Rennie Airth - The Blood-Dimmed Tide

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.

‘Hand her to me, Will!’

Madden was at the bank in a moment, and stood poised and ready as the constable tugged aside the screen of willows and lifted the body of Alice Bridger from the lapping water, wrapping her slight form in his cape and turning unsteadily to hand the bundle to Madden.

Even encased in the heavy waterproof material the child’s body was a negligible burden. Backing carefully so as to avoid stepping on the tarpaulin, Madden laid her on the ground beside the piece of canvas. The cape fell open as he did so and he was stricken once more by the sight of the girl’s ruined features. Hastily he covered her again.

Stackpole, meantime, had clambered out of the stream and stood shaking himself like a dog as the water cascaded off his helmet. He walked daintily around the piece of turf, trying not to leave footmarks in the soggy grass, and joined Madden at the edge of the bushes. The two men looked at the rushing water, which had now flooded the ledge where the body had lain and was already dangerously close to overflowing onto the bank where they stood beside the spread tarpaulin.

‘Looks like we may lose the lot, sir.’ Stackpole squeezed water from the cuffs of his trousers, which clung to his sodden boots.

‘No, I don’t think so, Will. It’s passing. See!’ Madden pointed up at the sky, which was clearing fast. The rain, too, was diminishing noticeably, and without warning it stopped. Sunshine broke through the thinning clouds, bathing the woods and the swift-moving stream in soft evening light. The silence around them was filled with the sound of dripping water. The constable fished a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his face.

‘You were going to look for those detectives, sir?’

‘Yes. In a moment.’ While they’d been standing there Madden’s mind had returned to the problem he’d been wrestling with earlier. Casting about, his eye had lit on a birch tree which stood outside the ring of bushes, its pale trunk partly screened by the undergrowth. He gestured towards it. ‘I just want to go and have a look at that.’

Mystified, the constable followed his lead and they worked their way round the ring of grass until they reached the birch, where Madden crouched down, parting the branches of a laurel that was growing wild beside the bank.

‘Yes! There… Look, Will!’

Peering over his shoulder, Stackpole saw that the trunk had been scored by grooves etched into it, strange runic designs carved with a knife or some other sharp instrument.

‘Those were made by tramps. This is one of their camp sites. That’s why Topper left the path. He was coming here…’ Madden shifted on his haunches. He gestured with his thumb behind him. ‘That ring of stones on the ground over there – that’s where they light their fires. You can’t see it now because the grass has grown over. But look at these marks… that one’s Topper’s.’

Squinting, the constable made out the shape of a cross carved into the trunk surrounded by a crude circle.

‘It’s a calling card. A sign he was here. Just like those others.’

Stackpole ran his fingers over the faint, spidery furrows. ‘But they’re old, sir, not one of them done this summer, I’d say…’

‘Except for this one…!’ Madden indicated a design cut into the trunk somewhat lower down than the rest. It showed a triangle with a line drawn through it.

‘That’s fresh, all right,’ Stackpole acknowledged. He peered at it more closely. ‘The bark’s only just been stripped. The wood’s still white. Why, it could have been done today…

‘It probably was.’ Madden rose from his crouch. ‘Topper told Helen he was due to meet someone hereabouts, a man called Beezy, another tramp, by the sound of it. That could be his mark.’

‘You mean, he may have been here earlier, this Beezy?’ Stackpole looked from the scarred trunk to where the girl’s body was lying, wrapped in his cape. His face changed as the significance of what he was saying became clear to him.

Madden nodded. ‘He was here, all right, by the look of it. But the question is, where is he now?’

Called out before dawn the next morning by the midwife on a maternity case, Helen did not get back to the house until after nine. Twenty minutes earlier Will Stackpole had rung with news he’d obtained by telephone from the police in Guildford which Madden recounted to his wife while they ate a late breakfast in the sun-filled dining room.

‘They haven’t had the pathologist’s report yet, but there seems no doubt she was raped and strangled. The police surgeon confirmed what I thought: her neck was broken. That’s how she died.’

The signs of a sleepless night Helen saw in her husband’s face took her back more than a decade. It had been another murder case, the brutal massacre of an entire household in Highfield itself, in the summer of 1921, that had brought them together, and Madden’s frown of worry was a grim reminder of those dreadful days.

‘What the pathologist will make of the damage to her face I don’t know. It looked deliberate to me.’

‘Deliberate?’

‘Systematic. I only glanced at it, but it seemed to me he’d set out to destroy her features. To obliterate them.’ Madden set down his cup. ‘Her father was shown the body this morning. He broke down, poor man.’

They’d been late getting back from Brookham the previous night. Darkness had fallen before Madden returned from Capel Wood and Helen had wanted to take him home and get him out of his wet clothes. She’d spent the intervening hours herself in the Henshaws’ kitchen, keeping Topper company, but had twice visited the Bridgers’ cottage, where the missing girl’s mother had fallen into a restless sleep from the sedative she’d been given earlier. Mr Bridger had refused Helen’s offer of similiar relief. She’d discovered him sitting in the darkened parlour with neighbours, a short, stocky man with thinning hair, his pale features racked by unspoken fears. Alice was an only child, she’d learned.

‘I heard there were some policemen come from Guildford and now they’ve gone off somewhere?’ Bridger had accosted her eagerly when she’d looked in. ‘Do you know anything about that, Dr Madden?’ His eyes had pleaded with her for an honest answer, but Helen could only prevaricate.

‘Not really, Mr Bridger, but I’m expecting my husband back soon. He’s with Constable Stackpole. They may have some news for you.’

In the event, Madden had returned in his car alone, leaving Stackpole with the two detectives, whom he’d encountered on the outskirts of the wood and guided to the murder site. At their urgent request, he had telephoned the Surrey police headquarters to arrange for a pathologist and a forensic team to be dispatched to Brookham without delay with an ambulance and more uniformed officers equipped with lamps and torches so that a search of the wood could begin at once.