Harris crossed the street and looked up at the dusty windows of the agency above the newspaper shop and couldn’t for the moment think of anything positive he could do. So he waited. Fifteen minutes later the man came out with a young girl. He guessed she was about eighteen. She was very pretty. He followed them both to Cambridge Circus where the man waved down a taxi. It had circled the roundabout before there was another empty taxi and he’d told the driver to go down Charing Cross Road and they caught up with the other taxi as it turned into Charing Cross Station.
He heard the man ask for two tickets to Folkestone and the clerk said that a train was due to leave in twelve minutes which had given Harris time to buy a ticket and phone through to Shapiro for some assistance. No assistance was available.
Just over an hour later the man and the girl got off the train at Ashford in Kent. Harris walked ahead of them and took the first taxi, telling the driver to wait. It was nearly five minutes later when the man and the girl came out of the station and Harris breathed a sigh of relief as they got into a taxi themselves. He had to use his ID card again but the driver cooperated well. Harris asked him to check with the taxi company’s despatcher where the white Granada was going. The reply was that it was going to Stone-cum-Ebony to Cooper’s Farm. The driver said he’d been there himself a month before, with a fellow and a girl. It was old man Hipcress’s farm. When Harris asked him to describe the male passenger he knew that it was the same man. The driver also volunteered that when he had done the trip he’d been told to pick them both up at the farm the following morning in time to catch the 9.15 from Ashford to London.
The white Granada was already heading back for Ashford as they turned into the lane that led past the farm. The driver slowed and stopped, winding down his window to talk to his colleague. He was going straight home. He’d got to pick up his fare at 8.15 the next morning. Harris paid off his driver a hundred yards past the farmhouse and asked him where was the nearest public telephone box. It was half a mile away at the bend in the lane, where it joined the main road to Rye.
The farmhouse was reached by a gravel drive, there was one light downstairs and one light upstairs in the gable end and Harris stood in the darkness, listening and watching. Apart from the distant bleating of sheep and the sound of water running in the ditches everywhere was silent. When his eyes were accustomed to the darkness he made his way cautiously up the drive.
When he was about twenty yards from the farmhouse he saw that the gravel drive gave way to a cinder track rutted from farm vehicles. As his eyes followed the ruts he saw the lights in the “looker’s” cottage by the trees. There were two cars parked by the cottage. A Mini and a Rover 90.
Harris waited for ten minutes before he approached the farmhouse. As he edged his way along the wall towards the lighted window he could see that the curtains were open and when he looked inside he saw that there was nobody in the room. It was a farmhouse kitchen. Quarry-tiled floor, a solid fuel cooker, big oak table and old-fashioned chairs. The sink and cupboards were modern and cheap. From the overhead beams the old hooks for carcasses still hung down. On one of them was an oil-lamp, its glass shade cracked and dusty.
The “looker’s” cottage was not so easy. There were lights on all over but the curtains had been drawn. There was a small gap in the curtains at one end of the downstairs window but the view of the inside of the room was blocked by a man standing with his back to the window. He could hear voices but not the words. He had a feeling that they were talking in a foreign language. The rhythms were not English.
Then the man moved away and he saw that it was the man he had been following. He was offering sandwiches to a white-haired man, a man in his fifties, and a woman who was a little younger. They were talking animatedly, shrugging and shaking their heads. Then they laughed at something the man had said.
Harris made his way cautiously back to the lane. He had no idea where it led but he followed it to the telephone kiosk and phoned the duty officer. Fifteen minutes later a police car picked him up and drove him back to Ashford Station.
The Vice Squad from West End Central applied some discreet pressure to the agency’s proprietor. The girl’s name was Judy Manners, she was twenty-two and she had a room in Islington. The client was a Mr. Gordon. He always paid cash and they had no address for him. He paid £80 and the girl got half.
A plain-clothes policewoman from the Vice Squad picked up the girl and brought her in to West End Central for Harris to interview. The three of them sat around the table in the stark interview room. The girl defiant but obviously scared.
“What are you charging me with?”
“Nobody’s charging you with anything—yet,”
