He covered the girl’s head and shoulders again and then waited to see if the two detectives had any questions. A frown had appeared on Cook’s face as he’d listened and he caught Billy’s eye.
‘So what you’re saying is, he must have meant to kill her.’
‘It would seem so.’ Ransom shrugged. ‘It’s hard to see what other purpose he could have had in mind.’
‘But … but that doesn’t make sense.’ Cook spoke before he could stop himself.
‘Possibly.’ The pathologist looked owlish. ‘But that’s your department, Inspector, not mine. Now, if you’ve no more questions …’ He stood poised to leave.
‘One moment, sir.’ Billy spoke up. ‘That matchstick on the shelf over there. The one in the saucer. Where does it come from?’
‘What matchstick where?’ Ransom’s eyes swivelled in the direction of his pointing finger. ‘Oh, that. Yes, I found it tangled in her hair. Blown there by the wind, I dare say. She’d been lying on the ground for some time. Why do you ask?’
‘We found others at the scene. It looked like somebody had been trying to light one.’
‘The killer, do you mean?’ Ransom showed renewed interest.
‘Perhaps. But we can’t be sure.’ Billy glanced at Cook. His jerk of the head suggested it was time they too departed.
‘Yes, but … but why would he have done that?’ The pathologist was clearly intrigued by the notion. ‘If it was him, I mean.’
‘I’ve no idea.’ Billy’s shrug was noncommittal. ‘But he may have been looking for something — something he thought she had on her.’
4
‘She was a dear girl, very likeable. But so hard to get to know. Still grieving, I fear.’
Helen Madden mused on her words. Seated on a settee facing the fire that her husband had lit in the drawing-room a short while before, she turned her gaze on the flickering flames.
‘She kept surprising us with her talents. Soon after she came I gave her a piece of parachute silk that had come my way and she made two embroidered blouses from it. They were quite beautiful. She was wearing one of them the day she went up to London, I remember.’
Helen glanced across at Sinclair, who was seated in an armchair on one side of the wide fireplace.
‘And then we only discovered a week ago that she was a pianist. There was a call for volunteers to perform at a concert for the patients at Stratton Hall and Rosa came forward. She played two Chopin nocturnes and you could have heard a pin drop. I asked her afterwards where she had learned and she said her father had taught her. He was the schoolmaster in the village where she grew up. He must have been a remarkable man.’
Again she paused.
‘But these are just odd details. We didn’t really know her. She was so quiet. So withdrawn.’
Sinclair frowned. ‘You said “still grieving”. What did you mean?’
Helen looked at him. ‘Are you aware she was Jewish?’ she asked.
Sinclair nodded.
‘It so happened she was in France when the Germans invaded Poland. Or perhaps it wasn’t by chance. Her father had arranged the trip for her. He sent her to stay with an old university friend of his in Tours; it may be that he saw what was coming and wanted her out of the country. In any event she never heard from her parents again, nor her two younger brothers, though of course she kept hoping. For as long as she could. Until the truth came out.’
Helen regarded the chief inspector for a moment, then turned her gaze to the fire, where the heaped logs flamed and cackled, sending sparks flying up the chimney. Sinclair, too, remained silent. Two years had passed since the Foreign Secretary had risen in the House of Commons to confirm the reports that had been circulating for some time of the wholesale massacre of Jews in occupied Europe. He recalled a phrase from the joint declaration issued by the Allies, which had named Poland ‘the principal slaughterhouse’.
‘We only talked once, properly, I mean.’ Helen put a hand to her brow. ‘But I could see how much the thought of her family, and of what must have happened to them, had affected her.’
Madden stirred in his chair. He was sitting across the fireplace from the chief inspector, his face half-hidden by the deepening shadows in the room.
‘There’s not much more we can tell you, Angus,’ he said. ‘The last time I saw Rosa was at the farm on Thursday, just before Helen arrived to drive her to the station. She was weighed down with her bag and a basket of food I’d given her to take up to her aunt, and she kept trying to thank me for them. She wasn’t a high-spirited girl. Reflective, rather, as Helen says. But she seemed cheerful enough that day; she was looking forward to seeing her aunt.’ He paused for a moment, then spoke again: ‘Tell us a little more about the murder itself. From what you said first, it sounded like a chance crime. Is that still your opinion?’
‘Yes and no. Which is to say, there’s now a question mark hanging over the case.’ The chief inspector grimaced. ‘It all revolves around the injury she suffered, the manner in which she was killed. But it’s a bit like trying to make bricks without straw. There just isn’t enough evidence to be certain, one way or the other. But I’ll lay it all out for you and you can tell me what you think. What you both think,’ he added, with a glance at Helen. ‘Just give me a moment to collect my thoughts.’
Though inured like all by now to the rigours of wartime travel, to the misery of unheated carriages, overcrowded compartments and the mingled smell of bodily odours and stale tobacco, he was still recovering from his trip down from London that afternoon when for two hours he had sat wedged in a window seat, gazing out at a countryside that offered little relief to eyes weary of the sight of dust and rubble, of the never-ending vista of ruined streets and bombed-out houses which the capital presented. Stripped to the bone by one of the coldest winters in recent memory, the fields and hedgerows through which they crawled had a lifeless air, while the sky above, grey as metal, had seemed to press on the barren earth. Scanning the paper he had bought at Waterloo, four pages of rationed newsprint filled mostly with war dispatches, his eye had lit on a single paragraph reporting the discovery of the body of a young Polish woman in Bloomsbury whose death was being treated by the police as suspicious. An account of the crime that Billy Styles had compiled and handed to him the day before was in his overnight case on the luggage rack above. The chief inspector had reviewed its contents a number of times without being able to come to any conclusion, an admission he had made to Madden when they had spoken on the telephone the previous evening.
‘It’s not exactly a puzzle, John,’ Sinclair had told his old partner. ‘To quote Styles, it’s more of a conundrum. I’ll tell you more when I come down tomorrow. I’m hoping you can help me with it.’
A frequent guest, the chief inspector’s visit had been arranged some time before, and he’d been looking forward not so much to the break from his duties it offered, which would be brief, but to the prospect of spending a few hours with friends who over the years had become dearer to him than any. The knowledge that his stay would now be overshadowed by a brutal crime, one to which they were connected, if only by circumstance, had darkened his mood, and it was not until his train was drawing into Highfield station and he glimpsed the familiar figure of his hostess waiting for him on the platform that his spirits had begun to recover.