'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 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. For 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 weapon — 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.