The Stratford Murder by Mike Hollow (best thriller novels of all time .TXT) 📗

At a quarter past ten on Thursday morning, therefore, after he’d briefed Cradock on some of what he’d been told at Special Branch, the two men set off from the police station for the ten-minute walk to where Evans lived. Jago had given the fireman the benefit of the doubt the previous day, and found himself hoping Mrs Evans’s testimony would bear out her husband’s claim concerning the rings. Not that he was being swayed by any sense of sympathy for Evans, he assured himself. If the man had committed a crime, he must be held to account for it, and there was something about stealing rings from a dead body that was particularly distasteful. It was dishonourable. But there was also the reputation of the fire service to consider. People had been quick to spread rumours after a number of firemen were convicted of looting from fire scenes, and he had no desire to embarrass the local Auxiliary Fire Service by prematurely arresting one of its members.

They reached the junction with Church Street, and Jago was reassured to see that the parish church of All Saints had come through another night’s bombing unscathed. For the second time in as many days a memory of sitting in its churchyard came unbidden into the forefront of his mind, this time of talking quietly with Dorothy about the stars, and war, and life. It had felt as though she were peeling away layers of the armour he’d built up to protect himself, but in a way that was only for his good. He remembered too with a pang of guilt how in that same conversation he had spoken harshly, paining her in a way that he would never have wanted.

He pushed these thoughts away as they crossed into Marcus Street. Here the scene was less tranquil: halfway down it, a bomb had left a large crater in the middle of the road, on either side of which two houses – or possibly three, it wasn’t easy to tell – had been reduced to an uneven pile of matchwood and rubble. The rescue workers were still there, but it looked as though they were packing up their trucks to go. Jago guessed that if anyone had survived the explosion they’d have been removed to a rest centre or hospital by now. He stopped to ask whether he and Cradock could lend a hand, but the answer was a polite no, with thanks.

At the end of Marcus Street they turned right into Stephen’s Road, looking for number 46, where Hosea and Amy Evans had their home. Jago had begun to count down the terraced houses from the one nearest to them, but he could soon tell that 46 was going to be in a section that was showing signs of serious damage. As they got closer to the house they could see that the glass had been blown out of all its windows, the slates had been blasted off the roof, the chimney stack had disappeared, and the front door was swinging open. Jago peered in at the door and saw wrecked furniture in the small front room that opened directly off the street. He knocked on the door and called, but there was no answer.

He turned away. The only activity he could see in the street was the relatively new sight of a small squad of Pioneer Corps soldiers shovelling the last of the debris onto the back of an army truck, in which they would presumably soon be transporting it to barges and dumping it on the Essex marshes. Any other civil defence workers who might have been there earlier had gone.

He was about to set off with Cradock in search of an ARP warden when a woman hailed them from across the street. She was middle-aged and wearing a floral-patterned cotton overall with an almost-matching turban.

‘Excuse me,’ she called as she approached them. ‘Are you looking for Mr Evans?’

‘Yes, we are,’ said Jago. ‘We’re police officers.’

‘Come with me, then. He’s in my front room. I’m a few doors further up and missed the worst of it.’

She took them into her house, which indeed seemed to have got off lightly in comparison with number 46 and its immediate neighbours. They found Evans sitting in an armchair with his head in his hands. Beneath the overcoat he was wearing, which like his hair was covered in grey plaster dust, his legs appeared to be clad in pyjamas. He looked up as they entered.

‘Mr Evans?’ said Jago.

Evans responded with a blank gaze that seemed to go straight through him and out to the street beyond.

‘Mr Evans,’ Jago repeated, his voice subdued. ‘Your house has been hit?’

‘Not my house,’ said Evans in a flat monotone. ‘My Amy.’

He closed his eyes, and the tears began to course down his cheeks and drop onto his coat.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Jago, squatting down on the floor beside the chair.

‘She came home yesterday afternoon after you’d gone,’ Evans whispered. ‘Said she’d decided I was right, she should try it again for a night, sleeping at home. Said if it was my night off she’d have me there to look after her, and it wouldn’t be as bad as when I was out on duty.’

‘But—’ Cradock began, but Jago hushed him.

‘We went to bed in the Anderson shelter in the back yard, and she wasn’t too bad at first, but then when the anti-aircraft guns started up she got very jittery – held on to me and wouldn’t let go. I said I’d go and get her some cotton wool so she could stick it in her ears and keep some of the noise out, and I’d fetch her a nice tot of whisky to help her sleep. So I went into the house. I was only gone a few minutes.’

His voice broke. Jago put an arm round Evans’s shoulders as the fireman struggled to regain his self-control.

‘I’d just gone upstairs into the front bedroom to find some cotton