by R. N. Morris
The body lay in a line with the den, its head pointing towards the entrance.
There were no signs of the body being moved. It seemed a fair assumption that she was killed here.
He scanned the ground. He had the feeling of something snagging on his vision, so crouched down to look more carefully at the surface of the undergrowth. There it was. A single white feather, a few yards to the right of the body. Macadam glanced quickly at Leversedge and Coddington as he contemplated drawing their attention to the feather. He could imagine what they would say. ‘A feather? What of it? There are birds around here, aren’t there?’
Macadam took out his notebook and made a sketch of the crime scene, indicating the position of the feather relative to the body. He then produced a pair of tweezers and an envelope, items he was never without, and deftly picked up the feather, transferring it to the envelope.
He imagined Silas Quinn watching him as he worked, nodding quietly with approval.
But his old boss would go further than that, he knew. The dead always exercised a fascination over Quinn, and in every investigation he would spend time staring into the face of the victim, usually when they were laid out naked on a marble slab in the morgue. Quite why he did it, Macadam could not guess. Was he trying to bring about some kind of communion between the living and the dead, willing them to give up their secrets?
If so, it was a little too mystical and unscientific for Macadam’s liking.
But still, Quinn was the best example of a detective that Macadam had to model himself on, so he gave it a go.
Her eyes were open. Staring straight ahead. She was looking whoever killed her in the eye. Reproachfully, as if storing up resentment. But fearlessly too, he would have said. From which he might tentatively conclude that the killer was known to her.
Her attacker was probably a man. No way of knowing for certain, of course, but it was a valid assumption given the way she had been overpowered, and the brute force that it must have taken to snuff out her life.
The medical examiner would tell them if she had been raped, but the arrangement of her clothes did not suggest it. Her skirt was not pulled up. The buttons on her light summer coat were all fastened. It was a strange rapist who tidied up his victim’s clothing after killing her.
Her hair wasn’t even in disarray.
Perhaps he had intended to rape her, but had accidentally killed her in the struggle.
Had she not cried out for help?
There was something about this, something not quite right, something that Silas Quinn would get to the bottom of in no time. This was right up Quinn’s street, and no mistake.
Macadam looked across at the airship hangar, which was surrounded by a wire fence, topped with barbed wire. It must have been thrown up when the navy took the station over. The consequence was that there would have been few members of the public passing that way, and most of the men from the base would have been inside the hangar. Scrubs Lane ran on the other side of the bushes, and beyond that were the railway tracks, together forming the dividing line that cut Little Wormwood Scrubs off from the main parkland. Perhaps a train had gone past at precisely the moment of the attack, drowning her screams in its clatter? All things considered, it was not unfeasible that she had cried out but no one had heard.
Macadam turned back to examine the dead girl’s face more closely.
Her mouth was open, no doubt in an effort to gulp in air.
She seemed about to cry out. As if she now regretted her earlier reticence. But it was too late now, of course.
Macadam felt the presence of someone standing at his shoulder. A quick glance confirmed there was no one there. He turned back to the body. That sense was still with him. He liked to think of it as Quinn, watching over him, making sure he didn’t put a foot wrong.
Good Lord! The fellow wasn’t dead. He could always go and consult him back at the Yard. He felt sure his old governor would take an interest in this case, especially as Leversedge already had it in mind to mark the file SFA, a decision which Coddington had approved. ‘It makes sense, doesn’t it?’ Leversedge had insisted. ‘What with the airship base right there. Poor girl stumbles on some German spy about his business and he’s done her in. One for the military intelligence chaps.’
Perhaps they were right. But it was stupid – and lazy – to jump to the conclusion so quickly, before they had conducted their own investigation.
Again, he returned to the question: What would Quinn do?
But the dead girl refused to commune with him. The livid bruising on her face merely made him feel queasy, and he felt there was something vaguely indecent about her mouth being open like that. Leversedge and Coddington had made a smattering of ribald comments about it. If it ever got out how some coppers spoke about the dead, there would be a public outcry, and quite right too.
But he had to admit, he could not take his eyes off that mouth.
Perhaps the killer had felt the same way about it? Certainly the bruises around the nose and mouth, and the supposed method of dispatch, suggested a degree of fixation. It looked almost as if he had been trying to block it. Perhaps she had tried to scream, and it was his over-energetic efforts to silence her that had killed her.
If she had been killed by a foreign agent, wouldn’t he have simply shot her, or cut her throat? He would have come armed with some weapon, for sure.
The fact (if he was right) that the killer had smothered the life out of her with his bare hands suggested that the whole business was improvised, unforeseen. Perhaps the result of a terrible accident.
Macadam dropped down to his haunches to get a closer look at her mouth. He took the tweezers out of his pocket and gently probed the small emptiness between her lips. It felt like a transgression, of course it did. He knew he should not be interfering with the body like this. In some ways, he was committing as serious an offence as Coddington and Leversedge had with their clodhopping about. Worse, perhaps, as this felt like a violation. But they had forced him to it. He could not leave it to them to manage the evidence in this case.
He pressed the flat of the tweezers down gently on the tongue. Rigor mortis had already set in, as he should have expected, given the likely time of her death. It always starts in the eyelids, spreading to the muscles of the jaw soon after. And so the tongue had become a resistant slab. He did not try to force the mouth, but instead moved round to kneel on the ground at the crown of her head so that he was looking down on to her tongue at an angle, at the same time allowing as much sunlight as possible on to her face.
He gasped when he saw what was lying there, almost on the tip of her tongue: a single white feather, identical to the one he had found on the ground a moment before.
He resisted the impulse to remove the feather. It was enough that he knew it was there.
He took out his notebook to record his find and make a sketch of the position of the feather on the tongue.
He heard a twig snap, the stirring of foliage somewhere behind him to his left.
Macadam stood up slowly and pocketed his notebook and pencil. He looked over at Coddington and Leversedge. They were still watching the hangar. The big doors were open now, and a number of men in naval uniforms were milling about the entrance.
The thing to do was to take yourself by surprise too. To lull the other into thinking you weren’t on to them, and then pounce.
He swung round in the direction the sound had come from. A figure, a man in uniform, khaki, not navy blue, was crouching in the bushes – not five yards away – watching him closely. The soldier remained as still as a plaster mannequin. There was something almost absurd about it. The two of them so close, close enough to have a civilized conversation without raising their voices, and one of them acting as if he were invisible.
The other fellow’s face was partially hidden by branches. The strain of holding still caused the bush to tremble. From what Macadam could see, the soldier was young. His eyes, which peeped through one of the many gaps in the scrubb
y foliage, were fixed warily on Macadam. He struck Macadam as an unlikely soldier, but no doubt Kitchener’s recruitment campaign had attracted a fair number of unlikely soldiers to the colours.
They stood looking at one another for some moments. Macadam even had time to take in the details of the brass badge on the soldier’s cap. He recognized it as the flaming grenade of the Royal Fusiliers. It was just one of those scraps of knowledge he had picked up along the way.
It seemed to fall to Macadam to break the ice. ‘I say, I wonder if I could have a word with you?’
The young man’s eyes widened with alarm. He looked like the proverbial startled rabbit. An instant later, he was gone, leaving the scrawny branches shivering in his wake.
Macadam stomped through the bushes to give chase. A low wooden fence marking the perimeter of the parkland slowed him down even more. As he clambered over it, he saw the soldier run out across Scrubs Lane, narrowly avoiding the path of an oncoming collier’s cart. Evidently, he was more afraid of an encounter with Macadam than of being trampled by a dray horse.
Macadam was cut off by a Model T speeding in the opposite direction. The driver honked his horn three times but did not slow down.
This gave the soldier enough time to scale the eight-foot chain-link fence that ran alongside the railway embankment. Macadam watched helplessly as the man dropped to the ground on the other side and disappeared into the thick greenery that grew there.
As he reached the other side of the lane, there was a sound like the bough of a dead tree cracking. At the same instant, it felt like an invisible assailant had punched him in the shoulder with a steel-gloved fist. Macadam looked down and saw a flower of blood blossom on his jacket.
He felt the unconscious tension that kept his body upright loosen its hold on his legs. They were all of a sudden all over the place. And the air was nowhere. He gasped in shallow breaths. His lungs lit up with a silent roar of pain. His heart went into spasm.
He sat down on the ground and tried to catch his breath as he felt his shirt front grow heavy, wet, clinging.
NINETEEN
Mary Ibbott came running into the drawing room waving a copy of the Clarion in front of her. ‘Mummy! Mummy! Have you seen this?’
Mrs Ibbott was almost afraid to ask what it was that had caught her daughter’s eye this time. Mary had taken to scouring the paper every day for news of Mr Hargreaves’ regiment. Mrs Ibbott had pointed out that he hadn’t even left the country yet, but was still at training camp.
This reasonable observation, which was intended to soothe, had provoked floods of tears. ‘But why doesn’t he write to me?’
‘Naturally, he doesn’t write to you, Mary. It would be very wrong of him to write to you. He writes to his wife. And so, all we need do is ask Mrs Hargreaves, if we are ever desirous for news of Mr Hargreaves.’
‘Oh, but she won’t tell me anything. She hates me!’
‘Mary! How dare you say such a thing? It’s nonsense and you know it.’
Mrs Ibbott had hoped that taking Mary to the Purity Meeting would calm her down somewhat. With any luck, it would restore in her a sense of propriety, though some days Mrs Ibbott had to wonder if her daughter had ever possessed such a thing. That’s why she had been so keen for the pastor to speak to Mary, though she had to admit that the interview had been somewhat disappointing. Admittedly, Mary had behaved rather rudely, hardly saying a word to the pastor, barely looking at him, her face as miserable as sin the whole time. But Pastor Cardew had seemed distracted too. His remarks were rather vague and inconsequential.
The meeting itself had turned out to be a very different affair from what Mrs Ibbott had expected. She had not realized there would be so much talk of the war, and so many military gentlemen in attendance. And she did not like the fact that there had been a suffragette on the platform, as Mary had informed her with glee. She had no argument with the aims of the suffrage movement. She considered it to be a matter of simple common sense that if a woman was expected to obey the laws of the country she ought to have a say in who made those laws. ‘Men know best’ was not a formula she ascribed to but neither was she convinced that the best way to get men to change their minds about this or any other matter was to go about throwing yourself under horses.
It seemed that some at least of those women who had formerly agitated for female suffrage had now put that struggle to one side in the national interest, which was of course commendable. But Mrs Ibbott was not sure she could wholeheartedly approve of all this business with the white feathers. Granted, we needed men to fight in the war. But there was something rather nasty about it, she thought. What good was it shaming a man into doing the right thing?
She certainly didn’t like the enthusiasm with which Mary had seized upon the wretched things. ‘I shall give one to Timberley and one to Appleby!’ she had cried, delightedly brandishing her little store of feathers.
‘You shall do no such thing,’ Mrs Ibbott had commanded.
‘But why should Jack risk his life when those two cowards stay here counting their beetles or whatever it is they do?’
‘Mr Hargreaves to you, I should think! And it is not for you to comment on what our gentlemen guests do or do not do. Do you hear?’
‘But Mummy …’
‘There is no but Mummy about it! If I hear that you have given one of those beastly feathers to Mr Timberley or Mr Appleby, I shall … well, I don’t like to say what I shall do but I wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end of it.’
Mary had pouted sulkily, clutching the envelope to her chest jealously, as if afraid her mother would snatch it away from her. But Mrs Ibbott was content that her daughter was sufficiently warned.
When they had got back to the house after the meeting, she had reminded her daughter: ‘You are to leave Mr Timberley and Mr Appleby alone, is that clear?’ Mary had taken off her toque and hung it up without comment, before thundering upstairs to her room. They had barely spoken a word for the rest of that day, or the next. When it came to bearing a grudge, Mrs Ibbott had to hand it to her daughter. At the same time she knew that Mary’s seeming rebelliousness was simply her coming to terms with the fact that she would in the end comply with her mother’s wishes. And Mrs Ibbott was wise enough to give her space to play out her pet.
Now it was Monday morning and Mary had come rushing in excitedly, their quarrel evidently forgotten. ‘Look! She’s on the front page!’
‘Who is? What on earth are you talking about, Mary?’
‘Eve Cardew. Pastor Cardew’s daughter. She’s been murdered!’
No, this couldn’t be right. The girl had got it muddled, surely. But that was a picture of Eve reproduced on the front of the Clarion. And there was a picture of Pastor Cardew too, so there could be little doubt that the girl shown was Eve Cardew. But surely it was some other girl the headline referred to, some other parson’s daughter: PARSON’S DAUGHTER FOUND DEAD IN PARK.
But no, the article confirmed it. The body of Eve Cardew had been discovered in Wormwood Scrubs Park. The police suspected foul play.
It was only now that Mrs Ibbott noticed the heading in slightly smaller type beneath the main headline: POLICE DETECTIVE SHOT. FIGHTING FOR LIFE.
‘Oh, but Mary … this is horrible!’
Her first thought was that it was Silas Quinn. But it was some other name in the account.
Mrs Ibbott could hardly take in what she was reading. First there was the death of Eve Cardew. That poor girl. Although she had to admit that her last memory of Eve was of her pushing past them to get to the table where they were handing out the envelopes of white feathers. She knew no good would come from those damnable feathers.
‘It says here that she was last seen alive at that meeting we were at!’ Mary’s eyes widened in horror as she read the newspaper account.
‘How awful!’
Mary shuddered. ‘I always knew there was something funny about that man.’
‘What are you talking about, child?’
&nb
sp; ‘Her father. He used to give me the cold creeps, I tell you. I wouldn’t be surprised if he done it himself.’
‘Good heavens, Mary!’ Mrs Ibbott told herself that it was the shock of the discovery that had somehow set Mary off on this regrettable raving. ‘You must be very careful what you say, dear. Especially when it comes to accusing people of things like this, when there is no basis whatsoever. Pastor Cardew is one of the most …’ Mrs Ibbott paused to find exactly the right word that would do justice to the pastor’s goodness, ‘saintly men there is.’
‘He used to lick his lips when he looked at you.’
‘But he can’t have had anything to do with … this. It’s simply unthinkable.’ Mrs Ibbott snatched the newspaper off her daughter. ‘No, no, no. It says here that the police suspect the murderer was a German spy whom Eve inadvertently interrupted as he was gathering information on the RNAS base in Wormwood Scrubs. There, you see, it’s not Pastor Cardew.’
Mary pursed her lips sceptically. ‘They say that, but what do they know? The police always get it wrong. That’s why they need Sherlock Holmes to solve all their cases for them.’
‘Oh, Mary, don’t be ridiculous. I wonder if I ought to write to Inspector Quinn?’
‘Write to old Quinn? Why would you do that?’
‘Well, he may want to hear from people who were at the meeting on Saturday. We were among the last to see Eve alive, you know. We may have something important to say.’
‘But I thought you said it was a German spy? If it was a German spy, what has the meeting got to do with anything?’
‘That’s for the police to decide. There may have been something about Eve’s behaviour that might shed light on her death. She was awfully keen to get at those feathers, if you remember.’
‘Yes, and I saw her give one to a chap outside the church.’ Mary grinned at the memory. ‘You should have seen his face.’
‘Well, there, you see … if she’s so all-out for the war, who knows, she might even have challenged the German spy when she found him. She was evidently a rather headstrong young lady, so perhaps …’
