by Rennie Airth
'Now don't go putting ideas into Master William's head,' Annie counselled. The boys had always been 'Master William' and 'Master Tom' to her, long after they had grown up. 'Let him slip along to the village and find out what's going on. Chances are, it's all a great fuss about nothing.'
Earlier William had donned his cap, backed the Lagonda out of the garage and driven into Stonehill to discover, as he put it, 'what the devil this is all about'.
He returned an hour later, in no better mood than when he had left. His wife and mother were waiting in the morning room to hear what he had to tell them.
'It's the most extraordinary business.' William seated himself on the settee beside Charlotte. 'Half a dozen police constables were sent here from Crowborough last night, and the others arrived at dawn, and just as Annie says they all marched off into the forest and haven't been seen since.'
William had obtained the information from an elderly police sergeant from Crowborough, who had been left behind at the village hall to receive and act on any messages sent back. He had professed ignorance of the purpose of the operation, but assured William that, 'Everything's in hand, sir, and there's nothing to worry about.'
From other sources William had learned that word had been put about in the strongest terms that no one was to accompany the police, who had been last seen heading off in the direction of Owl's Green, on the other side of the village, nor attempt to follow in their tracks. Explanations would be made in full in due course.
'The one man who might have told me something was nowhere to be seen,' William Merrick complained bitterly. 'I mean Proudfoot. Apparently he's there with them. According to his wife he was out all night.'
Harriet Merrick listened with sympathy to her son.
He was a man of consequence in the district, a Justice of the Peace. It was clear he felt he should have been consulted. She saw him instinctively rub his withered arm, and almost in the same instant, as though acting on a signal, his wife turned to him, putting her hand on his.
'Don't worry about it, darling. I bet you it turns out to be nothing.'
'Nothing! With twenty policemen tramping about the countryside!' William made his annoyance plain.
'Nothing that'll come to anything, I mean.'
William rose. 'I'm going to ring Richards,' he declared, referring to a magistrate they knew in Crowborough.
'I want to get to the bottom of this.' He went out.
Charlotte looked at her mother-in-law with raised eyebrows. 'Don't worry, I'll get him moving, I promise.'
Mrs Merrick didn't know whether her daughter-in law was aware of her irrational wish to see them all depart. She had done her best to disguise it, restricting herself to repeated admonitions to them not to waste the precious days of their holiday and drawing their attention to reports in the newspaper describing the glorious Indian summer that the west of England was still enjoying. But perhaps Charlotte sensed something more. Harriet Merrick had always meant to be a good mother-in-law, but her resolutions had never been tested. From the start she'd been touched by Charlotte's instinctive understanding of the special burden her son bore — his guilt at having survived the war in which his brother had died was but one manifestation of it. They'd been allies from the first day.
Charlotte ran her hands through her hair. She was thinking of having it bobbed in the prevailing fashion, but both William and his mother had begged her not to.
'I'm going to see to the children's packing,' she announced. 'Then I'll have all the cases brought down.
In the end we'll simply have to leave.'
A few minutes later Annie joined her mistress in the morning room bearing a silver tray on which a bottle, a spoon and a glass rested.
'Time for your medicine, Miss Hattie.'
Mrs Merrick made her customary fuss. 'I don't think it does me the slightest good. And it tastes quite foul.'
'You'll drink it none the less.'
The teaspoon containing a greyish liquid hung poised in the air before Mrs Merrick's mouth. Since she knew from experience it would remain there till Doomsday she opened her lips. 'Disgusting!'
Smiling, Annie handed her the glass of water. 'So you haven't been imagining things, after all.'
Mrs Merrick swallowed. 'What do you mean?'
'Policemen tramping about in the forest. Quite a to-do.'
'Oh, that!' Harriet Merrick dismissed the matter with a wave of her hand. She gazed into Annie's deep green eyes. 'I had such a strange dream last night,' she said softly. 'I was walking in the forest and I saw Tom.
He was in the trees ahead of me and when I called out he turned and beckoned, and I was coming closer and closer, but I couldn't quite reach him, and then I woke up… It'll be four years on Tuesday.'
'I know, my dear.' Annie took her hands.
'And then I lay awake for the rest of the night and all I could think of was how much I wanted William and Charlotte and the children to go away.'
Mrs Merrick removed her glance from her companion's eyes and stared down at their linked hands.
Annie sighed. 'It's a strange one you are. My poor dead mother always said you had the gift. No more than a child you were then. Little Hattie from the big house.'
Mrs Merrick smiled. 'Never mind the gift… What shall we do when they've gone? Let's be wicked. Let's light a fire in the drawing-room and roast potatoes in the ashes, the way we used to.'
'That's wicked, is it?'
'We'll sit in the garden and talk and gossip…'
Harriet Merrick looked into the face of her old friend.
'Oh, Annie, I'm so glad you'll be here with me.'
The green eyes opened wide. 'And where else would I be?'
The morning dragged on. William remained closeted in his study. The household, disrupted by the delay, was at sixes and sevens. Had all gone according to plan, parents and children, with the addition of Miss Bradshaw, the nanny, would have set out at ten o'clock in the Lagonda intending to reach Chichester in time for lunch. (The family's regular attendance at Sunday service had been suspended for once.) There William and Charlotte had arranged to spend the night with a schoolfriend of Charlotte's before leaving early next morning for Penzance. Other arrangements were dependent on these. At Harriet Merrick's insistence the entire household staff had been given the full two weeks off. She and Annie would manage alone, although Mrs Dean would come over from the village now and again to cook a meal for them. The three maids were poised to depart, but until the master had made a final decision everything hung in abeyance.
At a quarter to eleven Charlotte knocked on the study door and went in. Ten minutes later she emerged and hurried straight to the kitchen to deliver instructions before rejoining her mother-in-law in the morning room.
'We're leaving. I've asked Cook to make up a picnic hamper and we'll have lunch on the way to Chichester.
William's ringing the Hartstons now to tell them we won't be there till this afternoon.'
'Dearest Charlotte… you're a genius. How did you manage it?'
'It wasn't that difficult. William had more or less decided himself. He's had no satisfaction telephoning people. No one seems to know what's going on in Ashdown Forest. He's still quite cross, but his attitude now is, "If they don't want to tell me anything they can jolly well deal with it themselves."'
The two women smiled conspiratorially.
'The children will love the idea of a picnic,' their grandmother predicted.
'That's what I thought. I'm going to call them down now.'
She went out and Harriet Merrick was left rejoicing.
Eyes narrowed under the brim of his grey felt hat, Sinclair peered through a screen of leaves at the clump of trees and thick bushes half a mile away. Open pasture lay between the tangle of holly and hawthorn where the chief inspector crouched with Madden on one side of him and Inspector Drummond, a plainclothes detective from the Tunbridge Wells CID, on the other. The expanse of grassland, thinly sprinkled with young oaks, offered no cover and
prevented them from approaching any closer to the site of the pit into which Emmett Hogg had fallen.
'It's pretty well surrounded by open land, sir.'
Constable Proudfoot, crouching behind them, answered Sinclair's unspoken question. 'When I came back from Stonehill yesterday evening I made a circuit of the area. Took me a good while — I had to be sure of staying out of sight. That thicket there's like an island. There's no way you can get near it on any side without being seen.'
The village bobby, a stocky young man with cropped fair hair and a peeling nose, had been waiting at Stonehill to guide them through the woods to their present position, a walk of about three miles, he claimed, though to the chief inspector, increasingly anxious as the morning wore on, it seemed longer.
'You've been on your feet a good while, Constable.
Twenty-four hours and more. How are you bearing up?'
'Well enough, sir.' Proudfoot grinned and rubbed his bristly chin. 'I could do with a shave, though.'
The group of policemen had been bent behind the bushes, watching, for twenty minutes when they were rewarded by the sight of movement in the thicket.
'There!' Madden and Proudfoot spoke in the same breath.
Sinclair saw clearly the upper half of a man's body take shape amidst the undergrowth. He had his back to them and he bent down almost at once, then straightened, then bent again as though he were dragging something through the brush.
'I believe he's dark-haired.' Madden spoke quietly.
His eyes were narrowed to slits.
'Well, that's a relief,' the chief inspector said at last.
'At least we know he's still there. Now, let's get back to the others. We must decide what to do next.'
Two minutes later they had retreated into the shadow of the forest and rejoined the squad of uniformed policemen who were sitting under cover in a shallow depression some way in from the edge of the treeline. They numbered twenty-two in all. In addition to the six armed men Sinclair had brought — nine with Madden, Hollingsworth and himself- there were a further six officers bearing arms among the Tunbridge Wells contingent.
Inspector Drummond, too, was armed. He had been waiting for them with his men outside the village hall in Stonehill, a short, black-haired man with ice-blue eyes. He measured his fellow detectives. 'Chief Inspector Smithers sends his regards, sir. He would have come himself, but he said there was no point in two chief inspectors getting in each other's hair. He wishes you the best of luck.'
'My thanks to you both,' Sinclair responded drily.
They had paused in the village only long enough to assemble the men before following Proudfoot into the forest. The handful of villagers who had emerged from their cottages to take in the extraordinary sight of a score of coppers gathering on the green in the dawn light had been told sternly by Proudfoot not to venture on their trail.
Thankful at being able to stretch again after his long spell of crouching, Sinclair asked the constable to draw a rough plan of the thicket and the surrounding terrain. Proudfoot took out his notebook and busied himself for a few minutes. He handed the result to the chief inspector who squinted at it, with Madden and Drummond peering over his shoulder. The rough pencil sketch showed a semi-circle of woods surrounding the thicket and open pastureland. Where the woods ended the constable had marked the terrain down as 'broken country, scattered bushes'. This section included a stretch of water, which he named as Stone Pond.
'That's on the far side of the thicket from where we stand, sir.' Proudfoot indicated what he meant on the drawing. 'No need to worry about the pond — it's as good as a wall. It's the land on either side of it that's our problem. No trees to provide cover, just a few scattered bushes and flat ground.'
'All the same, we'll have to get men over on that side and then have everyone advance at the same time.'
The chief inspector squinted at the sketch. 'Now, this keeper, Hoskins. Where's he, exactly?'
Proudfoot pointed with his pencil.
'This stretch of woods we're in here — it bends around to the left and runs as far as that small hill.'
He tapped the pad. 'I told him to get up on top of there and stay put. If our man leaves the area at least Hoskins will know what direction he takes.'
'But he knows not to interfere?'
'He does, sir.'
'Very well.' Sinclair glanced at Madden. 'John, what do you think? You've had experience of this sort of thing.'
Madden trod on his cigarette. 'If you put armed men in a circle and bring them in to a central point they'll end up shooting each other. Better to concentrate them at three points and have the other officers filling in the gaps. Here — let me show you.'
He took the notepad from Sinclair's hands and borrowed the constable's pencil. The others watched as he drew a rough triangle on top of Proudfoot's plan.
'If we place the armed officers at each angle they'll be shooting towards the opposite base of the triangle, not at each other. If shooting starts, the unarmed men must drop to the ground and stay there until ordered to advance.'
Sinclair studied the combined drawing. 'Yes, I understand,' he said. He looked up. 'Would you see to that, John? The positioning of the men?'
'Yes, sir, of course.' The inspector thought for a moment. 'They'll have to start advancing at an agreed time,' he said. 'There'll be no way we can signal them without giving away our presence. I would suggest four o'clock this afternoon.'
'Good Lord!' Sinclair glanced at his watch. 'That's more than five hours off. Can't we be ready before then?'
'Probably.' Madden shrugged. 'But for some reason these things always take longer than one thinks. Also, the light will be better later. There'll be less glare.'
His glance went to the line of uniformed officers seated nearby in the shade. 'If that man over there is Pike, he'll shoot at us from cover. But he can only be on one side of the thicket at a time. The men must be told to advance quickly if they're unopposed. Once they're in the brush, he loses the advantage of his rifle.
But they must watch for the bayonet then.'
Crouched on his haunches in the dugout, Pike began to lay out his things. From the capacious leather bag he drew his uniform — shirt, breeches, tunic — and placed them on the broad step cut into the rear of the excavation. His neatly rolled puttees were added to the pile. Next came the gas mask.
His movements, measured and unhurried, gave no clue to his mental state, which for many hours had been battered by doubt and indecision. His normally stony emotional structure was fractured by extremes of feeling that produced at almost the same instant a hot flush of impulse towards action and an icy realization of the dangers that hung over him.
Travelling on his motorcycle from Rudd's Cross the day before, he had several times been on the point of turning back and returning to the hamlet. To the garden shed and Mrs Troy's cottage where a situation now existed that required his urgent attention.
But his need drew him on, and in the dark recesses of his soul this seemed to have its own logic. He had no other business than the one he was engaged on. It was the sole aim of his wasted life and, seen from that perspective, even the need to protect himself paled into unimportance.
Nevertheless, his agitation had already produced small but significant changes in his behaviour. He had begun his journey from Rudd's Cross in the usual manner, following a complicated route of back roads and country lanes, avoiding major thoroughfares. But after an hour he had lost patience and, with a recklessness foreign to his nature, had joined the main road, taking the coastal highway to Hastings, then swinging north towards Tunbridge Wells. Bent over the handlebars, and with his cap pulled low over his eyes, he had ridden at a steady thirty miles an hour without incident until he reached a turn-off that took him westwards into Ashdown Forest.
It was late afternoon when he arrived — still daylight — but he strode uncaring through the woods to the site of the dugout, his bag hoisted on his shoulder.
His thoughts were fixed o
n the hours that lay ahead.
Above all, on the following evening. Everything else was shunted to the back of his mind, to be dealt with later.
On reaching the dense thicket he found the brushwood he had used to camouflage the digging undisturbed except in one corner where some of the branches had fallen into the pit. He examined the spot carefully. Although it seemed likely that wind and rain had shifted them, he spent the next twenty minutes searching the area for any signs of a human intrusion. A footprint. A cigarette stub. He found nothing to arouse his suspicion.
His sleep that night was troubled. For the first time in years an old nightmare returned and he had woken drenched in sweat. The air inside the dugout seemed stifling and he had climbed out and stood motionless in the thick brush listening to the night sounds: the stirring of leaf and branch, the distant cry of an owl.
He remembered nights spent in the woods with his father. The waning moon, close to the end of its cycle, hung low in the eastern sky.
At first light he rose, determined to regain his poise, and settled at once into a routine of small tasks on which he could fasten his mind. He had the whole day to fill.
First he cleared all the brushwood, now yellowed and browning, that he had used to camouflage the dugout, gathering it into a large bundle which he later dragged through the thicket until he was some distance from the site of his digging where he began to distribute it — a piece here, a piece there — to make it seem like casual deadwood. Midway through it occurred to him there was no point in what he was doing. He didn't intend filling in the dugout later, or attempting to hide it, as he had on Upton Hanger.
The police must have found his earlier excavation.
They would know what to look for now. Yet in spite of this he completed the task he had set himself before moving on to another.
Twice during the morning he had paused to scout the surrounding landscape. He had chosen the patch of stunted oaks and dense underbrush because of its featurelessness and lack of any practical use. No one could have any reason for entering it, he reasoned. (None but himself.) Crouched at the fringe of the bushes, he had scanned the woods and stretches of open land encircling the thicket. On the second occasion he had caught a glimpse of a figure moving through the trees. It appeared for only a few seconds and then vanished. He remained with his eyes fixed on the spot for several minutes, but saw nothing more to attract his notice.