It made no difference that her charges were unfair. Fairness didn’t come into it. Billy saw that. Her distress, the fury she’d felt on learning of what had befallen her husband, was its own justification. The situation called for a sacrificial lamb, and there were no other candidates present. But he was cut to the quick by her words. Her good opinion had always mattered to him and he knew that the loss of it would leave him forever the poorer.
‘I thought I could trust you. I believed he’d be safe as long as he was with you. So tell me, how could this have happened?’ She demanded an answer, peering into his face, refusing to release him from her gaze. ‘You, Billy… I’m asking you. How could you have -’
‘Stop it, Mummy.’
Cut short by the child’s cry, Helen turned. She saw her daughter standing by the door. Lucy’s tear-filled eyes had the puffy look of one just aroused from sleep. The cord of her blue dressing gown trailed on the floor behind her.
‘Why are you being so horrid to Billy?’
‘Lucinda Madden!’ Knocked off balance, Helen struggled to recover. ‘Go to bed this instant.’
‘No.’
Defiant, the little girl came forward into the kitchen. She took up a position in front of the sergeant. Pale with the enormity of her rebellion, she faced her mother. ‘Not till you promise,’ she declared, her voice quavering.
‘Promise what?’
‘That you won’t be horrid to him any more.’
‘And why should I do that?’
‘Because he’s our friend.’
Helen stared back at her daughter. She seemed in shock, and Billy saw, with a flash of insight, that her anger had been only a disguise, something to cling to. That knowing how close Madden had come to death that afternoon had thrown her emotions into turmoil, pushing her to the edge of collapse. It was with an enormous effort that she gathered herself now and spoke.
‘Because he’s our friend?’ She looked down at the small figure before her, as though in puzzlement. Then a smile came to her lips. ‘But of course he is. And thank you for reminding me, my darling. I promise not to be horrid again.’
She stooped and kissed the little girl.
As she straightened, Billy saw that tears had begun to stream down her cheeks. Madden had already risen and he came to her side at once. Taking her in his arms, he drew her away from the table and they stood together, not speaking, but holding each other so closely they might have been one.
Wide-eyed, Lucy looked at Billy for an explanation. The sergeant put a finger to his lips.
‘Let’s go upstairs,’ he whispered in her ear, and hand in hand they tiptoed out together.
Epilogue
It was not until spring of the following year that Angus Sinclair finally closed the file on Gaston Lang and his many aliases. Despite weeks of patient digging little more had emerged to flesh out the figure whose shadowy past, like the single grainy snapshot supplied to the police by Philip Vane, offered no more than an impression of the man behind the mask.
‘We’ve found out all we ever will about him, sir. I think it’s time to write finis to the case.’
Sinclair had offered his verdict to the assistant commissioner after Bennett had summoned him to his office, along with Chief Superintendent Holly, so that he could inform them of the contents of a letter which he’d received from Berlin.
‘It’s full of assurances… inquiries proceeding, and so forth
… but nothing beyond what they’ve already told us. “Many difficulties have arisen in the course of this investigation and the full truth may never be known.” I think Nebe’s warning us not to hold our breath.’
Bennett passed the letter across his desk to Sinclair who studied it for a moment.
‘Reichskriminaldirektor.’ The syllables tripped lightly off the chief inspector’s tongue. ‘There’s a mouthful for you, Arthur.’ He handed the letter on to the chief super, who was sitting beside him. ‘It seems at least one of our Berlin brethren knows which side his bread is buttered. No surprise there, by the way, sir.’ He addressed himself to Bennett. ‘There’s a good reason why they won’t pursue this matter. I’ve received a letter myself on the same subject. I’ll get to it in a moment. But first, let me sum up what we’ve gathered in the way of information. It’s been accumulating somewhat in my absence.’
The chief inspector had only recently returned from Manchester where he’d been engaged for some time in a complicated case of company fraud.
‘The Swiss police have delved a little deeper into Lang’s background and come up with one rather chilling detail. It certainly made my hair stand on end when I read it.’ Sinclair grimaced. ‘You’ll recall what we learned from them earlier. That he was born a bastard. His mother was a domestic servant in a village not far from Geneva and if she knew who the father of her child was she never said. In any event, she died soon after he was born and Lang was taken in by the village pastor and his wife who gave him their name and raised him as a son along with their own baby daughter.’
‘Yes, I remember.’ Bennett sipped at a cup of tea. He’d had a tray sent in. ‘But later they dispatched him to an orphanage. We wondered why.’
Holly rumbled in accord. ‘They were still making inquiries, as I recall.’
‘Yes, the problem was they’d lost track of the pastor. Lang, of course, his name was. His wife had died and he’d disappeared from the village. More than that: it turned out he was no longer a churchman; he’d left the ministry.’
‘What about his daughter?’ Holly frowned. ‘She must have known something.’
The chief inspector grunted. He was staring into the cup of tea which he held balanced on his knee.
‘That’s part of what I have to tell you.’ He looked up. ‘It’s what the Swiss police learned after they’d tracked down Lang. The pastor, I mean. He was living in another part of Switzerland, in a village in the mountains, near Davos. He’d become a recluse, and at first was unwilling to respond to their questions. In particular, he didn’t wish to hear any mention of the boy: of the child he and his wife had raised.’ Sinclair shrugged. ‘However, by degrees they broke down his resistance and in the end he told them the story.’
The chief inspector paused. He appeared to be choosing his words.
‘It seems clear to me, reading between the lines, that they didn’t understand what it was they had burdened themselves with. The pastor and his wife, I mean. What affliction they had brought into their lives. As the boy grew older they realized he was not like others: that he had neither the desire nor the capacity to make those connections necessary in human society: that he was quite alone in the world and content to be so. But the picture was darker than that. Quite early on they detected a strain of deliberate cruelty in him. He had to be kept away from domestic pets, which he was prone to torture, and also had to be watched when in the company of other small children.’
Sinclair shook his head. ‘This is a theme we’re familiar with. It crops up time and again in cases involving violent offenders, particularly sexual criminals. Childhood experience is sometimes held to account for this sort of extreme anti-social behaviour. But it’s by no means the rule, and would seem to have been absent in this case, where the boy was shown nothing but kindness by his foster parents. Did something happen to him earlier, you may ask – during the months he was with his mother?’ The chief inspector shrugged. ‘I’ve no answer to that. In fact, I’ve no explanation to offer beyond the somewhat chilling observation that as a species we seem to possess a capacity for savagery that defies reason. That these seeds must lie in all of us. And that it’s a lesson history teaches us over and over, and which we never seem to learn.’
The chief inspector coughed to cover up his embarrassment. He wasn’t sure why he’d said what he’d just said, except that in some way it was related to the talk he had had with Franz Weiss at Highfield, and beyond that to some broader comprehension of which he had not, until that moment, been aware.