by Rennie Airth
“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 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 grand-mother predicted.
“That’s what I thought. I’m going to call them down now.”
She went out and Harriet Merrick was left rejoicing.
3
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 into 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 kn
ows 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.”
4
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 on 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.
At one o’clock he broke off to heat a tin of stew on his spirit stove and brew a mess tin of tea. Then he cleaned and put away his utensils and began to unpack his bag.
Examining the gas mask he frowned at the discovery of a small tear in the canvas hood beside one of the straps. Obsessively tidy, he would have mended it on the spot if he’d had needle and thread with him. The first time he had used a mask, in his attack on the farmhouse in Belgium, he’d worn it simply to hide his identity in case he left survivors. He had blown his whistle to cause confusion. (But it was his own pulses that had been set racing!)
At Bentham, in Kent, he had burst into the house bareheaded. It had been a mistake. In the bedroom upstairs, when he dragged the woman from her bath to the bed, she had looked into his eyes. Screaming, she had begged him to stop and Pike had found he could not endure the sensation of having his face uncovered to her gaze.
The shame of it.
He had killed her quickly. Nothing had gone well at Bentham.
Although he could easily have devised a more convenient cover for his face, he recalled the fierce satisfaction of his first assault, when he had worn full military uniform, and soon afterwards he had broken into an Army surplus warehouse in Dover and stolen what he needed, including a gas mask. At Melling Lodge the woman’s screams had left him unmoved. It was only the excitement of having her in his arms, crushed beneath him on the bed—excitement which had boiled up and overflowed too soon—that had prevented him from achieving the goal he hoped to attain that night.
The afternoon wore on. The light in the dugout dimmed as the sun declined. Overhead the bright blue autumn sky of the morning had paled. Fleecy clouds shaped like scallops drifted in from the west.
Pike took up his rifle. He had stolen the weapon from a barracks in Caterham when he was working for a construction crew installing a new plumbing system in the camp. F
or more than two years after his return from France—he’d smuggled himself aboard an empty supply vessel in Boulogne harbour—he had lived hand to mouth, picking up odd jobs, sometimes breaking into houses to steal food and money. It was only after he had obtained his post with Mrs. Aylward that the grim purpose he had found for his existence began to take shape in his mind.
He had already checked the firing mechanism—he did it as a matter of course whenever he unpacked the bag—but from habit he settled down to clean it, drawing pieces of two-by-four through the barrel with a weighted cord, oiling the breech. He checked the magazine to see that it was fully loaded.
When everything else was done he reached into his bag again and brought out a flat leather case, fastened with brass catches, and a whetstone wrapped in shammy. He had saved the honing of his razor until last.
He took it from the padded case. The ivory handle was yellowed with age. The blade glinted blue in the pale sunlight. It had been in his family for three generations. Together with his hunter timepiece it was the only souvenir he had of his father.
5
Detective Constable Styles walked grim-faced along the woodland path, two paces behind Inspector Drummond who in turn followed in Madden’s tracks. Billy was sulking. He had felt humiliated all morning, ever since he had been barred by Chief Inspector Sinclair from drawing a revolver along with the other men of the Scotland Yard contingent. Billy had stepped up to the grilled counter to sign the book, but at that moment the chief inspector, who was standing nearby talking to Madden, glanced over his shoulder and said to the armoury sergeant, “That won’t be necessary,” Giving no further explanation, and leaving Billy little option but to do a smart about-turn and walk away with his face on fire and thoughts of homicide not far from his mind. He had received training in the use of firearms as a uniformed constable and, as far as he knew, had passed the course satisfactorily. The chief inspector had no right, he reckoned.