The Blood-Dimmed Tide Read Online Free PDF

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?’

4
    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.
    ‘What about the Bridgers?’ he had asked Helen then. They were standing close together in the small hallway of the