Dead of Winter jm-3

by Rennie Airth

  The subject of Rosa’s skill as a seamstress had come up again when the chief inspector examined the girl’s belongings in what had been her bedroom. With Madden at his elbow, Sinclair had gone quickly through her clothes, few in number, but including one of the two embroidered silk blouses Helen had told him about and which he remarked on to his host.

  ‘Oh, she could do wonders with a needle and thread.’ Overhearing his remark, May commented from the doorway where she was waiting for them to complete their business. ‘There was also that coat she made for herself, Mr Madden, do you remember? She was wearing it the day she went to London.’

  Helen, too, had recalled the garment when she arrived at the farm later to collect the chief inspector, having spent the morning visiting patients in the area who for one reason or another were unable to get to her surgery during the week.

  ‘It was an old coat of Rob’s which he’d discarded,’ she told him, referring to their son, who was a naval lieutenant. ‘I was amazed when I took her to the station that day. She’d made a hood from some of the material left over after she’d shortened it. And not only that, she’d changed the whole cut. I hardly recognized it.’

  With his precious weekend all but over, Sinclair had taken his leave then of Madden, who was committed to driving the tractor he’d been using for the past fortnight over to a neighbouring farm which had an urgent need for it.

  ‘We’re all sharing machinery now,’ he’d remarked. ‘And everyone’s behind with the autumn ploughing as a result. But ours is done, thank God. We’ll have a chance to catch our breath. Winter’s usually a quiet time.’

  The chief inspector had long ceased to wonder at the ease with which his old partner had been able to turn his back on the profession where he had found such distinction and settle into the life of a farmer. A countryman by birth, it had needed only the accident of his meeting with Helen and their subsequent decision to marry to provide the impulse necessary to return to his roots. But that morning Sinclair had sensed a change in the other man, an uncharacteristic tension in his manner, which had shown itself during a stroll they had taken in the garden together after breakfast.

  Professing a wish to examine what damage had been done by the recent wind to his fruit trees, Madden had led the way down the long lawn in front of the house to the orchard that bordered a stream at the bottom of the garden. Beyond the brook lay a wooded ridge called Upton Hanger, which in summer glowed deep green but whose great oaks and beeches, stripped of their leaves, stood stark as skeletons in the leaden morning light.

  ‘She worked mainly with the cows, you know, Angus.’ Madden had spoken without preamble, taking the chief inspector by surprise. His attention had seemed to be fixed on the broken branch of a plum tree which he’d picked up from the ground and was examining. ‘She had a gift for it. I’d hear her talking to them while she was milking. In Polish, I imagine. She called them by their names. I think she was happy here. Or less unhappy. I’ll have to find someone local to take her place. May needs help in the dairy, but I can’t face asking for another land girl. Not till this is settled.’

  He had looked at Sinclair then.

  ‘You will keep me informed, won’t you, Angus?’

  Though spoken in a quiet tone, the demand had brooked no refusal, and the chief inspector had been swift to reassure his friend. But he’d been struck as much by the depth of feeling evident in Madden’s voice as by the look in his eye, which had seemed to reflect a stronger emotion; one, though, he was not used to seeing there: a cold, controlled anger.

  ‘John’s furious, though he tries not to show it,’ Helen told him later that day when they were driving to the station. ‘He never thought of Rosa as an employee. He saw the sadness in her from the first. The grieving. To him she was someone who needed help and comfort, as much a casualty of war as any wounded soldier. And now she’s gone and there’s nothing he can do about it.’

  They had continued in silence for a few moments. Then she had spoken again:

  ‘And something else. It’s reawakened an old pain in him. Not that he’s said so in so many words, but I can tell. The daughter he lost … you remember that?’

  She was referring to an episode in Madden’s life before he’d met her, an earlier marriage, which had ended in tragedy. A young detective at the time, he and his wife had had a daughter, but soon after her birth, the two of them had contracted influenza and died. Madden had witnessed the last hours of his child as she struggled for life, and the experience had left a wound in him which only the love he’d found later with Helen and the life they had made together had healed. Or so the chief inspector had always believed.

  ‘He dreamed of her the other night for the first time in years and he wondered why. I think it’s because of what happened to poor Rosa. She was in his care, you see. But he couldn’t protect her.’

  Her words had remained in Sinclair’s mind until they reached the station, where, having elected to return to London on an earlier train than he might have rather than risk being delayed until all hours by the uncertainties of the rail schedule, he had discovered with little surprise that the early train was no longer early; that at the very least it would be an hour late. Preferring the company of his hostess to the cramped squalor of the waiting room, he had returned with her to the churchyard where he sat now, with his coat buttoned up over a thick scarf and his hat pulled down low against the persistent cold, watching while she attended to her self-imposed task.

  ‘Poor Angus. It’s been a miserable weekend for you. We haven’t had a chance to talk about other things. For instance, I wanted to hear about your lunch with Lucy. Did you really invite her to the Savoy? That sounds far too grand for her.’

  Busy raking the scattered leaves into a heap, Helen glanced up, smiling.

  ‘I was the one who felt privileged.’ The chief inspector grinned in response. Childless himself — and a widower — he had observed the Maddens’ golden-haired daughter with fascination over the years, watching her grow from a strong-willed child, and via a stormy adolescence, into a beauty cast in the image of her mother. ‘Not to say envied. She turned every man’s head in the room.’

  ‘If you think to please me by saying that you’re making a grave mistake.’ Helen’s attempt at severity, contrived as it was, had little effect on her auditor. Sinclair’s grin merely widened. ‘Turning men’s heads seems to be my daughter’s sole ambition. And her only achievement to date. And no matter what she claims, I can’t believe she’s contributing to the war effort.’

  On leaving school, and despite the opposition of her mother, who had wanted her to try for university, Lucy Madden had enlisted in the WRNS, a move which had enabled her not only to slip the parental leash, but to obtain a posting in London, much to the disapproval of Helen, who thought her daughter too young at eighteen for such an adventure.

  ‘How she’s managed to get herself assigned to the Admiralty is beyond me. She can’t be remotely qualified for any sort of position there.’

  It had been on the tip of the chief inspector’s tongue when Helen had said this to him some months ago to point out that Lucy’s qualifications were all too obvious and that men of rank, none of them spring chickens any longer, liked nothing better than to have youth and beauty in close proximity, the better to burnish the image they had of themselves.

  ‘And any idea of Aunt Maud being a suitable chaperone is quite unrealistic. Poor dear, I doubt she knows what time of day it is, never mind what hour Lucy gets in at night. She may have survived the Blitz, but whether she can cope with the presence of my daughter under her roof remains to be seen.’

  The lady in question, a spinster now in her nineties, lived in St John’s Wood, and Lucy had lodged with her since moving to London.

  ‘Still, at least I’ll get a chance to talk to her when we go up,’ Helen said, returning to her job of raking the leaves. ‘And Lucy, too, if I’m lucky, though she’ll probably claim that some crisis on the high seas requires her to be at her desk
. If she has such a thing. It’s a ploy she’s discovered to avoid being interrogated, one she knows I can’t get round. At least I used to know the mischief she was getting up to. Now I haven’t the least idea, and I don’t know which is worse.’

  Unable to keep a straight face any longer, she began to laugh. But the change of mood was fleeting, and after a few moments her expression grew serious again.

  ‘I didn’t mention it earlier, Angus, but I rang Mrs Laski yesterday evening to tell her how shocked we were. I’ll talk to her again when I see her at the funeral. I want her to know at least that we cared for Rosa. That we feel the loss of her.’

  Unhappy with her thoughts, she stirred the mound of dead leaves with her rake.

  ‘It’s so wrong,’ she burst out.

  ‘Wrong?’

  ‘Unfair, I mean. Undeserved. Without cause or reason. We’ve been living for years with death all around us. Violent death. First the Blitz and now these dreadful flying bombs. The knowledge that anyone might be killed at any moment. People we love … our children.’

  Biting her lip, she looked away, and the chief inspector understood what it was she dared not say. A year had passed since the Maddens’ son Robert had been posted to a destroyer assigned to the perilous Murmansk convoys. Out of touch for weeks on end, his long absences — and the silence that inevitably accompanied them — were a source of anguished concern to his parents.

  ‘But this is different, somehow. It’s got no connection to anything, not even the war. All poor Rosa did was go up to London to see her aunt. Don’t you see — it makes a mockery of death?’

  She turned and found the chief inspector’s sympathetic gaze on her.

  ‘It’s meaningless. That’s what I’m saying. All those others, her family, her people. Dead, all of them. And now her own life lost for nothing.’

  5

  Turning the collar of his coat up against the driving sleet, Billy glanced at Madden, who like him was standing with his hands plunged in his coat pockets and the brim of his hat pulled down as protection against the tiny flecks of ice swirling about in the air around them. There were questions he wanted to put to his old chief, but now was not the moment.

  Instead, he looked about him with curiosity. It was the first time he’d been in a Jewish cemetery and he was struck by how different it was from a Christian churchyard, how bare of decoration and adornment. Stretched out before his eyes were row upon row of flat, closely packed graves with hardly a headstone among them. Nor was any relief to be found in the gravelled pathways lacking any bordering tree or flower to soften their stony lines. Here the bleak reality of death was undisguised.

  ‘Not much of a turn-out, is there, sir?’

  He nodded towards the small group of mourners, most of them elderly women, who had gathered around the freshly dug grave at the end of one of the rows some distance from where they were standing. The sudden icy squall had driven them to seek warmth together and they stood huddled under their umbrellas with bowed heads like sheep caught in a blizzard.

  ‘I doubt Rosa had many close friends,’ Madden murmured. For some minutes he’d been standing with his eyes fixed on the ground before them, lost in thought. ‘It was part of her sadness, the solitude she’d chosen.’

  ‘No young man, either,’ Billy remarked. ‘Not that we were expecting one.’

  Again he was tempted to probe Madden’s mind, to ask him to enlarge on something he had said earlier, before they had reached the cemetery, but mindful of the occasion he kept his impatience in check, and instead glanced over his shoulder at a small brick shelter near the gates of the cemetery, hoping to see some sign of life within.

  ‘I wish that rabbi would come,’ he muttered. ‘The sooner we get the old lady home, the better.’

  Earlier, having met the Maddens at Waterloo station and driven them up to Bloomsbury to collect Rosa Nowak’s aunt, Billy had been shocked to discover how frail the stricken woman appeared to be; how distraught at the loss of her niece. He had gone upstairs himself to knock on the door of the first-floor flat, and to give Mrs Laski the two suitcases containing Rosa’s belongings which Madden and Helen had brought with them from Highfield. Though familiar with the statements she had made to the Bow Street CID, it was the first time they had met, and Billy’s first reaction on seeing her had been to wonder whether she would be equal to the ordeal ahead of her. White-haired, thin to the point of emaciation, and with trembling hands, she had wandered about the small flat with slow steps, trying to get ready, but unable to remember where she had left her things. Watching her, he’d been put in mind of a wounded bird, one no longer able to fly, but dragging itself broken-winged along the ground. Her eyes, rheumed with age, seemed blind to the world around her. Until the moment of their departure, that was, when she had paused by a table where a number of framed photographs stood to direct her gaze at one in particular, a family group composed of a man and a woman with three children, two of them small boys and the third an older girl whom Billy had recognized as Rosa. The picture had been posed — it looked like a studio photograph, and the figures had something of the lifelessness of waxwork models about them. Mrs Laski had picked it up and, after studying it for a long moment, had pressed the glass front to her lips in a gesture of farewell.

  ‘Enough. Let us go.’

  They were the first words she had spoken to him. And the last.

  He’d escorted her down the stairs with a hand under her arm and the other ready to catch her in case she fell. Outside, in the road, Madden had already climbed out of the police car Billy had brought with him to assist her into the back seat beside Helen. Their greetings had been acknowledged by a lowering of her eyelids and a slight dip of her white head, but beyond taking Helen’s hand in hers and pressing it for a brief moment, she had shown no wish to speak or communicate. Rather, she had seemed lost in whatever world of pain she inhabited, and her frailty had been enough to excite Helen’s concern long before they reached Golders Green.

  Finding that the shelter by the gates was furnished with wooden benches, she had persuaded the old lady to rest there with her until the arrival of the rabbi who was to conduct the burial service. The two men had continued on into the cemetery and waited now beside the main path, but some way off from the rest of the mourners gathered at the graveside.

  Madden had said little in the interval, and Billy, too, had remained silent for the most part. But his thoughts had been occupied by what had occurred a little earlier that morning, before they had got to Mrs Laski’s flat, when they had stopped in Little Russell Street at the spot where Rosa Nowak had met her end.

  It was Madden who had requested the detour, and Billy had been surprised. He’d already given the older man a brief account of the progress of the investigation carried out by the Bow Street CID during their drive up from Waterloo station and Madden had seemed satisfied. At all events he’d asked no questions.

  ‘They’ve managed to pin down her route up to Bloomsbury,’ he’d told him. ‘She came up from Waterloo by tube. A guard on the Underground at Tottenham Court Road reckons he saw her go through the ticket barrier there, which makes sense. From there she would have gone on foot. He remembers a girl with a basket in one hand and a bag in the other; that’s what Rosa was carrying. But the crowd was even thicker than usual, he said, because there’d been an alert just a few minutes earlier: the sirens had gone off. It turned out to be a false alarm, but a lot of people came down into the station from the street, they were milling about, and he only caught a glimpse of her as she went by.’

  Madden had listened in silence, a frown grooving his brow, reviving Billy’s memories of the brief span of weeks they had spent working together twenty years before, a period unmatched in the intensity it had brought to his life then, and the realization which came later that thanks to the man into whose company he had been thrown by chance he had found his own centre of gravity, the place from which he could embark on his future with confidence. That Madden himself had chosen anothe
r way of life soon after had never affected Billy’s opinion of him. Even at that early age he had recognized qualities of character in the older man that set him apart from his colleagues: qualities that in time had become touchstones for Billy himself, standards against which he had come to measure himself.

  But he’d made no comment during their journey in the car, and it was Helen who had taken up the conversation, pressing Billy for news of his family, chiding him in an affectionate manner for having been a stranger lately.

  The warmth of her greeting and the kiss she had given him when they had met on the platform at Waterloo had brought a blush to Billy’s cheeks, just as if he were still the same green young detective-constable she had first known years ago.

  ‘But I’m cross with you,’ she had said, her smile belying her words. ‘It’s been so long since you and Elsie brought the children down to Surrey to see us. And Lucy was saying only the other day that it’s been nearly a year since she saw you last. You wouldn’t recognize her in her uniform. She’s grown up all at once.’

  Billy had had to explain that his family had moved out of London temporarily. Elsie had taken their three children to stay with her mother in Bedford.

  ‘It’s these blasted doodlebugs,’ he told her. ‘They really put the wind up Elsie, and me too. You never know where they’re going to land next. We had one come down on a house by Clapham Common, near where we live, and it killed the whole family. Folks we knew. The worst of it is you can hear them coming, the buzz bombs anyway, and you find yourself wondering whether this is the one that’s got your family’s name on it. Anyway, Elsie and I agreed it would be better if they stayed out of London, just for the time being.’