River of Darkness

They regarded each other in silence.

'I must call the Sussex chief constable.' The deputy moved towards the door. 'Where's Madden, by the way?'

'He spent the afternoon in Highfield, sir. He rang me from Waterloo half an hour ago. I told him to go home and get some sleep. He'll be here first thing tomorrow.'

Bennett paused at the door. 'Looking better lately, I thought.'

'Sir?'

'Inspector Madden. Less… less hunted, if you take my meaning.'

'Yes, I do, sir,' Sinclair agreed. He smiled for the first time that evening.

Breakfast was late at Croft Manor that Sunday morning. The silver chafing dishes, which were customarily placed on the sideboard punctually at half past eight, had not yet appeared when the three adult members of the Merrick family gathered in the dining room. (The children ate upstairs in the nursery.) Annie McConnell, who was in the habit of casting an eye over the breakfast table when she came downstairs to see that all was in order, sped off to the kitchen to investigate. She returned with some startling news.

'Did you know the village was crawling with policemen last night, sir?' she asked William Merrick, who said he most certainly did not.

'Yes, and more arrived today. Two carloads from London, they say, and a van from Tunbridge Wells.

More than twenty coppers in all.' Annie's eyes were bright with the news. 'And now they've gone off into the forest, the whole pack of them.'

Word had been brought to the house by Rose Allen, one of the maids, and Mrs Dean, the cook, who both lived in the village, a mile away. The excitement there had been the cause of their late arrival and consequent delay in preparing breakfast.

'They're at it now,' Annie assured the family, with a special smile for Mrs Merrick. She was concerned about her mistress, who seemed particularly disconcerted by what she had just heard.

Annie had to wait until after breakfast to discover what the trouble was and then chided herself for not having guessed it in the first place.

'William will just use this as another excuse to put off leaving for Cornwall. First they were going on Friday, then it was Saturday. Now who knows when he'll decide to start?'

They were taking their usual post-breakfast turn in the garden. Annie had ceased to wonder at her mistress's increasing anxiety over the delay in her family's departure on holiday. She sought only to comfort her.

'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…'