The call over at last, Bennett replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle. He removed his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. A slight, vital figure in his younger days, he had begun to put on weight lately and his dark hair, never abundant, was thinning to the point where what little of it remained barely covered his pale scalp.
‘Well, Angus? Is there anything else?’
‘Not for the moment, sir.’ With an effort Sinclair brought his mind back to the business in hand. ‘Apart from this murdered girl, of course.’
‘What do you plan to do?’ The assistant commissioner frowned. ‘Will you make it a Yard investigation?’ He was referring to a state of affairs relatively new in the capital, where in the past most serious crimes had been assigned as a matter of course to detectives stationed at the Yard, but where now, thanks to staff shortages, more cases were being farmed out to the various divisions.
‘No, I don’t think so, sir.’ The chief inspector began to gather his papers. ‘It sounds straightforward enough. Of course, it depends …’
He was interrupted by a knock on the door, which opened. Bennett’s secretary put her head in. ‘Excuse me, sir. I’ve just had a call from registry. They’ve received some information from Bow Street which Mr Sinclair is waiting for.’ She glanced at the chief inspector. ‘It’s a woman’s name and address.’
‘Come in, Miss Ellis.’ Bennett gestured her forward and took the sheet of paper she was carrying from her hand. Slipping a pair of spectacles on, he studied it for a few moments.
‘She’s a land girl, I see. A Polish refugee.’ He slid the piece of paper across the desk to Sinclair. ‘You can bring in my letters now, Miss Ellis. And a cup of tea, if you would …’ Bennett went on speaking to his secretary, but stopped when he saw the look of astonishment on the chief inspector’s face.
‘Angus …?’
Sinclair seemed not to have heard. He was staring at the piece of paper in his hand.
‘What is it, man?’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ The chief inspector collected himself. ‘It’s this young woman who was murdered. I know her. Or of her, rather …’
‘Are you sure? A land girl?’ Bennett seemed unconvinced. ‘Couldn’t it be someone with the same name? What was it again? Rosa … Rosa something …?’
‘Rosa Nowak. No there’s no mistake.’ The chief inspector glanced across at his superior. ‘You didn’t notice her address, sir? The farm where she was working? The name of her employer …?’
Wordlessly he passed the message back to Bennett, who peered at it through his spectacles for a moment, then shook his head in amazement.
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said.
3
‘John Madden ?’ Lofty Cook looked sceptical. ‘I saw the name, of course, but it didn’t ring a bell. Are you sure it’s the same bloke?’
‘It’s him all right.’
‘Your old guv’nor?’
Billy Styles chuckled. He’d just had a flash of memory: himself as a callow young detective-constable, pink-cheeked, and with a waistline that was now only a memory. And of the man he’d been assigned to then. All of twenty years ago it was now.
‘I’d hardly call him that,’ he said. ‘We only worked together the one time and I was wet behind the ears.’
‘Still, he gave you your chance, didn’t he? Melling Lodge! What a case to kick off with. But then you always were a lucky devil.’ Cook glanced down at his colleague, grinning. Recently promoted to detective-inspector, he stood a couple of inches over six feet and was called Lofty by his pals, of whom Billy was one. They had joined the force at the same time, right after the last war, but though Billy had advanced more quickly — he’d been an inspector for half a dozen years now — it hadn’t affected their friendship, and Billy had been pleased to see his old chum’s familiar hatchet face split by a grin when he’d climbed out of the radio car that had brought him from the Embankment up to Bloomsbury.
Although the gale had abated overnight, its icy claws could still be felt gusting down the narrow street and the pair of them had taken refuge in the doorway of a stationer’s shop. Across the road from where they were standing, two detectives from Bow Street were busy searching the spot where the young woman’s body had been found. The area, marked with tape, lay at the edge of a small unfenced yard that backed on to a bomb site, a building that had taken a direct hit at some time in the past and was now, like countless other tracts of ground all over London, a gutted ruin. An assortment of debris had been piled up in the cramped, cobbled space — bricks, mortar, sections of plastered wall — and the corpse had apparently been left on the fringe of this refuse, with the legs protruding on to the pavement.
‘What happened to Madden, then?’ Cook asked. He offered Billy a cigarette from his packet of Woodbines. ‘After Melling Lodge, I mean? After he quit the force?’
‘He got married to a lady he met while he was on the case. She was the village doctor.’
‘Must have been something special,’ Lofty observed. Cupping his hand, he struck a match and lit their cigarettes.
‘Special …?’ Billy considered the remark, drawing on his fag. ‘Yes, I reckon you could say that.’ He smiled to himself. ‘Anyway, he bought a farm down there, Madden did. Same farm where this girl was working. Which explains why I’m here. The chief inspector wants the full story. He and Madden are old friends.’
‘Fair enough.’ Cook pursed his lips, exhaling a plume of tobacco smoke into the frosty air. ‘But there’s not that much to tell. A case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, if you ask me.’
It was an opinion Billy had already heard voiced, and by the chief inspector himself when he’d been summoned to his office not half an hour earlier.
‘Odds on it was a casual assault, a crime of chance.’Sinclair had shown him the initial Bow Street report. ‘I’ve just spoken to John. The girl had only been with them for two months. She’d been given the weekend off and come up to London to see her aunt. Find out what you can. But don’t spend too much time on it. Just determine the facts and report back.’
The chief inspector had not thought it necessary to refer to the case Billy had been working on, a tortuous investigation into the sale by a black-market ring of petrol and heating fuels stolen from military depots, which had ended only the week before in a successful prosecution; nor the few days’ leave he’d been promised. With the shortage of staff that had prevailed for several years now, detectives were expected to put aside their personal lives as and when occasion demanded it.
‘And just so you’re clear in your mind, I’m not looking for an excuse to take this off Bow Street’s hands. We’ve enough on our plate as it is. Just see to it there are no loose ends.’
These last words had been spoken with a scowl, as though his listener was known to be contemplating just such an outrage, from which Billy, armed with his sleuth’s intuition, had deduced that the old boy’s gout must be playing up. In spite of his awesome reputation, the chief inspector had his critics at the Yard and the suggestion had been made in more than one quarter that it was time he was put out to pasture. Billy, though, would have none of it. Having come under Sinclair’s eye early in his career, and in circumstances where his inexperience might have cost him dear, he had never forgotten how the chief inspector, for all the sharpness of his tongue, had forgiven him his mistakes. And allowed him to profit from them.