Dead of Winter

by Rennie Airth

  ‘Medical opinion notwithstanding,’ he had declared drily, though with a smile at Helen, ‘I feel my days are numbered and would like to have my family around me when I make my adieus.’

  Nevertheless, in spite of his own preoccupations, he had not allowed the lunch to end and his guests to depart until he had asked Sinclair about the investigation he was conducting.

  ‘I had no idea who the child was, not until John told me, but I remember how beautifully she played the piano at the concert we had here. What a waste of a young life! As if enough have not been cast away already.’

  In response, Sinclair had spoken perhaps too encouragingly of the progress being made in the inquiry. Or so Madden had seemed to feel when they were pacing the platform a little later that afternoon, waiting for the train.

  ‘Don’t be too sure you’re closing in on him, Angus,’ he had cautioned, reverting to the subject that had occupied their morning. The chief inspector had used these same words a little earlier in replying to their host. ‘If you’re right about the link to that Fontainebleau business – if it really is Marko – then it’s worth remembering he’s never been arrested and that can’t just be down to luck.’

  ‘He’s taken pains to stay out of sight, you mean? And made sure there were never any witnesses to identify him. Yes, I’m aware of that. But the war has changed everything. It’s almost impossible for a man to go to ground now. We’re all hemmed in by regulations. Identity cards, ration books. They’re unavoidable. All we need is a clue to his identity and we’ll track him down.’

  Madden’s shrug had been noncommittal, his closing words all but drowned by the whistle of the approaching train.

  ‘Well, I hope you’re right,’ he had said. ‘But bear in mind he’ll be aware of that. And he may have other surprises up his sleeve.’

  13

  PADDINGTON POLICE STATION was quiet that Sunday evening, and the desk sergeant, an elderly Ulsterman named Paddy McDowell, was dozing quietly on his size elevens, swaying from side to side like a horse in its stable, Lily Poole thought, as she rapped smartly on the counter with her knuckles.

  ‘What … what … ?’ Paddy woke with a gulp and a splutter. ‘Here now … what do you think you’re doing, young lady … ?’

  The glare he fastened on her lasted for only a second or two. Then a broad grin took its place.

  ‘Hello, Lil.’ He regarded her with affection. ‘Didn’t recognize you out of uniform. Not in that get-up.’

  ‘What? This piece of haute couture?’

  Lily indicated her coat, a shapeless, dun-coloured garment furnished with narrow lapels and a single pocket. Produced under government regulations designed to save precious material and with the depressing description of ‘utility’ attached to it, it was an article shunned by many of her sisters, but not by Lily Poole, who cared little for her appearance.

  ‘I’ll have you know it’s the latest style, Sarge. Fresh from Paris.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Paddy grinned. ‘You’ll be looking for Fred, I dare say. He came in ten minutes ago for his break. Try the canteen.’

  He hooked his thumb at the door behind him and watched with a smile as she went by.

  ‘It’s good to see you again. You’ve been missed.’

  Lily was pleased to hear him say it, even if the accolade had been hard won. She’d spent her first two years in the force at Paddington before being posted to Bow Street, and with female officers still a rarity in the Met had faced more than her share of hostility, both silent and acknowledged. But she’d won them round at last – or so she liked to think – and when she stepped into the canteen a minute later it was to a muted rumble of greetings and one or two friendly waves.

  ‘There you are, lass.’

  Fred Poole rose from a table in the corner where he was sitting with a cup of tea, a pie and his conical helmet parked in a neat line in front of him. Broad-shouldered, and with cropped sandy hair that only now was starting to grey, he’d been a police constable for thirty years. And Lily’s Uncle Fred for twenty-five of them.

  ‘Sorry I wasn’t home,’ he said. Shy of showing his feelings, he slid a hand across the table to press hers. ‘I got called in sudden.’

  ‘Aunty Betty told me. Are you short-staffed?’ Lily asked.

  ‘That and the usual colds and flu.’ Fred brushed the matter aside. But I wasn’t best pleased since it meant missing you. How’ve you been, love? We’ve not seen you for a while, and you know how worried your aunt gets, the way she starts imagining things. “When I think of that young girl all on her own out in the blackout patrolling the streets …”’ His imitation of Aunty Betty’s anxious voice brought a grin to Lily’s lips. ‘I tell her, look, any bloke with mischief on his mind runs into our Lil, he’ll wish he’d stayed at home.’

  Again he reached for her hand and Lily returned the squeeze he gave it. Fred wasn’t just like a dad to her: he was the elder brother of the father she had never known, who’d been killed in the last weeks of the Great War before Lily was even born and whom her mother had mourned for only two years before she herself had died in the great influenza epidemic that had followed. It was Betty and Fred who had raised her and whom Lily loved as much as if they were her true parents. Her earliest memory was of a large blue-uniformed figure bending down from what seemed like a great height to sweep her up in his arms. And she firmly believed it was the sight of Uncle Fred preparing to leave for work each morning, slipping his silver whistle into his pocket and donning his helmet, weighing his heavy truncheon in his hand, that had fixed her heart on following in his footsteps. Even though he’d tried to dissuade her.

  ‘Believe me, love, it’s no job for a lass. There are things you don’t want to be doing, ever, stuff you don’t want to see.’

  But that was just what had drawn Lily to the job. Knowing there were things she might never see or know about if she went the way of other girls. The ones she knew, her friends even. All they seemed to care about was clothes and make-up. All they talked about was boys. Lily knew she wanted something else.

  ‘And don’t count on getting a warm welcome, either,’ Fred had counselled her. ‘There’s plenty of blokes in the force don’t like the idea of policewomen. You’ll be up against it from the start.’

  Fred hadn’t said whether he was one of those blokes, though Lily thought most likely he was. But once he knew she’d made her mind up, he’d taken her part, and from then on he’d been the one she had turned to for advice; and for encouragement when his predictions as to what might lie in wait for her once she’d donned a police uniform were borne out.

  ‘Sorry I haven’t been in touch lately,’ she said now. But I’ve been busy. And I’ve got a surprise for you.’

  ‘Oh, yes—?’ On the point of taking a bite out of his pie, Fred paused. He looked at her, narrow-eyed. ‘Is this about the job?’ he asked, and Lily nodded.

  ‘I’ve been working at the Yard these last few days. Straight up.’

  ‘Well, blow me!’ Fred beamed. ‘But doing what?’ he asked. ‘Paperwork?’

  ‘In a way.’ Lily’s blue eyes shone. ‘It’s this Wapping business. Biggest murder case in years. And I’m smack in the middle of it.’

  ‘Well, now …’ His pie still untouched, Fred drew back, as if to take her in. ‘So … so what does that mean, Lil?’ he asked. ‘Are you plainclothes now? Is that your surprise? Have they finally given in?’ He knew how long she’d been knocking on the door.

  ‘Nah … no such luck.’

  Lily’s smile faded as her jaw set in the bulldog look that was so familiar to Fred. Just like Winnie’s, he was wont to remark, referring to the Prime Minister. Same cut of the jib. Same sort of determination, too.

  ‘But it’s CID business. And you’ll never guess who I’m working under.’ The light had come back into her eyes.

  ‘Chief Inspector Sinclair, no less.’

  ‘Crikey!’ Fred was impressed. ‘The old man himself? You’d better mind your Ps and Qs, girl. They say h
e’s hard to please.’

  ‘Oh, he’s all right.’ Lily spoke airily. ‘His bark’s worse than his bite. But he keeps me at it, I can tell you.’

  ‘At what, Lil?’ Peering at his niece, Fred saw her hesitate. ‘Look, I’m not prying, lass …’

  ‘No, it’s not that.’ Lily rubbed his hand. ‘It’s just it’s confidential for the moment. It hasn’t been put out. So keep it to yourself for now, that’s all.’

  ‘Message received and understood.’ He nodded solemnly.

  ‘It’s to do with the man who shot those blokes in the pub. They don’t know who he is. I mean, they haven’t got a clue, even. So I was told to read through the files, and that’s what I’ve been doing, going through them, one after another, file after file, till I was cross-eyed, looking for a name, someone with a record who might fit the bill. But there didn’t seem to be anyone. That is, till I got my hands on this foreign stuff …’

  ‘Foreign stuff?’ Fred’s brow darkened.

  Lily explained about the IPC advisories. ‘It was in one of those. A report about a man who broke into a house in France before the war and topped the owner and his wife and daughter as well: three of them. Same modus operandi as at Wapping. Lots of similarities. Soon as I saw it I knew – this was the bloke. And Mr Sinclair agreed. He’s getting in touch with the police in Paris.’

  Basking in the warmth of her uncle’s proud smile, Lily sat back.

  ‘Modus operandi, is it?’ Fred chuckled. ‘I knew you’d show them if you ever got the chance.’ He regarded her fondly. ‘But …’ He bit his lip. ‘Now don’t take this wrong, love, but how did you come to get this job? Why you?’

  ‘Ah, well, that’s another thing. I haven’t even told you about that yet.’ She paused, her glance teasing. ‘But aren’t you going to eat your pie, Uncle Fred?’ She nodded towards the unappetizing-looking object still lying untouched on the table between them. ‘It’s getting cold sitting there.’

  Fred growled. ‘Never mind my pie,’ he said. ‘You bite into one of those things these days, you never know what you’ll find inside. Come on, lass. What haven’t you told me yet?’

  Lily hesitated. ‘You remember that girl who was killed in Bloomsbury?’

  ‘When you were first at the scene?’

  ‘That’s right. Well, it seems this bloke they’re looking for topped her as well. And the tart who was strangled in Soho last week. You’ll have heard about that.’

  Fred nodded. He whistled in amazement.

  ‘Well, I had a hand in both cases. Mr Cook let me help. He’s a decent sort and I reckon he put in a word for me with this inspector from the Yard who’s taken over. Bloke called Styles. It was him who sent my name up.’

  ‘Well, good for both of them.’ Fred Poole thumped the table with his fist in approval. ‘And about time, too. But will it lead anywhere? Does it mean you’ll get a crack at plainclothes?’

  ‘Hard to say.’ She sucked at her teeth. ‘Depends what Mr Sinclair thinks. He’s the one I have to impress.’

  ‘Seems to me you’ve done a good job so far.’

  ‘So far …’ Lily echoed his words. Then her face brightened. ‘But the good news is, when I dug out the report about the murders in France I thought that’d be it. I’d be on my way back to Bow Street, directing traffic and playing nursemaid to tarts. But Mr Sinclair told me I could stay on for the time being. So I’ll be back at the Yard tomorrow first thing.’

  ‘That’s my girl.’ Fred didn’t hide his satisfaction. ‘Once they’ve had a good look at you they’ll see what they’ve been missing.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that …’ His niece blushed.

  ‘Still, from what you’ve told me, it’s a rum business. I can’t make head or tail of it.’ He scratched his head. ‘You’re saying the same fellow who did the Wapping job killed those two girls?’

  ‘That’s what they reckon. But it’s the first one that’s really puzzling. Seems he killed her for no reason. She’d been working as a land girl, living on a farm in Surrey, minding her own business. Didn’t have a boyfriend, never been in any trouble. There was nothing to explain it. Nothing about her that was unusual.’

  Lily sat frowning.

  ‘Except she was foreign, of course,’ she added.

  ‘Well, maybe that was it,’ Fred responded, anxious to be of help. ‘Maybe that’s the reason. I remember you telling me now. Polish, wasn’t it?’

  PART TWO

  14

  ‘SO HE WASN’T a policeman at all?’ Mary Spencer said. She was standing at the sink, peeling potatoes and looking out of the window into the stable yard where her five-year-old son Freddy was pretending to be a Hurricane. Arms outstretched, he circled the cobbles, now and then emitting a high-pitched staccato noise meant to sound like a machine-gun.’ ‘Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh …’

  ‘Then what on earth was he doing here?’

  ‘That’s still a mystery,’ Bess Brigstock replied. Bess was a volunteer postal worker; she delivered mail to outlying farms and houses in the Liphook area and was an invaluable source of information and gossip. ‘Bob Leonard rang Petersfield in case they knew anything about it, but they didn’t. They certainly hadn’t sent anyone, and anyway they pointed out it wouldn’t have been a policeman enquiring about that sort of thing; it would have been someone from the Ministry of Agriculture, or the Board of Trade. They have their own inspectors.’

  ‘Yes, but he showed Evie a warrant card,’ Mary insisted. Tired of his circling, Freddy had zeroed in on Bess’s pony Pickles, who stood harnessed between the shafts of her trap in the middle of the yard. ‘Eh-eh-eh-eh …’ He swooped down on Pickles, who disappointingly showed no reaction but continued to chew thoughtfully on the contents of his nosebag. ‘He told her he was a detective.’

  ‘Annie MacGregor said the same.’ Bess frowned. ‘He turned up at Finch’s Farm before he came here and he flashed his card at her, too. She said he was a greasy little man.’

  ‘Evie couldn’t bear him. According to her he just pushed his way into the house.’

  Mary brushed the pile of peelings off the edge of the sink into a bucket that already held discarded bits of leaf vegetables, some of them in the first stage of decay, as well as other food fragments, all of them destined for the porkers Hodge was fattening in the pigsty behind the stables. She wiped her brow with the back of her wrist.

  ‘They tell you to cook them in their skins,’ she murmured, peering at a well-thumbed booklet published by the Ministry of Food that was lying open by the sink. ‘It’s supposed to keep the goodness in. Too late now. Potatoes au gratin? We’ve still got some mousetrap. Freddy will hate it. But he hates potato soup even more.’

  She turned to look at Bess, who was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea in front of her, taking comfort as always from her burly, reassuring figure, clad that day in a brown, hairy sweater that made Mary think of Mama Bear from the book of children’s stories she read to Freddy every evening. The cup of tea Bess was cradling in her large callused hands might easily have been a plate of porridge.

  ‘What did he say to Annie MacGregor, this man?’

  ‘The same as he told Evie, so far as I can gather.’ Bess’s face darkened. Heavy in the shoulders, and with thighs like oaks, her leathery complexion testified to a life lived out of doors. ‘That there’d been reports of illegal slaughtering of livestock in the area and what did she know about it. Annie said she’d never heard of such a thing and if he was trying to insinuate that she and Alec had been killing off their animals on the sly he must be out of his mind. He might not have noticed but they had a dairy herd. But it didn’t seem to faze him; he insisted on taking their names and the names of their two farmhands.’

  ‘That’s what he did with Evie. Took her name and got her to tell him mine and made a note of Hodge’s, too. I only wish I’d been here. Policeman or not, I’d have sent him off with a flea in his ear.’

  Mary began to fill a saucepan with water from the sink, and as she did so she ca
ught sight of her son’s nanny, who’d gone out a few minutes earlier to collect eggs, emerging from the barn with a basket on her arm. Spotting a fresh target, Freddy sped across the cobbles towards her. ‘Eh-eh-eh-eh …’ Smiling, Mary watched as Evie dropped the basket and caught him in her arms. She swung him around, her long red hair, in plaits that morning, airborne for a moment as she pirouetted on the spot, and while Freddy wriggled, trying to escape, she whispered something in his ear. Her words, whatever they were, seemed to work the desired spell and when she put him down and collected her basket from the ground he took the gloved hand she offered him and together they walked to the end of the stables and then disappeared from sight behind the long, low building.

  Mary carried the saucepan to the other end of the kitchen and placed it on the old iron range which stood there radiating heat. Unhitching the gate to the fireplace beneath the stove, she took two logs cut to size from a wood bin and added them to the bed of embers before returning to clean the sink.

  ‘But is that all Bob Leonard could tell you?’

  Leonard was the Liphook bobby. Bess had undertaken on Mary’s behalf to find out all she could about the mysterious man who had called at the Grange a few days earlier brandishing what now seemed to be a bogus warrant card. Mary herself had been in Petersfield that day: she’d gone to the market that was held there once a week, leaving her son in Evie’s care, and had returned to find the girl clearly upset by what had occurred. It appeared from her account that the man had behaved in a menacing way, warning her that the authorities were well aware of what was going on, which had made no more sense to Evie than apparently it had to the MacGregors, who were their closest neighbours.

  ‘Bob’s only contribution was to wonder whether you had anything worth stealing.’ Bess snorted.