'Stay where you are!'
The constable stopped in his tracks. He stood rooted.
Madden crouched down. On the damp earth in front of him, fresh as a newly minted coin, a footprint had appeared. The heel had a piece missing. His eye skipped swiftly past it and he saw others. They were coming in his direction. He looked over his shoulder at the path behind him: his own footsteps showed in the damp dust, but no others.
'Sir, what is it?'
'Quiet!'
Madden looked to his left: there was only the circle of beeches with the empty bowl at their centre. To his right the slope rose steeply to a line of ilexes, their leaves blowing silver and green in the gusting wind.
A dense growth of holly filled the spaces between their trunks, forming an impenetrable screen. As he stared at the thicket a familiar sound came to his ears, borne on the breeze: the oiled click of a rifle-bolt being drawn back.
'Down!' he roared. 'Get down!'
Madden dived to his left, where the nearest beech tree stood, and as he did so the silence exploded.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
The shots came in rapid succession and the ground beside Madden's head erupted as he rolled frantically towards the tree. Another shot rang out and a chunk of bark as big as a fist struck him in the face. Next moment he was safe behind the massive trunk.
He looked back and saw the constable lying flat on the path, his face white and shocked. 'Move!' he yelled. 'The trees!'
Galvanized by the command, Stackpole rolled over.
The earth where he had lain leaped into the air as the sound of two further shots coincided with a loud crack of thunder. The constable scrambled to his hands and feet and plunged behind a tree trunk.
Madden counted in his head: six. He looked around him. He was near the edge of the bowl, but where he was it was shallow, only inches deep. Stackpole was luckier. A few paces from where he crouched behind the tree, the floor of the depression was at least a couple of feet below the rim. Madden's experienced eye skipped from the row of ilexes to the lip of the bowl, working out angles of fire. His terror of a few moments ago had been replaced by a familiar numbness.
'Will!' He used the constable's name, speaking in a low voice. 'Can you hear me?'
'Yes, sir.' The hoarse whisper barely reached him.
'Stay behind that tree, but move back into the dip behind you. When you're there, get down on your stomach and crawl around the edge. Be sure to keep yourself pressed up tight against the side. Don't worry, he won't be able to see you from where he is. When you get to where the path straightens, stand up and run like hell!'
Stackpole was silent.
'Will?'
'I'm not leaving you, sir.'
'Don't be a damn fool.' His officer's voice came back to him easily. 'Do as I say. Now!'
The constable began to back away from the tree trunk. When he reached the edge of the bowl he slid down into the depression and began to crawl on his stomach, away from Madden, back the way they had come. Another shot rang out and bark flew off the side of the tree where he had been crouching.
Seven. A Lee-Enfield rifle held ten rounds in its magazine.
His mind cold, Madden waited for the inevitable to happen. Soon now the man would descend from the screen of holly to hunt them down. When that happened, he planned to spring to his feet and run along the path in the opposite direction to Stackpole, splitting up the available targets. He knew their attacker was expert with a bayonet. Whether he was also a marksman was something he would discover in the next few minutes. Still in the grip of the numbness that had taken hold of him after the first shots, Madden viewed the prospect with a fatalism bordering on indifference.
Thunder echoed, further off now. Then he heard another sound: the smashing of undergrowth. It came not from the line of ilexes but from higher up the slope. Taking a gamble, Madden sprinted across a dozen feet of open ground to the next beech tree in the circle. Pressing his body to the trunk, he waited for the answering shot. None came.
Again he heard noise, more distant now. He peered around the tree and caught a glimpse of a figure high up, near the crest of the ridge.
'He's moving!' he shouted. 'I'm going after him.'
Madden flung himself at the slope, tearing through the waist-high ferns, forcing a path through the dense undergrowth. Skirting the barrier of holly bushes, he came on the path left by his quarry, a line of snapped branches and flattened ferns leading up the hill, and he followed it. Stackpole's shout sounded behind him.
As Madden neared the crest the underbrush thinned and the ground became slick with pine needles.
Emerging from the straggling firs he saw the figure of a man running along the top of the bare ridge half a mile away. He was carrying a bulky object slung across his shoulder.
'I'm coming, sir…' Stackpole's voice was close, and a moment later he joined the inspector red-faced and gasping.
Wordlessly, Madden pointed. They set off in pursuit.
The line of the crest was uneven, broken by bumps and hollows, and twice they lost sight of their quarry as the ground dipped, only to see him again toiling up the next rise. Then he changed direction suddenly, veering off to the right, and when they reached the spot they found they were at the top of the path that ascended the ridge from the fields around Oakley. The hamlet lay beneath them surrounded by the broad sweep of farmlands.
The cough and stutter of a motorcycle being kicked into life sounded faintly.
'Blast!' Madden sank to his haunches.
'There he goes!' Stackpole started down the path, but the inspector called him back.
'It's no use. You won't catch him.'
They watched as a motorcycle and sidecar emerged from the treeline below and moved slowly along the rutted track through the cornfields. The rider, hunched over the handlebars, did not look back.
Madden cupped his hands like binoculars over his eyes. 'See what you can make out. Anything at all.'
The constable copied him. They crouched in silence.
'Cloth cap,' Stackpole panted. 'Just like Wellings said.'
'Black bodywork on the sidecar. What make of bike is that?'
'Harley-Davidson… I think. Hard to be sure from here. There's something in the sidecar, sir. Could be a bag.'
Madden stood up. 'I've got to get down to Melling Lodge and ring Guildford. I want you to stay here.
We have to know what road he takes when he reaches Oakley. As soon as you're sure, come down to the house.'
'Yes, sir.' Stackpole's gaze was riveted to the valley floor.
Madden turned and went plunging down the steep hillside.
Blue uniforms milled in the forecourt of Melling Lodge. To the chief inspector, as he stepped from his car, it seemed as though the scene of two weeks before was being re-enacted. The familiar form of Inspector Boyce materialized from the pale shadows cast by the limpid evening light.
'Sir.' He shook hands with Sinclair. 'We've been in touch with the Kent and Sussex constabularies.
There'll be officers on the look-out for him all over the south-east.'
Sinclair spied Madden's tall figure approaching.
'John?' His voice held a note of concern.
'I'm fine, sir.' They shook hands. 'Not a scratch. He missed us both.'
Sinclair looked at the two men. 'Any chance of him heading north or west?'
'It doesn't seem likely,' Madden replied. 'Stackpole saw him take the Craydon road. That rules out God aiming and Farnham to the west. If he passed through Craydon he'd come to the main road between Guildford and Horsham. He could have turned north there, but they're watching for him in Guildford. So either he turned south, towards Horsham, or he kept going east to Dorking and beyond.'
'That's assuming he sticks to the main roads,'
