Charlotte looked at her mother-in-law with raised eyebrows. 'Don't worry, I'll get him moving, I promise.'
Mrs Merrick didn't know whether her daughter-in law was aware of her irrational wish to see them all depart. She had done her best to disguise it, restricting herself to repeated admonitions to them not to waste the precious days of their holiday and drawing their attention to reports in the newspaper describing the glorious Indian summer that the west of England was still enjoying. But perhaps Charlotte sensed something more. Harriet Merrick had always meant to be a good mother-in-law, but her resolutions had never been tested. From the start she'd been touched by Charlotte's instinctive understanding of the special burden her son bore — his guilt at having survived the war in which his brother had died was but one manifestation of it. They'd been allies from the first day.
Charlotte ran her hands through her hair. She was thinking of having it bobbed in the prevailing fashion, but both William and his mother had begged her not to.
'I'm going to see to the children's packing,' she announced. 'Then I'll have all the cases brought down.
In the end we'll simply have to leave.'
A few minutes later Annie joined her mistress in the morning room bearing a silver tray on which a bottle, a spoon and a glass rested.
'Time for your medicine, Miss Hattie.'
Mrs Merrick made her customary fuss. 'I don't think it does me the slightest good. And it tastes quite foul.'
'You'll drink it none the less.'
The teaspoon containing a greyish liquid hung poised in the air before Mrs Merrick's mouth. Since she knew from experience it would remain there till Doomsday she opened her lips. 'Disgusting!'
Smiling, Annie handed her the glass of water. 'So you haven't been imagining things, after all.'
Mrs Merrick swallowed. 'What do you mean?'
'Policemen tramping about in the forest. Quite a to-do.'
'Oh, that!' Harriet Merrick dismissed the matter with a wave of her hand. She gazed into Annie's deep green eyes. 'I had such a strange dream last night,' she said softly. 'I was walking in the forest and I saw Tom.
He was in the trees ahead of me and when I called out he turned and beckoned, and I was coming closer and closer, but I couldn't quite reach him, and then I woke up… It'll be four years on Tuesday.'
'I know, my dear.' Annie took her hands.
'And then I lay awake for the rest of the night and all I could think of was how much I wanted William and Charlotte and the children to go away.'
Mrs Merrick removed her glance from her companion's eyes and stared down at their linked hands.
Annie sighed. 'It's a strange one you are. My poor dead mother always said you had the gift. No more than a child you were then. Little Hattie from the big house.'
Mrs Merrick smiled. 'Never mind the gift… What shall we do when they've gone? Let's be wicked. Let's light a fire in the drawing-room and roast potatoes in the ashes, the way we used to.'
'That's wicked, is it?'
'We'll sit in the garden and talk and gossip…'
Harriet Merrick looked into the face of her old friend.
'Oh, Annie, I'm so glad you'll be here with me.'
The green eyes opened wide. 'And where else would I be?'
The morning dragged on. William remained closeted in his study. The household, disrupted by the delay, was at sixes and sevens. Had all gone according to plan, parents and children, with the addition of Miss Bradshaw, the nanny, would have set out at ten o'clock in the Lagonda intending to reach Chichester in time for lunch. (The family's regular attendance at Sunday service had been suspended for once.) There William and Charlotte had arranged to spend the night with a schoolfriend of Charlotte's before leaving early next morning for Penzance. Other arrangements were dependent on these. At Harriet Merrick's insistence the entire household staff had been given the full two weeks off. She and Annie would manage alone, although Mrs Dean would come over from the village now and again to cook a meal for them. The three maids were poised to depart, but until the master had made a final decision everything hung in abeyance.
At a quarter to eleven Charlotte knocked on the study door and went in. Ten minutes later she emerged and hurried straight to the kitchen to deliver instructions before rejoining her mother-in-law in the morning room.
'We're leaving. I've asked Cook to make up a picnic hamper and we'll have lunch on the way to Chichester.
William's ringing the Hartstons now to tell them we won't be there till this afternoon.'
'Dearest Charlotte… you're a genius. How did you manage it?'
'It wasn't that difficult. William had more or less decided himself. He's had no satisfaction telephoning people. No one seems to know what's going on in Ashdown Forest. He's still quite cross, but his attitude now is, 'If they don't want to tell me anything they can jolly well deal with it themselves.''
The two women smiled conspiratorially.
'The children will love the idea of a picnic,' their grandmother predicted.
'That's what I thought. I'm going to call them down now.'
She went out and Harriet Merrick was left rejoicing.
Eyes narrowed under the brim of his grey felt hat, Sinclair peered through a screen of leaves at the clump of trees and thick bushes half a mile away. Open pasture lay between the tangle of holly and hawthorn where the chief inspector crouched with Madden on one side of him and Inspector Drummond, a plainclothes detective from the Tunbridge Wells CID, on the other. The expanse of grassland, thinly sprinkled with young oaks, offered no cover and prevented them from approaching any closer to the site of the pit into which Emmett Hogg had fallen.
'It's pretty well surrounded by open land, sir.'
Constable Proudfoot, crouching behind them, answered Sinclair's unspoken question. 'When I came back from Stonehill yesterday evening I made a circuit of the area. Took me a good while — I had to be sure of staying out of sight. That thicket there's like an island. There's no way you can get near it on any side without being seen.'
The village bobby, a stocky young man with cropped fair hair and a peeling nose, had been waiting at Stonehill to guide them through the woods to their present position, a walk of about three miles, he claimed, though to the chief inspector, increasingly anxious as the morning wore on, it seemed longer.
'You've been on your feet a good while, Constable.
Twenty-four hours and more. How are you bearing up?'
'Well enough, sir.' Proudfoot grinned and rubbed his bristly chin. 'I could do with a shave, though.'
The group of policemen had been bent behind the bushes, watching, for twenty minutes when they were rewarded by the sight of movement in the thicket.
'There!' Madden and Proudfoot spoke in the same breath.
Sinclair saw clearly the upper half of a man's body take shape amidst the undergrowth. He had his back to them and he bent down almost at once, then straightened, then bent again as though he were dragging something through the brush.
'I believe he's dark-haired.' Madden spoke quietly.
His eyes were narrowed to slits.
'Well, that's a relief,' the chief inspector said at last.
'At least we know he's still there. Now, let's get back to the others. We must decide what to do next.'
Two minutes later they had retreated into the shadow of the forest and rejoined the squad of uniformed policemen who were sitting under cover in a shallow depression some way in from the edge of the treeline. They numbered twenty-two in all. In addition to the six armed men Sinclair had brought — nine with Madden, Hollingsworth and himself- there were a further six officers bearing arms among the Tunbridge Wells contingent.
Inspector Drummond, too, was armed. He had been waiting for them with his men outside the village hall in Stonehill, a short, black-haired man with ice-blue eyes. He measured his fellow detectives. 'Chief Inspector Smithers sends his regards, sir. He would have come himself, but he said there was no point in two chief inspectors getting in each other's hair. He wishes you the best of luck.'
'My thanks to you both,' Sinclair responded drily.
