Turning away from the window, now she shed her dressing gown and joined her husband in bed.
‘But you still haven’t told me what Angus had to say when he rang. Has some new problem cropped up?’
‘Not exactly.’ Madden’s scowl had returned. ‘But their hopes of picking up Ash quickly seem to have been dashed. He left his digs a month ago. Right after he killed Rosa, in fact. He could be anywhere now. Anywhere in this country, that is.’
‘He can’t escape, you mean. Yes, I see …’
Helen settled down in bed, moving closer so their bodies were touching. She slipped into the circle of his arm.
‘But Angus is worried, and so am I … there’s something here we don’t understand.’
She made no response, but instead drew him down off his bank of pillows until they were lying side by side.
‘I don’t want to think about that,’ she said. ‘I’m too happy knowing Rob’s back safely and won’t be off again for weeks, if then.’
She kissed him and he returned the kiss, more deeply, and took her in his arms. But his brow was still knotted in a frown and Helen saw it.
‘You’re not giving this your attention, John Madden,’ she teased him, running her fingers through his hair, drawing her hand down over his old scar, smoothing out the deep grooves in his forehead. ‘I can see we’ll have to get this settled before we proceed. What is it you don’t understand?’
Smiling himself now, Madden kissed her.
‘No, tell me first,’ she insisted.
‘Well, by rights he shouldn’t be on the run, this Ash. He ought to feel he’s in the clear. He killed the only witness to the murder he committed in Paris and covered his tracks by getting rid of that French girl as well.’
‘But the police know who he is now. Mightn’t he have guessed that?’
‘He might. But I doubt it.’ Madden’s brow had darkened again. ‘It’s possible he’s guessed they’re looking for Marko, especially now that Paris has been liberated, but not Raymond Ash, surely. Yet the opposite seems to be the case. He’s pulled up stakes and gone on the run. So what does he know that we don’t? What have we missed?’
22
It was after nine when Fred Poole got home — more than two hours later than he was supposed to knock off — and he was pleased to find Lily working with her Aunt Betty in the kitchen getting things ready for their Christmas dinner in two days’ time. He knew their niece was going to stay with them over the holidays, but hadn’t been sure whether Lily would arrive that evening or the following morning.
‘Blimey, what a night!’ he exclaimed when he came through the front door still shaking the snow off his heavy policeman’s cape. ‘Thought I’d never get away.’
‘What was the trouble?’ Lily asked as she gave him a hug. She’d come from the kitchen at the back of the small house wearing an apron over her policewoman’s skirt, and Fred grinned at the sight.
‘Don’t often see you in one of those,’ he remarked as he shed cape and helmet and then produced an object wrapped in newspaper from under his arm, which proved on inspection to be a bottle of sherry. ‘Won it in a raffle at the station,’ he announced with a wink when he saw Lily’s questioning glance.
Back in the kitchen Aunt Betty was still busy with the prune pudding she and Lily had been making when her husband arrived. Though she was no cook herself, Lily was happy to take orders from her aunt and under her direction had earlier removed the stones from a packet of prunes that Aunt Betty had managed to lay hands on in lieu of the dried fruit she would have liked to have had.
‘There’ll be no Christmas pudding this year,’ she had told her niece when Lily had arrived straight from the Yard after work earlier that evening. ‘We’ll have to make do with these.’
And a little imagination, as Lily found out when she’d watched her aunt simmer the fruit in a mixture of water flavoured with golden syrup and cinnamon before blending cornflour into the mixture and then pouring it into a damp mould.
‘There now, that’ll set well. And I’ll make a nice custard to go with it, though it’ll have to be with powdered eggs.’
A motherly woman who’d been unable to have children of her own, Betty Poole harboured the hope that the cooking lessons she gave her much loved niece whenever the opportunity presented itself would one day take, like a vaccination, and Lily would suddenly blossom into a home-loving body like herself; and once this transformation had been achieved, the acquisition of a suitable young man to go with it would not lag far behind.
Fred Poole himself wisely declined to offer any opinion when these pipe-dreams were aired, as they were quite frequently, and particularly as the end of another year approached. He reckoned he knew their niece better than his wife did, and as soon as he’d poured them all a drink he turned to a subject he knew would seize her interest.
‘I’ve been doing door-to-door, that’s why I’m late. Me and half a dozen of the lads. Up and down Praed Street.’ He saw the gleam in Lily’s eye. ‘It’ll be on your crime sheet at the Yard tomorrow,’ he went on. ‘Matter of fact he’s an old friend of ours. Remember Horace Quill?’
‘That little rodent?’ Lily was all ears. ‘I thought you put him away. Two years, wasn’t it? What’s he been up to now?’
‘Not a lot.’ Fred gave his wife a placatory smile. He knew she didn’t like hearing him talk about his work; not the gory details, anyway. ‘Fact is, he got himself topped last night.’
‘Go on!’
‘Up in that rat hole of an office he kept off Praed Street. It must have happened last night, but the body wasn’t found till late this morning when a cleaning woman went up. He only had her in once a week, so that was lucky.’
‘How’d he cop it?’ Lily asked, forgetting for a moment that her aunt was standing beside her.
‘Had his head bashed in.’ Fred coughed, as if the noise might somehow distract Aunt Betty from the disapproval she was now starting to display. Busy with a sage and onion stuffing, she was stirring the bowl with unusual vigour. ‘There was a big brass urn with a plant in it lying next to the body. I heard them talking about it at the station. Gawd knows where it came from; probably nicked off a bomb site, knowing Horace. Anyway, that was the weapon used. They could tell from the blood.’
‘Now that’s quite enough of that.’ Driven beyond endurance, Aunt Betty tried to put her foot down. But to no avail.
‘Any idea who did it?’ her niece asked eagerly.
‘Not a clue. Not as yet.’ Fred tossed off his sherry and poured himself another.
‘Mind you, with a bloke like that, it could be almost anyone. You could never tell what Quill was up to, except it was likely against the law.’
‘He was sent up for selling forged identity cards, wasn’t he?’ Lily asked.
‘That and dodgy ration books and petrol coupons. He and his partners. They had a nice little business going. But he swore when he came out that he wasn’t going to touch it again. Said he was going to stick to his profession from now on. At least that’s what I heard.’
‘His profession?’ Lily scoffed. ‘He couldn’t even do that straight. You remember when he got had up for planting evidence in that divorce case? They should have put him away then.’
She shook her head in disgust. Horace Quill’s was a name she remembered only too well from her years at Paddington. A private enquiry agent — so-called — he had dabbled in all kinds of other businesses, including at least one that had caused their paths to cross.
‘I had to speak to him more than once,’ she recalled now. ‘It was about that girl of his, the one he used to send out on the street when he was short of cash. Molly was her name. Molly Minter. A couple of times he knocked her about so bad she had to go to St Mary’s. She wouldn’t lay a charge, but I warned him if I ever caught him at it I’d see him put away.’ Lily shook her head. One of her duties at Paddington had been to keep an eye on the tarts, of whom there was no shortage around the big railway station. ‘Silly cow. She thought Quill was going to marry her one day. That’s what she told me. Can you imagine — getting spliced to an oily little reptile like that?’