left a wound in him which only the love he’d found later with Helen and the life they had made together had healed. Or so the chief inspector had always believed.

‘He dreamed of her the other night for the first time in years and he wondered why. I think it’s because of what happened to poor Rosa. She was in his care, you see. But he couldn’t protect her.’

Her words had remained in Sinclair’s mind until they reached the station, where, having elected to return to London on an earlier train than he might have rather than risk being delayed until all hours by the uncertainties of the rail schedule, he had discovered with little surprise that the early train was no longer early; that at the very least it would be an hour late. Preferring the company of his hostess to the cramped squalor of the waiting room, he had returned with her to the churchyard where he sat now, with his coat buttoned up over a thick scarf and his hat pulled down low against the persistent cold, watching while she attended to her self-imposed task.

‘Poor Angus. It’s been a miserable weekend for you. We haven’t had a chance to talk about other things. For instance, I wanted to hear about your lunch with Lucy. Did you really invite her to the Savoy? That sounds far too grand for her.’

Busy raking the scattered leaves into a heap, Helen glanced up, smiling.