But even before he reached the further bank the squall passed and he was able to pause and take stock of the scene. Being near the docks, it was an area that had suffered heavily in the Blitz four years earlier, and while Madden could recall the dramatic newsreel footage of the destruction wrought by the bombing and of the damage left in its wake, it was the first time he had seen for himself the gutted buildings lining the river, their walls charred by the nightly rain of incendiary bombs, and the near-mystical sight of the great dome of St Paul’s, floating calm and serene above the devastation surrounding it, miraculously untouched.
It was not a part of London he knew well — he had never been posted to Southwark during his time as a policeman — but on the journey down he had found his thoughts straying to an episode from his past, before the Great War, when as a young detective he’d been assigned with a more senior colleague to investigate a double murder that had taken place in the borough. Two bodies had been found in a house not far from the river, one of them that of a postman who had gone missing. Like the second victim, a drayman’s wife, he’d been battered to death, and detectives later discovered he had called at her house the day before with a registered letter and, finding the door ajar, had stepped inside — no more than that — most likely announcing his presence as he did so, only to be struck on the head with a heavy lamp stand swung by the already dead woman’s enraged husband, who had just beaten his wife to death after a furious quarrel.
Although the case had been easily resolved — the husband had tried to drown himself in the Thames, but lacking the nerve, finally, had struggled ashore and lain sprawled on a stretch of bank exposed by the tidal ebb until he was spotted — Madden had never forgotten it. The casual manner of the postman’s death — the terrible power wielded by chance in human destiny — had struck a chord in him that was to sound over and over again in the years ahead when his own life had hung by a thread in the charnel house of the trenches while those of so many others around him had been blown away.
Only that morning he had put the same thought into words while relating to Helen what he had learned from Sinclair about Rosa’s tragic encounter in Paris with the man who would later kill her.
‘They might so easily have missed one another in the Underground. He wasn’t stalking her. He had no idea she was here. But he saw her by chance and her fate was decided in a moment.’
The market site, when he reached it, proved to be a stretch of muddy ground cobblestoned in places and crammed with stalls whose owners were still busy removing the protective strips of canvas and other makeshift coverings they had used to shield their goods from the rain. One of many that had sprung up all over the country in response to the shortages that were now a part of everyday life, it had the air of a temporary encampment hastily pitched and liable to vanish at any moment, an impression heightened by the chestnut vendors whose mobile braziers, glowing like campfires, had been set up at whim about the site.
‘Between you and me, we tend to turn a blind eye to them,’ Billy had told him that morning. ‘A lot of the goods on sale are black market, and then there’s the stuff that’s been pilfered from bomb sites. We come down hard on looters when we catch them, but once the stuff they’ve lifted has been put back in circulation, there’s not much we can do about it. And there are always people looking for household goods these days — stoves, pots and pans, cutlery — folks that might have been bombed out themselves and lost everything. So as I say, we tend to look the other way.’
Whatever else, there seemed to be no lack of customers, Madden noted wryly as, despairing of finding any easy way through the tightly packed stalls, he chose one of the roughly marked avenues between them and started to forge a path through the dense throng of shoppers, most of them women, and some of whom were still in their dressing gowns and slippers, suggesting they must live locally. The row he had picked was devoted to kitchenware and the trestle tables lining it on either side were heaped high with crockery, little of it matched, as well as an assortment of second-hand cooking utensils and mounds of cheap-looking cutlery. At the end of the line were some smaller tables where a variety of goods were on display: cigarettes, lipstick, pocket combs. One bore a stack of American magazines beside a bottle of men’s hair oil.
‘There are blokes really scraping the bottom of the barrel down there,’ Billy had told him. ‘And Alfie was one of them. I was told he had the odd bottle of scotch for sale and sometimes a few bars of decent soap. But mostly it was cigarettes and tinned food. It’s a mystery how he made a living at all.’
During his slow passage along the crowded avenue, Madden had been scanning the faces behind the banked tables. What he could see of them. With a cold wind still gusting up the river, most of the stallholders, both men and women, had wrapped themselves in heavy coats with scarves that were not just wound about their necks but in many cases pulled up to cover their mouths so that few of their features were visible. Having reached the end of the row, he paused, and as he did so his eye fell on some wooden planks that were lying stacked one on top of the other near to where he was. Stepping up on to the low platform they provided, he stood still, scanning the whole expanse of the market, letting his gaze move slowly up and down the rows of trestle tables, studying the faces of the stallholders. Towards the edge of the market, not far from the river, was a section where clothes were being sold, and as his glance wandered along the row, his eyes narrowed and he began to stare hard at one stall in particular, a long trestle table piled high with various articles of clothing, behind which a woman stood stamping her feet and slapping her gloved hands together. Clad in a coat and scarf like others, she also wore a knitted woollen cap pulled down low over her forehead, but even so there was something familiar about her stocky figure, and Madden smiled in recollection.
Two minutes later, having ploughed his slow way along another avenue packed with shoppers, he approached the stall where Nelly Stover was busy with a customer, a housewife by the look of her: she had a shopping bag not unlike the one Madden himself was toting, which she had parked on the table in front of her. He paused a short way off — now that he was closer he could make out Nelly’s craggy features more clearly, the jut of her lantern jaw — and waited patiently while the prospective purchaser chose a dress from a number hanging on a rail behind the stall. Holding it up to her body, she examined her reflection in a mirror which Nelly had produced from beneath the table, and, having nodded her approval, paid for the garment with a banknote and some change. As she moved away, Madden edged forward until he was standing in front of the stall. Nelly had bent down to return the mirror to its place under the table and he waited until she stood up before he addressed her:
‘Hello, Nelly,’ he said.
The slate-blue eyes beneath the woollen rim of the cap narrowed with suspicion. She gave him a long hard look. Then, without warning, a harsh cackle of laughter burst from her lips.
‘Well, strike me pink!’ she declared. ‘If it isn’t Officer Madden!’
‘I heard about you,’ she told him later. ‘Cos I asked, see. That sergeant at the station in Bethnal Green, what was his name — Callahan — he said you’d left the force. That you weren’t a copper no more. That was before the war. The last war. And I told him it was a pity. That we could do with a few more like you.’
‘I came back afterwards,’ Madden told her. ‘I rejoined the police. But not for long. I’m a farmer now.’
‘Garn …’ She was disbelieving.
‘It’s true. I got married and my wife and I bought a farm in Surrey. I’m hardly ever in London any more.’
By good fortune he’d arrived shortly before Nelly shut up shop for the day.