Bennett was busy drawing a doodle on his notepad.
He didn't look up.
It was Sampson who spoke. 'I'm surprised to hear you say that, Angus. Really I am.' His tone had changed to one of puzzlement. 'We all know what happens when you bring outsiders into these cases.
Before you know it, every half-baked soothsayer and trick cyclist will be telling us how to solve it.'
'I think you're exaggerating, sir.'
'Am I?' The chief superintendent reached into his top pocket and pulled out a newspaper clipping. 'From this morning's Express. I happen to have it with me.'
With his other hand he fished out a pair of spectacles and placed them on the end of his nose. 'A lady by the name of Princess Wahletka, a well-known psychic, has offered her services to the police to assist them in solving "the frightful crime of Melling Lodge" — I'm quoting, of course. "They have only to ask, and I am ready to put all my powers at their disposal."' He grinned. 'If you want to take her up, she's appearing nightly at the Empire Theatre in Leeds.'
Two red spots had appeared on the chief inspector's cheeks. 'Excuse me, sir, but you're trying to equate a medical practitioner with a quack.'
'I'm not trying to equate anything, Angus.' The chief superintendent was genial. 'I'm just giving you a friendly warning. So far the press hasn't known how to handle this case — they're as baffled as you are, if you like. Start calling in psychologists and you'll hand them an open invitation. Do you know what this is?'
He shook the clipping under Sinclair's nose. 'This is the tip of your bloody iceberg, is what it is.'
'Chief Superintendent!' Bennett spoke sharply.
'I'm sorry, sir.' Sampson sat back. The smile remained on his lips.
The deputy drummed his fingertips on the table.
He avoided Sinclair's glance.
'Thank you, Chief Inspector,' he said. 'I'll consider your suggestion. Gentlemen, this meeting is concluded.'
He rose from the table.
'That was highly educational. I trust you were taking notes.' Sinclair's file landed with a thud on his desktop.
'I thought the clipping was a nice touch. He just happened to have it with him. And did you notice Bennett back-pedalling for all he was worth? All in all you won't see a finer example of the Ripper complex in action.'
'The Ripper, sir?'
'Jack of the same name. By the time he was done there wasn't a smart alec between here and Temple Bar who didn't have a theory as to who he was and how to nab him, and the only point on which they agreed was that the police were a bunch of lamebrained incompetents who couldn't catch cold in an igloo.'
Madden was grinning.
'You may laugh, but there are people in this building who still wake up in a cold sweat thinking about it. They're terrified of opening the door, even a crack.' The chief inspector sat down at his desk. 'Don't blame Bennett,' he said. 'He understands what we're up against. But if we call in an outsider and the newspapers get hold of it — and the chief super will see to it they do — all hell will break loose. Careers are made and lost over cases like this one, and I don't mean yours or mine. Bennett's own future is at stake.'
Late that afternoon the telephone rang on the chief inspector's desk. 'Hullo… yes, he's here. One moment, please.'
He signalled to Madden. Then he got up and left the office. Madden picked up the phone.
'John, is that you?' Helen Blackwell's voice came to him from a long way off. 'Lord Stratton rang Father this morning. He told us what happened to you and Will… Are you all right?' Her voice swelled and faded on the trunk line.
'Yes, I'm fine…' Surprise robbed him of words.
He didn't know what to say to her. 'I'll see you in a fortnight?' he asked anxiously.
Her reply was lost in the crackle of the faulty line.
'What?' he called out. 'I can't hear…'
'… less than that now…' he heard her say. Her soft laugh reached his ears, then the line went dead.
A few minutes later Sinclair returned. With a glance at Madden he seated himself at his desk. 'Och, aye!' he remarked.
Billy Styles was at Waterloo station a good ten minutes before the time he had been ordered to report; it was only a short ride in the bus from Stockwell, where he lived with his mother. Mrs Styles had been widowed young — Billy's father had died of tuberculosis when he was only four — and she had had to support them both, by working first as a waitress in a tearoom in the high street, then later as a factory hand in a wartime munitions plant. Billy himself had tried to enlist in the last year of the war, when he was eighteen, but had been turned down by the doctor who examined him on the ground that he had weak lungs; a shock to the young man, who had never suspected he had any such flaw in his physical constitution.
His suspicion that the doctor was conducting some form of private vendetta against the conscription policy was strengthened when some time later he passed a medical examination to gain entry into the Metropolitan Police without incident. The memory rankled with Billy, who felt cheated of his due.
He had spent the past fortnight working with Sergeant Hollingsworth. Assigned space in a small office beside the chief inspector's, they had toiled over the list of discharged mental patients, dividing it up into regions and dispatching individual rosters to the various police authorities around the country. A number of ex-patients had already been interviewed and the results collated and assessed.
The work was grinding and repetitive, but after experiencing initial boredom with it, Billy had found increasing satisfaction in the process of gradual elimination which he and the sergeant, under Madden's supervision, were engaged in. He had been allowed to study the cumulative file: a history of the case, which Chief Inspector Sinclair kept up to date.
When he read the details of the attack on Madden and Stackpole in the woods above Highfield he felt fresh pangs of jealousy and envy. He felt it was he who should have been with the inspector, rather than the village bobby. Sometimes, in his imagination, he saw himself in the trenches under Madden's command.
The inspector appeared with three minutes to spare and they walked on to the platform together.
'Do you know what this is about, Constable?'
'No, sir.' Billy had to add a skip to his step to keep up with Madden's long stride.
'Let's find a compartment first.'
The telephone call had come the previous evening.
Sinclair had looked across at Madden and raised a thumb.
'That was Tom Derry,' he said as he hung up. 'He's a chief inspector now — head of the Maidstone CID.
We worked on that Ashford murder together. He thinks he may have something for us.'
Derry had read the item about the Melling Lodge murders in the Police Gazette two days previously, but had not made the connection in his mind right away.
'He didn't handle the case himself,' Madden explained to Billy as the train drew out of the station.
'But then he recalled one or two details from the file.
We'll find out more when we talk to him.'
Billy listened in silence. Pride stirred in him. For the first time he felt Madden was treating him as a colleague. He was tempted to join in, to offer some observation of his own, but decided, on balance, it would be better not to speak. If the inspector wanted his opinion he would ask for it.
'Where do you live, Constable?'
They had the compartment to themselves. The train moved at a steady clip through the green fields and hedgerows of Kent, a countryside still unmarred by the spreading stain of pink and white suburban villas.
'Stockwell, sir.'
'With your family?'
'Just my mother, sir. My father's dead.'
'Was he killed in the war?'
'No, sir. He died before.' For some reason he couldn't rationalize, Billy felt ashamed. It was as though he wished his father had perished in the conflict, rather than from a common disease. He wished, too, that he himself had worn a soldier's uniform, if only for a day. 'My uncle Jack now Mum's brother — he was killed on the Somme.'