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her into a bedroom where a night light burned. A dark-haired young woman in a maid's uniform got up from a chair as they entered. Dr Blackwell motioned to her to sit again. 'This is Mary,' she whispered. 'Sophy knows her well. They go for walks in the woods together when she comes to visit.' He went closer to the bed. At the sight of the blonde head buried in the pillow an old grief awoke in him and he stood for a long time, bent over her, listening to the faint rhythm of the child's breathing, so precious it seemed. Watching him, Dr Blackwell was startled by the look of pain that crossed his face. Earlier her curiosity had been aroused. She had wondered about this rough looking man who bore the stamp of the trenches in his dark, shadowed eyes. A year spent working in a military hospital had taught her to recognize the signs, but she'd been surprised to see them on the inspector's face. The police had been one of the reserved professions. Now, all at once, another image came to her, raw and shocking, causing her to flush and bite her lip. And she thought then how cruel life could be. How heartless and uncaring.
    Madden lived with ghosts. They came to him in dreams: men he had known in the war, some of them friends, others no more than dimly remembered faces. Most were the youths with whom he had enlisted, shop assistants and drapers, clerks from the City and apprentices. Together they had marched through the streets of London in their civilian clothes to the bray of brass bands, heroes for a day to the flag-waving crowds, full of pride and valour, none dreaming of the fate that awaited them in the shape of the German machine-guns. Valour had died on the Somme in the course of a single summer's day. One of the few survivors in his battalion, Madden had mourned the death of his comrades. For a time their loss had seemed like an open wound. But as the war went on he ceased to think of them. Other men were dying around him and their deaths, too, came to mean little. With no expectation of staying alive himself his emotions grew numb and by the end he felt nothing. He never spoke of his time in the trenches. Like many others who came back, miraculous survivors of the carnage, he had tried to put the war from his mind, doing his utmost to block out all memory of it. Offered his old job back, he had hesitated before accepting. His decision to leave the Metropolitan Police before the war had been taken in the hope of finding a new life in the familiar surroundings of the countryside. And although he came to accept the choice he had made, finding in the day-to-day demands of investigative work at least a partial shield against the charnel house of memories that threatened to engulf him, he could not shake free from the cold hand of the past. Always he sensed the abyss at his feet. Sleep brought no respite, for what he kept from his mind by day he was forced to relive in his dreams where he was haunted by the faces of old comrades and by other, more terrible images from the battlefield, and from which he would wake, night after night, choking on the imagined smell of sweat and cordite and the stench of half-buried corpses. For a while he had hoped all this would pass. That his memories would grow dim and peace of mind return to him. But he lived in the long shadow of the war, and as time passed and the shadow deepened he came to see himself as permanently injured, a casualty of the conflict, which had failed to kill him but left him none the less damaged beyond repair. Increasingly solitary, he saw his life as all that was left to him: a tattered sail that might bear the wind but would bring him to no haven.
    AT NINE O'CLOCK the following morning, Chief Inspector Sinclair addressed the team of detectives assembled in the Highfield church hall. 'Some of you with experience in murder inquiries may already have recognized the particular problems we face in this case. Most murders, as we know, are either domestic in origin or are committed