‘Him of all people, you mean?’ The chief inspector sat down.
‘Yes, and how did Alfie come to accept the job?’
‘Oh, well, that’s easily answered. I told you, he had sixty pounds in his pocket. It wasn’t money he could have earned any other way.’
‘Still …’ Madden pursed his lips. ‘It’s hard to believe he would have let himself be used so easily. Not unless he and Marko were already acquainted. I know that’s unlikely, but have you looked into it?’
‘In detail, I assure you.’ Sinclair heaved a sigh. All the way back to when Meeks was fifteen and was sent to a borstal for breaking and entering. We’ve checked the names of the people he was banged up with, then and later, but we haven’t found one worth following up, never mind a killer of this kind. He was a petty criminal all his life and the people he associated with were just the sort you might imagine. Nobodies like himself.’
Madden acknowledged his words with a grunt.
‘Well, that’s no surprise, at least. He was only a lad when I knew him, twelve or thirteen, but he was timid even then.’
Sinclair said nothing. Earlier, in the course of their leisurely stroll, he’d been brought up sharply by a mental lapse, the thought of which still irked him. It had entirely escaped his memory that early in his career his old partner had been stationed at Bethnal Green and had known the Meeks family.
‘It was when I was a young copper,’ Madden had reminded him. ‘Still in the uniform branch. The first thing I was told when I got there was to keep an eye out for Jonah Meeks, Alfie’s father. He gave us more trouble than the rest of the borough put together. He had a violent streak — he’d been inside twice on assault charges — and we reckoned it was only a matter of time before he went over the edge and killed someone in a fit of rage. I was there when the firemen recovered his body.’
‘I remember it all now.’ Sinclair had shaken his head in chagrin. ‘In fact, correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t there some question as to how Jonah met his end? A suspicion of foul play?’
‘A suspicion, perhaps. But nothing more than that. Jonah had his share of enemies all right, but most of them were too scared to go near him. He was a great hulking brute, strong as an ox, and though he was drunk the night he died it’s doubtful anyone would have had the nerve to tackle him. He’d spent the evening in a pub and then set off home, taking a short cut through the yard of an abandoned soap factory. Next morning his body was spotted floating in a cistern with a severe head injury. Blood was found on a stone at the edge of the tank and it was reckoned he tripped and fell on it, then tumbled into the water unconscious, or semi-conscious, and drowned.’
‘I take it he wasn’t robbed?’ Sinclair had found himself silently marvelling at his old friend’s tenacious memory, a quality he had always displayed and one that the chief inspector now had cause to envy.
‘No, he had money on him, I remember. His wallet was in his pocket. In fact, the only thing missing was his false teeth. He had an upper set. They must have come out when he went into the water.’
‘It sounds like an accident. Why was there any doubt?’
‘Only because of Jonah himself.’ Madden had shrugged. ‘When a villain like that meets a violent end there are always questions asked, but there was no real basis for calling it murder. Still, I did wonder once or twice …’
‘Wonder …?’ The chief inspector had been curious.
‘Going about later, speaking to people. They’re a close-mouthed lot down there, they don’t care for the police, but I got the impression there were people around who knew more than they were saying. That was one thing; and the other was they didn’t bother to hide their satisfaction: you could almost taste it. No one had a good word for Jonah, and that included his wife, Alfie’s mother; stepmother, rather. She didn’t even pretend to any regret. Meeks was a brute: he’d made her life hell, by all accounts. Alfie’s, too.’
Considering that they’d gone over the matter in such detail earlier, it surprised Sinclair to find his old partner still nagged by the same questions.
‘There must be some way of getting to the bottom of this,’ Madden insisted now. ‘How did their paths cross? Where did Alfie encounter this man? Were they spotted together anywhere before the shooting?’
‘Not so far as we know,’ Sinclair replied. ‘Meeks disappeared without explanation from the market in Southwark where he was working ten days ago. We only found out the other day where he’d been living; it was a room he’d rented in Bermondsey. His landlady said he’d been there for three weeks and was already owing her rent. But then all of a sudden he’d paid up. She said he was acting chipper, full of himself. Told her he wouldn’t be staying much longer and implied he was moving on to better things. Obviously he’d met his new employer by then, but why such a nonentity should have been taken on by our man remains a mystery. Even in the short time they were together Alfie managed to make two mistakes that may turn out to be critical in the end. Surely Marko could have found someone more reliable.’
He was interrupted by the sound of a voice calling out their names: looking up, he saw Helen standing at an open window in the house above. She was waving to them.
‘She’s calling us in,’ Madden said. He returned her wave, and they rose from the bench. ‘What mistakes?’ he asked.
‘Well, first there was the trail Alfie left from Soho to the White Boar via Solly Silverman’s shop. That enabled us to tie all these killings together.’
The chief inspector trod gingerly as they set off across the lawn.
‘And second was that list of stones. I’d lay odds Meeks was ordered to bring it back with him from Leather Lane and either forgot or was bullied into leaving it with Solly. The irony is, if we do crack this case it’ll be largely due to Alfie’s slip-ups, and that brings us back to the question you’ve just asked. How did this man come to pick him? Now, if we knew the answer to that…’
It was with a feeling of a day well spent that Sinclair boarded the train for London later that afternoon. Not only had he had an opportunity to discuss the investigation with his former colleague, something he set great store by; he had also learned that Madden would be in town the following week.
‘There’s a problem at Aunt Maud’s,’ he’d explained. ‘Her boiler’s giving trouble and Helen’s asked me to go up and deal with the problem. She also wants me to cast an eye on Lucy and find out what she’s up to. I’ll probably have to spend a day or two there, so with any luck we can get together again.’
As so often, the ideas they’d exchanged had given Sinclair a fresh perspective on the problems before him, and even the familiar sense of regret he had felt as he and Madden had ambled around the gardens together had done no more than remind him of the time, now long past, when they had worked together as one.
Nor had he been alone in this exercise in nostalgia. Their luncheon host, Lord Stratton, had been equally affected. Greeting the chief inspector warmly, he’d been moved to recall the circumstances of their first encounter, which had taken place two decades earlier during the murder inquiry that had brought both Sinclair and Madden to Highfield. Albeit with a wry smile.
‘Do you know, I can recall those days as if they were yesterday,’ he’d remarked on welcoming the chief inspector. #x2018;’s yesterday I have trouble remembering, though my doctor assures me this is nothing to be concerned about.’ He caught Helen’s eye and smiled. ‘A slow erosion of the faculties is a small price to pay for the blessings of old age, she says. Blessings indeed!’
Though a frail figure now, he had lost none of the grace and old-world courtesy that Sinclair recalled from previous encounters, and if the changes which the war had wrought to his way of life weighed on him at all he showed no sign of it, speaking instead of the satisfaction it had given him to see his family seat transformed into a convalescent home for wounded soldiers and airmen.