What he was looking at was nothing more than an oak leaf, and it had taken him several moments before he realized why his gaze had suddenly become fixed on it.
The colour, dark brown in the dreary light, was starting to run.
He’d bent down on his haunches at once and picked it up delicately by its stem. The patina coating the leaf’s surface had been smeared by falling raindrops; the dry crust was reverting to its liquid form. There was no doubt in Madden’s mind as to what it was.
Looking around then, he saw other bloodstains; other leaves bearing the telltale marks. The green grass, too, was spattered with tiny rust-coloured flecks.
Backing into the bushes a little, Madden went down on his hands and knees. and brought his face even lower so that he could examine the ground minutely, and it was while he was in that position, like some hound questing on a scent, that he saw, protruding from beneath the drooping willow branches across the stream, at the same level as his eyes were now, a sock-clad foot.
Next moment lightning split the sky above him and the thunder came crashing on its heels. Before the last echoes had died away, Madden had scrambled to his feet, torn off his socks and shoes and waded through the cold, ankle-deep current to the opposite bank. Parting the trailing willow fronds he found the body of a young girl lying on its side on a narrow ledge. Without hope he bent down and felt for a pulse in the thin white wrist that rested on her hip. There was none. She was dead. He had called out then to Stackpole.
During their shouted exchange, Madden’s eyes remained busy. The position of the body, wedged beneath an overhang in the bank and screened by the drooping branches, indicated that the killer had meant to conceal it. And it might have remained hidden longer, he thought, had a piece of the ledge on which it lay not crumbled away and fallen into the stream below, causing the girl’s foot to slide down into view.
Was that how Topper had found her? Had he taken the shoe off her foot? It seemed unlikely.
The cause of death would be determined later by medical examination, but judging by her blood-soaked hair, which covered her face as she lay, she appeared to have been struck about the head, and the evidence pointed to the assault having taken place on the bloodstained grass behind him…
Coolly, Madden continued to compile his mental notes, aware that he was acting from habit, doing something he hadn’t done for many years, but had once been trained to do, keeping his emotions separate from the process of observation. But his poise deserted him a moment later when he drew aside the matted hair to look at the girl’s face.
‘Dear God!’ A gasp of horror escaped his lips.
No stranger to violent death, he’d seen more than one murder victim cruelly battered and during two years spent in the trenches had been witness to unspeakable injuries: he’d seen bodies rent and flayed and blown to pieces. But nothing in his experience had prepared him for the sight of Alice Bridger’s face, beaten flat to a red pulp on which no trace of a human feature remained. As he stared at it in disbelief he heard Stackpole’s voice calling to him from close by.
‘Am I getting near, sir?’
‘Keep following the stream, Will.’ Somehow Madden found his voice. ‘You’ll come to me. And hurry. It’s going to pour in a minute.’
As he spoke, thunder boomed out again like a great bass drum and the rain grew heavier. Madden glanced uneasily at the stream in which he stood. The ledge where the child’s body lay had been carved out of the bank by the water on some earlier occasion and there was no telling how fast it might rise again in the cloudburst that now threatened. Quickly he bent again to study the corpse, noting its position, attentive to details.
The pale blue skirt bunched about the girl’s hips was smeared with blood, as were her white thighs. Livid marks that were turning into bruises showed on her small bare buttocks. The water where he stood was littered with loose stones and rocks and Madden supposed that one of them might have been used as a weapon. If so, it would be washed clean by now.
Studying the position of the body, he realized that he was able to observe the full effect of the damage done to the girl’s face because her head was twisted around at what he saw now was an unnatural angle. It seemed likely that her neck was broken.
Was this how she had died? He hoped so. The thought that she might have been alive and conscious when the stone was raised above her head was close to unbearable.
‘Ah, Christ… no!’
Madden looked behind him. Will Stackpole’s tall figure had appeared through the bushes on the far bank. Water dripped from the constable’s heavy blue cape. His glance dwelt on the pathetic huddled shape revealed behind the drawn willow branches.
‘What did he do to the lass?’ He pointed. ‘Is that her face?’
‘Yes, it’s been smashed in. God knows why.’ Madden let the branches fall, hiding the corpse from sight. Pale beneath his helmet, Stackpole stood rooted. He seemed unable to take in what he’d seen. ‘There’s blood on the grass over there, Will.’ Madden gestured. ‘You’d better keep off it. That’s probably where she was killed. And raped, by the look of it.’ The words he chose, as much as the harsh tone in which they were spoken, served to jerk the constable back to a state of awareness. He listened to what Madden was saying.
‘We can either protect that patch, or try to cover the body. But we can’t do both.’
Nodding that he understood, Stackpole looked up at the sky. Although the rain was increasing steadily, the full force of the storm was yet to break on them. He took the tarpaulin from under his arm. Unable to make up his mind, he looked from where the body lay to the grass at his feet and back again. A sudden gust of rain blew a shower of raindrops into his face.
‘What do you think, sir?’ His glance was pleading.
Madden scowled in reply. ‘Well, the stream’s bound to rise, so we may have to move the body.’ He paused, turning the problem over in his mind. ‘Let’s cover that piece of grass,’ he decided.
While Stackpole busied himself unrolling the canvas, Madden recrossed the stream, pausing to collect an armful of stones from the river bed which the two men then laid at the corners of the spread tarpaulin on which the rain now drummed steadily.
‘The Guildford police won’t find their way here. I’ll have to go and fetch them.’ Madden had to shout to make himself heard above successive peals of thunder, meanwhile struggling to put on his socks and shoes again, balancing first on one foot, then on the other. After standing for so long in the icy water he’d lost all feeling in his toes. ‘Keep an eye on that stream, Will. You won’t get much warning once the water starts rising.’
He waited a moment longer to look around him, torn between the need for haste in summoning the detectives and the equally urgent task he had set himself of searching for any clues left behind by the killer, evidence that might be destroyed or washed away in the storm, which now broke in earnest upon them. As Madden stood there, shivering in his drenched tweed jacket, a curtain of rain descended and in a second he was immersed in a mist of spray and falling drops as water poured through the flimsy canopy of leaves above him.
Caught there in the downpour his eye fell again on the ring of stones he’d noticed earlier. In the last few minutes an answer had occurred to him to a question he’d been asking himself since entering the wood and he looked around now for other indications that might confirm it. His inspection of the rain-blurred scene had hardly begun, however, when he was interrupted by a yell from Stackpole. Madden glanced up in time to see the constable plunge into the stream in his boots. Just as he’d forecast earlier, the level of the water had risen with alarming speed and Stackpole was already knee-deep in the frothing torrent, struggling to keep his footing while he tore off his cape.