He was in haste to get away, not simply to avoid discovery, but to put as much distance as he could between himself and what he had done. The image of the woman's battered face, the eye dislodged from the socket, pursued him like one of the Furies through the moonless night. He saw, too, the other eyes that had looked on him, wide and blue and unafraid.
Not until he reached the dugout did he remember his gas mask, lying discarded on the floor of the drawing-room, but by then it was too late to return for it.
His bag was already packed, such items as he was not taking with him wiped clean of fingerprints.
Within twenty minutes he was kicking the motorcycle's engine into life and beginning the long ride back. He reached the Hastings road without incident, but had to wait at the intersection while a military convoy rumbled by. As soon as the last tarpaulin covered lorry had passed, he pulled out and settled down at the rear of the convoy, tucked almost under the tail-light of the bulky vehicle ahead, travelling south at a steady twenty miles an hour.
Short of Hastings he abandoned the cover of the convoy and thereafter travelled by lanes and back roads until he arrived at Rudd's Cross a little before midnight.
Pausing on the outskirts of the hamlet to extinguish the carbide lamp of his headlight, he sat quiet in the saddle for some time watching for any sign of life in the huddled cottages. It was late. He saw none.
Mrs Troy's cottage, too, was in darkness as he approached it, pushing his machine along the dirt track up to the doors of the garden shed. The headache that had started while he was still in Ashdown Forest hammered at his temples. But sleep was a long way off. His night's work was only beginning.
At seven o'clock on Wednesday morning, soon after Sinclair had left for London by car to attend the conference called by the commissioner at Scotland Yard, the telephone rang in the public bar of the Green Man in Stonehill.
The landlord, Henry Glossop, would normally have risen by that hour, but both he and his wife had had difficulty sleeping since the terrible events at Croft Manor and they had both consulted Dr Fellows, who had prescribed sleeping draughts.
Glossop heard the phone but lay in bed for a while, hoping someone else would answer it. The building was full of police. The four rooms at the opposite end of the corridor from where he and his wife slept were all occupied by detectives. Overnight bags packed with clean clothes had been sent from London and Tunbridge Wells the day before and distributed to the various recipients.
The phone continued to ring. With a sigh, Glossop rose, put on his flannel dressing-gown and slippers and shuffled down the linoleum-carpeted stairs to the shuttered, beer-smelling taproom where the bell still pealed monotonously.
The caller, yet another policeman, was ringing from Folkestone, in Kent. He was polite but insistent, and half a minute later Glossop found himself toiling back up the stairs trying to recall which of the rooms housed the tall detective inspector from London.
'I just hope this doesn't turn into a wild-goose chase, sir. That's all I hope.'
Detective Sergeant Booth had put on weight. Billy noticed it right away, as soon as the sergeant stepped out from under the awning at Folkestone station and hastened up the platform to greet them. The trousers that had hung loosely at their last meeting now fitted snugly about his waist. For a thick-set man he was surprisingly light on his feet.
'Don't worry about that,' Madden reassured him.
'And how are you, Constable?' Booth gave Billy a wink.
'Fine, thank you, Sergeant.'
In fact, he was still feeling drowsy from having dozed off in the compartment. It had taken them three hours, with changes, to reach Folkestone. Billy was suffering from lack of sleep, and so was the inspector, to judge from his deeply withdrawn gaze and white marble-like features. But Billy, who had worked at Madden's side for the past two days, had yet to see him flag, even for an instant.
Booth led them out of the station to a car parked in the road outside, a Wolseley four-seater painted dark blue.
'Chief Inspector Mulrooney's given us one of the station cars for the day, sir.' The sergeant let Madden into the passenger side. 'Not a luxury we normally enjoy.'
Just like the Yard, Billy thought, as he jumped into the back.
'It's the devil of a place to get to.'
'How long will it take us?' Madden asked.
'With the car, no more than half an hour.'
As they drove away from the station Billy looked back and saw the sea, flat and calm under the low grey sky. He marked where the road wound down the hillside to the harbour below — the Road of Remembrance — and recalled what Madden had told him: how the men had marched down in their thousands from the camp on the bluff to the steamers bound for France.
The inspector was speaking again: 'I need to get in touch with Mr Sinclair. He was on his way up to London earlier. The commissioner's called a meeting.
Can I ring him from the cottage?'
'I'm afraid not, sir.' Booth steered the car past a wagon loaded with straw baskets piled high with apples. They were out of the town, driving between hedgerows. 'There's no phone in the house, nor in the village. But Knowlton's nearby. Would you like to stop off there first?'
Madden pondered. Then he shook his head. 'No.
Let's go straight to Rudd's Cross.'
Billy knew only the bare bones of the story, what Madden had told him on the train. But listening to the inspector's questions now, and Booth's answers — leaning forward from the back seat with his chin almost resting on the sergeant's shoulder-blade — he was able to gain a full picture of the chain of circumstances that had led to their hurried departure from Stonehill earlier that morning.
It had started on Monday with a cleaning woman called Edna Babb, who worked for an old lady named Mrs Troy who lived in Rudd's Cross, which was where they were headed now. When Edna arrived at Mrs Troy's cottage the first thing she noticed was that the doors of the silver cabinet in the parlour were standing open and several items missing from it. When she went upstairs she found her employer lying dead in bed. There was nothing to indicate that Mrs Troy had met a violent end, but Edna had been sufficiently upset to hurry across the fields to Knowlton, two miles away, to report her discovery to the village bobby, Constable Packard.
Packard had returned with her directly to Rudd's Cross, where they were joined by the police surgeon.
His brief examination of Mrs Troy's body led him to suspect death by asphyxia, which he estimated to have occurred some forty-eight hours earlier. Packard had sealed the house forthwith and returned to Knowlton where he telephoned a report to the central police station at Folkestone.
'I was assigned to the case and went out later that day with a detective constable,' Booth said. 'We arranged for the body to be taken to Folkestone for examination by the pathologist, along with the pillows on the bed, and we also took fingerprints off the cabinet. I had a word with Babb, who lives in Rudd's Cross, and she told me about this man Grail who's been using the garden shed. The shed was padlocked shut, but I reckoned the circumstances were suspicious enough to warrant breaking in, so I got hold of a screwdriver and took off the latch. The shed was empty, apart from some garden tools.'
'How did Grail come to be using the shed?' Madden asked. 'Was he renting it from Mrs Troy?'
'Not exactly, according to Babb. They had some arrangement whereby Grail took care of the garden and brought her food from time to time.'
'But she never met him? Edna Babb, I mean.'
'Never set eyes on him, she said. He always came at the weekends. I didn't think anything about it at the time, but I realized later, next day, talking to people around there, that he must have taken damned good care not to be seen.'