River of Darkness

'Sir?' Styles's voice reached them from inside the wood. 'There's something here, sir. A cigarette tin, I think…'

Madden spun on his heel and strode over to where the constable was standing behind a low bank. As he approached Billy went down on his haunches.

'Don't touch it!'

The two older men joined him. He pointed, and they saw the glint of metal in the deep shade beneath the bank. Madden crouched down.

'You're right, Constable.'

Taking a pencil from his jacket pocket he lifted the cylindrical cigarette tin off the ground and held it up.

'No label,' Billy said regretfully. He felt he'd earned the right to make a comment.

'The man we're after smokes Three Castles,' Madden explained.

'If it's his it's been here since early April. You won't get a print off it now,' Derry remarked.

'True. But we'll take it with us, anyway. Constable — handkerchief!'

Billy reached into his pocket, recalling, as he did so, the shame he had felt the last time he'd been required to produce one. As Madden was passing the tin over to him, he paused and looked at it more closely, holding it up to the light. 'Do you see that burn mark?' he asked Derry, and the chief inspector nodded. The inside of the tin was blackened. 'I want to search this patch of ground. We're looking for a piece of cloth, probably burned or charred. Anything that would serve as wadding. This tin's been used as a Tommy cooker. You can brew a cup of tea on it if you haven't got a stove handy. The troops used to put wadding at the bottom and soak it in methylated spirits.'

Billy, with the tin safely stowed in his pocket, was already examining the ground around him. Madden and Derry joined in the search. To Billy's chagrin, it was the chief inspector who found what they were looking for.

'Isn't this what they call two-by-four?' Derry was down on his heels brushing away the dead leaves.

Madden picked up the ball of charred cloth. A small square of flannel, unconsumed by the flames, was still visible. He took out his own handkerchief and wrapped it around the burned fragment. Then he returned to the spot where Billy had found the tin and got down on his knees. The other two watched as Madden laid his long body against the low bank in front of him and peered over the rim. They were a dozen yards from the edge of the coppice. Nevertheless, the inspector had a clear line of sight through the trees to the Reynolds's farmhouse below.

'There… that's it!' Madden growled his satisfaction.

When they went back down the hill Reynolds was nowhere to be seen. As before, his figure emerged suddenly from a hidden hollow in the slope. The dog was trotting at his heels. It stopped and pricked up its ears as they approached. Reynolds waited, hands in pockets, his face expressionless.

Madden wasted no words. 'Can you remember what time it was, Mr Reynolds, when you left the house and when you returned? It matters to me how long you were absent.'

Reynolds blinked. He swallowed. 'We left the house, Ben Tompkins and I, just after half past five and came down here looking for strays. We were back soon after half past six. Say twenty to seven at the latest.'

'It was dark by then?'

He nodded.

'You were out of sight of the house all the time?'

'Pretty well. We were further down.' Reynolds turned and pointed away. 'There's a dip in the land, it's not obvious from here.'

'I know you didn't see anything,' Madden said.

Billy was surprised again by his tone. His manner with Reynolds now was businesslike, impersonal. Yet Reynolds was responding readily to his questions. 'But did you hear anything? It's important.'

'No, I already told the police.' For the first time he seemed eager to help.

'Nothing at all? Think hard.'

Reynolds frowned. 'What sort of thing?'

Madden shook his head. 'I'm not going to say. I don't want to put it in your mind.'

Reynolds stared at him. 'I know I didn't hear anything,' he said. 'But I remember Ben saying something 'What was that?' The inspector leaned closer.

'We'd found a ewe caught by her leg in a cleft down by the stream. We were just easing her out when Ben looked up. I remember now…" He kept staring at Madden. 'He said, "Did you hear that? It sounded like a whistle."'

It was after seven when Madden got back to the Yard.

Sinclair was waiting in his office.

'We're lucky Tom Derry's in charge at Maidstone.

There aren't many who would have smelled a rat.'

They stood together at the open window and watched as a pleasure-steamer, strung with coloured lights, moved slowly downriver. 'But is it our rat?'

'I think it is, sir. The razor, the dogs, the whistle.'

'And the fact she wasn't raped?'

'Especially that.'

The sounds of a jazz band drifted up to them through the gathering dusk.

'No evidence of a bayonet this time,' the chief inspector remarked.

'That doesn't mean he wasn't carrying one. You can't see the front door of the house from the coppice.

He couldn't have known whether Reynolds was at home or not.'

'So, assuming it was our man, he must have been ready to kill him, too, and he'd have wanted better than a razor for that. The razor's for the woman.'

'It looks that way,' Madden agreed heavily.

Sinclair turned from the window with a sigh and went to his desk. 'I must get home. Mrs Sinclair is threatening divorce on the grounds of desertion.' He eyed his colleague. 'And so should you, John. Get some rest.' The chief inspector viewed Madden's pale face and sunken eyes with concern. Did the man never sleep? 'There were differences, though.' Madden sat down at his desk and lit a cigarette. 'He was in more of a hurry than he was at Melling Lodge. He was in and out of that house in a matter of minutes. There was no sign of him when the gypsy arrived just after six.

And there was none of the preparation. He must have poisoned the dogs on Friday night — Reynolds found them on Saturday morning. He killed Mrs Reynolds the same evening.'

'He took his time at Highfield,' Sinclair agreed.

'Perhaps he's getting a taste for it.' He shuddered at the thought.

'But it wasn't done on the spur of the moment,'

Madden insisted. 'He knew the lie of the land. He lay up in the wood waiting for sunset. He must have picked out the coppice on an earlier visit.'

'An earlier visit…' Sinclair echoed the words. 'But why did he go there in the first place? Or Highfield, come to that. And what was it that caught his eye?

What brought him back?'

He slid a pile of papers into an open drawer.

'I keep telling myself it's the women. It must be the women. But he never touches them. So could it be something else?' He looked at Madden questioningly.

The inspector shook his head. 'I don't know,' he said. 'I just don't know.'

Madden left Scotland Yard in the early evening and walked along the Embankment to Westminster.

With summer drawing to an end the city was filling again. Sitting on the upper deck of an omnibus bound for Bloomsbury he looked down on pavements crowded with young women, typists from government offices hurrying home at the close of the working day.

He could remember a time before the war when the same sidewalks would have held only clerks in bowler hats and high stiff collars. He liked the change that had come about.

Late that morning a telegram had been delivered to his desk by one of the commissionaires. It was from Helen Blackwell. can you meet me in London this evening query. She gave an address in Bloomsbury Square and a time: six o'clock.

The two weeks were only just up and Madden hadn't dared to hope that he would hear from her so soon.

Earlier, at the regular Monday conference in Bennett's office, he had given an account of his trip to Maidstone and the conclusions he and Sinclair had drawn from it.