O Love, be fed with apples while you may,
And feel the sun and go in royal array,
A smiling innocent on the heavenly causeway,
Though in what listening horror for the cry
That soars in outer blackness dismally,
The dumb blind beast, the paranoiac fury…
10
White-haired and frail, but with a curiosity undimmed by age and failing health, Harriet Merrick paused by the pond to count the puffballs of yellow feathers paddling behind their broad-beamed mother.
Six. Only the other day there had been eight. Either a fox had been busy, or one of the village cats was finding the water-meadow a happy hunting ground.
The afternoon darkened as a cloud moved across the sun. Thunder rumbled close by.
Mrs Merrick glanced at the sky. She debated whether to return to the house. The thought of the scolding awaiting her there brought a smile to her lips. Her habit of taking solitary walks was a matter of concern to her son and daughter-in-law. It had reached the point where she was obliged to slip out when they weren't looking. Mrs Merrick maintained her independence serenely.
She decided to walk on. She was wearing a cardigan over her dress and a sensible straw hat. When she felt the first drops of rain she quickened her pace, then checked and deliberately slowed. Dr Fellows had advised her to take exercise in moderation. 'Don't overdo it,' had been his considered judgement, delivered after a lengthy study of her chart. He told her her heart was 'good for years', though he did not say how many. Harriet Merrick, who had little faith in doctors, thought she was in reasonably good health and might expect to live for a while yet. Unless Providence decreed otherwise.
She was planning to walk around Shooter's Hill the path she was following circled the wooded knob, a pleasant ramble taking no more than half an hour but the sudden brisk downpour prompted her to seek shelter beneath the trees bordering the footway. The weather had changed in the last few days. The first showers after the long summer drought had dampened the dust and leaf-mould of the forest floor. Standing under the wide branches of a purple beech she breathed in the soft autumnal scents.
On an impulse she decided to climb the hill, taking the most indirect route she could find, walking back and forth across the slope, following a line of easy contours to the summit. It was something she had not done for two years — Dr Fellows frowned on gradients — and she was pleased when she reached the top without either breathing hard or feeling the familiar warning flutter in her chest. Although it was still raining steadily, the dense canopy of leaves kept her dry. Near the summit she found a place to sit down on a leaf-covered bank beside the exposed roots of a giant beech.
There was a good view of Croft Manor from up here. The house had been in the Merrick family for nearly three hundred years. Her two sons had been born there: William, who had just passed his thirty- sixth birthday; whose withered arm had seemed like a curse, but had proved a blessing. And her darling Tom. On his last leave they had taken a walk in the woods together, the three of them. (Her husband, Richard Merrick, had died when the boys were barely grown.) Tom had made them laugh with his tales of a winter spent in the trenches before Arras. How the hot tea froze in minutes and the bully beef turned into chunks of red ice. When he described a night raid into no man's land he made it sound like an adventure from Boy's Own. Volunteers and blackened faces, knives and coshes.
A month later she had awoken in the middle of the night consumed by grief. The emotion was so profound — so far in excess of any nightmare's backwash — that she had roused her elder son and he had tried to comfort her. She lived through the next two days in a state of shock and confusion, unable to equate the psychological disturbance she had suffered with any known reality. Fearful of contemplating what the unknown might hold. On the evening of the second day the telegram had arrived from the War Office.
Her darling Tom.
She sat quietly, remembering. Grieving still. The patter of rain on the leaves overhead ceased, and presently the sun came out. Almost at once the glassed doors opened and the children slipped out and went hurrying down the yew alley towards the croquet lawn at the bottom of the garden. They had invented a game of their own, Mrs Merrick had observed, a complicated affair in which the mallets had been discarded and the hoops set up in a seemingly random pattern that only its devisers understood. Before they had reached the end of the alley the figure of Enid Bradshaw, their nanny, appeared in the doorway. She called out to them, or so Mrs Merrick judged, watching the dumb show from afar. The children paused and looked back.
Words were exchanged, no doubt on the subject of wet feet, and then Miss Bradshaw retired into the house and the children continued on their way.
Alison, the elder, had Charlotte's fair hair and already, at seven, her graceful gestures. She had never known her father, who had been killed in the first months of the war. William had married the young widow and together they had produced Robert, aged five. Harriet Merrick had watched her diffident son, always conscious of his handicap, grow into full manhood as he took on the responsibility of a dead man's wife and made her his own.
She smiled suddenly. Another person had made her appearance on the lawn. She was dressed in a long skirt that might have seemed old-fashioned even before the war, and her thick grey hair was tied behind her head in a severe-looking bun. Her name was Annie McConnell and she had once been Mrs Merrick's maid when they were both young girls growing up in County Tyrone. Annie had accompanied her mistress to England when she got married and had remained with her ever since. For a while she had been Tom and William's nanny, and after that had filled the post of housekeeper. Now she was simply Annie, part family retainer, part friend. Harriet Merrick loved her dearly.
She watched as Annie strode forthrightly down the yew alley towards the croquet lawn. From a distance her stiff black-skirted figure looked forbidding; to the children it seemed to have the opposite effect. They rushed across the lawn to greet her — Annie had been away for four days visiting her sister in Wellfleet and threw themselves into her outstretched arms. Mrs Merrick had once spent a whole day weeping in those arms.
She thought now with pleasure of the days they would soon be spending together. William and Charlotte were taking the children to Cornwall to stay with friends. The maids would be sent off. She and Annie would have the house to themselves. They would gossip and reminisce.
Meanwhile, Robert's small hands had been busy in the deep pocket of Annie's skirt. Whatever it was he found there seemed to give him pleasure, and Alison followed his example. Annie shot a guilty glance back in the direction of the house. Apparently contraband was being passed. Not wishing to spy further, Mrs Merrick rose to her feet and dusted off her dress. A slight movement on the slope below caught her eye and she stood still and watched as a pair of red squirrels worked busily, gathering nuts from beneath a walnut tree.
She noticed something else as she started back down the hill: half a dozen cigarette stubs lying in a neat line on the ground near to where she had been sitting.
It seemed someone else had found the bank a pleasant place to sit and meditate.
Five minutes after he arrived at his desk on Monday morning Sinclair received an urgent summons from Deputy Assistant Commissioner Bennett. He was gone half an hour and returned with a thick manila envelope on which the heavy red wax seals had been broken. 'From the War Office,' he told Madden, as he tossed him the packet. He stuck his head into the adjoining office. 'Sergeant, in here! You, too, Constable.'
Hollingsworth and Styles came in from their cubbyhole.
Sinclair perched on the edge of his desk. There was a light in the chief inspector's eye.
'A criminal attack very similar to the ones we're investigating took place in Belgium in September 1917. A
