He had waited for her to respond. To his surprise she’d remained silent.
‘Did she talk to you about it, by any chance? Eva, I mean. Since she mentioned meeting Rosa, I wondered if she said anything more.’
While he was speaking Madden had noticed a further change in his hostess’s demeanour. For the first time she appeared ill at ease, and he saw that she was keeping something from him.
‘Mr Madden, who are you?’ Flushed in the face now, she had burst out with the question. ‘You say Rosa worked for you as a land girl. But you sound more like a policeman than a farmer.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He had smiled. ‘Old habits die hard. I was a policeman years ago, and funnily enough I met a friend of yours on the way here who asked me about that. Bess Brigstock. She and my wife knew each other once.’
He had deliberately mentioned a name that he knew would be familiar to her, and was relieved to see her face relax a little on hearing it.
‘Bess was a friend of your wife’s?’
‘When they were girls. Helen Collingwood was her name then. She grew up in Highfield.’
‘But why are you here asking these questions? Surely it’s the business of the police.’
‘It is, but I’ve been helping them. I still have friends at Scotland Yard.’
He had paused at that point, hoping she might relent, but after a moment he saw she was still obdurate.
‘I don’t know how to put it exactly, but I feel Rosa was my responsibility. That I owe it to her to help find her murderer and …’
‘Yes, yes, I understand now. I see what you mean. But …’ She had sat biting her lip. ‘Oh dear … this is so difficult.’
Madden waited. But finally he could contain himself no longer.
‘Obviously you know something,’ he had said. ‘And if that’s the case I do urge you to tell me what it is. The man who killed Rosa is a particularly dangerous criminal, one of the worst the police here have ever had to deal with, and though they’re on his trail they haven’t caught up with him yet.’
She had bitten her lip. ‘I suppose they could be connected …’
‘Connected? What do you mean?’ He had pressed her at once, but still to no avail.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Madden, I really am, but this is something I can’t discuss with you, not until Eva gets back. You must ask her.’
Mary Spencer’s eyes strayed to the clock on the wall once more.
‘ should be here by now. Let me go and have a look.’ She rose from the table. ‘ along if you like.’ As if to excuse her stubborn refusal of a moment ago, she smiled an invitation to him.
Madden followed her out of the kitchen and down a short stretch of passage to a sitting-room on the opposite side of the house. A pleasant room furnished with a mixture of pieces of no particular style but all dating from an earlier age, its walls were hung with an eclectic collection of paintings and other adornments that made Madden look twice when his eye fell on them.
‘This house belonged to an uncle of mine,’ she explained, having seen his expression. ‘I never really knew him, only about him, that he was a great traveller. But he certainly had the most extraordinary taste in art, or perhaps no taste at all. If you think all this is peculiar, you should see what I left in the attic.’
Madden had already noted a Chinese silk screen rubbing shoulders with a picture of a wide expanse of prairie across which a lone cowboy galloped, the brim of his hat blown back by the speed at which he was riding. Now he paused to examine a pair of Turkish carpets hung like tapestries on either side of the fireplace and, most unusual of all, a Zulu ox-hide shield crossed with an assegai mounted above the mantelpiece.
‘I put those there for safety.’ She had caught the direction of his glance. ‘My son longs to get his hands on them.’
She had crossed the room, meanwhile, to one of two sash windows facing the door, and when Madden joined her there he found himself looking at a snow-clad garden, formal in design, but much neglected to judge by the unclipped box hedges and pieces of broken statuary dotting the white landscape.
‘This is the way they’ll come,’ she said. ‘Eva and Freddie. Look, you can see their tracks going down.’ She pointed to a set of fresh footprints running from the terrace in front of them down some shallow steps to a path that led to an open gate at the bottom of the garden. ‘’ve gone over to the MacGregors’; it’s only a mile away. I collected our turkey from them yesterday but forgot to pick up the Christmas pudding Annie MacGregor made for us. Eva said she’d go and get it and Freddie insisted on accompanying her. There are two puppies over there he’s fallen in love with, and I dare say we’ll be landed with one of them ourselves sooner or later.’
She was chattering, unable to hide her nervousness, and as he looked out over the snow-covered lawns and beds Madden wondered what knowledge it was she was harbouring.
‘Oh, Lord — the fire! I’d clean forgotten!’
Clapping a hand to her head Mrs Spencer turned from the window and hurried to the fireplace, where the grate was already laid with twigs and other kindling and a basket stuffed with logs stood ready for use.
‘I meant to light it this morning. That friend of mine you met, Bess Brigstock, is coming to spend Christmas with us and I want this room to be warm by this evening so we can sit here. There’s a concert of carols on the BBC.’
While she fumbled with a box of matches, Madden turned back to gaze out of the window and found that the scene he’d been looking at moments before had changed. Two figures had appeared on the path at the bottom of the garden, one of them a small boy. They were moving towards the house, but only by stages, their progress slowed by the snowballs which the child was hurling at his companion, who was hampered by the burden she was carrying: Mrs Spencer’s Christmas pudding, no doubt. Finally she held up one arm in token of surrender and having submitted to a final volley from her attacker took hold of his hand and drew him along with her.
‘There they are now.’ Madden spoke in a quiet voice.
Mrs Spencer made as if to rise, then checked the movement and struck another match instead. ‘They’re quite useless these days,’ she muttered. ‘Not like they were before the war.’ She had already tried to light two, but both had fizzled and gone out. Now the third one, too, died in her fingers. ‘Bother!’
She glanced up at him.
‘I’m so relieved.’ She smiled guiltily. ‘You’ll be able to speak to Evie yourself in a minute. You’ll see why I couldn’t talk to you about it. It’s her story to tell.’
As he looked down at her crouched figure — at the way her fingers fumbled with the matchstick she was holding — a thought stirred in the back of his mind. Frowning, he returned his gaze to the two figures making their slow way up the snow-covered path. Both wore coats and gloves, but while the boy was bare-headed, the girl had something over her head, and when they came closer he saw it was a thick woollen shawl. The ends were tucked into the collar of her coat so that they seemed like almost one garment.
At that instant a shaft of memory almost physical in nature sent a shudder through him. Its genesis was an incident that had occurred many years before when he had been a young policeman and recently married. He had come home after a day’s work to find his then wife busy with household tasks, and as he saw her figure bent over an ironing board he had realized with the force of revelation that he did not love her as he had hoped he would; that he would never love her in that way and that equally he would never leave her or the daughter born to them a few weeks earlier. In the event, both had died within six months, victims of an influenza epidemic, but the memory of the pain he had experienced at that moment had never left him, and although their causes could not have been more different, it was the same feeling he felt now: the same sickening realization of a truth that could not be denied.