JM01 - River of Darkness

by Rennie Airth

  The caller, yet another policeman, was ringing from Folkestone, in Kent. He was polite but insistent, and half a minute later Glossop found himself toiling back up the stairs trying to recall which of the rooms housed the tall detective inspector from London.

  I just hope this doesn’t turn into a wild goose chase, sir. That’s all I hope.”

  Detective Sergeant Booth had put on weight. Billy noticed it right away, as soon as the sergeant stepped out from under the awning at Folkestone station and hastened up the platform to greet them. The trousers that had hung loosely at their last meeting now fitted snugly about his waist. For a thick-set man he was surprisingly light on his feet.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Madden reassured him.

  “And how are you, Constable?” Booth gave Billy a wink.

  “Fine, thank you, Sergeant.”

  In fact, he was still feeling drowsy from having dozed off in the compartment. It had taken them three hours, with changes, to reach Folkestone. Billy was suffering from lack of sleep, and so was the inspector, to judge from his deeply withdrawn gaze and white marble-like features. But Billy, who had worked at Madden’s side for the past two days, had yet to see him flag, even for an instant.

  Booth led them out of the station to a car parked in the road outside, a Wolseley four-seater painted dark blue.

  “Chief Inspector Mulrooney’s given us one of the station cars for the day, sir.” The sergeant let Madden into the passenger side. “Not a luxury we normally enjoy.”

  Just like the Yard, Billy thought, as he jumped into the back.

  “It’s the devil of a place to get to.”

  “How long will it take us?” Madden asked.

  “With the car, no more than half an hour.”

  As they drove away from the station Billy looked back and saw the sea, flat and calm under the low grey sky. He marked where the road wound down the hillside to the harbour below—the Road of Remembrance—and recalled what Madden had told him: how the men had marched down in their thousands from the camp on the bluff to the steamers bound for France.

  The inspector was speaking again: “I need to get in touch with Mr. Sinclair. He was on his way up to London earlier. The commissioner’s called a meeting. Can I ring him from the cottage?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir.” Booth steered the car past a wagon loaded with straw baskets piled high with apples. They were out of the town, driving between hedgerows. “There’s no phone in the house, nor in the village. But Knowlton’s nearby. Would you like to stop off there first?”

  Madden pondered. Then he shook his head. “No. Let’s go straight to Rudd’s Cross.”

  Billy knew only the bare bones of the story, what Madden had told him on the train. But listening to the inspector’s questions now, and Booth’s answers—leaning forward from the back seat with his chin almost resting on the sergeant’s shoulder-blade—he was able to gain a full picture of the chain of circumstances that had led to their hurried departure from Stonehill earlier that morning.

  It had started on Monday with a cleaning woman called Edna Babb, who worked for an old lady named Mrs. Troy who lived in Rudd’s Cross, which was where they were headed now. When Edna arrived at Mrs. Troy’s cottage the first thing she noticed was that the doors of the silver cabinet in the parlour were standing open and several items missing from it. When she went upstairs she found her employer lying dead in bed. There was nothing to indicate that Mrs. Troy had met a violent end, but Edna had been sufficiently upset to hurry across the fields to Knowlton, two miles away, to report her discovery to the village bobby, Constable Packard.

  Packard had returned with her directly to Rudd’s Cross, where they were joined by the police surgeon. His brief examination of Mrs. Troy’s body led him to suspect death by asphyxia, which he estimated to have occurred some forty-eight hours earlier. Packard had sealed the house forthwith and returned to Knowlton where he telephoned a report to the central police station at Folkestone.

  “I was assigned to the case and went out later that day with a detective constable,” Booth said. “We arranged for the body to be taken to Folkestone for examination by the pathologist, along with the pillows on the bed, and we also took fingerprints off the cabinet. I had a word with Babb, who lives in Rudd’s Cross, and she told me about this man Grail who’s been using the garden shed. The shed was padlocked shut, but I reckoned the circumstances were suspicious enough to warrant breaking in, so I got hold of a screwdriver and took off the latch. The shed was empty, apart from some garden tools.”

  “How did Grail come to be using the shed?” Madden asked. “Was he renting it from Mrs. Troy?”

  “Not exactly, according to Babb. They had some arrangement whereby Grail took care of the garden and brought her food from time to time.”

  “But she never met him? Edna Babb, I mean.”

  “Never set eyes on him, she said. He always came at the weekends. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, but I realized later, next day, talking to people around there, that he must have taken damned good care not to be seen.”

  Booth was getting ahead of his story. He went back to Monday afternoon. At that point the police hadn’t been sure what they were dealing with, whether murder, or death by natural causes. It would depend on the pathologist’s report, which wouldn’t be available until later. As for the items missing from the cabinet, they didn’t know yet whether these had been stolen or whether Mrs. Troy had removed them herself for some reason. Booth had gone back to Folkestone for the night, intending to return to Rudd’s Cross the following day to question the inhabitants.

  “I found the station had had a call that afternoon from a firm of solicitors. One of their employees was missing, a man called Biggs. He’d gone out to Rudd’s Cross on Saturday to attend to some business for Mrs. Troy, who was a client of the firm. For the second Saturday running, apparently. What she wanted was for him to get rid of Grail. After his first visit he reported he’d left a letter giving the fellow his marching orders and he’d volunteered to go back the following week to see him off the property.”

  “Kind of him,” Madden observed drily. “You thought it might have been Biggs who lifted the silver?”

  “That was a possible explanation, sir. In a sense it still is. Biggs was supposed to meet a friend in Folkestone on Saturday evening, but never showed up, and no one’s seen hide or hair of him since. Nor any sign of the silver.” Booth blew his horn to warn a couple on a tandem cycle ahead of their approach. The road was narrowing. “But it strikes me as being far-fetched. If Biggs stole the silver it must mean he smothered Mrs. Troy first. But he hardly seems the type. Solicitor’s clerk, no record with us. I’m inclined to think he ran foul of Grail.”

  Billy, in the back seat, wet his lips. He glanced at Madden, but the inspector’s face showed no expression.

  Booth continued his story. On arriving at the station the following morning he discovered that the pathologist had confirmed the initial diagnosis. Mrs. Troy had died from asphyxiation. Saliva traces on the pillow confirmed his finding. The case was now a murder inquiry and Booth was dispatched to Rudd’s Cross with a forensic team. While the others were busy examining the cottage, he had gone from house to house questioning the inhabitants.

  “That’s when I began to think there was something off about this Grail. No one had seen him close up. A few times he’d been spotted in the fields, coming or going, but apart from the fact that he was reckoned to be a big bloke, no one could say what he really looked like. It made me wonder. I decided to take another look at that shed.”

  Booth paused while he turned off the paved surface on to a narrow dirt track that ran between apple orchards where pickers armed with the same type of straw baskets Billy had noticed earlier were busy under the laden trees. A girl with her hair bound up in a red scarf waved to him and Billy tipped his hat and smiled back.

  “I’d opened the side door the day before, but there was another door at the front, stable-type, top and
bottom, also padlocked. I went to work on that and got it open. I’d only seen the inside in semi-darkness before—the window was boarded over. It wasn’t until I had both doors open and light flooding into the place that I saw how clean it was.”

  “Clean?” Madden glanced at the sergeant. They were travelling slowly now, easing over the ruts in the lane. Billy saw a cottage ahead of them, on the right.

  “Spotless, sir.” Booth returned the inspector’s look. “Someone had swept and washed the floor until there wasn’t a speck of dirt or dust to be seen. But having the light shining in like that made all the difference.” He grinned. “I saw something. It was right in the middle of the floor.” He nodded as they drew up beside the house. “This is Mrs. Troy’s cottage. You’ll see what I mean in a moment.”

  They climbed from the car. Booth opened a gate in a hedge and led the way into a small garden. It was well-tended, Billy noticed, the flower-beds weeded and the edges of the lawn trimmed. The sound of the gate squeaking on its hinges had brought a uniformed policeman around from the other side of the thatched cottage. He touched his helmet. “All quiet, Constable?”

  “Yes, Sarge.”

  “We’ve finished with the house for the time being,” Booth told Madden. “But I thought it best to leave a man here. We may need to look at that shed more closely.”

  The wooden structure occupied a corner of the garden. The metal latch hung loosely by a single screw.

  “Let’s look at it now,” the inspector said.

  Booth opened the door and they followed him inside. Though the day was cool the air felt warm and smelt musty under the corrugated-iron roof. Billy made out the dim shape of a work-table at the back of the shed. A fork and a spade stood propped against the wall beside it. Then the room brightened as the sergeant pushed open the double doors at the far end, first the top leaf, then the bottom. Billy peered down at the floor. It was made of cement and looked white and clean, just as Booth had said. He didn’t see the mark until the sergeant pointed it out to them.

  “It’s very faint, sir. But you can just see the outline.”

  Billy picked it up then. It was like a shadow on the pale surface. Madden got down on his hands and knees. He peered at the floor closely, then put his nose close to the cement and sniffed.

  “I tried to pick out some of the stuff with the point of a knife.” Booth bent over him. “I’m not sure if there was enough to test.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I sent it off to the government chemist last night. Don’t know when we’ll hear from him.”

  Madden rose to his feet. He looked at the open doorway at the end of the shed.

  “Too narrow for a car,” he observed.

  “That’s what I thought.” Booth mopped his face with a handkerchief. The fresh air coming in from outside smelt of apples. “So if that was a patch of oil before he cleaned it up, seems to me it could only have come from a motortcycle standing there.”

  Madden grunted. It was hard to tell what he thought.

  “And there’s something else, sir.” Booth was grinning now, like a conjuror displaying his best trick. “It wasn’t till the idea of a motorbike came into my mind that I thought to look for it. We’ll have to go back up the lane a way.”

  He led Madden out of the shed and they walked past the parked car and along the dirt track. Billy, following a few paces behind, spied something ahead of them at the side of the road. When they got closer he saw that a shallow depression in the surface had been marked off with a triangle of wooden stakes, tied together with string. A piece of cardboard fixed to one of the stakes bore a rough pencilled message: POLICE NOTICE—KEEP OFF. He had missed it when they drove by.

  Booth was speaking to the inspector. “This lane we’re on is used by farmworkers to get to the fields and orchards. The only cottage it passes is Mrs. Troy’s. It doesn’t go anywhere.”

  They were standing by the stakes now. The depression held a filling of crusted mud marked with a criss-cross pattern. Booth crouched down, and Madden and Billy did the same. The sergeant pointed with his finger. “I took a plaster cast of that yesterday afternoon. When I got back to Folkestone I checked it against our book of tyre patterns. It’s a standard Dunlop diamond design supplied to motorcycle manufacturers, Harley and Triumph in particular. Someone’s ridden a motorbike down this lane in the last few weeks, since the rains started.”

  Still Madden said nothing.

  “I didn’t get the pattern checked till late.” Booth took out a packet of cigarettes and offered one to the inspector, who declined, with a slight shake of his head. “Chief Inspector Mulrooney had gone home, but I called round to see him and we had a word. I told him what I thought. We wondered if we shouldn’t wait for the chemist’s report . . .” Booth pulled a face. “I didn’t like the idea of dragging you down here for nothing, sir. Not with what you’ve got on your hands. But the chief inspector decided the matter was too serious to let any chance slip. Specially after what happened at Stonehill. He said I should ring you first thing in the morning.”

  They stood in silence. Booth drew on his cigarette. He glanced nervously at the inspector.

  “What do you think, sir?”

  Madden glanced down the lane towards the shed. Then his gaze swept the surrounding fields and orchards. Finally he spoke: “I want to look for a footprint. He might have left one somewhere on this track. Check the puddles.”

  They formed themselves into a line and walked back slowly towards the cottage, eyes cast down. Billy noted several patches of mud on his side of the lane, but none bore any footmarks. He was almost level with the garden gate when he noticed that Madden, who was walking between them, in the middle of the track, had stopped. He was down on his haunches, looking at the ground in front of him. Booth had seen him, too.

  “Have you found something, sir?”

  The inspector’s muttered reply was unintelligible. He was peering closely at the saucer of dried mud before him.

  “Fetch me some grass, would you, Sergeant?”

  Booth tugged a handful from the verge and brought it over to him. Madden fashioned a makeshift brush from the blades and began to flick surface dust and grit from the mud base. He bent down and blew away the dirt. Billy crouched beside him. Gradually the outline of a footmark appeared. First the sole, only lightly sketched on the crusty soil. Then the full print. Madden blew away more loose grains of earth. The deeper impression of the heel grew clear. Billy saw that the outer rim of the oval shape had a piece missing. He heard the soft sigh that issued from the inspector’s lips.

  The young man never forgot the scene. He carried with him for the rest of his life the image of Madden as he glanced up and met the sergeant’s rapt gaze. And in later years, whenever the scent of harvest apples came to him he would hear the inspector’s murmured words: “It’s him. It’s Pike.”

  13

  Booth parked the car in the forecourt of the village pub beside a sign depicting St. George slaying the dragon. The three men walked quickly down the street, Billy and the sergeant having to stretch their legs to keep up with Madden’s long strides. Knowlton seemed like a busy centre. Besides the usual butcher, baker and general store the narrow street boasted a dressmaker and an antique dealer, side by side, and further down a shop that sold bric-à-brac. Billy barely had time to glance in the windows as they swept by.

  As though in keeping with the ambitions of the place, the village bobby maintained an office in the front room of a cottage at the end of the street. Packard, a man in his late forties with greying hair and worrylines etched deep into his broad forehead, showed no surprise at seeing Booth. But his eyes widened on learning the inspector’s identity, and when Madden told him why they were there the constable paled visibly.

  “We think this man Pike may live in the district.”

  Packard opened the middle drawer of his desk and took out a copy of the police poster. “This arrived yesterday, sir. I can’t say I know this man.”

  “Have a look at these, would you?” Madde
n passed him the two artist’s sketches he’d brought with him. “And I need to use your telephone urgently.”

  Billy watched Packard’s expression as he studied the drawings and saw at once that he didn’t recognize the face. The constable had vacated his desk so that Madden could make his call.

  “He’s not a man who draws attention to himself.” Madden spoke with the telephone held to his ear. He’d placed a call to Stonehill via the Folkestone exchange. “You won’t find him buying a round of drinks in the pub. He probably has no friends.”

  Packard shook his head. “I saw one of these in the newspaper today. I’m sorry, sir . . .” He handed the sketches back. The inspector began speaking into the phone, but the conversation didn’t last long, he hung up.

  “Mr. Sinclair’s not back from London yet. They’re expecting him shortly.”

  He looked at his wristwatch. Billy instinctively did the same. It was a quarter to one.

  “Let’s see if we can work out the timing of this.” Madden addressed Booth, who sat in one of two straight-backed chairs placed in front of the desk. Packard had taken the other. Billy stood behind them. “Pike must have gone to Rudd’s Cross on Saturday morning to prepare for his trip to Ashdown Forest. Suppose Biggs came on him in the shed and they got into an argument. Whatever happened, it ended with Pike killing him, and once he’d done that he had to dispose of Mrs. Troy as well. He couldn’t afford to leave a witness to his presence there.”

  The inspector lit a cigarette. Booth was already smoking.

  “Now the sensible thing would have been to clear up and move out during the weekend. But we know he went to Ashdown Forest. He’s not a sensible man, not rational in the way you or I would understand it. He does what he’s driven to do.

  “So let’s say he returned to Rudd’s Cross on Sunday night. He could have been back by midnight and that would have given him several hours of darkness in which to clean the shed and dispose of Biggs’s body. What about the silver?” Madden frowned, pursing his lips. “I think he took that, too. He likes to lay false trails. He’s tried it before. His father was a gamekeeper, you know.” The inspector’s glance was still on Booth. “My guess is he’s buried them somewhere, Biggs and the silver both.”