Rennie Airth - The Blood-Dimmed Tide

His gaze came to rest on a leather case that lay open on the ground near his feet. It was half filled with labelled glass jars, the fruits of the detectives’ efforts that morning, he supposed. Galloway, catching the direction of his glance, gestured.

‘You did a good job with that piece of canvas, John. You and the bobby. Thanks to you both, we can say for certain the assault was carried out here, on this very spot. I’ve plenty of blood samples from the grass. They’ll have to be tested, of course, but I’ve no doubt they’re from the girl’s body. Pieces of bone, too. And I’ve had them collecting pocketfuls of soil’ – he pointed out several holes dug in the rectangle of turf – ‘they’ll go to the government chemist for analysis. She must have lost a lot of blood, and most of it probably soaked into the ground.’

Madden’s thoughts had been moving on a parallel course. ‘He’d have needed a spot like this, wouldn’t he? Secluded, I mean?’ For a moment he was distracted by the sudden appearance of a kingfisher which shot by like a blue streak, close to the water, leaving its characteristic chee-chee call echoing in its wake.

Galloway, meanwhile, seemed to find the image conjured up by the other man’s words distasteful. He grimaced. ‘Given what he had in mind, I’d have to agree,’ he said. ‘Rape. Murder. Plus what he did to her face afterwards. No, he wouldn’t have wanted an audience for that.’

‘I was thinking the same thing, sir.’ Wright glanced up from the statement he was reading. ‘He already knew about this spot, didn’t he?’

Madden looked at him inquiringly.

‘That tramp, sir. Beezy. We can place him here earlier, before the other one found the body… what’s his name… Topper? That mark on the tree…’ He gestured towards the birch growing by the bank. ‘We’ve got you to thank for that, Mr Madden. I’m not sure any one of us would have spotted it. Or known what it meant if we had.’

Unmoved by the accolade, Madden frowned. ‘You’re treating Beezy as a suspect, then, are you?’

‘Well, yes, sir… until otherwise demonstrated. He’s the obvious one. We’ve had no word yet of any other strangers seen in the area, just motorists driving through the village, the usual Sunday traffic. And though we can’t exclude it was someone local, I’m inclined to doubt that possibility. Being a Sunday, I think you’ll find most of them were at home, and able to prove it.’

‘So if there were any strangers about, it’s unlikely they were seen.’ Galloway made the point.

Wright shrugged. He seemed more interested in Madden’s opinion, which so far had not been offered.

Galloway persisted. ‘Don’t you find it peculiar that he’d try to conceal a body at a spot where he’d already left his mark?’

‘Yes, I do, sir.’ Wright turned to him. ‘And, what’s more, a place where he was expecting to meet another tramp later. But that’s looking at it rationally, and this sort of crime doesn’t happen that way.’ His eyes returned to Madden’s face. He seemed to be hoping for some response from that quarter. ‘I can tell you how it might have come about,’ he went on. ‘This Beezy turns up yesterday looking to meet Topper, finds he has time on his hands, cuts that mark to show he’s been here, then goes off exploring. Remember, he hadn’t been to these parts before. Now you can get to the Craydon road from here easy. There’s a way off the main path that runs through the wood to the road and it comes out not far from where Alice Bridger was last seen.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not saying that’s proof of anything, but it’s possible opportunity. He could have come on her there, lost his head maybe and attacked her, knocked her out or choked her and then brought her back up here. There’s evidence she was carried-’

‘Evidence?’ Madden had been staring at the ground while he listened. Now his head came up.

‘Yes, sir, that bit of thread you noticed caught on a bramble.’ Wright seemed relieved to have heard him speak at last. ‘It came from her skirt. We matched it. Now, if you recall, it was about waist high on the bush, and that suggests to me she was being carried at that point, since it came from the lower part of her clothing, from her skirt.’

Madden nodded his agreement with this interpretation, but made no further comment.

‘Now, as I was saying, he could have brought her back here from the road, this Beezy – back to where he knew they wouldn’t be seen. And if that’s what happened, then I don’t reckon he would have been thinking of any mark he’d made on a tree earlier. That would have been the last thing on his mind. Like I said, you can’t expect rational behaviour with a crime of this type. Look what he did to her face, for pity’s sake! Isn’t that so, sir? You must have come across cases like this in the past.’ The confidence had begun to seep out of the inspector’s manner as he went on speaking and there was a hint of desperation about the appeal he flung out to Madden, who had resumed his former attitude and was standing with arms folded, eyes fixed to the ground, still giving no indication of what was in his mind.

Observing the Surrey policeman, Peter Galloway drew a measure of grim amusement from the spectacle of his discomfiture. He had known John Madden for a number of years and considered him a rare bird. To an air of natural authority, striking enough in itself, another quality was added that was even more disconcerting: a capacity for silence bordering on the inhuman. Once sunk into meditation, or reflection, he gave every appearance of being deaf to reason or argument. Confronted now by these twin phenomena, Wright was descending into garrulousness.

‘And then there’s something else you can’t ignore, sir, the fact he took off in a hurry-’

‘Did he?’ Once again Madden’s head jerked up. ‘How do you know that, Inspector?’

‘Well, from that old clasp knife of his we found-’

‘Clasp knife?’

‘Yes, didn’t you hear, sir? We picked it up last evening by the stream, not far from here.’ Wright’s expression changed as he realized he had told Madden something he didn’t know. ‘It was lying on the ground, wrapped in an old bandana. Must have fallen out of his bundle, or his pocket. Now I can’t see that happening unless he was in a hurry and not taking proper care. We showed them both to Topper this morning, the knife and the bandana, and he confirmed they belonged to Beezy.’

‘On the ground, you say?’ Madden seemed struck by the discovery. ‘I wonder how I missed them?’

‘Oh, it wasn’t the way you and the constable came.’ Wright was eager to explain. ‘It was the other direction.’ He pointed downstream. ‘He must have made off along the bank that way.’

‘Towards Brookham? That’s strange. The other way leads back to the fields.’

‘Well, if you ask me, he was in a panic by then and could easily have been confused.’ Wright shrugged. ‘But all he had to do was get back to the path, and you can do that either way, upstream or down. Once he’d reached it he could have doubled back and left the wood the same way he came in, by the fields.’ Wright pointed to the mass of tangled holly bushes on the opposite bank and drew an imaginary line along them with his finger.

Madden had been paying close attention to what he was saying and now he signalled his agreement. ‘Yes, that’s so,’ he conceded. ‘I see what you mean, Inspector. He must have done that.’

Sensing he’d finally made a breach, Wright pressed ahead.‘But what’s really suspicious, sir, is he’s disappeared. We’ve been searching the neighbourhood since last evening and no one’s seen hide or hair of him. There’s no doubt he’s made himself scarce, and you have to ask yourself why.’