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.'