Something moved out in the night. A patch of darkness suddenly became cohesive and shifted slightly. I knew it had been six feet or so to the right a minute before. Dark's solid where living things are. My hands groped about the armchair. Great. Caught without even a stone or a poker, in pyjamas. The black grew larger. Dear God, I thought, sweating, it's coming right up to the window. The window darkened to one side. I was so tightened up I couldn't even screech for Janie. A faint gleam on spectacles drenched me in a sweat of relief.
It was sodding Algernon, the stupid bastard.
I blundered to the window and scrabbled for the catch muttering I'd kill him, frightening me to death like that.
'Lovejoy.' A whisper.
'What?' I croaked back, third go.
'He's out there. Do you want my night glasses?' He was whispering where the windows met. This was it. Dandy's killer had finally come.
I forced myself to push the window gently open. Cold air streamed blessedly in.
'Where?' Never mind where, Lovejoy, for God's sake, ask who. 'Who?'
'The badger.' He sounded surprised.
'Eh?'
'Shhh, Lovejoy!' he hissed in anguish. 'You'll distract him!'
A bloody badger.
He got a three-minute whispered torrent of invective. Once one person whispers everybody does it and nobody can stop. Ever noticed that? Contagious, like yawning.
I deliberately slammed the window and went back to bed. Once I'd got warm again and my terror had lessened a bit I began thinking. In spite of myself Algernon's stalking impressed me. How come that he was normally so clumsy? Maybe daylight did things to his co-ordination. I couldn't tell Janie about the incident. She'd only laugh and tell me what I should have done.
That's the trouble with hangers-on, I thought bitterly as I nodded off. I'm on a three-seat tandem. We all want to honk the horn but nobody wants to pedal.
It must have been in one of those semi-conscious states that my logic did its stuff.
Tandems. My dopey dawn mind saw a tandem ridden by Kate and Nichole. Then it took them away and put the diaries there. Then it put the two sketches there.
I awoke at six stark with cold fear. All Bexon's pointers were in twos, everything from the Roman babes on the gold coins, Romulus and Remus suckling on the she-wolf.
Everything. Except for one lonely horrid decayed nightmare place, one terrible exception. So obvious. Suddenly so clear.
Dear Jesus. The inlet.
It had to be the seal pen.
I rose, creeping out of bed and tiptoeing about.
CHAPTER XXI
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I SHOULD have spotted it earlier.
His hiding-place'd had to be near Groundle Glen. Had to. Otherwise, why stay here? His diary said '… it's convenient.' There was only the old railway line and the seal pen. I'd walked the length of the tracks several times and seen nothing. There was one place I'd never inspected close to, though. And that was the seal pen. Courage, Lovejoy.
I was out at first light. No signs of life from Algernon's bungalow. Janie slept on. I hurried down towards the bridge and climbed up the path to the diminutive railway.
There wasn't another soul awake among the bungalows. I was clear away. I trotted on.
In the dawn light the seal pen scared me more than ever before. The cleft seemed to run a thousand miles down to where the sea struggled over the stone barrier. Most of the palings on the narrow wall had rusted to jagged points with fallen pieces lying obliquely to trail nastily into the sea. I wondered if any seal had ever managed to escape. Surely they must have wanted to. It was like a bad stage set nicked from Wagner's Teutonic worst.
A concrete platform with a wonky railing was the only sign of civilization where the railway ended. I was frightened. The ledge was pretty dangerous even on a calm sunny day. What it looked like on a stormy night didn't bear thinking of. I edged my way cautiously on to the platform feeling like a figurehead on a ship. I'd never seen so much sky around.
The heather and the grass had created a bulge where the tiny rails ended. There were probably buffers under there, overgrown. A circular rim set in the concrete level looked oddly familiar, reminding me: a gun emplacement, probably anti-aircraft. They'd built the platform wider and stuck an ack-ack weapon on top, for the war. Which miserable gunner battery had snapped up this particular posting? Poor sods. They'd have had to struggle back along the railway in the dark even to fill a kettle from the leaky tap at the ruined brick hut. Well, at least they could have used the little train for hauling shells. To me they were heroes as brave as any fighter pilot. I looked down again. The nightmare cleft had deepened a few miles since my previous glance. Did it go up and down with the sea? Was its water connected underneath all that stone and rusted iron? There was a noise behind me. A sheep rolled its mandible at me over the wire fence.
'Bloody fool,' I said. 'Go away. I'm scared enough as it is.'
It didn't shift. I've never been able to tell people off.
The cage on the other side of the inlet was set on a lower level than the platform where I stood. A dice-
