love.' He leaned over and kissed her accurately on the lips. Cool lips, nice cool soft lips. A sensible man wouldn't get up and make himself coffee. But a sensible man would have explored this bright idea hours earlier, and this must be his penance. 'I have to do some noisy thinking.'
'Oh, very well—if you must.' She yawned. 'Just don't wake up Cathy. And don't wake up Sergeant Digby either.'
He reached with his toes for his slippers, and with his hand for his dressing gown. Everything was exactly to foot and to hand in the darkness, with no blind groping. And no blind groping in his brain, either: he knew at last what he was doing.
Cathy's bedroom door across the passage was open, as always. In the soft light of the shaded 25-watt bulb outside he could see her lying under the sheet with the abandoned innocence of childhood, long legs and slender arms resting where they had fallen. That was how the dead on the battlefield lay, uncaring and oblivious of prying eyes.
Mustn't think of that now, he shook his head fiercely. Must leave her to her dreams, to pursue his own nightmares.
He stared past the sleeping child into the darkness of the open window beyond her. Somewhere out there lay Charlie Ratcliffe secure in the dreamless sleep of success.
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Dreamless until this moment, when a stranger bent his mind towards the tiny flaw in his otherwise perfect crime.
Now was the instant when Charlie ought to stir uneasily for the first time.
7
AUDLEY drew the crudely cyclo- styled pages of the Battle Scenario out of the plastic folder.
7. The battle will commence at 3.15 p.m.
He had left the pages in the wrong order, from the time when he had read them through quickly the first time, just before dinner.
Henry Digby had watched him in silence as he read, without any sign of expectation. And that had annoyed him a little—
that loyal assumption that he would get nothing more out of them than Superintendent Weston—and everyone else— had done.
But now, thanks to Faith, things were different. Now there were four names on his blotter.
Swine Brook Field: Battle Scenario.
Swine Brook Field: Murder Scenario.
—and it had annoyed him because it was correct. If there had been nothing here for Superintendent Weston then there dummy5
couldn't possibly be anything here for anyone else.
Only now, as he ordered the pages, he realised that he was smiling to himself. For now the game had changed. Or the rules of the game, which had shackled Superintendent Weston, had been abolished—that was the difference.
1. Roundhead Objective: to raise siege of Standingham Castle, or alternatively to deliver supply of artillery shot and to reinforce garrison.
Royalist Objective: to prevent above and to capture supplies for own use.
Of course it wasn't surprising that the Royalists too had been short of powder and shot after the siege of Bristol and with the siege of Gloucester in prospect. And as Digby had explained, they had been fatally short of ammunition at the battle of Newbury next month.
Unimportant.
2. Topography.: At the battlefield site the Swine Brook flows between two parallel ridges, with the Old Road to Standingham (ten miles distant) running beside stream, the course of which is marked by clumps of vegetation.
Audley closed his eyes for an instant, in an effort to recreate not what he had seen a few hours earlier, the ten-week growth which had sprung up since the Murder Squad had painstakingly cut back the bushes in a search for nonexistent clues, but the Swine Brook as it had been—
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'It wasn't like this, sir.'
'No, Sergeant? Then tell me what it was like.'
'Clumps' hadn't been altogether accurate. Except for the thirty-yard gap in the centre, where Digby had been stationed under one of the willow trees with his canisters of red dye, the tangle of blackberry and hawthorn bushes had formed an almost continuous and impenetrable hedge on each side of the stream—an overhanging hedge which met and interlocked above the water.
Members of both armies will cross the Swine Brook ONLY
between points x and y (see Map 'A') . . .
In fact, members of both armies
Under Sergeant Digby's eye.
And then, on the far side, the farm track running beside the stream, and beyond it the field of wheat stubble, freshly cut and dotted with bales of straw.
But it hadn't been a stubble field then.
Members crossing the Swine Brook must NOT walk on the growing corn, but will keep STRICTLY to the track,
