The Reckoning (15 page)

The warning wasn't necessary. With a smile to the housekeeper – and putting a finger to her lips – Sally slipped out of the door and began to tiptoe down the now-empty passage. The long stretch of stone-flagged floor produced audible echoes and she took pains to move silently along it until she reached the cubbyhole that served as her office. Slipping inside, she was about to switch on the light when she stopped herself. Sir Horace might see it come on under the door linking the two rooms and, if he did, he was sure to summon her. He had probably thought of some changes he wanted to make in his speech and had come downstairs in the hope of intercepting her. Well, if so, he was in for a disappointment. She would quietly remove her handbag from the back of the chair where it was hanging and steal away.

She began to tiptoe across the floor, feeling her way in the darkness, but before she had reached her chair the sound of Sir Horace's voice brought her stealthy movement to a halt. The distinctive barking note was pitched higher than usual.

‘
What?
' she heard him say. ‘
What the blazes . . . ?
' The words were sharp with anger. ‘
Now just a moment—'

He stopped in mid-sentence: cut off as though by a knife, so sudden was the silence that followed. Sally wondered if he was
talking on the phone, but then remembered that there wasn't one in the study any longer. He'd had it banished to the hall.

There was someone in there with him.

But
who
?

His last words had made her uneasy. When he had said, ‘
Now just a moment—'
she had detected what she thought was a note of alarm in his voice. Had some intruder found his way into the house?

The doors to the terrace were unlocked. She knew, because she'd gone out that way herself. Paralysed by indecision, she stood there in the darkness wondering whether she ought to knock on the door, or create some other disturbance. As she hesitated, a second voice made itself heard. Pitched low, it was impossible to hear what was being said. But the voice was soft and the tone even, and since there was no response from Sir Horace – no indication that he was still upset (if indeed he had been) – Sally decided to continue with her original plan of retrieving her bag silently and slipping away.

However, just as she was about to take a further and final step towards the chair where it hung, she heard a sound that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up in terror. A hoarse, unintelligible cry, it was followed by a sob so clear that, without pausing to think, she turned instinctively to the inner door. Fumbling for the handle, she flung it open . . . And stopped, frozen in the doorway by the sight that met her eyes.

Directly in front of her was the slumped shape of a man. Although he was on his knees and his face was in shadow, she recognized the balding head of her employer. Immediately behind him a dark-clad figure stood, holding a pistol close to his head. Before Sally could speak or utter a sound there was a deafening report and the back of Sir Horace's head exploded in a spray of blood and bone. At the same instant a gaping hole appeared in his forehead and his body toppled over and fell
face-down on the carpet. Unable to move, paralysed by shock, Sally lifted her gaze past the still-smoking gun to the figure behind. The face of the assassin was covered by a black balaclava. All that was visible through the narrow slit in the close-fitting hood were two eyes. They were fixed on her.

The gun moved.

Steady in the killer's hand, it shifted to point at Sally's chest, and in that last, agonizing second the lovely future she had dreamed of – her marriage . . . Tony . . . her children . . . all the years ahead – poured through her mind in a torrent and were gone, leaving only the present moment, which was shrinking to a pinpoint, telescoping inwards with the speed of a comet, until there was only this single instant of time, this moment,
now . . .

14

W
ITH THE MIST THAT
had blanketed the countryside all day growing thicker now, Madden set out from the farm in good time to walk home, striding down through the ploughed fields to the stream at the bottom of his land and then following the path that ran alongside it, at this season ankle-deep in fallen leaves and all but invisible to the naked eye.

‘Come along, Hamish.'

Lagging behind him, the basset was making heavy weather of the walk. Used to spending his mornings snoozing peacefully under Helen's desk in her surgery, and his afternoons lying on the back seat of her car as she made her rounds, that day he had received a rude awakening.

‘He's getting fat and lazy,' Helen had announced at the lunch table, meanwhile stroking the heavy head resting on her foot. ‘The only exercise he gets is digging up my flower beds. It's time he exerted himself. If you really are going over to the farm this afternoon, you might take Hamish with you.'

Although it was a Sunday, when he usually stayed home, Madden had earlier announced his intention of spending an hour or two attending to business.

‘I'm falling behind with the paperwork and, since I've got to
go up to London again tomorrow to see to Aunt Maud's house, I'd better get up to date before I leave.'

‘You better had.' Helen had appeared to take his resolve seriously. ‘Especially since there's no knowing when you'll be back.'

‘It won't be more than a few days,' Madden promised her. ‘I'll be home by the end of the week.'

‘So you say.' Helen finished her coffee. ‘But the siren of St John's Wood may have other plans for you.'

Madden was laughing.

‘Do you really want the house to fall down about your poor old aunt's ears?'

‘Must I answer that question?'

Rising from the table then, she had bent to kiss him.

‘I'm off myself. I promised to look in on the Dawson clan. The whole family's down with flu. And then I'm going to pass by the Hall. Violet's busy cleaning out the butler's pantry. She's bought herself a pair of dungarees and says she's joined the working classes and doesn't know why they make such a fuss about it. Manual labour is perfectly healthy, she says, and good exercise too. I've told her if she carries on this way, she'll be lynched.'

Madden had accompanied her outside to the garage, only a few steps from the front door, but still half-hidden by the mist.

‘I hate this weather.' Helen shivered.

‘It reminds me of France.' Madden had looked about him. ‘Sometimes it lasted for days, but we thought it a blessing. Nothing much could happen as long as we couldn't see the Germans and they couldn't see us. We used to pray it would go on.'

She had lifted a hand to his cheek and then, with no need for words or explanation, they had held each other in a long embrace.

‘I'll be back in time for tea.'

Although they had made no mention of the fact, it was a day
special to them both – Remembrance Sunday – and that morning they had attended a service in the village church honouring the dead not only of the war just past, but of the earlier one as well, in which Helen had lost two much-loved brothers, and her husband a host of comrades-in-arms. But if the fallen were seldom far from Madden's mind that day, the anniversary had a further significance for him. Despite surviving the carnage he had returned home scarred in body and mind, numbed by what he had experienced and unable to feel any more; or so he had thought, until fate had led him to this quiet corner of the English countryside and to a love that had brought him his own peace at last.

Later, recounting his time in the trenches to Helen, he had told her of the shame he had felt at his own survival.

‘I would see these young men arrive at the front thinking they were on some great adventure, and then I would see them die, and the ones who came after – they would die, too – and in the end it seemed there was only death to look forward to, so I shut my mind to it all. I stopped caring. I simply waited for my own time to come, but it never did.'

No longer trapped in an existence that had lost all meaning for him, he had found the courage to speak of things he had kept hidden, even from himself, and in return had received from Helen the assurance that the deadening of all emotion, of which he talked with such remorse, was simply the mind's way of protecting itself from unbearable truths; and that now that he had opened himself once more to the pain, healing would follow.

And so it had proved. With the passing of the years those memories had grown dim and, thinking back now as he walked beneath the eaves of the still, silent woods, it was not the images evoked by the anniversary that occupied his mind, but rather the continuing mystery of the murder investigation into which he'd been drawn. His suggestion of a possible link to the Great
War had not been made lightly. Although there was no evidence that the three murdered men had ever met, they were part of a whole generation that had been called to the colours – just as he had – and, try as he might, Madden had been unable to think of any other circumstance that might have united them.

But beyond that idea he could find no further clue to resolving the mystery, no event that might explain the killing of three seemingly unconnected individuals; and, aware that the alternative solution of a trio of purely random murders made just as much sense, he worried that he might have urged his idea too strongly, and resolved then and there to stress the point to Billy when he spoke to him next.

The thought had no sooner come into his mind when he heard the sound of voices and, as Hamish gave tongue behind him, a figure took shape in the mist ahead. To Madden's astonishment, the very person he was thinking of materialized out of the billowing cloud of grey.

‘Billy!' He stopped dead. ‘What are you doing here?'

‘I was coming to see you, sir.'

As the younger man halted on the path a second form appeared out of the fog. It was Angus Sinclair, wrapped in a Burberry coat and scarf. A young woman was following in his tracks.

‘I saw you pass by the cottage a while ago,' the chief inspector called out to Madden. ‘I said we'd most likely find you at the farm.'

‘We were on our way back from Winchester.' Billy blew on his fingers. Madden saw he was rumpled and unshaven. ‘This is Lily Poole, by the way.' He gestured towards the young woman who had advanced to join them. ‘Detective Poole, I should say.'

‘How do you do, Miss Poole.'

Lily flushed as she shook the hand Madden held out to her. His was a name well known to her. He had once been on the
force – she knew that – and there were those, Styles among them, who reckoned he was one of the best detectives who had ever held a warrant card.

‘Highfield wasn't that far off our route back to London,' Billy was explaining, ‘I thought we'd look in on the off-chance.'

‘And I'm very pleased you did. But why?' Madden was still baffled by their presence.

Billy lowered his fingers. For a long moment he held Madden's gaze.

‘You haven't heard then, sir?'

‘You mean she actually saw him shot?'

‘He was on his knees when she came into the room. It happened before her eyes. The killer even turned his gun on her, and the poor girl thought she was done for. But he didn't pull the trigger.'

As though his words called for a moment's silence, Billy paused.

‘He was wearing a balaclava. She couldn't see his face. Maybe that's why he let her live. But she witnessed the murder all right, and he must have known that would be enough to put his head in a noose one day.'

He shook his head in wonder.

The four of them had repaired to the chief inspector's cottage, where Madden learned that Billy had called first at the house before going in search of Sinclair, who had just heard about the shooting on the lunchtime news and was considering walking over to the farm himself in order to inform his erstwhile partner of it. The two detectives, both pale with exhaustion, had driven down to Hampshire late the previous afternoon and had ended up spending a sleepless night at Winchester police headquarters. They had been happy to accept their host's
offer of a cold leg of chicken and a sandwich by way of a late lunch, and were sitting now in his living room, a snug parlour lined with bookshelves and warmed by a fire burning brightly in the grate.

‘Start at the beginning,' Madden said. ‘Tell me about the girl. What happened to her? Did she call for help?'

‘No, she fainted, passed out cold, and only woke up when the housekeeper found her lying by the body.' Billy lowered the glass of beer he was holding in order to reply, but then nodded to Poole, who was sitting beside him. ‘I sent Lil over to her aunt's house to speak to the girl. She can tell you more.'

Lily opened her notebook. She wanted to appear calm, as if this was just another job. But there were people she wanted to impress here. Not just this Madden bloke, but Chief Inspector Sinclair – ex-chief inspector maybe, but still the man who had given her her chance in CID, and to whom she felt a debt of gratitude.

‘She'd been put to bed and given a sedative by the time I arrived,' Lily began. ‘But I went back to the house and spoke to her this morning. Sally Abbot's her name. She had her fiancé there with her. They're getting married next summer.' Lily shook her head ruefully. ‘I reckon she knows how lucky she was. She told me she'd been working for Canning for a couple of months, helping with his memoirs. She didn't say so, but I got the impression she hadn't cared for him.'

‘Still, he was the Lord Lieutenant . . .' Billy rolled his eyes in silent comment on the fact.

Sinclair grunted. ‘It's not as grand as it sounds,' he remarked. ‘But that won't stop the press from making the most of it.'

‘So it was the housekeeper who raised the alarm?' Madden wanted to press on.

‘She and the chauffeur.' Billy took a sip of his beer. ‘They were the only ones on duty. They rang the police in Winchester, and they were on the scene in less than half an hour, but even so
it was too late. The man had vanished. But they think they know how he got out there, and also how he got away. Earlier that day a van used for delivering newspapers was reported stolen. It disappeared from a depot in the city and this morning it was found parked near the station. One like it was spotted by a farmer a mile or so from the Manor late yesterday. It had been left in a lane.'