“Okay,” Miller said. “I’ll take over. You can shove off now.”
The patrol car moved away and he got back into the Cooper and drove up to the house. As he got out, a voice hailed him and he turned to find Harriet crossing the lawn. She was wearing an old trenchcoat of her father’s and a scarf was bound around her head peasant-fashion.
“I saw the police car at the gate when I came downstairs,” she said, her face grave. “What is it, Nick?”
“Maybe we’d better go inside.”
“No, I’d rather not. Jenny’s in the kitchen…”
“And she doesn’t know what you and your father have been up to, is that it?”
She turned away, an angry flush staining her cheeks, and he pulled her round to face him. “You said your father had gone away for a few days. Is that the truth?”
“Of course it is.”
“And you didn’t know what he was up to last night?”
She shook her head, her eyes anxious. “Please, Nick — I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He looked at her searchingly for a moment and then nodded. “All right — I believe you.”
He sketched in the events of the night briefly and when he finished, she looked pale and drawn. “I can’t believe it.”
“But you knew about the other things.”
She gazed up at him searchingly. “Are you here as a friend, Nick, or as a policeman?”
“As a friend, damn you.” He took her hands and held them fast. “You must believe that.”
She nodded. “Yes, I knew about the other things. It seemed wrong somehow that Max Vernon should get away with what he did.” She looked up at him fiercely. “I’m not sorry.”
“You will be if he gets his hands on your father.”
“You think that’s possible?”
“Not really, he’s too many other problems facing him at the moment, but you never can tell what a man like Vernon might pull. We’d better give your father a ring just in case.”
“But there isn’t a ’phone,” she said. “He’s staying in our houseboat on the river at Grimsdyke.”
“In the marshes?”
“That’s right, he goes for the shooting.”
“That’s about twenty miles, isn’t it?”
“Eighteen on the clock.”
“Good — we’ll drive down and see him. It’s early yet and the roads will be quiet. Shouldn’t take more than half an hour.”
She nodded briefly. “I’d better tell Jenny. I’ll only be a moment.”
She turned and ran across the lawn to the terrace and Miller walked back to the car.
It was no more than ten minutes after they had left when the ’phone rang and Jenny answered it on the kitchen extension.
“Colonel Craig’s residence.”
The voice was smooth and charming. “Good morning — my name’s Fullerton. Gregory Fullerton. I’m a colleague of Colonel Craig’s. He told me he was going away for a few days and gave me his address so that I could get in touch with him if anything came up. Damned stupid of me, but I’ve mislaid it.”
“It’s the houseboat you’ll be wanting, sir,” Jenny said. “That’s on the river at Grimsdyke in the marshes about a mile south of Culler’s Bend.”
“So kind of you.”
“Not at all.” She replaced the receiver and went back to her work.
When Max Vernon emerged from the telephone box at the end of the small country lane he was grinning wolfishly. He opened the door of the brake and climbed into the passenger seat next to Carver.
“Right, Benny boy, we’re in business,” he said. “Let’s have a look at that map.”
CHAPTER 14
The marsh at Grimsdyke on the river estuary was a wild lonely place of sea-creeks and mud flats and great pale barriers of reeds higher than a man’s head. Since the beginning of time men had come here for one purpose or another — Roman, Saxon, Dane, Norman, but in the twentieth century it was a place of ghosts, an alien world inhabited mainly by the birds, curlew and redshank and the brent geese coming south from Siberia to winter on the flats.
Miller turned the Cooper off the main road at Culler’s Bend and followed a track no wider than a farm cart that was little more than a raised causeway of grass. On either side, miles of rough marsh grass and reeds marched into the heavy rain and a thin sea mist was drifting in before the wind.
Harriet lowered the window and took a deep breath of the salt-laden air. “Marvellous — I love coming here. It’s like nowhere else on earth — a different world.”
“I must say I’m impressed,” he said. “I’ve never been here before.”
“Lost in a marsh punt in a sea mist it can be terrifying,” she said. “In some places there are quicksands and mud-holes deep enough to swallow a cart.”
The closer they got to the estuary, the more the mist closed in on them until visibility was reduced to no more than twenty yards. Finally the track emerged into a wide clearing of rough grass surrounded by thorn trees. Craig’s Jaguar was parked under one of them and Miller braked to a halt.
“We have to walk from here,” Harriet said. “It isn’t very far.”
They followed a narrow path through the reeds. Wildfowl lifted out of the mist in alarm and somewhere a curlew called eerily. The marsh was stirring now, water swirling through it with an angry sucking noise, gurgling in crab holes, baring shining expanses of black mud.
“If we don’t hurry we might miss him,” Harriet said. “The tide’s on the ebb. The best time for duck.”
She half-ran along the track and Miller followed her and suddenly, the wind was cold on his face and she called through the rain, waving her hand.
The mist had cleared a little so that one could see the river, the houseboat moored to the bank forty or fifty yards away. Duncan Craig was about to step into a flat-bottomed marsh punt and straightened, looking towards them.
He was wearing an old paratrooper’s beret and combat jacket and carried a shotgun under one arm. He stood there staring at them, one hand shielding his eyes from the rain and then ran forward suddenly.
His face was white and set when he grabbed Harriet by the arm, the first time Miller had known him to show real emotion. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Harriet was bewildered by the anger in his voice. “What is it, Daddy? What’s wrong?”
“We tried to arrest Max Vernon early this morning, but he gave us the slip,” Miller told him. “I thought you ought to know he was on the loose.”
Craig gave Harriet a quick push forward. “Get her out of here, Miller! Get her out now before it’s too late!”
Harriet swung round, her face white, and Miller said softly, “My God, you’re actually expecting him, aren’t you? You’ve arranged the whole damned thing?”
“Every step of the way.” Craig patted the shotgun. “Vernon shall have his chance — all part of the game.”
“It isn’t a game any longer, you bloody fool,” Miller said. “Can’t you get that through your head? If Max Vernon comes looking for you he’ll have only one thought on his mind.”
