‘There’s no need to go to the police,’ he remarked, after a moment. ‘Just get word to me.’
Goram’s face cleared. He looked up. ‘Oh, I’ll do that, if you want, sir.’ Vastly relieved, he made bold to offer his own hand to Madden, who took it at once. ‘Anything I hear, you’ll hear. You have my word on it.’
6
The coroner’s inquest into the death of Alice Bridger, held at Guildford the following Friday, was quickly concluded. As officer in charge of the case, Inspector Wright baldly described the murder scene and outlined the measures already taken by the Surrey constabulary at the start of their investigation. Apart from routine questioning, these were mainly concerned with tracking down strangers seen in the vicinity of Brookham that day.
The presence of a number of vagrants in the general area had been reported and some of them had been identified and questioned, so far without result. The search for the rest was being extended.
‘I am authorized to inform the court that we are looking for one man in particular,’ Wright stated. ‘We expect to trace him and to be able to question him in the very near future.’
Dr Galloway was equally terse. Attaching to Alice Bridger’s rape the single adjective ‘brutal’, the pathologist briefly detailed the injuries, internal and external, that she had suffered in the course of the assault, reading from a prepared statement, not looking up, aware perhaps of the presence of Alice’s parents in court. The girl had been strangled subsequently and from the amount of water found in her lungs it was likely the killer had also held her submerged in the stream. Her face had been ‘badly battered’, Galloway said, but provided no further description.
‘I’m giving the London press as little as possible to feed on,’ he’d told Madden and Helen, encountering them outside the courtroom before the proceedings opened. ‘They keep an eye on inquests.’
One of the first witnesses, Madden had testified at some length to the discovery of the body beside the stream. The coroner, a recent appointee, was plainly puzzled by his involvement in the affair.
‘Why exactly were you there, Mr Madden?’ he inquired.
‘I gave Constable Stackpole a lift from Brookham. He felt the wood should be searched without delay, rather than wait for the arrival of the detectives from Guildford.’
‘Yes, but why were you involved in the search? Surely it’s not usual for a member of the public to be engaged to that degree in a police investigation?’
‘Not usual at all,’ Madden had agreed solemnly, leaving his questioner scratching his head, disgruntled, but none the wiser.
‘I thought for a moment he was going to clap you in irons, John.’ Silver-haired and in his sixties, Chief Superintendent Boyce, head of the Guildford CID, buttonholed Madden in the street outside afterwards. They were old acquaintances. ‘Six months to my pension and we’re landed with a case like this! Mind you, at least it’s straightforward.’
He waited for a response, but none was forthcoming.
‘You don’t agree?’ Boyce cocked an eyebrow, then turned aside to doff his hat and bow. ‘Dr Madden!’
‘Mr Boyce… how are you?’ Helen shook his hand. She had come from talking to Mrs Bridger, the murdered girl’s mother, who was standing by the steps to the courthouse in a circle of Brookham villagers, clinging to her husband’s arm as though she required its support to remain upright. Bridger himself, white-faced and with a glazed expression, was hardly more steady on his feet. Molly Henshaw hovered in attendance on them both.
‘They’re close to collapse, the pair of them,’ Helen said, taking refuge in her dispassionate doctor’s voice. ‘He won’t like it, but I’m going to write a note to Dr Rowley. He really must take proper care of them.’
During the court proceedings, Madden had noticed Fred Bridger sitting two rows from the front in the public seats. Their eyes had met for an instant and he had felt the force of the other man’s anguish as he listened to the flat accounts offered by various witnesses of the circumstances surrounding his child’s last agonized moments on earth.
‘This man you’re searching for,’ Helen said to Boyce. ‘Is he the mysterious Beezy?’
‘He is, and I don’t know why we haven’t laid hands on him yet.’ The Surrey police chief looked glum. ‘These tramps know how to lie low, mind you – they’ve places to hide where we wouldn’t think of looking. But all the same, he must show himself soon. He’ll need to find food, if nothing else.’
Madden had seen the description circulated by the Surrey police. It had been sent not only to village bobbies in the district but to farmers and gamekeepers as well, and Will Stackpole had brought him a copy of the poster.
Beezy was described as being of middle age, bearded and dressed in rough clothes – words that could be applied to a good many vagrants, as the constable had pointed out. However, he had one distinguishing feature noted by the farmer he’d worked for recently at Dorking: the lobe of his right ear was missing.
‘And we haven’t seen any sign of Topper either since we let him go,’ Boyce complained. ‘Wright had to strike his name off the witness list today. I wonder where he’s got to.’
The suspicious glance he directed at Helen as he spoke these words provoked no reaction, beyond the amused smile it brought to her lips.
‘Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong,’ she declared. ‘I haven’t set eyes on him since that evening in Brookham, and I haven’t the faintest idea where he is now.’
Both statements were true, Madden reflected, though, as an old policeman, he might have been tempted to charge his wife with being less than entirely frank. The previous day their gardener, Tom Cooper, had found a bunch of rose hips and old man’s beard bound in a willow branch lying on the grass outside the gate at the foot of the orchard. He’d been somewhat put out to discover, in addition, a crude design scratched on the green paint of the wooden gate – it showed a cross with a circle round it – and had been for taking a brush and a tin of paint down and repairing the damage, until Helen had stopped him. ‘Let it stay there,’ she’d decreed.
Madden had found the tramp’s gesture mystifying until his wife explained it to him.
‘He’s lying low,’ she said. ‘He knows the police will be looking for him again. They should have hung on to him while they had the chance.’
‘Yes, but since he was here, why didn’t he come in and see you?’
‘Because then we would have had to decide what to do – whether to inform the police or not – and he didn’t want to put us in that position. Mrs Beck was right. He’s a proper gentleman, my Topper. But I do worry about him. He’s getting too old to be wandering about.’
Boyce, meanwhile, had turned his attention to Madden. ‘To get back to what I was saying, John – the girl’s injuries aside, do you think there’s something unusual about this killing?’
Listening to the Surrey policeman, Helen felt a twinge of unease. Well aware of the regard in which her husband had once been held by his colleagues – and not only those at the Yard – she knew that his views would be eagerly sought, particularly in a case as grave as this one. But watching it happen now, she was filled with misgivings.
‘Oh, it’s shocking, I grant you,’ Boyce went on, having failed to elicit an immediate response. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that poor child’s face. But ten to one this Beezy will turn out to be the man we want. Or someone very like him.’
‘A tramp, you mean?’ Madden sounded surprised.
‘Well, yes, I suppose I do. That sort of man.’ The chief superintendent pursed his lips. ‘Look, it’s not inconceivable, living the life they do… tramps… vagrants… they lack so much… they’ve no opportunity…’ He directed an embarrassed glance at Helen, who’d divined the source of his discomfiture.
‘You’re implying they’re sexually deprived,’ she said.