The Blood-Dimmed Tide Read online

  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 Stackpole.

  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.

  The pale blue skirt bunched about the girl’s hips was smeared with blood, as were her white thighs. Livid marks that were turning into bruises showed on her small bare buttocks. The water where he stood was littered with loose stones and rocks and Madden supposed that one of them might have been used as a weapon. If so, it would be washed clean by now.

  Studying the position of the body, he realized that he was able to observe the full effect of the damage done to the girl’s face because her head was twisted around at what he saw now was an unnatural angle. It seemed likely that her neck was broken.

  Was this how she had died? He hoped so. The thought that she might have been alive and conscious when the stone was raised above her head was close to unbearable.

  ‘Ah, Christ ... no!’

  Madden looked behind him. Will Stackpole’s tall figure had appeared through the bushes on the far bank. Water dripped from the constable’s heavy blue cape. His glance dwelt on the pathetic huddled shape revealed behind the drawn willow branches.

  ‘What did he do to the lass?’ He pointed. ‘Is that her face?’

  ‘Yes, it’s been smashed in. God knows why.’ Madden let the branches fall, hiding the corpse from sight. Pale beneath his helmet, Stackpole stood rooted. He seemed unable to take in what he’d seen. ‘There’s blood on the grass over there, Will.’ Madden gestured. ‘You’d better keep off it. That’s probably where she was killed. And raped, by the look of it.’ The words he chose, as much as the harsh tone in which they were spoken, served to jerk the constable back to a state of awareness. He listened to what Madden was saying.

  ‘We can either protect that patch, or try to cover the body. But we can’t do both.’

  Nodding that he understood, Stackpole looked up at the sky. Although the rain was increasing steadily, the full force of the storm was yet to break on them. He took the tarpaulin from under his arm. Unable to make up his mind, he looked from where the body lay to the grass at his feet and back again. A sudden gust of rain blew a shower of raindrops into his face.

  ‘What do you think, sir?’ His glance was pleading.

  Madden scowled in reply. ‘Well, the stream’s bound to rise, so we may have to move the body.’ He paused, turning the problem over in his mind. ‘Let’s cover that piece of grass,’ he decided.

  While Stackpole busied himself unrolling the canvas, Madden recrossed the stream, pausing to collect an armful of stones from the river bed which the two men then laid at the corners of the spread tarpaulin on which the rain now drummed steadily.

  ‘The Guildford police won’t find their way here. I’ll have to go and fetch them.’ Madden had to shout to make himself heard above successive peals of thunder, meanwhile struggling to put on his socks and shoes again, balancing first on one foot, then on the other. After standing for so long in the icy water he’d lost all feeling in his toes. ‘Keep an eye on that stream, Will. You won’t get much warning once the water starts rising.’

  He waited a moment longer to look around him, torn between the need for haste in summoning the detectives and the equally urgent task he had set himself of searching for any clues left behind by the killer, evidence that might be destroyed or washed away in the storm, which now broke in earnest upon them. As Madden stood there, shivering in his drenched tweed jacket, a curtain of rain descended and in a second he was immersed in a mist of spray and falling drops as water poured through the flimsy canopy of leaves above him.

  Caught there in the downpour his eye fell again on the ring of stones he’d noticed earlier. In the last few minutes an answer had occurred to him to a question he’d been asking himself since entering the wood and he looked around now for other indications that might confirm it. His inspection of the rain-blurred scene had hardly begun, however, when he was interrupted by a yell from Stackpole. Madden glanced up in time to see the constable plunge into the stream in his boots. Just as he’d forecast earl
ier, the level of the water had risen with alarming speed and Stackpole was already knee-deep in the frothing torrent, struggling to keep his footing while he tore off his cape.

  ‘Hand her to me, Will!’

  Madden was at the bank in a moment, and stood poised and ready as the constable tugged aside the screen of willows and lifted the body of Alice Bridger from the lapping water, wrapping her slight form in his cape and turning unsteadily to hand the bundle to Madden.

  Even encased in the heavy waterproof material the child’s body was a negligible burden. Backing carefully so as to avoid stepping on the tarpaulin, Madden laid her on the ground beside the piece of canvas. The cape fell open as he did so and he was stricken once more by the sight of the girl’s ruined features. Hastily he covered her again.

  Stackpole, meantime, had clambered out of the stream and stood shaking himself like a dog as the water cascaded off his helmet. He walked daintily around the piece of turf, trying not to leave footmarks in the soggy grass, and joined Madden at the edge of the bushes. The two men looked at the rushing water, which had now flooded the ledge where the body had lain and was already dangerously close to overflowing onto the bank where they stood beside the spread tarpaulin.

  ‘Looks like we may lose the lot, sir.’ Stackpole squeezed water from the cuffs of his trousers, which clung to his sodden boots.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, Will. It’s passing. See!’ Madden pointed up at the sky, which was clearing fast. The rain, too, was diminishing noticeably, and without warning it stopped. Sunshine broke through the thinning clouds, bathing the woods and the swift-moving stream in soft evening light. The silence around them was filled with the sound of dripping water. The constable fished a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his face.

  ‘You were going to look for those detectives, sir?’

  ‘Yes. In a moment.’ While they’d been standing there Madden’s mind had returned to the problem he’d been wrestling with earlier. Casting about, his eye had lit on a birch tree which stood outside the ring of bushes, its pale trunk partly screened by the undergrowth. He gestured towards it. ‘I just want to go and have a look at that.’

  Mystified, the constable followed his lead and they worked their way round the ring of grass until they reached the birch, where Madden crouched down, parting the branches of a laurel that was growing wild beside the bank.

  ‘Yes! There ... Look, Will!’

  Peering over his shoulder, Stackpole saw that the trunk had been scored by grooves etched into it, strange runic designs carved with a knife or some other sharp instrument.

  ‘Those were made by tramps. This is one of their camp sites. That’s why Topper left the path. He was coming here ...’ Madden shifted on his haunches. He gestured with his thumb behind him. ‘That ring of stones on the ground over there - that’s where they light their fires. You can’t see it now because the grass has grown over. But look at these marks ... that one’s Topper’s.’

  Squinting, the constable made out the shape of a cross carved into the trunk surrounded by a crude circle.

  ‘It’s a calling card. A sign he was here. Just like those others.’

  Stackpole ran his fingers over the faint, spidery furrows. ‘But they’re old, sir, not one of them done this summer, I’d say ...’

  ‘Except for this one ...!’ Madden indicated a design cut into the trunk somewhat lower down than the rest. It showed a triangle with a line drawn through it.

  ‘That’s fresh, all right,’ Stackpole acknowledged. He peered at it more closely. ‘The bark’s only just been stripped. The wood’s still white. Why, it could have been done today ...

  ‘It probably was.’ Madden rose from his crouch. ‘Topper told Helen he was due to meet someone hereabouts, a man called Beezy, another tramp, by the sound of it. That could be his mark.’

  ‘You mean, he may have been here earlier, this Beezy?’ Stackpole looked from the scarred trunk to where the girl’s body was lying, wrapped in his cape. His face changed as the significance of what he was saying became clear to him.

  Madden nodded. ‘He was here, all right, by the look of it. But the question is, where is he now?’

  4

  CALLED OUT before dawn the next morning by the midwife on a maternity case, Helen did not get back to the house until after nine. Twenty minutes earlier Will Stackpole had rung with news he’d obtained by telephone from the police in Guildford which Madden recounted to his wife while they ate a late breakfast in the sun-filled dining room.

  ‘They haven’t had the pathologist’s report yet, but there seems no doubt she was raped and strangled. The police surgeon confirmed what I thought: her neck was broken. That’s how she died.’

  The signs of a sleepless night Helen saw in her husband’s face took her back more than a decade. It had been another murder case, the brutal massacre of an entire household in Highfield itself, in the summer of 1921, that had brought them together, and Madden’s frown of worry was a grim reminder of those dreadful days.

  ‘What the pathologist will make of the damage to her face I don’t know. It looked deliberate to me.’

  ‘Deliberate?’

  ‘Systematic. I only glanced at it, but it seemed to me he’d set out to destroy her features. To obliterate them.’ Madden set down his cup. ‘Her father was shown the body this morning. He broke down, poor man.’

  They’d been late getting back from Brookham the previous night. Darkness had fallen before Madden returned from Capel Wood and Helen had wanted to take him home and get him out of his wet clothes. She’d spent the intervening hours herself in the Henshaws’ kitchen, keeping Topper company, but had twice visited the Bridgers’ cottage, where the missing girl’s mother had fallen into a restless sleep from the sedative she’d been given earlier. Mr Bridger had refused Helen’s offer of similiar relief. She’d discovered him sitting in the darkened parlour with neighbours, a short, stocky man with thinning hair, his pale features racked by unspoken fears. Alice was an only child, she’d learned.

  ‘I heard there were some policemen come from Guildford and now they’ve gone off somewhere?’ Bridger had accosted her eagerly when she’d looked in. ‘Do you know anything about that, Dr Madden?’ His eyes had pleaded with her for an honest answer, but Helen could only prevaricate.

  ‘Not really, Mr Bridger, but I’m expecting my husband back soon. He’s with Constable Stackpole. They may have some news for you.’

  In the event, Madden had returned in his car alone, leaving Stackpole with the two detectives, whom he’d encountered on the outskirts of the wood and guided to the murder site. At their urgent request, he had telephoned the Surrey police headquarters to arrange for a pathologist and a forensic team to be dispatched to Brookham without delay with an ambulance and more uniformed officers equipped with lamps and torches so that a search of the wood could begin at once.

  ‘What about the Bridgers?’ he had asked Helen then. They were standing close together in the small hallway of the Henshaws’ cottage, where the telephone was. ‘What have they been told?’

  ‘Nothing, so far as I know.’ Shocked by the news her husband had brought from Capel Wood, Helen had wanted only to get him home. Sensing his intention then, she had put a staying hand on his arm. ‘Leave it to the police, my darling. It’s not your business any longer.’

  But Madden had refused to be shaken from his course. ‘They have to be told,’ he’d insisted. ‘They can’t be left in ignorance. It’s not right. Who knows what time the police will get back?’

  So she had taken him to the Bridgers’ cottage, leaving him in the kitchen there to wait while she went in search of the murdered girl’s father, wishing there was some way she could ease the burden he had taken on himself. A few minutes later, standing alone in the back yard, Helen had watched through the lighted window as her husband spoke words she could not hear and had seen the other man clap his hands to his ears as though in agony and lay his head like an offering on the table before him.

 
Catching Madden’s eye now, she smiled, hoping to dispel his dark mood. ‘What’s happened to Topper?’ she asked. ‘Are the police still holding him?’

  ‘He spent the night in the cells at Guildford. Only by invitation, mind you - they’d no right to detain him - but it seems to have loosened his tongue. He told them all he knew and they let him go this morning. He’s been ordered to appear at the inquest on Friday.’

  ‘Will he do that?’ Helen looked sceptical.

  ‘I doubt it. To quote Will, he’ll more likely be in the next county by then. Unless he drops in to see you, of course.’

  ‘I’ll be hurt if he doesn’t.’

  Her words brought a smile to Madden’s lips, just as she’d hoped they might, and they laughed together.

  The old tramp had first come into their lives several years before, knocking on the back door one summer afternoon, another in the legion of homeless: tramps, vagrants, men of no fixed abode in the language of the law courts, whose numbers had swelled vastly with the years of the Depression. The Maddens’ cook, Mrs Beck, had standing orders to offer food and drink to these wanderers whenever they presented themselves. Whether or not she admitted them to her kitchen was up to her, but Helen had returned that afternoon from her rounds to find Topper seated at the table, with his hat beside him and his bundle on the floor at his feet, busily plying knife and fork under Cook’s approving eye. He had risen to his feet when she entered and made her a courtly bow.

  ‘A proper gentleman, this one, ma’am.’ Mrs Beck had purred her approval.

  Ordering her own tea to be served in the kitchen, Helen had sat with the old man, eliciting little more from him than his name and some account of his recent journeyings, but finding herself drawn to the dusty, travel-stained figure with his absurd attire. Although he told her nothing of himself - either then, or later - she’d been moved by the sound of his soft voice and by his gentle manner. His grey eyes, seeking hers across the table in fleeting, timid glances, had spoken of pain and loss; of some past to which he could never return.