by Rennie Airth
A tremor went through his body and his grip on her fingers tightened. He shook his head violently.
Helen studied his face for a few moments. Then she leaned close again. ‘Whereabouts in the wood, Topper?’
Silent at first, he simply stared at her. But then, as though drawn by her steady gaze, he bent forward and whispered to her once more.
Helen glanced behind her. ‘By the stream, he says…’ She rose and came over to him. ‘Will, this is going to take a long time, and I’m not even sure how much more I can get out of him.’
A scowl crossed Stackpole’s features. ‘Sir?’ He addressed Madden. ‘Could we have a word?’ The two men went out into the passage. The constable gestured. ‘What do you think, sir? Should I try and squeeze him harder?’
Madden shook his head. ‘Helen knows him better than anyone. You’d be wasting your time.’
‘By the stream…’ Stackpole grimaced. ‘It’s not much to go on. And we’ve already been there. There’s a path that runs alongside it. It goes through the wood. I took some men and we walked the length of it, calling her name. Once you get off it you can’t see three feet in front of you.’ He shook his head in despair. As he glanced at his wristwatch, a flash of lightning lit the dim passageway for an instant, and the answering peal of thunder set the windowpanes in the kitchen rattling. ‘Well, those detectives from Guildford will be here soon. Better wait for them, I suppose…’
His glance seemed to suggest another course of action, however, and Madden responded to it. Despite the formality of address which the constable insisted on maintaining towards him, they were friends of long standing.
‘No, we can’t do that, Will. We must get out there right away. I think Topper found more than a shoe.’
3
The first fat drops of rain splattered the windscreen of Madden’s car as he turned off the paved road onto a rough track that ran through hedgerows and overhanging trees around the dark flank of Capel Wood. The dull grey afternoon light had changed to a deep leaden gloom. Black, swollen clouds were racing in from the west.
‘Won’t be long now,’ Stackpole predicted, squinting up through the glass. He glanced behind him at the roll of canvas lying on the back seat as though to reassure himself of its presence there. It was Madden who’d suggested they bring it with them.
‘I don’t know what we’ll find, Will, but you may need to cover the area.’
The piece of tarpaulin had been provided by Dick Henshaw. He’d used it to patch a hole in the roof of his cottage the previous year when a number of shingles had blown off in an autumn gale. While he was fetching it from the garden shed Helen had come out of the kitchen to talk to Madden.
‘I must go and see how Jenny Bridger is. I won’t say anything to her about Capel Wood.’ She eyed her husband unhappily, upset to see him becoming involved. Madden’s life as a policeman lay in the distant past, and it was one she did not wish to recall. To the constable she added, ‘You’d better keep an eye on Topper, Will. He’ll slip off if he gets the chance.’
Stackpole had charged both Henshaws with this duty and cautioned them to say nothing to the neighbours until the reinforcements from Guildford arrived.
‘I don’t want word of this spreading. Not till we’ve gone over there and seen what there is to see.’
‘Please God you find her,’ Molly Henshaw had murmured as they departed.
The hope – it was more of a prayer – that the child might be no worse than lying injured and in need of succour had lent speed to their preparations, but glancing at Madden’s expression as he steered the car down the narrow, rutted lane, Will Stackpole felt they shared the same grim premonition as to the girl’s fate.
‘We’ll be taking the same route Topper took, will we?’ Madden’s low voice was barely audible over the sound of the car’s motor as they ground along in bottom gear.
‘Yes, sir. If he was heading for Brookham he’d have come into the wood from the other side and walked through it on the path, the one that runs by the stream. It leads straight to Brookham.’
They’d debated taking this same path themselves, following Topper’s route in reverse and walking up to the wood from the hamlet. But the likelihood of being caught in the open by the advancing storm had persuaded them to use the car instead and they had driven along the road to Craydon for half a mile before turning off it close to the point where Alice Bridger had last been seen.
As the track they were on now continued to circle the wood, the hedgerows on either side dropped away and they saw to their right a wide, open field where a herd of Friesians stood close together, their sturdy black and white bodies barely visible in the dying light. Although the rain continued to fall in isolated drops the storm was fast approaching and a number of cows were already lying down in anticipation of the deluge that was about to break on them.
Their way ran close to the wood now, the spreading branches of oak and chestnut brushing against the side of the car, the road making a slow bend to the left which they followed until they came to a circular patch of dried mud where the track petered out and where two haystacks shaped like beehives stood close together beside a wooden fence bordering a field beyond.
As Madden brought the car to a halt he glanced at the dashboard and saw they had covered just over two miles since leaving Brookham. He got out and briefly inspected the ground around them. The bare strip of earth showed only the deeply engraved ruts made by cartwheels at some earlier date.
‘Are you thinking someone might have brought her here?’ Stackpole asked. ‘Come the same way we did?’ He’d climbed out of the car himself and was putting his helmet back on.
Partly shielded by the haystacks, the spot where they’d ended up looked out over empty fields with a distant vista of tree-clad hillocks.
‘It’d be a quiet spot,’ the constable observed. ‘Nobody working in the fields on a Sunday. No reason for anyone to come here.’
‘It’s possible.’ Madden shrugged. ‘But we’d only be guessing. Let’s get moving, Will. There’s no time to lose.’
The constable donned his cape, then retrieved the roll of tarpaulin from the back seat of the car, tucking it under his arm. He pointed ahead of them to a line of willows and low bushes that wound across the field towards the tree line.
‘There’s our stream, sir. It runs clear through the wood and comes out on the other side not far from Brookham.’
The two men set off, with the constable leading the way, forging a trail through knee-high grass around the outskirts of the wood until they came to the stream. A pathway was visible running alongside it on the further bank and they crossed to it by means of a fallen log. Thunder crashed all around them and they hurried to seek the shelter of the forest. When they got there, Stackpole stepped aside off the path.
‘You lead the way, sir. Your eyes are better than mine.’
Madden went ahead and soon found himself in a zone of twilight cast by the dense canopy of foliage, which deepened as they moved further into the trees. Rain pattered on the leaves overhead, but did not reach the ground, which remained dry. A layer of damp leaf mould underfoot muffled the sound of their steps.
The path continued to run parallel to the stream, which was visible most of the time, disappearing only briefly behind tree trunks or overhanging branches. Madden kept his eyes on it, knowing that Topper must have come this way himself since he was heading for Brookham and that whatever he had found would not be far from the water.
‘How big is the wood, Will?’ He spoke over his shoulder. ‘How long will it take us to walk through it?’
‘Twenty minutes, at least. It’s a fair size.’
Half that time had elapsed, and so far they had seen nothing of note, apart from a set of stepping stones in the stream which they had passed and which Madden had inquired about. Stackpole told him they connected with a secondary path that ran down to the road between Brookham and Craydon.
‘So Alice Bridger could have walked into the wood?’
Stackpole nodded. ‘Or been brought. I came that way myself with the men when we searched up here earlier.’
Not far beyond this point the path changed direction, crossing the stream by a second set of stepping stones and then apparently taking a course away from the brook into the depths of the forest. Madden halted.
‘Topper said by the stream…’
The constable came up to his shoulder. He saw what Madden meant. ‘They only separate for a short distance, sir. The path and the stream. They join up again a little further on.’
Madden shook his head, unconvinced.
‘No, I want to stay by the water.’ He peered downstream, but his view was impeded by thick undergrowth and overhanging trees. The rain was steadily increasing in volume and the thunder boomed louder overhead. Madden stood for some moments, hands on hips, looking about him. Then something caught his eye and he switched his attention to the brush lining the path, studying the ferns and low, stunted bushes that filled the spaces between the tree trunks.
‘Look-!’ He went down on his haunches. The constable peered over his shoulder. ‘Someone left the path here, or rejoined it.’ Madden indicated a fern that had been broken at the base and, near it, a slender oak sapling bent askew. ‘If Topper was following the stream rather than the path he might have come this way.’
‘But why would he do that?’ Stackpole was puzzled. ‘It’s hard work pushing your way through that.’ He gestured at the dense underbrush.
‘I’ve no idea.’ Madden bent lower to scan the ground, hoping to find some trace of a footprint, but the damp mould was too loose to hold an impression. He stood up. ‘Will, I’m going to carry on down the stream on this side. You stay on the path. If what you say is right, we should meet up further on.’
Had the circumstances been different, his words might have brought a grin to Will Stackpole’s face. Without realizing it, Madden had reverted to his old role, taking charge. He was behaving like the police inspector he’d once been.
‘I’ll do that, sir. Call out if you see anything.’
The constable waited until his companion had moved into the underbrush and then continued along the path, crossing the stream on the stepping stones and following the course of the footway, which left the brook initially, but then bent back so that it was running parallel to it again, only further from the bank than before. He found that, although he could still hear the rushing water, his view of it was blocked by the intervening trees and a screen of tangled bushes.
‘Will?’
‘I’m here, sir.’ Stackpole halted. Madden’s voice had reached him clearly from the other side of the stream. He wasn’t far off.
‘Someone’s come this way, all right… there’s a trail of sorts …’
Stackpole shifted the roll of tarpaulin from one arm to the other. He waited for a moment, then walked on, but after only a few paces he heard the other man call out again.
‘What kind of clothes was she wearing, Will? What colour were they?’
The constable thought. ‘She had a blue skirt on, sir. Blue skirt, white blouse, black shoes.’ Dry-mouthed now, he waited anxiously.
‘I can see a bit of thread caught on a bramble. It might be blue
… it’s difficult to see in this light…’ Madden’s voice trailed off. But he called out again, suddenly, ‘No, wait! There’s something else!’
Stackpole stood riveted to the spot, awaiting Madden’s next words. Ears pricked, he stared at the dense wall of greenery blocking his view of the stream and presently fell into a half-trance which was abruptly shattered when a bolt of lightning ripped through the low clouds overhead, followed almost instantaneously by a tremendous clap of thunder.
The air about him seemed to shiver and he caught a whiff of ozone. Curiously, the patter of rain drops on the leaves above had diminished in the last few seconds, but the sky continued to darken. It was as if the elements were gathering themselves to unleash an assault, and the constable felt a comparable coiling of forces within him, a rising tide of agonized tension that cried out for release.
‘Will?’
‘Sir!’
‘You’d better get over here!’
The sharpened note in Madden’s voice caused the hairs on the back of the constable’s neck to rise, and he caught his breath.
‘You won’t get through those holly bushes, Will. Better to go back to where I left you and come the way I did.’
‘What is it, sir?’ Fearful of the answer, Stackpole’s voice was choked. ‘Have you found her, then…?’
The few seconds it took Madden to reply seemed to stretch into an eternity. Then at last he spoke.
‘Yes, I’ve found her, Will.’
He said no more. But his voice told all.
It was only by chance that Madden had spotted the body.
Earlier, picking his way through the brush and clinging brambles, his attention had been focussed on the abundant signs that one or more people had come by this route: snapped twigs and ferns bent back and flattened marked the rough passage that had been forced through the undergrowth.
The disturbance seemed recent – some of the broken twigs were green, with the sap still wet in them – and had probably occurred within the past few hours. Closer study might have told him more, but there was no time to linger and he had carried on downstream until his attention was caught by the piece of thread, which was snagged on a bramble at waist height. This he had paused to examine, but such was the gloom brought on by the approaching storm he’d been unable to determine its colour with any certainty and had decided to leave it where it was.
All this time he had kept the stream in view, though his glimpses of it were intermittent and hampered by the thick brush that clung to the banks. But a few steps further on a sudden break in the bushes gave him a clearer sight of the water. He found he was standing at the edge of a small rectangle of leaf-strewn turf bordering the stream, whose opposite bank was hidden by the overhanging branches of a willow tree behind which an unbroken wall of holly bushes, a little higher up the bank, formed an impenetrable barrier.
Sheltered from rain and sun by the spreading branch of an oak tree, it struck Madden as being a tranquil spot and he was surveying an irregular ring of stones, much overgrown by grass, which lay at one end of the rectangle, wondering whether they’d been placed there by human hand, when his eye was caught by another object on the ground, closer to where he was standing., ‘No, wait!’ he had called out to the constable. ‘There’s something else!’
What he was looking at was nothing more than an oak leaf, and it had taken him several moments before he realized why his gaze had suddenly become fixed on it.
The colour, dark brown in the dreary light, was starting to run.
He’d bent down on his haunches at once and picked it up delicately by its stem. The patina coating the leaf’s surface had been smeared by falling raindrops; the dry crust was reverting to its liquid form. There was no doubt in Madden’s mind as to what it was.
Looking around then, he saw other bloodstains; other leaves bearing the telltale marks. The green grass, too, was spattered with tiny rust-coloured flecks.
Backing into the bushes a little, Madden went down on his hands and knees. and brought his face even lower so that he could examine the ground minutely, and it was while he was in that position, like some hound questing on a scent, that he saw, protruding from beneath the drooping willow branches across the stream, at the same level as his eyes were now, a sock-clad foot.
Next moment lightning split the sky above him and the thunder came crashing on its heels. Before the last echoes had died away, Madden had scrambled to his feet, torn off his socks and shoes and waded through the cold, ankle-deep current to the opposite bank. Parting the trailing willow fronds he found the body of a young girl lying on its side on a narrow ledge. Without hope he bent down and felt for a pulse in the thin white wrist that rested on her hip. There was none. She was dead. He had called out then to Stackpol
e.
During their shouted exchange, Madden’s eyes remained busy. The position of the body, wedged beneath an overhang in the bank and screened by the drooping branches, indicated that the killer had meant to conceal it. And it might have remained hidden longer, he thought, had a piece of the ledge on which it lay not crumbled away and fallen into the stream below, causing the girl’s foot to slide down into view.
Was that how Topper had found her? Had he taken the shoe off her foot? It seemed unlikely.
The cause of death would be determined later by medical examination, but judging by her blood-soaked hair, which covered her face as she lay, she appeared to have been struck about the head, and the evidence pointed to the assault having taken place on the bloodstained grass behind him…
Coolly, Madden continued to compile his mental notes, aware that he was acting from habit, doing something he hadn’t done for many years, but had once been trained to do, keeping his emotions separate from the process of observation. But his poise deserted him a moment later when he drew aside the matted hair to look at the girl’s face.
‘Dear God!’ A gasp of horror escaped his lips.
No stranger to violent death, he’d seen more than one murder victim cruelly battered and during two years spent in the trenches had been witness to unspeakable injuries: he’d seen bodies rent and flayed and blown to pieces. But nothing in his experience had prepared him for the sight of Alice Bridger’s face, beaten flat to a red pulp on which no trace of a human feature remained. As he stared at it in disbelief he heard Stackpole’s voice calling to him from close by.
‘Am I getting near, sir?’
‘Keep following the stream, Will.’ Somehow Madden found his voice. ‘You’ll come to me. And hurry. It’s going to pour in a minute.’
As he spoke, thunder boomed out again like a great bass drum and the rain grew heavier. Madden glanced uneasily at the stream in which he stood. The ledge where the child’s body lay had been carved out of the bank by the water on some earlier occasion and there was no telling how fast it might rise again in the cloudburst that now threatened. Quickly he bent again to study the corpse, noting its position, attentive to details.
