Having lived with his grandparents for some years, he had gone for a soldier at the age of sixteen and found a way of life ideally suited to his needs, the strict demands of military practice fitting easily into his own more rigorous code. He had prospered to the extent of his capacities and by the time war broke out had already attained the rank of sergeant. For a while he had been employed as an instructor at a training depot, but when his battalion was posted to the front he had assumed his former position as a company sergeant.
Wounded on several occasions, he nevertheless managed to survive in rhe lottery of trench warfare, and the summer of 1917 had found him, now a company sergeant major, engaged with his battalion in the British offensive south of Ypres at the start of the months-long agony that would later be called Passchendaele.
During the bitter struggle for control of the Menin Road, Pike's company had come under heavy fire from the German artillery. Crouched behind a tree stump he saw a man's head blown off as neatly as if it had been hewn with an axe, the trunk stumbling on for several paces before collapsing. Next moment he was flung high into the air by an exploding shell that buried itself in the ground a few yards away.
He awoke to find himself lying in a crater with the battle still raging around him. Concussed and barely conscious, he listened to the fluttering sound of shells as they streamed through the upper air overhead. A great cloud of smoke and dust hung over the battlefield.
He saw men running past him on their way back to the lines, but when he opened his mouth to call to them no sound issued from his lips.
He slept for a few hours, but woke towards evening and realized for the first time that he had received a slight wound to his wrist. Although his limbs were undamaged he found he had no desire to move from where he was, lying on the slope of the crater, staring up at the violet sky. From habit he removed the field dressing sewn into the flap of his tunic and poured iodine into the cut on his wrist. He discovered he still had his water-bottle with him and he drank from it.
At that moment he became aware that he was not alone in the crater. A man from his own company named Hallett lay on the opposite slope, curled up on his side, hugging his blood-soaked tunic. He was calling out faintly, begging for water. Pity had never stirred in the icy heart of Amos Pike, and he watched in silence as the man died.
During the night it began to rain, a hard, driving, relentless downpour, which turned the dry, powdery dust of the battlefield into a quagmire. The battle resumed before dawn. German mortar shells whistled overhead. Smoking clods of earth were flung into the crater. By the blanching flare of a rocket Pike saw troops moving forward weighed down with rolls of wire and pigeon baskets, picks and shovels, but he made no attempt to attract their attention.
Morning came. The body of Hallett had vanished.
He saw nothing but mud all around him. Mud and the stumps of trees, and bodies, or parts of bodies nearby he spied a hand holding a mug, nothing more.
The crater became a lake of liquefied mud and when he dozed off he slid down the slope and had to claw his way back up, covered in clayey ooze. The rain had stopped and presently the sun came out. Pike slept again. When he awoke he discovered that the mud had formed a hard crust about his body. It would have been a simple matter to break it, but he found he was content to lie where he was, immobile, his limbs held fast in the mud's embrace.
He began to review his life, and as he did so a strange image took shape in his mind. He saw himself wrapped in a winding sheet like an Egyptian mummy, unable to move, the prisoner of a rigid and unforgiving regime that was slowly grinding his life to dust.
He felt a fierce urge to break out, to burst his bonds.
Yet the winding sheet spoke to him of death and he knew that if he decided to lie there, unmoving, he would presently die. And that that, too, would be a solution.
He endeavoured to fix his mind on the problem, to come to some kind of decision. As the mud continued to harden about him he heard a sucking sound and Hallett's bloated body surfaced in the crater, coming to rest on the slope beneath his feet. One of the eyes had remained open and it settled on Pike with an accusing glare. He felt an urge to turn away, but found he couldn't do so without cracking the shell of mud coating his neck and jaw. Part of him wished to stay as he was, stiff and unmoving; another part longed for release.
Early next morning a pair of stretcher-bearers found him and brought him back to the British lines, still encased in his suit of mud. He was put in the hands of a medical orderly, who freed him by tapping at the shell with a cook's ladle as though he were cracking an egg, peeling off the covering a piece at a time.
'There!' he said. 'Just like a new-hatched chick.'
The words had a powerful effect on Pike. All of a sudden he felt free. Reborn! A dark urge, like a dragon waking, stirred in his entrails.
The battalion medical officer pronounced him concussed and he was dispatched, via a casualty clearing station, to the base hospital at Boulogne where they kept him for a week and then returned him to his company.
Pike's battalion had been withdrawn from the line and was resting in a rear area near a village in the midst of farming country, some of it still being worked by peasant families.
As soon as he got back he began to cast around.
6
At the end of the week, on Bennett's orders, Sinclair and Madden drew up a report on the current state of the investigation.
The lengthy inquiry into the whereabouts of mental patients discharged from Army wards was nearly concluded.
No likely suspects had been identified. Recent purchasers of Harley-Davidson motorcycles living in the Home Counties had been interviewed and the investigation was being broadened to other regions.
Second-hand dealers were also being questioned. A description of the man sought had been circulated to police authorities, and Sinclair had sent a separate message to stations in the south of England asking them to instruct rural constables to be on the look-out for motorcyclists travelling by back roads over the weekends. Where possible, they were to be stopped and questioned and a note made of their particulars.
The constables were urged to exercise caution.
'Another Friday!' Sinclair stood at the window of his office and stared down at the sluggish tidal flow of the Thames. 'And to think I used to look forward to the weekends! Now I sit waiting for the telephone to ring. I wonder what he's up to, our friend with the size eleven boots.'
Madden had arrived at the office that morning to find the chief inspector glowering over a copy of the Daily Express, whose front page was covered with photographs and a story about the R38 airship, which had crashed into the Humber a few days before with the loss of more than forty lives.
'Thank God for all disasters great and small. Any other day it would have been us smeared all over the front page.'
He opened the paper and handed it to Madden who saw the headline: 'Melling Lodge Mystery — Murders Still Unsolved — Disquiet At The Yard.'
'Sampson's been talking to that stoat Ferris.'
The article began by summarizing the information already published about the case and noting that the police remained 'baffled' by the mysterious killings.
'In the opinion of some observers they are no closer now to solving the crime than they were at the start of the investigation.'
It went on:
A measure of their desperation may be seen in the spreading rumours that certain officers are in favour of seeking help from outside sources.