Dead of Winter

by Rennie Airth

  ‘Oh, Hodge, you really mustn’t. That’s much too heavy for you.’ Mrs Spencer came to life. ‘You’ll do yourself an injury.’

  She had hurried down the steps from the door, but was too late to prevent Madden from taking hold of the handles himself and wheeling the barrow over to a woodbin that stood against the wall of the house near the back door.

  ‘That is kind of you, but you shouldn’t, Mr… ? I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’

  ‘Madden.’

  ‘Mr Madden …’

  She waited until they had finished tossing the logs into the woodbin, then spoke again:

  ‘Come inside, won’t you? And you, too, Hodge. Mrs H and I were about to have a cup of tea.’ To Madden she added, ‘And you want to speak to Evie, you say?’ She smiled. ‘It’s what my son has always called her and now we all do.’

  ‘If I may.’ Madden had followed her up the steps. ‘As you’ve probably gathered, I don’t know her, but I believe she was a friend of a young Polish woman who worked for me as a land girl.’

  ‘Really?’ Mrs Spencer had looked surprised. ‘Well, she’ll be back soon so you won’t have long to wait. She and my son have walked over to some neighbours of ours.’

  Inside the warm kitchen ‘Mrs H’ was revealed to be a woman several sizes larger than her husband and occupied at that moment in stoking the embers of an iron range. Down on her knees, she lifted a round, red face lit by a smile when Mrs Spencer introduced them, but continued with her work, prodding the fire vigorously with a poker until she was satisfied, and then carefully inserting logs into it, cut to measure, from a pile lying on the stone-flagged floor beside her.

  ‘A Polish girl, you say?’ Having hung Madden’s coat and hat on a hook in the wall behind a Christmas tree which stood at one end of the spacious kitchen, Mrs Spencer began to busy herself with the tea things, laying out cups and saucers and fetching a tin of biscuits from a cupboard. ‘Eva never told me she had a friend in the neighbourhood.’

  ‘They only met recently,’ Madden explained. ‘That’s to say they didn’t know they were living so close to one another, or even that they were both in England. But they attended the same college in Warsaw years ago.’

  ‘Oh, that girl … !’ Mrs Spencer had stood transfixed, a milk jug in her hand. ‘Yes, of course – Eva told me all about her. What was her name again?’

  ‘Rosa. Rosa Nowak.’

  ‘I remember now. They met on the train going up to London and Eva said this girl … Rosa … had promised to get in touch with her. They were both going to be away for a few days, but Rosa said she would ring her when she got back. She had our telephone number, but she never rang and Eva was quite upset. She was hoping they could get together again.’

  She had looked at him questioningly, as though hoping that he could supply the missing pieces of the puzzle, but at that moment, deaf to the conversation going on behind her, Mrs H had risen from her knees with an effortful groan.

  ‘There we are …’

  Dusting off her hands, she had picked up a kettle that was whistling on top of the stove, spouting steam, and brought it to the table.

  Aware that he and his hostess were about to embark on a sensitive topic, Madden had decided to delay any further explanation. But during the next ten minutes, while Mrs Spencer poured their tea and the talk had been of small matters, he had twice caught her glancing at him with what seemed to be more than mere curiosity. With a guarded look.

  ‘Come on, Ezra. Up you get.’ Mrs H had nudged her husband, who’d fallen into a doze at the table. ‘There’s lots to do.’

  Mary Spencer had escorted them to the door.

  ‘And you will look in on us later this afternoon like you promised?’ Mrs H spoke anxiously as she paused on the steps outside. We’d like to wish the lad a happy Christmas. You can tell him I’ll show him me glass eye if he likes.’

  With a chuckle she turned her face in Madden’s direction in case he had failed to notice the object.

  ‘They’re going over to Mrs H’s sister in Liphook for Christmas dinner,’ Mary Spencer explained as she shut the door behind them. ‘So we won’t see them tomorrow. They’re such a kind pair. I don’t think I would have managed without them.’

  Madden had been considering his next words.

  ‘I understand your move down here wasn’t voluntary,’ he had said finally, and as he’d hoped it brought her up short.

  ‘How on earth would you know that?’ she had asked, and when he made no reply she went on, ‘Why are you really here, Mr Madden? What do you want with Eva?’

  The moment had come to reveal the purpose of his visit, but during the preceding ten minutes he’d become aware of a current of feeling emanating from Mary Spencer: not suspicion exactly, but a wariness which clearly had him as its object. His initial intention, which had been to sit down quietly with Eva Belka and find out what she remembered of the journey she had made with Rosa, now seemed impractical. He realized he would have to deal with her employer first, and in the circumstances frankness had seemed to be his best strategy.

  ‘I’m afraid I have some sad news for her,’ he had said. Rosa’s dead.’

  ‘Oh, Lord!’ She had put a hand to her mouth. ‘How dreadful. What happened to her? Was it a bomb? Eva said she’d told her she was staying in London for a few days.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry to say she was murdered.’

  ‘Murdered—?’

  ‘That same evening. In fact, only about half an hour after she and Eva parted at Waterloo.’

  Mrs Spencer had stared at him dumbstruck. The shock on her face had been unmistakable.

  ‘I think something happened on the train – something Eva was a witness to – and I want to ask her about that. Also, whether Rosa said anything to her about it at the time.’

  He had waited for her to respond. To his surprise she’d remained silent.

  ‘Did she talk to you about it, by any chance? Eva, I mean. Since she mentioned meeting Rosa, I wondered if she said anything more.’

  While he was speaking Madden had noticed a further change in his hostess’s demeanour. For the first time she appeared ill at ease, and he saw that she was keeping something from him.

  ‘Mr Madden, who are you?’ Flushed in the face now, she had burst out with the question. ‘You say Rosa worked for you as a land girl. But you sound more like a policeman than a farmer.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He had smiled. ‘Old habits die hard. I was a policeman years ago, and funnily enough I met a friend of yours on the way here who asked me about that. Bess Brigstock. She and my wife knew each other once.’

  He had deliberately mentioned a name that he knew would be familiar to her, and was relieved to see her face relax a little on hearing it.

  ‘Bess was a friend of your wife’s?’

  ‘When they were girls. Helen Collingwood was her name then. She grew up in Highfield.’

  ‘But why are you here asking these questions? Surely it’s the business of the police.’

  ‘It is, but I’ve been helping them. I still have friends at Scotland Yard.’

  He had paused at that point, hoping she might relent, but after a moment he saw she was still obdurate.

  ‘I don’t know how to put it exactly, but I feel Rosa was my responsibility. That I owe it to her to help find her murderer and …’

  ‘Yes, yes, I understand now. I see what you mean. But …’ She had sat biting her lip. ‘Oh dear … this is so difficult.’

  Madden waited. But finally he could contain himself no longer.

  ‘Obviously you know something,’ he had said. ‘And if that’s the case I do urge you to tell me what it is. The man who killed Rosa is a particularly dangerous criminal, one of the worst the police here have ever had to deal with, and though they’re on his trail they haven’t caught up with him yet.’

  She had bitten her lip. ‘I suppose they could be connected …’

  ‘Connected? What do you mean?’ He had pressed her at once, but
still to no avail.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Madden, I really am, but this is something I can’t discuss with you, not until Eva gets back. You must ask her.’

  Mary Spencer’s eyes strayed to the clock on the wall once more.

  ‘ should be here by now. Let me go and have a look.’ She rose from the table. ‘ along if you like.’ As if to excuse her stubborn refusal of a moment ago, she smiled an invitation to him.

  Madden followed her out of the kitchen and down a short stretch of passage to a sitting-room on the opposite side of the house. A pleasant room furnished with a mixture of pieces of no particular style but all dating from an earlier age, its walls were hung with an eclectic collection of paintings and other adornments that made Madden look twice when his eye fell on them.

  ‘This house belonged to an uncle of mine,’ she explained, having seen his expression. ‘I never really knew him, only about him, that he was a great traveller. But he certainly had the most extraordinary taste in art, or perhaps no taste at all. If you think all this is peculiar, you should see what I left in the attic.’

  Madden had already noted a Chinese silk screen rubbing shoulders with a picture of a wide expanse of prairie across which a lone cowboy galloped, the brim of his hat blown back by the speed at which he was riding. Now he paused to examine a pair of Turkish carpets hung like tapestries on either side of the fireplace and, most unusual of all, a Zulu ox-hide shield crossed with an assegai mounted above the mantelpiece.

  ‘I put those there for safety.’ She had caught the direction of his glance. ‘My son longs to get his hands on them.’

  She had crossed the room, meanwhile, to one of two sash windows facing the door, and when Madden joined her there he found himself looking at a snow-clad garden, formal in design, but much neglected to judge by the unclipped box hedges and pieces of broken statuary dotting the white landscape.

  ‘This is the way they’ll come,’ she said. ‘Eva and Freddie. Look, you can see their tracks going down.’ She pointed to a set of fresh footprints running from the terrace in front of them down some shallow steps to a path that led to an open gate at the bottom of the garden. ‘’ve gone over to the MacGregors’; it’s only a mile away. I collected our turkey from them yesterday but forgot to pick up the Christmas pudding Annie MacGregor made for us. Eva said she’d go and get it and Freddie insisted on accompanying her. There are two puppies over there he’s fallen in love with, and I dare say we’ll be landed with one of them ourselves sooner or later.’

  She was chattering, unable to hide her nervousness, and as he looked out over the snow-covered lawns and beds Madden wondered what knowledge it was she was harbouring.

  ‘Oh, Lord – the fire! I’d clean forgotten!’

  Clapping a hand to her head Mrs Spencer turned from the window and hurried to the fireplace, where the grate was already laid with twigs and other kindling and a basket stuffed with logs stood ready for use.

  ‘I meant to light it this morning. That friend of mine you met, Bess Brigstock, is coming to spend Christmas with us and I want this room to be warm by this evening so we can sit here. There’s a concert of carols on the BBC.’

  While she fumbled with a box of matches, Madden turned back to gaze out of the window and found that the scene he’d been looking at moments before had changed. Two figures had appeared on the path at the bottom of the garden, one of them a small boy. They were moving towards the house, but only by stages, their progress slowed by the snowballs which the child was hurling at his companion, who was hampered by the burden she was carrying: Mrs Spencer’s Christmas pudding, no doubt. Finally she held up one arm in token of surrender and having submitted to a final volley from her attacker took hold of his hand and drew him along with her.

  ‘There they are now.’ Madden spoke in a quiet voice.

  Mrs Spencer made as if to rise, then checked the movement and struck another match instead. ‘They’re quite useless these days,’ she muttered. ‘Not like they were before the war.’ She had already tried to light two, but both had fizzled and gone out. Now the third one, too, died in her fingers. ‘Bother!’

  She glanced up at him.

  ‘I’m so relieved.’ She smiled guiltily. ‘You’ll be able to speak to Evie yourself in a minute. You’ll see why I couldn’t talk to you about it. It’s her story to tell.’

  As he looked down at her crouched figure – at the way her fingers fumbled with the matchstick she was holding – a thought stirred in the back of his mind. Frowning, he returned his gaze to the two figures making their slow way up the snow-covered path. Both wore coats and gloves, but while the boy was bare-headed, the girl had something over her head, and when they came closer he saw it was a thick woollen shawl. The ends were tucked into the collar of her coat so that they seemed like almost one garment.

  At that instant a shaft of memory almost physical in nature sent a shudder through him. Its genesis was an incident that had occurred many years before when he had been a young policeman and recently married. He had come home after a day’s work to find his then wife busy with household tasks, and as he saw her figure bent over an ironing board he had realized with the force of revelation that he did not love her as he had hoped he would; that he would never love her in that way and that equally he would never leave her or the daughter born to them a few weeks earlier. In the event, both had died within six months, victims of an influenza epidemic, but the memory of the pain he had experienced at that moment had never left him, and although their causes could not have been more different, it was the same feeling he felt now: the same sickening realization of a truth that could not be denied.

  ‘You say she has a story to tell?’

  He turned from the scene outside to look at Mary Spencer again; at the burning match she was holding to the kindling in the grate; to the spent matches with their charred heads that lay on the stones beside her.

  ‘Yes, a quite extraordinary tale. Awful, really.’

  ‘Does it by any chance start in Paris?’

  ‘Good heavens!’ The match she was holding dropped from her nerveless fingers; she stared at him in astonishment. ‘So you knew all along—?’

  He shook his head. ‘It was only a guess …’

  He turned back to the window and watched as hand in hand the two figures mounted the steps to the terrace. The murmured words he spoke were for his ears alone.

  ‘Poor, poor Rosa …’

  28

  ‘HE KILLED the wrong girl, Angus. He had to decide quickly when they reached Waterloo. He saw two young women dressed much the same, and both with their heads covered, which made it hard to recognize their faces. They both had baskets of food, too, and the platform was crowded. When they got off the train he had to pick one to follow, and as luck would have it he chose wrong: he followed Rosa.’

  With the receiver pressed to his ear, Madden stared out at the garden. The phone was kept on a small table by one of the windows, and as he stood there his gaze fell on the straggling line of footsteps which Eva and her charge had left in the snow when they had come up the path from the gate at the bottom of the garden.

  ‘I half guessed it when I saw her walking up to the house; she was wearing a coat with a shawl drawn over her head like Rosa’s hood. Then when I saw the matches it was clear to me.’

  ‘Did you say matches?’ The chief inspector wasn’t sure he’d heard right. The telephone line they were using had faded momentarily.

  ‘The charred heads. Mrs Spencer was trying to light the fire and I remembered what Billy had said about finding spent matches around Rosa’s body. We thought her killer must have been searching for something. But it was Rosa’s face he was looking at. He had to be sure, and it was only then he knew he’d killed the wrong girl.’

  ‘How could anyone do such a thing?’ Sinclair was disbelieving. ‘Any normal human being would have checked first.’

  ‘We’re not dealing with a normal human being, Angus. What was one dead girl more or less to Raymond Ash?’
/>
  Even as he spoke, an image of Rosa’s face, with its veiled air of sorrow, returned to him with a pang, together with another face, hardly resembling hers in features – Eva Belka was red-haired and fair of complexion – but afflicted now with the same pain and remorse.

  ‘It cannot be so.’ Racked by sobs she had kept repeating the words after Madden had revealed to her what had happened to her friend after they had parted. ‘ cannot be so.’

  Prior to that – and with the eagerness of one who had borne a burden for too long and wanted only to shed it – she had described her brush with a killer in Paris four years earlier, an encounter that had haunted her ever since. In English as fluent as Rosa’s, and marked by the same accent, she had poured out her story; still unaware of the tragic chain of events that had led to her compatriot’s murder. Judging it better to let her speak first, Madden had kept what he had to tell her until last. But as he listened to her stumbling story and watched as she sat twisting her fingers, her green eyes fixed on his, he had found himself wishing that the sad task had fallen to another.

  Still wearing her coat, and with the same shawl covering her hair which had led to Ash’s fatal error, she had been ushered into the sitting-room by Mary Spencer, who, though aware of the ordeal facing the young woman and wanting to remain with her, had had her young son to think about. Since he could not be present, she had had to leave them alone, and had paused only to reassure Eva and to tell her she wasn’t to worry any longer; that all would be well once she had spoken to their visitor.

  When they were done – and before Eva had left him to rejoin her mistress – Madden had made one final effort to comfort her.

  ‘ may seem hard to believe,’ he had said gently, but even if you had gone to the police earlier it would have made no difference. You and Rosa would still have been on that train together. Nothing would have changed that.’

  But his words had gone unheeded; she had continued to weep.