by Rennie Airth
'They're not putting him in charge, are they?'
'Not yet — but he hasn't suggested it. He wants to sniff around a little first, get the feel of it. After all, other headlines are possible. "Sampson Of The Yard Falls Flat On His Face. Sampson Of The Yard Doesn't Know His Arse From A Pineapple."' The chief inspector looked wistful. 'He's playing it canny for the moment. He and Bennett will oversee the investigation, but it's still ours.'
He tapped out his pipe in the ashtray.
'I gave them a summary of our inquiries to date.
That we've no reason to suspect any local involvement in the murders. We think they were killed by an outsider. Norris, from Guildford, was there. He still believes more than one man was involved. Said the victims downstairs and Mrs Fletcher were almost certainly killed by different people. Sampson agreed with him.'
'Why did he do that?' Madden scowled.
'To create difficulties for us?' Sinclair shrugged.
'Who knows? I should warn you, he doesn't care for me. Wouldn't mind seeing me fall flat on my face. The point is, we're still officially searching for more than one man. So be it.'
He emptied his glass.
'But the important thing was, Bennett supported us on the bayonet theory. Over Sampson's objections, by the way — he said the medical evidence was inconclusive. Did you know there were more than sixty thousand soldiers in mental hospitals at the end of the war? Most of them shell-shocked, poor devils, but there must have been some of the other kind.
Bennett's going to talk to the War Office. We'll get a list of patients who've been released and start running them down. He'll also ask them to look into Colonel Fletcher's military service record. Did he have a run in with one of his men? Some deep-held grudge?' The chief inspector shook his head. 'Motive's still our main problem. I told them that. Revenge is a possibility, but this notion of an armed gang losing their heads and going berserk is pure balderdash, and Bennett knows it. Those killings were deliberate.'
At the coroner's inquest, held in Guildford the following day, verdicts of murder by person or persons unknown were returned in the case of all five victims. The coroner, an elderly man with red-veined cheeks and a drooping eyelid, spoke of the horror felt 'not only in Highfield, but here in Guildford' at the 'heartless, brutal murders of Colonel and Mrs Fletcher'.
'He seems to have forgotten about the maid and the nanny,' Sinclair remarked to Madden afterwards. 'Not to mention Mr Wiggins, the poacher.'
They were standing in the street outside the courtroom.
Madden nodded to the Birneys as they went by with a group of villagers, heading for the station. The public benches had been crowded.
Helen Blackwell had been one of those testifying.
She had arrived with Lord Stratton and a tall, silver haired man whom she seemed to resemble. Now she brought him over.
'Chief Inspector, I'd like you to meet my father, Dr Collingwood.' Sinclair shook hands. 'And this is Inspector Madden.'
Dr Collingwood told them he had been driving through France with friends when word of the murders had reached him. 'I thought I'd got over the shock, until I drove past Melling Lodge yesterday evening.'
He had the same dark blue eyes as his daughter, and he looked at her with concern. 'My dear, this has been harder on you than you realize. You seem quite worn out.'
It was true, Madden thought. She was paler than he remembered, tense and stiff-backed, and for the first time her manner with him was cool and distant.
'Don't treat me like a patient,' she scolded her father. 'Anyhow, my main worry's over now, thanks to Mr Sinclair.' She turned to the chief inspector. 'I can't thank you enough for agreeing to let Sophy go to Scotland.'
Sinclair tipped his hat to her and bowed. 'You should thank Inspector Madden, ma'am. He was a most persuasive advocate.'
Dr Blackwell looked at her watch. 'We ought to go. Sophy gets anxious if I'm away too long.'
Dr Collingwood moved off towards Lord Stratton's Rolls-Royce, which was parked nearby. Sinclair accompanied him. Dr Blackwell lingered.
'I almost forgot,' she said. 'Sophy keeps doing those squiggles. But today she produced something different.
Or, rather, it's the same, only bigger.'
She opened her handbag and took out a sheet of drawing paper. It bore a single, enlarged version of the smaller figures the child had drawn earlier.
'I can't think what she means by it.'
She gave the drawing to Madden, who studied it.
'It looks like a balloon,' the doctor said. 'But why does she keep repeating it?'
Madden stared at the drawing, frowning. 'Has she ever done anything like this before?'
'I don't think so. Mary says not. To tell the truth, I haven't the faintest idea what's going on in her mind.' Or yours, Inspector, Dr Blackwell thought, as she turned away and went off to join her father and Lord Stratton.
Walking briskly, briefcase in hand, Chief Inspector Sinclair threaded a path between the headstones and joined Madden where he was standing in a corner of the Highfield churchyard.
'Has something happened, sir?' Madden had been expecting him earlier — in time for the funeral service — but there had been a message from Scotland Yard to say the chief inspector would be delayed.
'Later, John.'
Sinclair nodded to Lord Stratton, who was with a small group of mourners making their way from the graveside. The sexton was already at work filling in the twin graves of Charles and Lucy Fletcher. A silent line of black-clad villagers filed through the churchyard gate.
'I've something to show you.' He hefted his briefcase.
Lord Stratton led one of the group aside, a lean, suntanned man with greying temples.
'That's Robert Fletcher, the colonel's brother,' Madden told the chief inspector. 'He and his wife came down from Edinburgh yesterday. They're going to leave things at Melling Lodge as they are for the time being. They want to get Sophy back with her brother as soon as possible.'
They watched as the two men crossed the churchyard to where a black-suited figure stood in the shade of a cedar tree. Madden recognized the florid features of Sir William Raikes, the Lord Lieutenant.
'I'd better go, too, and pay my respects to his nibs.'
Sinclair glanced at his companion. 'No need for you to trouble yourself, Inspector.'
Madden was glad to be left on his own. The funeral scene took him back to his youth. He'd been too young to remember his mother's death, but his father had perished in a barn fire when he was sixteen. The boy, home on holiday from the Taunton grammar school where he was a scholarship pupil, had helped to drag the body from the blazing timbers. The sight of the charred corpse, shocking to him then, now seemed like a foretaste of what had awaited him on the fields of northern France. His father had been buried in late summer. It had been a day like today.
Helen Blackwell's face, white beneath a veil, appeared before him. 'Inspector, I've come to say goodbye.' Her voice was strained. 'My father and I are going up to Yorkshire to stay with friends for a few weeks. I imagine you'll be gone by the time we return.'
Madden stared at her. Finally he spoke. 'Yes, we're moving out this weekend. The Surrey police will stay on for a time.'
'I hardly dare ask — have you made any progress?'
'Some…' He checked himself. He felt the need to be open with her. 'Hardly any, I'm afraid. It's a case where the answers aren't obvious.' He wanted to say more, to detain her further, but the words dried in him.
She smiled briefly and held out her hand. He felt her firm grip for the last time.
'Goodbye, then, Inspector.'
She rejoined her father. Madden followed her figure with his gaze as they left the churchyard together.
'It makes fascinating reading, doesn't it?'
Sinclair stood with his hands on his hips while Madden sat studying the typewritten pages. Both men had removed their jackets in the stifling heat of the snug bar.
'Good of Dr Tanner to let us know f
inally. A pity he couldn't have told us earlier. But, then, the government chemist is a busy man. It moves me to think that one day the police will have their own laboratory.
It moves me even more to know I haven't a hope in Hades of being alive to see it!'
'Tanner's sure about it being tobacco ash?' Madden asked.
'I put the same question to him. He said there's no doubt in his mind. He'll swear to it.'
'What made you look there?' Madden was curious, but not surprised. The chief inspector's meticulousness was legendary.
'The lavatory bowl was clean, but there seemed to be dust on the rim. Now that was strange, I thought.
The rest of the bathroom was spotless. So I took some scrapings and sent them off with the other stuff.'
'Colonel Fletcher didn't smoke, did he?'
'No, he gave up three years ago, on doctor's advice.
Nor did Mrs Fletcher.' Sinclair cocked his head. 'And somehow I couldn't see the upstairs maid sneaking a quick fag in the master's bathroom. No, it was our man, all right. He likes a cigarette now and again you'll see.'
' "Traces of blood in the handbasin and on the hand towel…"' Madden was reading from the chemist's report. ' "Blood group B…"'
'We were lucky there. Mrs Fletcher was the only one in the household with that group. It's quite rare.
He cut her throat and then washed and dried his hands.' Sinclair began to pace up and down the small room. 'He was in hell's own hurry coming in, but afterwards he had the leisure for a wash and brush-up.
Time for a smoke, even.'
Madden looked up. 'The robbery was a blind, wasn't it?'
'It's starting to look that way,' Sinclair agreed. 'Mrs Fletcher's jewellery case was lying open on the dressing-table.
He grabbed a few pieces. The same downstairs.
A brace of candlesticks, that clock off the mantelpiece in the study, Colonel Fletcher's shooting cups. Anything that shone or looked fancy. He should have thought a little while he was doing that. Put himself in our shoes.'
'What's he done with the stuff, I wonder?'
'Thrown it away?' Sinclair shrugged. 'I'll wager it won't turn up at the pawnbroker's. Not unless he's careless or greedy, and I've a nasty feeling he's neither.'
The chief inspector took out his pipe and pouch. He pointed with the pipestem at the file. 'And now comes the really interesting part. Read on, Macduff.'
Madden bent over the report again. Sinclair filled his pipe. From the taproom next door the sound of voices signalled the arrival of opening time.
'My God!' Madden looked up. 'Can we be certain of these times?'
'Reasonably so — Tanner's own words. I spoke to him on the telephone.' The chief inspector lit his pipe.
'It's a question of the moisture content of the tobacco.
Three of the cigarette stubs found by Wiggins's body were recent, no more than forty-eight hours old. Four had been lying there longer — up to three weeks.
Tanner's sure about those. It's the other six he won't commit himself on, except to say the condition of the tobacco suggests a longer period still. I tried to press him, but he wouldn't be pinned down. They could be many weeks old, he said, even months.'
'Months?' Madden grasped the implication at once.
'He must have sat there and watched them,' he said.
'Long before he did anything. There's a good view of the house and garden from where Wiggins was killed.
He must have come back to the same spot over and over…'
'And watched them… as you say.' Sinclair took his pipe from his mouth. 'I've no idea what we're dealing with here,' he admitted. 'But I know this much — we'll have to think again.'
Promptly at ten o'clock the following Monday morning, Sinclair and Madden were shown into the office of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Wilfred Bennett at Scotland Yard. Office space at the Yard was assigned on the basis of seniority, in ascending order.
The lowest ranks worked at the top of the building where they had the most stairs to climb. Bennett occupied a comfortable corner suite on the first floor with a view of the Thames and the tree-lined Embankment.
He was speaking on the telephone when they went in, and he motioned them to an oak table lined with chairs that stood by the open window. London was still in the grip of a heatwave and no breeze stirred the white net curtains. Coming to work that morning, Madden had sat on the upper deck of an omnibus, but even there he had found the air humid and stifling.
He thought with regret of the quiet upstairs room in the Rose and Crown, which he had occupied for the past week. Waking from tortured dreams he had sensed the countryside breathing silently around him, the woods and fields stretched out like a sleeping giant under the starry sky.
As Bennett hung up, the door opened and Sampson entered. The chief superintendent was in his mid fifties, a heavy-set man with brilliantined hair and a muddy complexion. He greeted Sinclair and Madden warmly. 'Another scorcher! And they say it's going to get worse.'
Madden had had few dealings with him, but he knew that the air of bonhomie was a front. Sampson's reputation at the Yard was that of a man whom it was wise not to cross.
Bennett seated himself at the table with his back to the window. His glance rested on Madden for a moment, taking in his hollow-eyed appearance. Sampson sat down beside him.
'Until this case is resolved, I intend that we should meet every Monday morning at this time to review the progress of inquiries and discuss whatever action needs to be taken.' Slight, no more than forty, with dark, thinning hair and a quick, decisive manner, Bennett was known to be one of the coming men at the Yard. 'Chief Inspector?'
'Since we last talked, sir, there have been some new developments. I'll run through them for you.'
Sinclair opened his file. Elegant in a dove-grey suit, he had the knack of looking cool on the hottest day.
'First, the footprint by the stream. Thanks to Inspector Boyce and the Surrey police, we've established that the boot that made it doesn't belong to anyone residing in Highfield. While we can't assume it was worn by the man we're seeking, there's a strong likelihood it was, and if it should prove to be his, it's almost as good as a fingerprint. You'll recall the sketch of the cast I showed you, with the wedge missing from the heel?'
Bennett nodded.
Sampson spoke. 'The "man"?' His small eyes, black as currants, were crinkled with puzzlement. 'I thought it was agreed at our last meeting that it's likely more than one person was involved.'
'Yes, sir, but as I said, there have been new developments.'
Sinclair regarded him blandly.
'Go on,' Bennett said.
'We've identified all the fingerprints lifted from Melling Lodge apart from three sets. One of them is a child's — we're assuming it belongs to the Fletchers' son, James, who was not in the house at the time of the attack. The other two have been sent to the Criminal Records Office. They're being checked now.
'On Friday I received from the government chemist, somewhat belatedly, the results of tests made on various items sent to him for analysis. In consequence, Inspector Madden and I have made certain deductions.
Qualified, of course. But disturbing none the less.'
He gave a brief summary of the chemist's report relating to the ash and blood traces found in the bathroom and the cigarette stubs retrieved from the woods.
'Sir, this man, and I say man,' he glanced at Sampson, 'because I cannot conceive that this crime was carried out by a gang or group of men, was in the neighbourhood of Melling Lodge many weeks beforehand.
He seems to have made repeated visits in order to observe the Fletcher residence. I'm increasingly inclined to view the robbery as a blind, an attempt to mislead us. I believe his sole intention was to murder the members of the household.'
Sampson spoke again. 'Pure supposition,' he said genially.
Bennett looked uneasy. 'There's a lot of theorizing in what you say, Chief Inspector-'
'And precious little evidence
to back it up,' Sampson cut in. His tone was friendly, almost jocular.
'Come on, Angus, we don't know who smoked those cigarettes. We don't know whether one or more men broke into the house, and we don't know that they didn't panic in the middle of what started out as an ordinary robbery.'
'Strictly speaking, that's true, sir,' Sinclair agreed.
He seemed unruffled. 'And you're right. We lack hard facts. An eyewitness, for example. So far we've found no one who noticed anything amiss, or even out of the ordinary that day. I find it hard to believe that a gang of men could have moved in and out of the area without someone spotting them. But one man — now that's possible.'
Sampson pursed his lips, plainly unconvinced.
'Then, if it was a gang, shouldn't we have heard something by now?' Sinclair continued.
'Not necessarily. Not if they're professionals.'
'If they were professionals, sir, they would have done a better job of robbing the place.'
The chief superintendent's muddy complexion darkened. 'Are you finished?' he inquired.
'Not quite.' Sinclair turned to Madden. 'Inspector?'
Madden consulted his notebook. 'The Fletchers owned a dog,' he said. 'A Labrador. It died about three weeks ago, apparently of old age. In view of what Dr Tanner had to say about the cigarettes, I tried to get in touch with the local vet, but he's on holiday, in the Hebrides.
'However, I spoke to the Fletchers' gardener, Cooper, and he was able to tell me where he and the colonel had buried the animal. We dug up the remains on Saturday morning and I had them brought up to London for Dr Ransom to examine.'
'That must have made his weekend,' Bennett observed.
Madden's smile flickered briefly. 'He rang me this morning, sir. He found a heavy dose of strychnine in the dog's stomach. There's no doubt it was poisoned.'
'There's no doubt it ate poison,' Sampson interrupted in a tired voice. 'You're making assumptions again, Inspector.'
'Possibly, sir.' Taking his cue from Sinclair, Madden adopted a conciliatory tone. 'But I did speak to Lord Stratton and he assured me that his keepers are categorically forbidden to lay poison of any sort on his land.'
Bennett cleared his throat. 'All right, I've heard enough. From now on, unless we discover anything to the contrary, we'll proceed on the assumption that this is the work of one man.'
