XXI
A Walk in the Dark
Bredon made no great pace up the river; he was exhausted by his twenty-five minutes of variety performance at the lock, and there was, besides, no need for haste. If the unknown took his punt downstream at all—Leyland, in any other contingency, would be able to keep close on his tracks—he must needs reach Millington Bridge before he could get a lodging for the night or a high road to bring him back into touch with civilization. And it would be easy work for Bredon to reach Millington first, in his lighter craft. Actually when the bridge stood up before him, dark-outlined against a cream and silver horizon of late sunset, he saw a figure leaning over the parapet towards him, and was hailed in Leyland’s voice: “Tie up the canoe at the raft, and join me up here. I’m on the lookout.”
Millington Bridge is not among those one-way-traffic concerns in which our thrifty forefathers delighted; there is room to pass a lorry on it; but, by a kind of false analogy, it has a sharp angle over each of its jutting piers in which the pedestrian may take refuge from the dangers and the mud-splashings of the road. It is easy to lean over the parapet at these points, not nearly so easy to stop doing it; the leisurely flow of the stream beneath laughs at the scruples which would forbid you to spend another five minutes in doing nothing … another ten minutes … another quarter of an hour, so as to make it a round number by the clock. To Leyland, and to Bredon, who now joined him, no such scruples even presented themselves. The stranger, it appeared, was taking a quite easy course down the river; and Leyland had had no difficulty in outwalking him. In a few more minutes he was due; meanwhile, there was nothing to be done but watch the stream below them and talk over their immediate plans.
It was one of those evenings when the clouds that have ushered out the setting sun find relief (you would say) after the formalities of that majestic exit by chasing one another and playing leapfrog across the clear expanse of sky. The sky itself had passed from fiery gold to a silver gilt that faded into silver; and now the massed cloudscape that had hung, in islands and capes and continents, with bays and lagoons of fire between them, across the Western horizon, broke up into grotesque shapes which breasted the sky southwards—a lizard, a plane-tree upside-down, a watering-can, an old man waving a tankard. They moved along in procession, like the droll pantomime targets of the shooting-range at a country fair, cooling off as they did so from crimson to deep purple, from purple to slate-blue. The river, in the fading light, had lost something of its companionableness, but had taken on an austerer charm; the patches of light on it were less dazzling but more solemn, the shadows had less of contrast but more of depth. A silence had fallen on Nature which made you instinctively talk in a low voice, as if the fairies were abroad. The willow-thicket that nestled under the extreme right arch of the bridge, below which they were standing, stirred, and whispered with the first presage of a breeze.
“He can’t be long now,” said Leyland. “When he comes round the corner we can walk away slowly towards the canoe—he’ll hardly recognize us. What I’m afraid of is that he may want to stop the night here; in that case I shall have to stop here, and you, if you don’t mind, ought to go back and hold Nigel’s hand for a bit. Do you mind making a land journey of it? I’d rather keep the canoe.”
“Not a bit. Good evening for a walk. But I bet he doesn’t stop here. He’s still time to get through Shipcote Lock, and it’s all the better for him if he can do it in the half-light.”
“D’you mean he suspects that he’s being trailed?”
“At least he must know that he’s walking into danger.”
“I dare say you’re right. Hang it all, why doesn’t he come? If he goes straight on, we must follow at a safe distance in the canoe.”
“What about the lock? It’ll give him a good lead if Burgess has to fill up and let out again before we can get through.”
“I’ve thought of that. You and I are going to drag over the weir. That puts us ahead, of course; at the end of the weir-stream, where it joins the lock-stream, we’ll go across on to the Byworth bank, and lie up in those bushes till he comes past. We can leave the canoe moored to the bank; he won’t find anything suspicious about it. We still follow, and then, of course, we can’t exactly tell what he’ll do.”
“No. I take it, though, that he has no reason for knowing that Inspector Leyland of the C.I.D. has his headquarters at the Gudgeon Inn, Eaton Bridge.”
“None that I know of. Perhaps fortunately for us. Confound it all, what on earth is he waiting for?”
They stood there perhaps five minutes longer, and then, beyond the furthest fringe of the willows to their left, a punt-pole, rising and dropping rhythmically, betrayed the stranger’s approach. The watchers turned, with a single motion, and walked slowly to the end of the bridge; before the flashing pole was out of sight downstream they too had embarked, and were paddling noiselessly in its wake.
It was the simplest piece of shadowing-work conceivable. They had only to hug the shore and keep a good lookout at the turns; for the rest, they were content to follow the conspicuous white flash ahead of them, while they were concealed by every tuft of rushes, every stretch of overhanging bank. At any moment, with their superior mobility, they
