“You are mistaken in one thing, Mr Swain. I like it very much. And what of passengers leaving the train here?”
Swain gave an awkward sideways nod of his tall head.
“Major Mordaunt would find it hard to pass in disguise round here. He’s not been seen, not before the ferry train and certainly not since.”
“Then that’s that!” said Gregson irritably. “By playing games, we’ve lost him!”
In his indignation he spoke across Holmes directly to Swain.
“I think not,” said Holmes quietly.
“Then how—”
“One moment.”
Conversation was impossible as the engine of the mail train uttered its long shunting blasts of steam, pulling the jolting sorting-vans towards King’s Lynn.
Instead of replying to Gregson, Holmes turned to Swain and took the inspector’s lamp.
“If you please, Mr Swain.”
Swain let it go. With his grey cloak wrapped round him, Holmes patrolled the edge of the platform, shining the lamp across the dark iron rails to the platform on the far side. He turned to the station-master.
“When was the last train tonight from the far platform?”
“Ten-fifteen, sir. Always the last. After that the gate is locked and the way over the footbridge is closed as well. You don’t want that side, sir!”
“On the contrary,” said Holmes under his breath, “it is the very thing I do want and mean to have.”
He drew his cloak tighter around him, still holding the police lamp. The station-master had just time to cry, “You can’t do that, sir!”
But Holmes had done it. In a swirling leap he was down from the platform onto the iron rails where the mail train had stood. Three strides carried him across the double tracks. One hand at waist height on the opposite paving and a lithe upwards swing bought him, crouching, onto the far platform, breaking every railway by-law on his way. The station-master could only watch as Swain, Gregson and I followed more cautiously. Holmes was staring at a cream-painted wooden wicket-gate that led to the station yard and a darkened road. It would serve well enough to enforce ticket collection among law-abiding passengers. He unwrapped his cloak and handed it to me, took two long-legged strides, and cleared the top bar effortlessly. He landed heels-down on the soft earth beyond.
Presently he called back to us.
“In the dark, no one would see him drop down on this side while the train was stationary. From other sets of footprints—the depth of their impact—this has been a popular escape route from railway premises by those who feel disinclined to buy a ticket.”
Swain was inspecting the wicket-gate.
“You might have saved yourself the trouble, Mr Holmes. Someone kicked this fastening loose after it was locked tonight. Anyone could walk out of here.”
“Very well, Mr Swain, then we will begin our advance upon Bly, if you please. Let us take a roundabout route. If Major Mordant is on foot, as he may be, or if he is lying low, we must not alert him. It is almost five miles. With the use of a vehicle, we may still count on getting there first.”
So began our journey in the dark. A black van stood in the lamplight of the cobbled yard outside the country station. Its horses were restless in the chill. A sergeant and six uniformed men of the local division were waiting. A second sergeant and a constable had gone ahead to reconnoitre the gates and approaches of the house. With Holmes, Gregson, Swain and myself, there were twelve in the van. Gregson was of equal rank to Swain. Yet without speaking a word on the subject, Holmes had made the country policeman his second-incommand.
Mordaunt, if it was he, would be an hour ahead of us but on foot. I calculated his route as a trek across rough ground in the dark. The summer night was damp and much cooler by the time we reached the deserted gate-house of Bly, its long driveway between lime trees leading to the main courtyard and house. Sergeant Acott saluted his inspector and spoke softly.
“No sign yet, sir. He must either cross the road from Abbots Langley or take the lane from the village. He hasn’t done either yet—and both are being watched. What’s more, he could hardly penetrate these woods without a light—and we haven’t seen one.”
“Major Mordaunt served with scouting parties of the Queen’s Rifles in the Second Afghan Campaign,” said Holmes quietly. “You will not see him. We shall not get a sight of him until he reaches us.”
A few stars were out. The landscape was almost dark except where the tallest trees and the hedges caught what light there was in the sky. We passed on foot through a strange white-onblack world like a photographic negative. Acott with his constable remained at the gates as we approached the forecourt of the empty house.
Holmes and I knew the lie of the land as well as any of the others. Acott posted another two men to keep surveillance on the house. Four more were to lie low at different points in sight of the lake. With one lantern between us, its shutter almost closed, Holmes and I with Swain and the sergeant followed the shadows of the rear lawns until we came to the locked stone structure of the boat shed in its walled rose garden. Among these smaller formal gardens, Holmes took a general survey without making a sound or casting a shadow. I followed him to the door of the stone shed, whose simple lock he had picked with his pocket-knife on our first visit. He tried the handle and found it still locked.
“Excellent,” he said softly to one of our uniformed constables. “Stand out of sight by the corner of the wall. If anyone should approach, alert us. You will have time to get round the far side of the wall. I do not think he will come this way now, but we must know at once if he does.”
Not five seconds later the lock clicked and the door eased open. Here was the same stone interior, facing the dark lake. The grimy window panes still danced with their mad race of little flies in a dimmed blade of lamplight. It was impossible to risk the reflection of a lantern on the white-washed stone interior.
“He will not come here now,” Holmes repeated softly. “He has been. See for yourself, Watson. A man who would keep pace with the scouts of the Queen’s Rifles on campaign must cover forced marches over the worst terrain of barren hills. He would cross the fields from Abbots Langley to Bly at night as light-footedly as a huntsman with a pack of beagles. He has quite literally stolen a march upon us.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Look up there on the brackets. The oars have gone. The boat that looked as if no one used it can be used after all. But only by the man who can get at its oars. Only by the man who could open the lock on this shed. Therefore, only by Major Mordaunt. I daresay Miss Jessel might purloin the key, but she is otherwise engaged.”
In the uncertain starlight we followed the path taken long ago by Victoria Temple, Mrs Grose and Flora on the afternoon of Miss Jessel’s apparition. It now occurred to me that Mordaunt was certainly armed. He had used a gun to put down his dog. No gun was found in his house, therefore he still had it with him. I had not packed my Army revolver because I had not supposed I should need it at a spiritualist seance! Gregson had not stopped to draw a handgun, knowing his plain-clothes men in Eaton Place would be carrying their police pistols. Holmes seldom bothered with firearms. As for “Mr Swain” with his poetry books and his geology! I doubted if he knew one end of a gun from the other. Our manhunt might yet turn into an awkward business with an armed and determined fugitive.
We moved cautiously over dew-soaked turf towards the lake’s edge. The lily pads showed pale in the starlight. About five minutes later I saw the place on the bank where the shell of the white boat in its cradle would have been, if it had still been there. It was presumably concealed, for there was no sign of it on the water. Could Mordaunt have crossed to the island already, for that was presumably the “crossing” that Maria Jessel had meant? Holmes had been right about that.
A rift in the night clouds struck a starlit gleam from the lake and lightened the background. The surface of the water was a flat calm. Ahead of us the shore was a sweep of lawn to the water, trees massed together further on. A plantation of beech and spruce rose behind the laurel and overhanging rhododendron. I made out the irregular silhouette of ash trees and sycamore standing high, sometimes reaching out low across the water for twenty feet or more. The shoreline would soon become inaccessible as the bank with its tree roots dropped steeply and unevenly to the lake. The path ahead of us now turned inland, skirting this wide shrubbery and coming back to the water’s edge well beyond it.
“There is nothing for him here,” I muttered obstinately. “He should make for Holland or France.”
