Read The Reckoning for Free Online Page B

fixture in their lives.
    Stooping to fondle the silky head pressed against his knee, Madden saw his wife come out of the house onto the terrace above and, at the sight of her still-slender form silhouetted against the light behind her, his heart skipped a beat and in an instant he was transported back years, to an evening just such as this when, in gathering twilight, he had walked up to the house from the gate at the bottom of the garden and seen her for the first time.
    â€˜We thought you might be coming back this way.’
    Helen smiled a greeting from the terrace as he climbed the steps to join her.
    â€˜I saw our vixen,’ he told her. ‘She’s got a new litter. That’s her third, by my count.’
    â€˜Don’t you dare call her our vixen. She’s yours, not mine.’ She greeted him with a kiss. ‘At this very moment she’s probably off plundering some hen-coops. The woods have run wild – I hear about it from my patients all the time. They want me to speak to Violet when she gets back.’
    She meant the daughter of the late Lord Stratton, Highfield’s largest landowner who had died the previous year. A childhood friend of Helen’s, Violet Tremayne, as she was now, was married to a diplomat currently posted to the British Embassy in Moscow.
    â€˜Are you expecting them?’ Madden asked.
    â€˜Next week. I had a card from her today. Ian’s got leave.’
    Helen took her husband’s arm.
    â€˜And I’ve got more news. I had a letter from Lucy today. She’s coming home. She says she’s penniless.’
    â€˜Penniless?’
    Their twenty-year-old daughter had been in Paris for three months, learning French. Under new regulations introduced recently by the government, it had become impossible to send money abroad and Madden had been concerned about her, wondering how she was coping. Not so his wife.
    â€˜A relative term, where Lucy’s concerned, my darling.’ She kissed him. ‘Our daughter is nothing if not resourceful. I shouldn’t bother my head about it, if I were you. Just think how nice it will be to have her back. We never seem to see our children any more.’
    Their son Rob, a naval officer currently serving on a destroyer in the Far East, had not been home for nearly a year.
    â€˜What you must do, though, is call Billy Styles at the Yard. He wants to talk to you.’
    â€˜Now?’ Madden glanced at his watch.
    â€˜He said to tell you he’d wait for your call, even if you were late back. It must be something important.’
    â€˜Do you mean to say he went out fishing and somebody shot him? Why, for heaven’s sake?’ Helen gave her husband the glass of whisky she had poured for him. He had made his call from the study and then joined her in the sitting room.
    â€˜The Sussex police have no idea. Billy was down in Lewes today. He’s only just heard about the letter.’
    â€˜And your name was in it?’
    â€˜Apparently. Or at any rate the name Madden. But the man who wrote it – the man who was shot – said he knew this Madden had worked at the Yard years ago, so it must be me.’
    â€˜And they don’t know why he wanted to get in touch with you, or why he didn’t send the letter?’
    â€˜They haven’t the first notion. His brother doesn’t know, either. It’s a mystery.’ Madden shook his head. ‘Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s got anything to do with him being killed a few days later. He had a visitor, this Oswald Gibson, before he was shot – some person who upset him. It was after that that he began to write the letter.’
    He paused, biting his lip.
    â€˜And that’s not all. According to Billy, something similar happened up in Scotland a month ago. A doctor, a GP, was shot in his surgery in exactly the same manner.’
    â€˜So both men could have been killed by the same