‘You say she has a story to tell?’
He turned from the scene outside to look at Mary Spencer again; at the burning match she was holding to the kindling in the grate; to the spent matches with their charred heads that lay on the stones beside her.
‘Yes, a quite extraordinary tale. Awful, really.’
‘Does it by any chance start in Paris?’
‘Good heavens!’ The match she was holding dropped from her nerveless fingers; she stared at him in astonishment. ‘So you knew all along-?’
He shook his head. ‘It was only a guess …’
He turned back to the window and watched as hand in hand the two figures mounted the steps to the terrace. The murmured words he spoke were for his ears alone.
‘Poor, poor Rosa …’
28
‘He killed the wrong girl, Angus. He had to decide quickly when they reached Waterloo. He saw two young women dressed much the same, and both with their heads covered, which made it hard to recognize their faces. They both had baskets of food, too, and the platform was crowded. When they got off the train he had to pick one to follow, and as luck would have it he chose wrong: he followed Rosa.’
With the receiver pressed to his ear, Madden stared out at the garden. The phone was kept on a small table by one of the windows, and as he stood there his gaze fell on the straggling line of footsteps which Eva and her charge had left in the snow when they had come up the path from the gate at the bottom of the garden.
‘I half guessed it when I saw her walking up to the house; she was wearing a coat with a shawl drawn over her head like Rosa’s hood. Then when I saw the matches it was clear to me.’
‘Did you say matches?’ The chief inspector wasn’t sure he’d heard right. The telephone line they were using had faded momentarily.
‘The charred heads. Mrs Spencer was trying to light the fire and I remembered what Billy had said about finding spent matches around Rosa’s body. We thought her killer must have been searching for something. But it was Rosa’s face he was looking at. He had to be sure, and it was only then he knew he’d killed the wrong girl.’
‘How could anyone do such a thing?’ Sinclair was disbelieving. ‘Any normal human being would have checked first.’
‘We’re not dealing with a normal human being, Angus. What was one dead girl more or less to Raymond Ash?’
Even as he spoke, an image of Rosa’s face, with its veiled air of sorrow, returned to him with a pang, together with another face, hardly resembling hers in features — Eva Belka was red-haired and fair of complexion — but afflicted now with the same pain and remorse.
‘It cannot be so.’ Racked by sobs she had kept repeating the words after Madden had revealed to her what had happened to her friend after they had parted. ‘ cannot be so.’
Prior to that — and with the eagerness of one who had borne a burden for too long and wanted only to shed it — she had described her brush with a killer in Paris four years earlier, an encounter that had haunted her ever since. In English as fluent as Rosa’s, and marked by the same accent, she had poured out her story; still unaware of the tragic chain of events that had led to her compatriot’s murder. Judging it better to let her speak first, Madden had kept what he had to tell her until last. But as he listened to her stumbling story and watched as she sat twisting her fingers, her green eyes fixed on his, he had found himself wishing that the sad task had fallen to another.
Still wearing her coat, and with the same shawl covering her hair which had led to Ash’s fatal error, she had been ushered into the sitting-room by Mary Spencer, who, though aware of the ordeal facing the young woman and wanting to remain with her, had had her young son to think about. Since he could not be present, she had had to leave them alone, and had paused only to reassure Eva and to tell her she wasn’t to worry any longer; that all would be well once she had spoken to their visitor.
When they were done — and before Eva had left him to rejoin her mistress — Madden had made one final effort to comfort her.
‘ may seem hard to believe,’ he had said gently, but even if you had gone to the police earlier it would have made no difference. You and Rosa would still have been on that train together. Nothing would have changed that.’
But his words had gone unheeded; she had continued to weep.
‘I was so happy to see her,’ she had told him, her eyes filled with tears. ‘Sad and happy. I found she was like me, always thinking of the past, of her family. But at least we could talk about the old days. We could share our memories of Warsaw. Now all I wish is that we had never met.’
Once she had left him he had set about the problem of telephoning London, something that had now become a matter of urgency. Remembering the advice he’d received earlier that day, he had got the Liphook exchange to put him in touch with Leonard and had then asked the village bobby to use his authority to get through to the Yard.
‘I can’t explain now, Constable. There isn’t time. You must speak to Chief Inspector Sinclair. Ask him to ring me here at Mrs Spencer’s number. Tell him it’s urgent.’
‘Isn’t there anything I can do, sir?’
It had been plain from Leonard’s tone that he wasn’t altogether comfortable with the request.
‘Not at this moment. Later perhaps. You’ll have to trust me, Constable.’
Ten minutes later the phone had rung, and Madden, who had not left the sitting-room, had picked up the receiver and found himself talking to Sinclair.
‘I’m sorry, John, I was out of my office. They had to hunt me down.’
Calm as his voice was, Madden had realized from his old chief’s tone that he was under some stress himself and he would do well not to waste time on preliminaries. Accordingly he had plunged at once into an account of what he’d just learned.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t speak to you about this before I came over here, Angus, but frankly I didn’t think it would amount to anything. I just wanted to find out who this other Polish girl was.’
‘Tell me quickly about her encounter with Ash in Paris. Did she see him face to face? Can she identify him?’
‘I believe so. The report you got from the French police is substantially correct. Only it wasn’t Rosa who went to Sobel’s house that evening, it was Eva Belka. She and her husband had been offered a lift to Spain in Sobel’s car and told to be at his house on the outskirts of Paris by a certain hour. They went there separately and Eva arrived first. She found the front door ajar, and when she pushed it open he was there. Ash. On his knees by Sobel’s body.’
Recounting the scene to him earlier, the young woman had turned pale at the memory, biting her lip.
‘Ash must have strangled him moments before. He was busy gathering what Eva said looked like stones from the floor. The diamonds, obviously. She screamed and ran back to the street and he went after her. As she came out of the garden gate she saw a pair of patrolling gendarmes nearby and ran towards them. Ash was coming up fast behind her at that point, but when he saw the police he turned tail and fled. They went after him and one of them called to Eva to wait for them, but instead she carried on and when she reached the Metro station she met her husband, who was coming out of it with their luggage. She told him what had happened and suggested they go back to the house and wait for the police. But he stopped her. It was as we surmised. He saw at once how dangerous that would be for them. They’d be detained as witnesses by the French police in Paris and eventually fall into the hands of the Germans, and for him that would have meant a death sentence. He’d been part of a resistance group in Warsaw and there was a price on his head. Added to which, Eva’s Jewish. The only thing for them to do was to flee Paris at once.’
‘How did they get to England?’ Sinclair had listened in silence.
‘Via Spain and eventually Portugal. Partly on foot. When they got here Eva’s husband — his name’s Jan Belka — enlisted in the armed forces. He’s serving with the Polish Brigade. Some weeks ago he was wounded in Holland and brought back to England to recuperate. Eva went up to Norwich to see him in hospital. That was when she met Rosa.’