The Blood-Dimmed Tide Read Online Free PDF Page B

Henshaws’ cottage, where the telephone was. ‘What have they been told?’
    ‘Nothing, so far as I know.’ Shocked by the news her husband had brought from Capel Wood, Helen had wanted only to get him home. Sensing his intention then, she had put a staying hand on his arm. ‘Leave it to the police, my darling. It’s not your business any longer.’
    But Madden had refused to be shaken from his course. ‘They have to be told,’ he’d insisted. ‘They can’t be left in ignorance. It’s not right. Who knows what time the police will get back?’
    So she had taken him to the Bridgers’ cottage, leaving him in the kitchen there to wait while she went in search of the murdered girl’s father, wishing there was some way she could ease the burden he had taken on himself. A few minutes later, standing alone in the back yard, Helen had watched through the lighted window as her husband spoke words she could not hear and had seen the other man clap his hands to his ears as though in agony and lay his head like an offering on the table before him.
    Catching Madden’s eye now, she smiled, hoping to dispel his dark mood. ‘What’s happened to Topper?’ she asked. ‘Are the police still holding him?’
    ‘He spent the night in the cells at Guildford. Only by invitation, mind you – they’d no right to detain him – but it seems to have loosened his tongue. He told them all he knew and they let him go this morning. He’s been ordered to appear at the inquest on Friday.’
    ‘Will he do that?’ Helen looked sceptical.
    ‘I doubt it. To quote Will, he’ll more likely be in the next county by then. Unless he drops in to see you, of course.’
    ‘I’ll be hurt if he doesn’t.’
    Her words brought a smile to Madden’s lips, just as she’d hoped they might, and they laughed together.
    The old tramp had first come into their lives several years before, knocking on the back door one summer afternoon, another in the legion of homeless: tramps, vagrants, men of no fixed abode in the language of the law courts, whose numbers had swelled vastly with the years of the Depression. The Maddens’ cook, Mrs Beck, had standing orders to offer food and drink to these wanderers whenever they presented themselves. Whether or not she admitted them to her kitchen was up to her, but Helen had returned that afternoon from her rounds to find Topper seated at the table, with his hat beside him and his bundle on the floor at his feet, busily plying knife and fork under Cook’s approving eye. He had risen to his feet when she entered and made her a courtly bow.
    ‘A proper gentleman, this one, ma’am.’ Mrs Beck had purred her approval.
    Ordering her own tea to be served in the kitchen, Helen had sat with the old man, eliciting little more from him than his name and some account of his recent journeyings, but finding herself drawn to the dusty, travel-stained figure with his absurd attire. Although he told her nothing of himself – either then, or later – she’d been moved by the sound of his soft voice and by his gentle manner. His grey eyes, seeking hers across the table in fleeting, timid glances, had spoken of pain and loss; of some past to which he could never return.
    His meal done, she had given him directions to their farm, with a note to her husband. Topper had stayed for a week, helping with the harvest and sleeping at night in a corner of the barn. On the morning of his departure Mrs Beck had found an old jam jar on the back steps outside the kitchen filled with pink campion and the yellow buds of St John’s Wort, picked from the hedgerows. Tucked beneath it was a scrap of paper bearing a roughly pencilled message: For the lady.
    She had presented them to Helen at the breakfast table with a smile. ‘Looks like you’ve made a conquest, ma’am.’
    ‘What did Topper tell them?’ Helen asked Madden now.
    ‘He said he came into the wood from the same side we did – from the fields – and left the path to get to