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.