The Blood-Dimmed Tide (6 page)

‘Towards Brookham? That’s strange. The other way leads back to the fields.’

‘Well, if you ask me, he was in a panic by then and could easily have been confused.’ Wright shrugged. ‘But all he had to do was get back to the path, and you can do that either way, upstream or down. Once he’d reached it he could have doubled back and left the wood the same way he came in, by the fields.’ Wright pointed to the mass of tangled holly bushes on the opposite bank and drew an imaginary line along them with his finger.

Madden had been paying close attention to what he was saying and now he signalled his agreement. ‘Yes, that’s so,’ he conceded. ‘I see what you mean, Inspector. He must have done that.’

Sensing he’d finally made a breach, Wright pressed ahead.‘But what’s really suspicious, sir, is he’s disappeared. We’ve been searching the neighbourhood since last evening and no one’s seen hide or hair of him. There’s no doubt he’s made himself scarce, and you have to ask yourself why.’

Madden pondered the inspector’s meaning in silence. Then he nodded. ‘Yes, why? That’s the question.’

His sudden change of manner took both his listeners by surprise, and it was clear from Wright’s relieved expression that he felt he had won his point, that his line of reasoning had prevailed at last. Madden’s next words only served to strengthen that impression.

‘You’re right about the tramp, by the way. He must be found. And the sooner the better.’

Driving to the farm later that morning, Madden had much to occupy his mind, but little chance to explore it. On his return from Brookham he had called in at the house for a moment that nevertheless proved long enough for him to acquire a passenger before he departed again in the shape of his six-year-old daughter. Lucy had been left in the sole charge of Mrs Beck since breakfast and the Maddens’ cook was in sore need of relief.

‘Can I play with Belle today?’

Flaxen at birth, Lucy Madden’s hair now matched her mother’s honey-coloured shade. A tireless child, her fair skin had been golden brown all summer from hours spent playing in the open air.

‘I don’t know.’ Madden spoke over his shoulder to the restless presence in the back seat. ‘We’ll have to wait and see. She was still coughing on Saturday. She may not be allowed outside yet.’

‘Then I’ll ask May if we can play inside.’

‘Don’t you mean Mrs Burrows?’

Lucy’s last nanny had left them six weeks earlier after less than a year’s employment, citing urgent family reasons for returning home to Bradford. Helen had diagnosed a case of loss of nerve. No replacement for her had yet been found and the Maddens were wondering if they could manage their daughter on their own from now on with the help of the household staff. Lucy would be going to the village school soon, and when she started it would take some of the strain off them, Madden had pointed out. ‘Off us and on to poor Miss Tinsley,’ had been Helen’s pessimistic prediction.

‘Can we go and see the waggle-taggle gypsies?’

‘Raggle-taggle. And don’t call them that. They’re Mr and Mrs Goram to you.’ Her eyes, blue as sapphires, challenged his in the rear-view mirror. ‘Yes, we can,’ he said, after a moment. ‘They’re leaving soon, and I want to talk to Mr Goram before they go.’

‘What about?’

‘Never you mind.’

The dirt road to the farm sparkled with muddy puddles. The land on which it lay, overlooked by Upton Hanger, was little more than a mile from the Maddens’ house and less than three miles from Highfield itself. They had bought it from Lord Stratton, a local landowner, soon after their marriage, when Madden had quit his job at Scotland Yard to return to the life he had known as a boy.

Although the rain of the previous day had fallen heavily here, too, he was relieved to see no sign of damage to the lines of late tomatoes flanking the roadway. When he and Helen had acquired the property wheat had been its principal crop. Since then cheap grain from Canada and Australia had driven down prices and like many farmers in the area Madden was devoting more land each year to growing vegetables and fruit, which found a ready market.

As he drove past the brick-built, shingled farmhouse, May Burrows waved to them from the kitchen doorway. She had been May Birney when he first came to Highfield; her father owned the village store. Later, she had married George Burrows, a worker on the Stratton estate, and they had moved into the house which came with the farm, a primitive structure when the Maddens had bought it, but now, with the addition of two new rooms and the installation of indoor plumbing, a comfortable house for a young couple.

Madden had made George his farm manager, though not without a qualm. There had never been any thought that he and Helen might move from the house where they lived: a handsome, half-timbered dwelling, it had been in her family for three generations. But living away from his land, leaving it each evening in the hands of another man, made him feel at times like a gentleman farmer, and he was in the habit of assuaging these periodic bouts of guilt by engaging in the hardest manual work he could find – ditching and hedging, scything grass and baling hay – returning home on those evenings with blistered hands and aching muscles, exhausted but happy, to the raised eyebrows of his wife.

‘Mr Madden, sir! I was hoping to see you today.’

Joe Goram called out from the steps of one of his caravans as Madden rode into the encampment. A burly, dark-haired man with unshaven cheeks, his face bore a scowl that seemed permanently fixed until he caught sight of Lucy, who was wearing a blue dress with a ribbon in her hair, riding perched on the saddle in front of her father. The gypsies’ camp lay at the bottom of the farm beside the stream that ran along the foot of Upton Hanger. Madden had parked his car at the stable yard and ridden down.

‘Good morning to you, young missy.’ Waving to her, he came down the steps. His broad grin showed he had several teeth missing.

‘Hullo, Mr Goram.’ She gave him a dazzling smile. ‘May I see the puppies, please?’

‘Of course, m’dear. They’re tied up over there, behind the caravan.’

The little girl slid to the ground and ran off.

‘Don’t offer her one, Joe, I beg you,’ Madden said hastily. ‘We’ve two dogs at home, and one of them’s just had puppies herself.’

Dismounting, he shook hands with the gypsy and passed him the reins of the old mare he used for getting about the farm and which Goram inspected with his usual disparaging eye. He’d several times offered to replace it with a better animal from his own string, but Madden, no horseman, had suggested instead that he look out for a suitable mount for Lucy at some unspecified date in the future.

‘And don’t mention the pony, either. Please. We’ll talk about that next time you’re here.’

Goram didn’t hide his disappointment. ‘There’s no harm in spoiling them while they’re young,’ he ventured.

Since this was an argument Madden used himself on occasion, and one on which Helen poured particular scorn, he thought it best not to respond.

Instead, he gazed about him, taking note of the signs of bustle and activity in the encampment. The various members of Joe Goram’s family – his wife and two sons, his daughter and son-in-law – were all busy collecting and stowing items in the trio of caravans that were parked at the edge of the clearing in the shade of a beech tree. One young grandson, eyes fixed to the ground, was quartering the area, picking up bits of paper and other rubbish and depositing them in a sack.

‘You were hoping to see me, you said?’

‘Yes, Mr Madden, sir. We’ll be pulling out first thing tomorrow and I wanted to thank you again for letting us stay.’

The gypsies had first appeared four summers before. Joe Goram had presented himself to Madden, greasy cap in hand, and asked for permission to park his caravans on a patch of tree-shaded land by the stream and to graze his horses in the lower paddock, which he must have seen was empty. Over strong objections from George Burrows – gypsies had a well-deserved reputation for being light-fingered, he’d argued, it was asking for trouble to allow them on your land – Madden had agreed to let them remain. In spite of his policeman’s conditioning, he clung to the belief he’d grown up with: that people, by and large, behaved according to how they were treated.

In the course of the next few days two bridles and a set of stirrups had vanished from the stables and George had found one of his scythes missing. At the end of the week they had miraculously reappeared in the places where they had been before, and Joe Goram had dragged his elder son, Sam, by the collar into the yard and made him apologize to Madden in front of Burrows and the other two farmhands. Sam, sporting a black eye and a loose tooth, had sworn it would never happen again.

The family had returned every year since, accepting the hospitality that was offered and in return mending pots and pans, sharpening knives and doing other odd jobs about the farm. Madden had grown used to seeing the smoke from their fires drifting up through the screen of oak and beech and to catching the scent of strange spices and aromas wafting his way from their blackened cooking pots.

‘There’s something you ought to know, Joe. A young girl was murdered over at Brookham yesterday.’

‘I heard about it, sir. Mr Burrows told us this morning. Poor lass

…’ The gypsy watched Madden’s face closely.

‘The police will be questioning people in the area. Tramps in particular, but travellers, too. You may be stopped on the road.’

Joe nodded. His face was impassive.

‘I understand you were at the farm all day yesterday?’

‘That’s right, Mr Madden. I took my boys up to say goodbye to Mrs Burrows. She gave us a cup of tea.’

‘Good. I’m glad. You’ll have no trouble with the police, then. But if you do, refer them to us. To Mr Burrows or myself.’

‘Thank you, sir. I’ll do that if I may.’ Joe Goram twisted his cap in his fingers. He could think of no way to repay this man who had shown him such special favour. Who shook hands with him when they met.

‘There’s something else, Joe…’ Frowning, Madden watched as one of Goram’s sons dismantled a clothes line, thrusting the poles into a rack beneath a caravan. ‘Have you ever come across a man called Beezy? He’s a tramp, a friend of Topper’s?’

Goram shook his head. ‘I’ve not heard the name, sir. Beezy, you say?’

‘It’s a nickname, I expect. He was in the Brookham area yesterday, near where the child’s body was found.’

‘Are the police looking for him, then?’ Goram’s face was expressionless.

‘Yes, they are. They think he might have done it.’ Madden paused, considering how to frame his next remark. ‘You might hear of his whereabouts,’ he suggested.

The gypsy’s swarthy features darkened still further. He stared down at his feet. Madden studied him in silence. He had more than an inkling of what was going on in the other man’s mind.

‘There’s no need to go to the police,’ he remarked, after a moment. ‘Just get word to me.’

Goram’s face cleared. He looked up. ‘Oh, I’ll do that, if you want, sir.’ Vastly relieved, he made bold to offer his own hand to Madden, who took it at once. ‘Anything I hear, you’ll hear. You have my word on it.’

The coroner’s inquest into the death of Alice Bridger, held at Guildford the following Friday, was quickly concluded. As officer in charge of the case, Inspector Wright baldly described the murder scene and outlined the measures already taken by the Surrey constabulary at the start of their investigation. Apart from routine questioning, these were mainly concerned with tracking down strangers seen in the vicinity of Brookham that day.

The presence of a number of vagrants in the general area had been reported and some of them had been identified and questioned, so far without result. The search for the rest was being extended.

‘I am authorized to inform the court that we are looking for one man in particular,’ Wright stated. ‘We expect to trace him and to be able to question him in the very near future.’

Dr Galloway was equally terse. Attaching to Alice Bridger’s rape the single adjective ‘brutal’, the pathologist briefly detailed the injuries, internal and external, that she had suffered in the course of the assault, reading from a prepared statement, not looking up, aware perhaps of the presence of Alice’s parents in court. The girl had been strangled subsequently and from the amount of water found in her lungs it was likely the killer had also held her submerged in the stream. Her face had been ‘badly battered’, Galloway said, but provided no further description.

‘I’m giving the London press as little as possible to feed on,’ he’d told Madden and Helen, encountering them outside the courtroom before the proceedings opened. ‘They keep an eye on inquests.’

One of the first witnesses, Madden had testified at some length to the discovery of the body beside the stream. The coroner, a recent appointee, was plainly puzzled by his involvement in the affair.

‘Why exactly were you there, Mr Madden?’ he inquired.

‘I gave Constable Stackpole a lift from Brookham. He felt the wood should be searched without delay, rather than wait for the arrival of the detectives from Guildford.’

‘Yes, but why were you involved in the search? Surely it’s not usual for a member of the public to be engaged to that degree in a police investigation?’

‘Not usual at all,’ Madden had agreed solemnly, leaving his questioner scratching his head, disgruntled, but none the wiser.

‘I thought for a moment he was going to clap you in irons, John.’ Silver-haired and in his sixties, Chief Superintendent Boyce, head of the Guildford CID, buttonholed Madden in the street outside afterwards. They were old acquaintances. ‘Six months to my pension and we’re landed with a case like this! Mind you, at least it’s straightforward.’

He waited for a response, but none was forthcoming.

‘You don’t agree?’ Boyce cocked an eyebrow, then turned aside to doff his hat and bow. ‘Dr Madden!’