The Blood-Dimmed Tide (2 page)

‘Oh, no, not for sure.’ She swallowed. ‘But Jenny Bridger brought her a new pair only the other day. Alice came and showed them to me. They were shiny black with pearl buttons on the straps, just like the one Topper brought.’

‘But he wouldn’t say where he’d found it?’

‘No, nor anything else.’ Molly Henshaw dabbed at a teary eye. ‘So I gave him a cup of tea to keep him occupied and ran outside to look for Dick.’

‘We’d just come back from the fields, Will, and I saw Molly waving to me.’ Her husband took up the story. ‘She told me what had happened and I went in to see Topper myself, tried to get him to talk. But it were no good. He wouldn’t say a word. So I came to fetch you.’ Noticing the tears that were coming down his wife’s cheeks now, Henshaw put his arm around her shoulders. ‘There, there, old girl,’ he said gruffly. ‘Don’t take on now.’

Stackpole caught Helen’s eye, his glance bright with urgency.

‘Molly, dear, could we go inside now?’ She pressed the hand she was holding. ‘I need to see Topper myself.’

The room lay in shadow, the only illumination coming from a shaft of dull grey light entering through the back window. It fell on the kitchen table, where a child’s shoe, black and shiny, showed starkly against the scrubbed wooden surface.

Surveying the scene from the doorway, Helen heard the murmur of Stackpole’s voice. It came from the hallway at the front of the cottage. He was speaking on the telephone to the Surrey police headquarters in Guildford. Madden stood behind her in the narrow passage, out of sight of the shabby figure seated on a straight-backed chair in the far corner of the room. She felt his reassuring hand on her shoulder and reached up to press it with her own. Then she crossed the room to where Topper was sitting.

He showed no awareness of her approach. Well into middle age, or perhaps past it – his white-stubbled cheeks were deeply grooved – he sat slumped in the chair with his chin resting on his chest and his hands loosely linked on his knees, seemingly oblivious of his surroundings. Like others who’d encountered the old tramp in the past, Helen knew him only as Topper, a name that derived from his hat, a battered piece of evening headgear, cracked at the brim and missing half the crown, but given a jaunty, individual air by the addition of a cock pheasant’s tail feather stuck in a red velvet band. The manner in which he wore the hat – square, and pulled down low – gave it the appearance of a permanent feature, and he was seldom seen without it. Dressed in a black cloth jacket over striped trousers, his feet were shod in heavy boots, worn down at the heels and tied with a combination of string and broken shoelaces.

‘Hullo, Topper,’ she said softly.

At the sound of her voice he lifted his head. She drew up a chair beside him.

‘How have you been?’

He gave a slight shrug, but made no other response.

‘Are you well?’

He nodded. A smile came to his lips, and he fixed her with a look of shy affection.

‘We missed you at harvest time. Why haven’t you come to see us?’

‘Was coming…’ The muttered words brought a faint gasp from the doorway behind Helen where Molly Henshaw had appeared and was watching them. ‘Had to meet Beezy first…’

‘Beezy?’

The tramp nodded again.

‘Who’s Beezy? Where were you meeting him?’

Topper’s grey eyes lost focus. He looked away.

Helen regarded him in silence for a few moments. Then she took his left hand in hers. ‘Let me see your arm.’ She pushed up the sleeve of his jacket and then the threadbare flannel shirt beneath it, revealing a fresh scar fully six inches long running from the top of his wrist up the back of his sunburned arm towards the elbow. She ran her fingers lightly over it.

‘Look, Molly,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘That’s where Topper cut his arm last year. He was helping us with the haymaking and his scythe slipped. I had to sew him up.’

‘You fixed it…’ The old tramp chuckled. He brought his eyes back to hers. ‘You mended old Topper.’

‘It was a nasty cut, but it’s healed well.’

Still holding his hand in hers, and continuing to stroke his arm, she spoke again. ‘You were right to bring the shoe, Topper. But we need very badly to know where you found it. Can you help us?’

The fingers she was holding stiffened and she saw the fear in his eyes. His glance shifted and went past her shoulder. She looked round again. Madden had come quietly into the room with Molly Henshaw. Stackpole’s uniformed figure hovered in the doorway behind them, and when Topper caught sight of it his eyes fell. He slumped lower in the chair.

‘Now none of that,’ the constable rumbled. ‘You know me, Topper. There’s no need to take on.’

Helen turned back. ‘The shoe,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Where did you find it? You must tell me, Topper. Please…’ She had kept hold of his hand, and after a moment she felt renewed pressure on her fingers. When she bent closer he whispered in her ear.

‘What was that?’ She struggled to hear his husky murmur. ‘Did you say Capel Wood?’

Behind her, Stackpole stiffened in the doorway. ‘We’ve already looked there,’ he muttered to Madden. ‘Is he sure?’ he asked Helen.

‘Capel Wood?’ She repeated the name clearly and looked into the tramp’s eyes for confirmation. He nodded. ‘Would you take us there?’ she asked. ‘Would you show us where you found it?’

A tremor went through his body and his grip on her fingers tightened. He shook his head violently.

Helen studied his face for a few moments. Then she leaned close again. ‘Whereabouts in the wood, Topper?’

Silent at first, he simply stared at her. But then, as though drawn by her steady gaze, he bent forward and whispered to her once more.

Helen glanced behind her. ‘By the stream, he says…’ She rose and came over to him. ‘Will, this is going to take a long time, and I’m not even sure how much more I can get out of him.’

A scowl crossed Stackpole’s features. ‘Sir?’ He addressed Madden. ‘Could we have a word?’ The two men went out into the passage. The constable gestured. ‘What do you think, sir? Should I try and squeeze him harder?’

Madden shook his head. ‘Helen knows him better than anyone. You’d be wasting your time.’

‘By the stream…’ Stackpole grimaced. ‘It’s not much to go on. And we’ve already been there. There’s a path that runs alongside it. It goes through the wood. I took some men and we walked the length of it, calling her name. Once you get off it you can’t see three feet in front of you.’ He shook his head in despair. As he glanced at his wristwatch, a flash of lightning lit the dim passageway for an instant, and the answering peal of thunder set the windowpanes in the kitchen rattling. ‘Well, those detectives from Guildford will be here soon. Better wait for them, I suppose…’

His glance seemed to suggest another course of action, however, and Madden responded to it. Despite the formality of address which the constable insisted on maintaining towards him, they were friends of long standing.

‘No, we can’t do that, Will. We must get out there right away. I think Topper found more than a shoe.’

The first fat drops of rain splattered the windscreen of Madden’s car as he turned off the paved road onto a rough track that ran through hedgerows and overhanging trees around the dark flank of Capel Wood. The dull grey afternoon light had changed to a deep leaden gloom. Black, swollen clouds were racing in from the west.

‘Won’t be long now,’ Stackpole predicted, squinting up through the glass. He glanced behind him at the roll of canvas lying on the back seat as though to reassure himself of its presence there. It was Madden who’d suggested they bring it with them.

‘I don’t know what we’ll find, Will, but you may need to cover the area.’

The piece of tarpaulin had been provided by Dick Henshaw. He’d used it to patch a hole in the roof of his cottage the previous year when a number of shingles had blown off in an autumn gale. While he was fetching it from the garden shed Helen had come out of the kitchen to talk to Madden.

‘I must go and see how Jenny Bridger is. I won’t say anything to her about Capel Wood.’ She eyed her husband unhappily, upset to see him becoming involved. Madden’s life as a policeman lay in the distant past, and it was one she did not wish to recall. To the constable she added, ‘You’d better keep an eye on Topper, Will. He’ll slip off if he gets the chance.’

Stackpole had charged both Henshaws with this duty and cautioned them to say nothing to the neighbours until the reinforcements from Guildford arrived.

‘I don’t want word of this spreading. Not till we’ve gone over there and seen what there is to see.’

‘Please God you find her,’ Molly Henshaw had murmured as they departed.

The hope – it was more of a prayer – that the child might be no worse than lying injured and in need of succour had lent speed to their preparations, but glancing at Madden’s expression as he steered the car down the narrow, rutted lane, Will Stackpole felt they shared the same grim premonition as to the girl’s fate.

‘We’ll be taking the same route Topper took, will we?’ Madden’s low voice was barely audible over the sound of the car’s motor as they ground along in bottom gear.

‘Yes, sir. If he was heading for Brookham he’d have come into the wood from the other side and walked through it on the path, the one that runs by the stream. It leads straight to Brookham.’

They’d debated taking this same path themselves, following Topper’s route in reverse and walking up to the wood from the hamlet. But the likelihood of being caught in the open by the advancing storm had persuaded them to use the car instead and they had driven along the road to Craydon for half a mile before turning off it close to the point where Alice Bridger had last been seen.

As the track they were on now continued to circle the wood, the hedgerows on either side dropped away and they saw to their right a wide, open field where a herd of Friesians stood close together, their sturdy black and white bodies barely visible in the dying light. Although the rain continued to fall in isolated drops the storm was fast approaching and a number of cows were already lying down in anticipation of the deluge that was about to break on them.

Their way ran close to the wood now, the spreading branches of oak and chestnut brushing against the side of the car, the road making a slow bend to the left which they followed until they came to a circular patch of dried mud where the track petered out and where two haystacks shaped like beehives stood close together beside a wooden fence bordering a field beyond.

As Madden brought the car to a halt he glanced at the dashboard and saw they had covered just over two miles since leaving Brookham. He got out and briefly inspected the ground around them. The bare strip of earth showed only the deeply engraved ruts made by cartwheels at some earlier date.

‘Are you thinking someone might have brought her here?’ Stackpole asked. ‘Come the same way we did?’ He’d climbed out of the car himself and was putting his helmet back on.

Partly shielded by the haystacks, the spot where they’d ended up looked out over empty fields with a distant vista of tree-clad hillocks.

‘It’d be a quiet spot,’ the constable observed. ‘Nobody working in the fields on a Sunday. No reason for anyone to come here.’

‘It’s possible.’ Madden shrugged. ‘But we’d only be guessing. Let’s get moving, Will. There’s no time to lose.’

The constable donned his cape, then retrieved the roll of tarpaulin from the back seat of the car, tucking it under his arm. He pointed ahead of them to a line of willows and low bushes that wound across the field towards the tree line.

‘There’s our stream, sir. It runs clear through the wood and comes out on the other side not far from Brookham.’

The two men set off, with the constable leading the way, forging a trail through knee-high grass around the outskirts of the wood until they came to the stream. A pathway was visible running alongside it on the further bank and they crossed to it by means of a fallen log. Thunder crashed all around them and they hurried to seek the shelter of the forest. When they got there, Stackpole stepped aside off the path.

‘You lead the way, sir. Your eyes are better than mine.’

Madden went ahead and soon found himself in a zone of twilight cast by the dense canopy of foliage, which deepened as they moved further into the trees. Rain pattered on the leaves overhead, but did not reach the ground, which remained dry. A layer of damp leaf mould underfoot muffled the sound of their steps.

The path continued to run parallel to the stream, which was visible most of the time, disappearing only briefly behind tree trunks or overhanging branches. Madden kept his eyes on it, knowing that Topper must have come this way himself since he was heading for Brookham and that whatever he had found would not be far from the water.

‘How big is the wood, Will?’ He spoke over his shoulder. ‘How long will it take us to walk through it?’

‘Twenty minutes, at least. It’s a fair size.’

Half that time had elapsed, and so far they had seen nothing of note, apart from a set of stepping stones in the stream which they had passed and which Madden had inquired about. Stackpole told him they connected with a secondary path that ran down to the road between Brookham and Craydon.

‘So Alice Bridger could have walked into the wood?’

Stackpole nodded. ‘Or been brought. I came that way myself with the men when we searched up here earlier.’

Not far beyond this point the path changed direction, crossing the stream by a second set of stepping stones and then apparently taking a course away from the brook into the depths of the forest. Madden halted.

‘Topper said by the stream…’

The constable came up to his shoulder. He saw what Madden meant. ‘They only separate for a short distance, sir. The path and the stream. They join up again a little further on.’

Madden shook his head, unconvinced.