The Reckoning (12 page)

‘Come in, Lil,' he called out.

Detective-Constable Lily Poole crossed the room to his desk. Smartly turned out in a skirt and blouse, topped by a man's blue jacket, she took the chair he pointed to.

‘What are you up to at the moment?'

‘Not much, guv. I've been working for Mr Strickland.'

‘Forgery case, is it? Petrol coupons printed abroad – Belgium or somewhere?'

‘That's the one.'

‘What are you doing exactly?'

‘Not a lot. Paperwork mostly.' Lily Poole looked him straight in the eye. Her expression didn't change.

And making tea for the lads, Billy guessed. It wasn't written down, but as far as most of his colleagues were concerned, women were still second-class citizens, good for only two things, and one of them was making tea. Even now there were only a handful in plain clothes and mostly they were restricted to domestic cases. But since he'd been one of the ones instrumental in getting Lily Poole transferred from the uniform branch to CID, and since she just happened to be several times brighter than the average heavy breather fleshing out the Met's roster of detectives, he wasn't about to stand by and watch
her being put in her place by a mentality better suited to the Stone Age.

‘Well, I've got something else for you to do,' he told her. ‘More interesting, I reckon. It's this shooter.'

Lily blinked. It was her only reaction. She continued to look straight at Billy.

‘I'll be working the case, and I need someone with me. Would you like the job?'

‘Would I ever.'

Like sunlight falling on barren rock, the smile that lit up her face had the effect of transforming it. No beauty at the best of times, in repose Lily's features were marked by a steely jaw, testimony to the character and determination that had brought her this far. Now, for just a moment, she looked like a young woman who had been handed a bouquet. The effect was shortlived. After only a moment she scowled.

‘But what about Mr Strickland?' she asked.

‘Don't worry about him. Your job now is to go through this.' He pushed his file across the desk to her. ‘I want you to read it carefully.'

Lily picked up the folder. ‘More paperwork, is it, guv?'

Billy looked at her. She flushed under his gaze. They had met on a murder case a couple of years earlier when she had been a uniformed officer stationed at Bow Street. As luck would have it, she had played a notable part in hunting down a ruthless killer, and from the first Billy had admired her single-mindedness together with her refusal to kowtow to superiors: her insistence on standing up for herself. But there were limits.

‘Now listen to me, Detective,' he said. ‘There's a man out there with a pistol who's already topped three people and, as things stand, we've no real leads apart from an iffy description. In the circumstances you should do what you're asked to do and assume there's a good reason for it.' He paused to let that
sink in; then he continued: ‘Facts have a way of accumulating in an investigation. Statements get made and filed away, things get missed. That's why it pays to have someone look at them with a fresh pair of eyes. Do you get my drift?'

‘Yes, guv.' She had turned redder under his gaze.

Billy smiled.

‘Besides, you might find something there to interest you: Mr Sinclair's name, for one.'

‘Strewth!' Caught off-guard, Lily burst out. It had been the chief inspector more than anyone who had brought about her transfer to CID. The recommendation that Sinclair had sent to the commissioner had been one of his last official acts before retiring. ‘Is he back on the force?'

‘No such luck. But he's a friend of Mr Madden's . . . You've heard that name, I fancy?'

Lily nodded.

‘Well, if you read that file you'll see how they're both involved in this, and why there's no explanation yet for any of these killings. Have a good look through it and let me know if anything strikes you.'

Billy paused so as to underline his next words. He looked her straight in the eye.

‘And don't hang about, Lil. We haven't a clue as to what this bloke's up to – why he's killing people – but there's a good chance he isn't done yet.'

11

V
IVID?
V
ISIBLE?
V
ISIT?

Sally Abbot stared hard at the pencilled squiggle on her shorthand pad, as if somehow, by doing so, she could decipher its meaning.

Vindicate? Vilify?

The ‘V' sign was clear enough, but there was no strategically placed stroke or dot, as decreed by Pitman's, to indicate what followed. Oh dear, her mind must have been wandering again. And none of the words she had thought of so far made any sense in the context of the paragraph.

‘Vee,' she murmured to herself – and then all at once, like a bolt of lightning, the answer came to her.

‘
Vimy
,' she said aloud.

It was the ridge he'd been going on about all morning – Vimy Ridge – which the Canadians had attacked so brilliantly in 1917. Just why Sir Horace wanted to include it in his memoirs – he wasn't Canadian and he'd played no part in the battle – was a mystery. But he seemed to take pleasure in describing war (even if he hadn't played much of a hand in it, having done most of his observing from well in the rear). ‘Hard slogging' was frequently the order of the day in his accounts; divisions tended to get ‘knocked about'. But although there were times when they
suffered ‘rather severe casualties', it was surprising – to Sally at least – how often, having gone through a day or two or three of this kind of thing, the men who survived the shells and bullets had remained in ‘good heart'.

Once, out of curiosity, she had gone to a library in Winchester and looked up some of the battles that Sir Horace was describing in an official history and had stared in horror at the numbers of dead and wounded printed there. Ten thousand, twenty thousand . . . The figures had lost all meaning when you thought of them as individuals: as men with families, loved ones, children even. On one occasion more than fifty thousand had fallen in a single day. Leaving those who had survived the slaughter in ‘good heart'?

Not for the first time Sally had wondered whether General Sir Horace Canning, Rtd, Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire and currently Lord Lieutenant of the County of Hampshire, had a screw loose.

She looked at her watch and sighed. He was due to address the Winchester Rotary Club that afternoon and luckily the occasion would be preceded by a lunch, so he'd be out of her hair for several hours. She had only taken the job as a way of filling in time before her marriage, which was due to take place the following spring, but the three months she had spent with Sir Horace felt like a lifetime and she had recently told him she couldn't continue working for him beyond the end of the year. He had not been best pleased.

‘Bad show, Miss Abbot. Thought I could count on you. Thought we had an understanding. Yes?'

He had that peculiar way of speaking. Barking, Sally called it. He barked at her and he barked at Mrs Watts, the housekeeper. He barked at Greig, his chauffeur, and at the maids and the gardeners. He was like a bad-tempered pug.

The bell on her desk rang. She rose and went into the next room.

Her employer was at the French windows, gazing out over the well-tended gardens fronting the old stone manor, standing with his hands locked behind his back and his chest thrust out, in a pose Sally supposed was military and which was reflected in nearly all of the photographs of his past career decorating the walls of the study. There he was as a younger man in an old-fashioned uniform astride a horse, but somehow managing to project the stiff, forward-thrusting pose. In the background was a flat expanse of grassland fading into the distance, and beneath the picture was a penned caption that read:
En route to Mafeking, 1900.
Seeing it, Sally imagined him barking at the Boers.

The most recent photographs dated from the First World War, in which, as Sally knew from the memoir she was helping him to compile, he had attained the rank of general. One picture showed him standing by an artillery piece, swagger stick clamped tightly under his arm; in another he was bent down in a trench, peering through a periscope. Pride of place in the collection was given to a print larger than the rest, which was placed in a commanding spot in the middle of the wall facing his desk. It pictured him striding along beside another senior officer, both grim-faced, both staring straight ahead. The caption beneath the photograph read:
With Field Marshal Haig, Arras, 1917.

‘Butcher Haig,' Aunt Millicent had remarked when Sally mentioned the photo to her. ‘That's what people used to call him. Imagine sending all those young men to their deaths time after time. Mind you, if it hadn't been him, I expect it would have been someone else. Once the war started, no one knew how to stop it.'

They had reached a point in Sir Horace's memoirs when he had just been appointed ‘corps commander' – obviously a big thing – and only the day before Sally had typed out a passage that recounted the summons he had received to attend the field
marshal at his headquarters, where he had learned of his promotion.

‘He wasn't much of a general by all accounts, our Sir Horace; it's a wonder he got where he did.' Aunt Millicent knew a surprising amount about the war. Her younger brother had been killed early on at the Battle of Mons and she had also lost two cousins later in the conflict. ‘Most likely he was one of Haig's yes-men, someone who didn't question his tactics, no matter what they cost in terms of lives lost. He retired quite early – I think he realized he wouldn't be offered another command – but he was taken out of mothballs during the last war and given some job in the Home Guard. And now he's the Lord Lieutenant, if you can believe it. Not that that counts for much. Mostly he presents prizes at agricultural fairs and makes boring speeches.'

It was Uncle Guy who had suggested to Sally that she might like to work for Sir Horace for a few months before she got married. She had given up her job in London at the start of the summer in order to spend time with her mother, recently widowed and not long returned from India, where Sally's father had worked in the colonial administration, and to see her settled in Feltham, the Hampshire village where Uncle Guy was the vicar.

‘Sir Horace has been lonely since his wife died, poor old boy, stuck up there alone at the Manor,' Guy had told her. Bascombe Manor, situated a mile or so outside the village, had been the seat of the Canning family for generations. Sally gathered that Sir Horace had inherited the estate following the death of his elder brother, who had expired leaving no heirs. ‘He mentioned to me that he was working on his memoirs and asked if I knew of anyone with secretarial experience who could help.'

The Lord Lieutenant had shown no sign of having heard her come in now. He remained staring out of the French windows. Finally he turned and fixed his blue, slightly bulbous eyes on
her. Sally had been taken aback by his gaze the first time they met. It was more like a glare, and she had thought something must have upset him. He had seemed to tremble on the brink of outrage. It was only later that she learned it was his normal look – the face he showed to the world – and with it had come a further realization.

‘His glaring and barking are all a great front,' she'd declared to Tony, her fiancé, when she had told him about Sir Horace. ‘I think he's afraid.'

‘Of being found out, do you mean?' They had gone for a walk in the woods behind Feltham and were strolling hand-in-hand. ‘Then I know how he feels. During the war we used to put up a terrific front. You wouldn't have thought we were the least bit scared.' Tony had been a pilot in the Battle of Britain and had won a Distinguished Flying Cross. ‘But I know that every time I went up I was terrified. I kept wondering if that day would be my last. But I never showed it. Or at least I don't think I did, and the same was true of the other chaps.'

‘Yes, but that was different . . .' It pleased Sally that, unlike some of his friends who were unable to put the war behind them, her fiancé never tried to play the hero. ‘And with him it's not a passing thing. I bet you he's always been like that.'

‘Pretending to be someone he's not?' Tony had ruminated on her words. ‘Then I feel sorry for him. It means his whole life has been a fraud.'

Sir Horace was still glaring at her now.

‘My speech, Miss Abbot?' His protuberant eyes were accusing.

‘It's in that folder on your desk.'

Where I put it. Where you saw me put it.

Giving no sign that he had heard her, he went to the folder, glanced at the clipped pages inside, folded them neatly in half and slipped them into the inner pocket of his jacket.

‘I shall be back by four. You've enough to keep you busy? Yes?'

‘Quite enough, Sir Horace.'

‘Good.'

Turning on his heel, he strode to the door. She heard his footsteps echoing on the uncarpeted, flagged corridor outside. The noise receded. Sally breathed a sigh of relief. As soon as she heard the front door close and the sound of the car starting she went out through the windows onto the terrace and lit a cigarette. Tony wanted her to stop smoking, and she'd promised to before they were married. But she felt she had earned a fag that morning and she stood at the balustrade looking down at the garden below. Laid out in the Italian style, its neat, symmetrical beds and gravel paths were contained at the far end by another balustrade, beneath which the parkland stretched away for a quarter-mile or more to a wooded knoll.

Leaning against the stone rail, enjoying the mild sunshine – and the taste of the tobacco, forbidden fruit as it was – Sally saw something move in the distant grove of trees. The Bascombe estate covered more than a hundred acres and extended for a mile or so beyond the wooded knoll. Again she caught sight of movement in the undergrowth, and this time a figure appeared at the very edge of the wood. Shadowed by overhanging branches, it was impossible to make out in any detail, but presently Sally caught sight of the glint of sunlight on glass – two glints, to be precise – and she realized that someone was studying the Manor through a pair of field glasses.