Among the Mad (33 page)

“Where are we going?”

“Upstairs.”

“Upstairs?”

Maisie had stayed at the house before, so knew the
geography of the Partridge home. She walked toward the large bedroom where
Priscilla’s three sons were sleeping and opened the door with care. A
night-light was glowing on a table to one side of the room, and the two women
looked in at the boys, asleep. The youngest, Tarquin, had thrown off his
bedcovers and slept at the bottom of his bed, with one leg over the side. The
eldest, Timothy, lay on his back, with one arm bent across his eyes. The middle
son, Thomas, slept under the covers, the bump under the eiderdown making it
seem as if an animal were in the midst of hibernation.

Priscilla began to weep again.

“They’re all here,” said Maisie. “And they’re all
safe. You can’t keep them so forever, because one day they will be men, and I
know they will be very fine men. But now they are safe, and they are well, and
they are loved. You need do no more, or less, for them.”

“But, I—”

Maisie closed the door without a sound. “But what you
can do is not try to dull your fears with drink. You know, more than anyone,
that it doesn’t take away the pain of grief or fear, it only robs you of
today.”

Priscilla nodded. “I suppose I know what my resolution
should be.”

“Darling? Are you up there?” The voice of Douglas
Partridge echoed on the stairs. “Ah, I might have known I’d find you here with
‘Tante Maisie.’ Come on, breakfast is about to be served and—believe it or not—even
after that never-ending supper, everyone’s famished.”

“Just coming!” Priscilla turned to Maisie and took her
hand. “Thank you, Maisie. Thank you for coming tonight. I know you were
exhausted, but your being here means so much to me.”

“I’m glad I came too,” said Maisie. Then, louder, “You
know, I am very, very hungry. Douglas is right—let’s go down to breakfast.”

SEVENTEEN

January 1st, 1932

After a late start on New Year’s Day, Maisie arrived
just in time to join Frankie for a midday meal of rabbit stew and mashed
potato. Father and daughter sat together at the kitchen table with the door of
the cast-iron stove wide open, so the warmth of the blaze could be felt even as
the sky outside was wreathed in the shimmering gray clouds that were known to
herald a dusting of snow.

“I’ll have to get Jook out soon, just in case that
weather closes in.”

Maisie pushed some potato onto her fork and looked out
of the window. “I’ll take her if you like, Dad. You stay here in the warm.” She
turned back to her father and continued eating.

“We’ll go together, down to the meadow, across the
field beyond, then double-back around through the woods to the front of the
manor. I want to check on the horses, too. Drop in temperature like this can
bring on a colic.”

“And you’d better wrap up warm, Dad. You don’t want to
catch anything yourself.”

As soon as they’d finished the meal, Maisie dressed in
thick corduroy trousers more suited to a farm laborer, with a flannel shirt and
a heavy pullover to keep the cold at bay. Woolen socks and heavy Wellington
boots would keep the moisture and, hopefully, the cold from her feet, and she
wore her old cloche to hold the warmth in her body—otherwise Frankie would
remind her that heat escaped from the top of the head. Soon father and daughter
were making their way across the field, with the lurcher at heel but ready to
run in pursuit of a rabbit if given leave to do so. Maisie walked at a slower
pace than she might if alone, for her father could not move as smartly as a
younger man, and when they reached the bottom of the meadow, he stopped to
catch his breath. Barely a sound dented the silence; on such a cold day not
even birds sang. In the distance, they watched a fox steal across the top of a
snow-dusted field, and all the while, the dog remained still, her head tilted
up as she watched Frankie’s eyes, her skin attuned to his every move.

Frankie turned his head at another sound, one that did
not come from nature. “There’s a motor car coming, just pulled up along by the
Dower House.”

“Is Lady Rowan expecting anyone today? Or Maurice,
perhaps?”

“No plans for guests, as far as I know—and I always
know who’s coming and going.”

Maisie looked back at the Groom’s Cottage, and turned
to her father. “We’ll see who it is soon enough, when we come around the front.
Ready then?”

“Right you are, love.”

They began walking again, though Maisie wondered about
the crunching of tires on gravel, a sound that echoed in winter’s stillness as
the vehicle pulled into the estate. Motor cars were rare in the village still,
and never seen on a Sunday or bank holiday. And because the Comptons did not
entertain quite so much now, the arrival of guests was always known and
expected, and the unexpected was unwelcome by the Comptons and their servants
alike.

Leaves still crisp from an overnight frost crackled
underfoot, disturbing the silence of a winter woodland. They crossed the stream
where it narrowed, and Maisie held out her hand to help her father up the bank
to join the path again. Now Jook was walking on in front, her head low, her
nose to the ground as she loped along with such a light step that her paws left
barely a print underfoot. Father and daughter climbed over a stile to begin the
last lap of their walk, which would bring them out to the front of the estate,
where they would continue along past the lawns until reaching the turning off
to the Groom’s Cottage, Frankie’s home.

As they approached the narrow turning to the right,
they could see smoke from the cottage’s two chimneys lazily snaking upward, and
the thought of easing back in armchairs on either side of a crackling fire
caused them to walk a bit faster.

“I think I might sit down in that chair and go right
off like a top, what with that lovely drop of stew inside me and a bit of fresh
air. I can have a look at the horses later.”

“You should, Dad. It’ll do you good.” Maisie was
tired, and thought the idea of an afternoon’s forty winks sounded like just the
prescription she needed after the events of the past week and a late night
behind her.

“Well, who’s this then?” Frankie Dobbs stopped at the
top of the lane leading to the cottage, and looked straight in front of him.
His lurcher stood at his side and began to growl.

“Oh no, now what?” Maisie linked her arm through her
father’s. “They’ve no right to come here.”

“That your Scotland Yard blokes then?”

Maisie nodded. “I could tell that black Invicta
anywhere, Dad. Yes, it’s them.”

As Maisie and her father approached the cottage,
Stratton and MacFarlane emerged from the motor car.

“Sorry to disturb you on New Year’s Day, Miss Dobbs.”

Maisie thought MacFarlane seemed less than contrite.
“I trust you wouldn’t have come to my father’s home unless it were urgent.”

“Yes, it is important,” said Stratton, who held out
his hand toward Maisie’s father. “Mr. Dobbs, a pleasure. And I’m sorry we’ve
had to come to your house today.”

Frankie shook hands with both Stratton and MacFarlane,
and stepped up to the front door. “You’d better come on in, instead of standing
out here in the perishing cold.”

Maisie made a pot of tea, which she served in front of
the fire in the small sitting room. Frankie said he wanted to read the racing
pages anyway and took his seat alongside the kitchen stove.

Maisie passed a cup of tea to MacFarlane. “What’s
happened?”

“Bit of a problem, I’m afraid. We brought in your man,
Anthony Lawrence, to identify the body.” MacFarlane took a gulp of the hot tea
and winced as it went down. Then he set the cup on a small table next to his
chair and folded his hands in his lap. “Anthony Lawrence says he’s never seen
this man in his life, and it’s not Stephen Oliver, because Stephen Oliver is in
a secure wing at the Princess Victoria Hospital, or should I say the loony
bin.”

“It’s not Oliver?”

“No.”

Maisie was silent. “But we know our man was the one
who wrote the letters, and was the same man who killed the dogs, birds and a
junior minister—and who planned to kill again, most likely at St Paul’s.”

“Yes, that’s right,” said Stratton. “Our guest in the
morgue is definitely the man we’ve been after. But we don’t know who he is.”

MacFarlane spoke again. “A couple of things came to
light during the postmortem.” He handed Maisie an envelope. “You will see he
had areas of deep scarring to the legs, and upon closer examination there was a
significant amount of shrapnel still embedded in his flesh. There was also that
scar on his face and jaw. All of this indicates a man who served in the war—and
given his age, it wasn’t the Boer War. He was definitely British, we know that.
Mind you, he might have gone overseas before the war, when thousands of boys
went off to find their fortune, so he could have served with any army from the
Canadians to the South Africans, Anzacs or the Doughboys. He could have been an
airman, which I doubt, or on board ship, though evidence of his wounds would
suggest a battlefield. But we should remember that men from the navy were
pressed into the artillery and infantry, because that’s where they were
needed.”

Maisie had been reading the contents of the envelope
as MacFarlane spoke. Now she replaced the pages and pulled out the dead man’s
diary, which had also been placed in the envelope. She leafed through it,
stopping at a page here and there, then closed the diary and returned it to the
envelope, which she passed back to MacFarlane.

“You’re very quiet about this, Miss Dobbs. What do you
think? Who do you think this man might be?”

“I don’t know, Chief Superintendent MacFarlane. My
search led me to think it was Stephen Oliver, but there was an element of
doubt—in fact, I think there’s always an element of doubt. We know we have our
man, and we’re as sure as we can be that he acted alone, even though he had a
friend, Ian Jennings—oh, and I wouldn’t be too sure that Ian Jennings is the
man’s real name. Of course we were given to understand he received a pension,
but we never saw any official forms with his name, did we?”

MacFarlane and Stratton looked at each other. Stratton
cleared his throat. “What are you saying, Miss Dobbs?”

Maisie wondered how to couch her response, how to best
present her sense of the situation. “I am saying it’s a possibility you’ll
never discover the man’s true identity. He might as well be John Smith. He destroyed
or did not retain any identification and did not reveal his name in either his
diary or to me when I was in his flat. If Croucher knew, it’s too late, he took
that information with him when he died, as did Ian Jennings.”

“We’ve searched Croucher’s rooms and there’s nothing
there, though it seems he was in the habit of trying to help out men who are
homeless and who were soldiers in the war. We’ll have more on him by tomorrow,
in any case.” MacFarlane sighed. “Well, at least we know there’s a killer off
the street and we’re all safe, don’t we?” He placed his hands on the arms of
the chair, as if he was about to stand.

“I don’t think we can be that complacent.”

“What do you mean?” MacFarlane sat back again and
looked at Maisie, then Stratton, and back at Maisie.

“Chief Superintendent, in our man we saw the symptoms
of a disease. He was wounded in body and mind in the war—indeed, he was wounded
in his soul. He came home to endure a great deal of pain and felt as if he had
become invisible, as if he didn’t exist—read that diary, it says as much. Now,
according to Dr. Lawrence, there were about sixty, seventy, eighty thousand men
who suffered some sort of war neuroses—shell-shock—to a greater or lesser
degree. And if you listen to Lawrence for long enough, he’ll tell you how that
number has been massaged since 1915—first, to put the lid on a syndrome that
few understood, and secondly to limit damage to the exchequer from a
never-ending pensions liability. Lawrence says that some two hundred thousand
men are alive today who were shell-shocked, and if you agree that anyone who
served has sustained a psychological wound of some description, then you are
looking at more than just a few time bombs.”

“Are you saying that all these men are likely to go
off and cook up nerve agents or get up to some other mischief?”

Maisie shook her head. “Of course not. Our man was
clearly someone who knew his way around a laboratory, and who was capable and
inventive enough to create those conditions in a small cold-water flat. He might
be someone you can find on the basis of that skill alone, but don’t count on
it.” Maisie considered her words with care. “Many of those men came back to
loving families. When I was a nurse at the Clifton Hospital, you would see
mothers and fathers who treated their sons with such care, such gentleness, as
if they were children again. There were others who could not bring themselves
to see a son so maimed, or you’d see a sweetheart, a young wife, perhaps, who
could not bear to go unrecognized by her husband, who could not envisage
sharing a home with a mate who was not the man she had taken into her heart.
Many of those men were discharged from hospital care at the earliest
opportunity, allowed to leave, told to find a job and settle down and live a normal
life. But life will never be normal again, not when you’ve gazed into the jaws
of death, not even when you have heard the cannonade in the distance. The
screech of tires on the street or a motor car backfiring can send a man running
for cover, can lead him to lose control of his physical movements, of his
speech. And the people look away, don’t they? We all know when someone isn’t
quite right, and for the most part, it’s an element of our nature to want to be
out of the way of people who aren’t what we consider to be ‘normal.’”