JM01 - River of Darkness

by Rennie Airth

  Madden thought of his own barren life. But he couldn’t bring himself to speak of it. Instead, he asked, “There’s been no one since?”

  She laughed softly against his chest. “How did St. Paul put it? Marry or burn?” Then her brow creased and she looked up at him. “Oh dear, I never even asked, I just took it for granted—You’re not married, are you?”

  He shook his head. “I was. But it was years ago.” He needed to tell her. “We had a child, a little girl. They both died of influenza. It was before the war.”

  She held him in her steady gaze. “I saw that when you looked at Sophy. I didn’t know what it meant. She knew . . . she felt something. The way she went with you . . .”

  She kissed him and then released herself from his arms, sitting up and covering her legs as she did so. She ran her fingers through her hair.

  “I must pull myself together. My new locum will be here in an hour and I have to get him settled in. Then Lord Stratton’s giving me a lift to London. I’m spending the night with my aunt and catching the train to Yorkshire tomorrow morning.”

  She smiled down at him.

  “You were laughing earlier because the other one fell off his horse,” Madden said. “Why?”

  “If he hadn’t, you and I wouldn’t be here now.”

  “But that was before . . .” He was amazed.

  “Yes, but I knew this was going to happen.” Her eyes held his. “Are you shocked?”

  He drew her down to him.

  She said, “I never even gave you any lunch. There’s still time.” He felt her breath on his lips. “Or we could make love again. Though I don’t know . . . can we?”

  Smiling, she slipped her hand between his legs and took him gently, like a bird, in her folded palm.

  “Oh, yes . . .”

  They left the hamper with the blanket and cushions by the garden gate.

  “I’ll get Mary to collect them later. I haven’t the strength now.”

  She watched, smiling, as he put on his tie and jacket, and then they walked arm in arm through the dappled shade of the orchard until they came in sight of the house, when he started to pull away from her. She kept his arm in hers and drew him into the shade of the weeping beech, near the side gate.

  “I’ll be away for a fortnight.” She kissed his cheek. “When I get back I’ll find some excuse and come up to London.”

  He watched her turn and leave, the pain of loss already sharp in him. He was afraid she would soon start to regret what she had done. That the next time he saw her it would be only to hear excuses and embarrassed explanations.

  As though she had read his mind, she turned and came back to him. “Hold me for a moment.”

  He wrapped his arms about her and they stood like that. Then she drew back and kissed him full on the mouth.

  “In two weeks,” she said.

  16

  Madden awoke in terror, thinking he was under shellfire, and then lay sweating in the darkness as the rumble of approaching thunder grew louder.

  His sleep had been tormented by a familiar nightmare, a racking image that dated from the first time he had been wounded when he had lain in a casualty clearing station and watched an Army surgeon, his white smock drenched with blood, saw off the leg of an anaesthetized soldier. Awake, Madden could recall the surgeon completing the operation and tossing the shattered limb into a corner of the tent with other amputated fragments. In his dream the bloodstained figure kept sawing and sawing while the soldier’s mouth stretched wide in a soundless scream.

  Peace returned to his mind with the memory of Helen Blackwell’s kisses and the feel of her body pressed to his. Along with the throb of renewed desire came a yearning for the anchor of her calm, steady glance.

  The room where he awoke was the same one he had used before in the Rose and Crown. He had returned to the village intending to catch a train to London. Instead, either on a whim or because he could not tear himself away, he had spoken to the landlord, Mr. Poole, and fixed to spend the night there.

  During his hours of sleeplessness an idea had come to him—he’d been thinking of his childhood, and days spent in the woods with his friends—and after breakfast he walked up the road from the pub to the village shop, where Alf Birney, tonsured and aproned, greeted him from behind the counter.

  “We thought you’d all gone back to London, sir.” His voice held a hint of reproach.

  “We’ll be back and forth, I expect.”

  “You haven’t caught any of them yet, have you, sir?”

  “Not yet, Mr. Birney.”

  Madden bought half a loaf of bread, a tin of sardines, and a packet of biscuits. Coming out of the store he was hailed by Stackpole, who was walking by. “I didn’t know you’d stayed on, sir.”

  “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. Mr. Sinclair gave me the weekend off. There’s something I want to do.” He looked at the constable, bronzed and smiling under his helmet. He felt a warmth for this man who had kissed Helen Blackwell. “Are you busy today?”

  Stackpole shook his head. “Saturdays are usually quiet. We’ve got the wife’s sister and her brood coming over at lunchtime. Now, if I could find a good excuse to get away . . .” He grinned.

  “Let’s walk along,” Madden suggested. “I’ll tell you what I have in mind.”

  Stackpole listened carefully while he explained.

  “I see what you mean, sir—he didn’t care about tossing his cigarette stubs around so if he’d eaten anything there we ought to have found some traces. Maybe a tin or a crust or an empty packet.”

  “More than that,” Madden admitted. “We haven’t put this about, but we’re fairly sure he kept coming back to the woods over a long period so that he could watch the Fletchers.”

  “And I never knew it!” The constable looked grim.

  “No fault of yours,” Madden hastened to assure him. “He must have taken good care not to be seen. I think Wiggins only came on him by chance.”

  “Still, I see what you mean, sir. He might have had some other spot up there. A hide, or a lair.”

  “How well did the police search the woods?”

  “Search?” Stackpole’s snort was contemptuous. “They just tramped around, flattening things. They gave up after four days, and none too soon, if you ask my opinion.” He raised his hand in greeting to a pair of men sitting on a bench in the forecourt of the pub. “Tell you what, sir. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to get out of my jacket—you could do the same—then we could go up there and take a look around.”

  They walked on until they reached the Stackpoles’ cottage near the end of the village. While the constable got ready, his wife sat with Madden in the small parlour. A plump, curly-haired young woman with a deep dimple, she seemed unawed at finding herself in the presence of a Scotland Yard inspector.

  “Just you see you get home in good time, Will Stackpole,” she called through the doorway. “There’s the lawn needs mowing, and the baby’s chair’s broken again.” To Madden, she said, “You’ve got to keep after them.”

  The constable came in in his shirtsleeves carrying a brown-paper packet. “I see you bought some things at the shop, sir. I’ve got a few bits myself. We’ll have enough for a bite of lunch.”

  “What’s this, then?” his wife inquired of the ceiling. “A picnic in the woods?”

  She missed the inspector’s deep blush.

  A uniformed constable sent from Guildford was on duty outside Melling Lodge, but Stackpole said there wouldn’t be one there after the weekend.

  “We’ll just lock up the gates, and I’ll keep an eye on the place. Mr. Fletcher will come down from Scotland to see what needs doing. The Lodge will go to young James, I’m told, but that won’t be for years. Can’t see anyone wanting to live there. Not for a while, anyway.”

  Water still sprayed from the fountain in the forecourt. The Cupid figure, bow drawn, cast a shadow on the white gravel at their feet. Madden noticed that the ivy clothing the walls of the house was freshly t
rimmed.

  “Tom Cooper’s been told to keep up the garden,” Stackpole informed him. “Poor old Tom, he hates having to come here now. This was a happy house. Anyone in the village will tell you that.”

  They walked down the terraced lawn to the gate at the bottom of the garden and crossed the stream on the stepping-stones. A rumble of thunder broke the stillness of the morning. Clouds like hewn marble darkened the sun.

  Madden paused at the foot of the path. “Now, my idea is, if he lay up anywhere it wouldn’t be on this side, towards Lord Stratton’s land and his keepers, it would be in the other direction.” He pointed west along the ridge, away from the village. “Let’s climb up a bit, then look for a way across.”

  All along the length of the path the ferns and undergrowth on either side had been trodden down.

  “That lot from Guildford, they just spread out in a line and walked up the hill,” Stackpole said, in disgust. “Then, when they got to the top, they spread out some more and came down again.”

  “How much of the woods did they search?” Madden was sweating freely in the stifling heat.

  “No more than a mile across. The keepers scouted around a bit, but they didn’t find anything.”

  Two-thirds of the way up the slope they came to a track branching to the right, and Madden took it. The trampled undergrowth continued for some distance, then the ferns sprang up again and the forest seemed to draw in on them. The inspector kept his gaze on the ground ahead, though the footpath showed no sign of recent use. The narrow track was littered with dead twigs and leaves.

  Thunder boomed, louder than before. The air was close and still. Stackpole swatted a midge. “You can’t see more than a few yards,” he complained, his glance probing the bushes on either side of them.

  “Look for a broken branch,” Madden advised. “Anything that seems disturbed.”

  The path began to descend and they came to a natural bowl in the side of the hill, circled by a ring of lofty beech trees. The track went around it, resuming its straight course on the far side. Taking a short-cut, the two men walked across the shallow depression. Successive generations of dead leaves had given the surface a soft, yielding quality, and mid-way across Madden was assailed by a sudden sharp memory of a trench, springy with bodies like a mattress, and the eyes of dead men staring up at him. These fragments of a past he had tried to forget came without warning, often accompanied by dizziness and a feeling of vertigo, and he hurried to regain the footpath.

  “How far have we come?” He saw that Stackpole was looking at him with concern and realized he must have paled in the few seconds it had taken them to cross the bowl.

  “More than a mile, I’d say, sir. Dr. Blackwell’s house is below us.” He pointed down. “You can see it from further on.”

  Lightning crackled in the darkening sky, followed almost at once by a loud peal of thunder. A sudden gust of wind brought a shower of leaves and twigs from overhead.

  “Let’s find some shelter,” Madden suggested.

  A short distance along the path they came to another clearing where a huge sweet chestnut stood. The spreading branches, decked with graceful leaves shaped like spear-heads, provided ample protection from the fat raindrops that were starting to fall.

  “Good place to stop for a bite, sir.” The constable was still anxious about his companion.

  “Why not?”

  They settled down under the tree. Madden peeled back the top of the tin of sardines. Stackpole sliced bread with his pocket knife. The constable had brought two bottles of beer with him. They ate and drank, sitting comfortably with their backs against the deeply scored trunk, while the sky at first grew darker, and then brightened. By the time they had finished eating the sun had come out again, but at that moment it began to rain in earnest and they sat in the shelter of the great tree and watched the drops falling like a shower of golden coins through the sunlight.

  “It won’t last,” Stackpole, predicted with the assurance of a countryman, and after a minute he was proved right. The rain ceased. Perversely, however, the sky began at once to darken again and the thunder continued to roll.

  Madden had been thinking. “I don’t believe he’d have picked a spot too far from Melling Lodge. Can we find a path to the top of the ridge? I’d like to have a look around up there.”

  “We passed one a quarter of a mile back.”

  Gathering the remains of their lunch, they set off again, retracing their steps. Lightning flashed, followed by a detonation of thunder. Madden increased his pace, striding out along the path. They had come to the circle of beeches where the footpath bent like a bow, and this time the inspector followed it, avoiding the bowl of leaves. The dusty track had darkened in colour with the earlier shower. Madden’s eyes were fixed on the ground ahead of him. Suddenly he halted.

  “What is it, sir?” Stackpole hurried forward.

  “Stay where you are!”

  The constable stopped in his tracks. He stood rooted.

  Madden crouched down. On the damp earth in front of him, fresh as a newly minted coin, a footprint had appeared. The heel had a piece missing. His eye skipped swiftly past it and he saw others. They were coming in his direction. He looked over his shoulder at the path behind him: his own footsteps showed in the damp dust.

  “Sir, what is it?”

  “Quiet!”

  Madden looked to his left: there was only the circle of beeches with the empty bowl at their centre. To his right the slope rose steeply to a line of ilexes, their leaves blowing silver and green in the gusting wind. A dense growth of holly filled the spaces between their trunks, forming an impenetrable screen. As he stared at the thicket a familiar sound came to his ears, borne on the breeze; the oiled click of a rifle-bolt being drawn back.

  “Down!” he roared. “Get down!”

  Madden dived to his left, where the nearest beech tree stood, and as he did so the silence exploded.

  CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

  The shots came in rapid succession and the ground beside Madden’s head erupted as he rolled frantically towards the tree. Another shot rang out and a chunk of bark as big as a fist struck him in the face. Next moment he was safe behind the massive trunk.

  He looked back and saw the constable lying flat on the path, his face white and shocked.

  “Move!” he yelled. “The trees!”

  Galvanized by the command, Stackpole rolled over. The earth where he had lain leaped into the air as the sound of two further shots coincided with a loud crack of thunder. The constable scrambled to his hands and feet and plunged behind a tree trunk.

  Madden counted in his head: six.

  He looked around him. He was near the edge of the bowl, but where he was it was shallow, only inches deep. Stackpole was luckier. A few paces from where he crouched behind the tree, the floor of the depression was at least a couple of feet below the rim. Madden’s experienced eye skipped from the row of ilexes to the lip of the bowl, working out angles of fire. His terror of a few moments ago had been replaced by a familiar numbness.

  “Will!” He used the constable’s name, speaking in a low voice. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.” The hoarse whisper barely reached him.

  “Stay behind that tree, but move back into the dip behind you. When you’re there, get down on your stomach and crawl around the edge. Be sure to keep yourself pressed up tight against the side. Don’t worry, he won’t be able to see you from where he is. When you get to where the path straightens, stand up and run like hell!”

  Stackpole was silent.

  “Will?”

  “I’m not leaving you, sir.”

  “Don’t be a damn fool.” His officer’s voice came back to him easily. “Do as I say. Now!”

  The constable began to back away from the tree trunk. When he reached the edge of the bowl he slid down into the depression and began to crawl on his stomach, away from Madden, back the way they had come. Another shot rang out and bark flew off the side of the tree wh
ere he had been crouching.

  Seven. A Lee-Enfield rifle held ten rounds in its magazine.

  His mind cold, Madden waited for the inevitable to happen. Soon now the man would descend from the screen of holly to hunt them down. When that happened, he planned to spring to his feet and run along the path in the opposite direction to Stackpole, splitting up the available targets. He knew their attacker was expert with a bayonet. Whether he was also a marksman was something he would discover in the next few minutes. Still in the grip of the numbness that had taken hold of him after the first shots, Madden viewed the prospect with a fatalism bordering on indifference.

  Thunder echoed, further off now. Then he heard another sound: the smashing of undergrowth. It came not from the line of ilexes but from higher up the slope. Taking a gamble, Madden sprinted across a dozen feet of open ground to the next beech tree in the circle. Pressing his body to the trunk, he waited for the answering shot. None came.

  Again he heard noise, more distant now. He peered around the tree and caught a glimpse of a figure high up, near the crest of the ridge.

  “He’s moving!” he shouted. “I’m going after him.”

  Madden flung himself at the slope, tearing through the waist-high ferns, forcing a path through the dense undergrowth. Skirting the barrier of holly bushes, he came on the path left by his quarry, a line of snapped branches and flattened ferns leading up the hill, and he followed it. Stackpole’s shout sounded behind him.

  As Madden neared the crest the underbrush thinned and the ground became slick with pine needles. Emerging from the straggling firs he saw the figure of a man running along the top of the bare ridge half a mile away. He was carrying a bulky object slung across his shoulder.

  “I’m coming, sir . . .” Stackpole’s voice was close, and a moment later he joined the inspector red-faced and gasping.

  Wordlessly, Madden pointed. They set off in pursuit.