They had paused in the village only long enough to assemble the men before following Proudfoot into the forest. The handful of villagers who had emerged from their cottages to take in the extraordinary sight of a score of coppers gathering on the green in the dawn light had been told sternly by Proudfoot not to venture on their trail.
Thankful at being able to stretch again after his long spell of crouching, Sinclair asked the constable to draw a rough plan of the thicket and the surrounding terrain. Proudfoot took out his notebook and busied himself for a few minutes. He handed the result to the chief inspector who squinted at it, with Madden and Drummond peering over his shoulder. The rough pencil sketch showed a semi-circle of woods surrounding the thicket and open pastureland. Where the woods ended the constable had marked the terrain down as 'broken country, scattered bushes'. This section included a stretch of water, which he named as Stone Pond.
'That's on the far side of the thicket from where we stand, sir.' Proudfoot indicated what he meant on the drawing. 'No need to worry about the pond — it's as good as a wall. It's the land on either side of it that's our problem. No trees to provide cover, just a few scattered bushes and flat ground.'
'All the same, we'll have to get men over on that side and then have everyone advance at the same time.'
The chief inspector squinted at the sketch. 'Now, this keeper, Hoskins. Where's he, exactly?'
Proudfoot pointed with his pencil.
'This stretch of woods we're in here — it bends around to the left and runs as far as that small hill.'
He tapped the pad. 'I told him to get up on top of there and stay put. If our man leaves the area at least Hoskins will know what direction he takes.'
'But he knows not to interfere?'
'He does, sir.'
'Very well.' Sinclair glanced at Madden. 'John, what do you think? You've had experience of this sort of thing.'
Madden trod on his cigarette. 'If you put armed men in a circle and bring them in to a central point they'll end up shooting each other. Better to concentrate them at three points and have the other officers filling in the gaps. Here — let me show you.'
He took the notepad from Sinclair's hands and borrowed the constable's pencil. The others watched as he drew a rough triangle on top of Proudfoot's plan.
'If we place the armed officers at each angle they'll be shooting towards the opposite base of the triangle, not at each other. If shooting starts, the unarmed men must drop to the ground and stay there until ordered to advance.'
Sinclair studied the combined drawing. 'Yes, I understand,' he said. He looked up. 'Would you see to that, John? The positioning of the men?'
'Yes, sir, of course.' The inspector thought for a moment. 'They'll have to start advancing at an agreed time,' he said. 'There'll be no way we can signal them without giving away our presence. I would suggest four o'clock this afternoon.'
'Good Lord!' Sinclair glanced at his watch. 'That's more than five hours off. Can't we be ready before then?'
'Probably.' Madden shrugged. 'But for some reason these things always take longer than one thinks. Also, the light will be better later. There'll be less glare.'
His glance went to the line of uniformed officers seated nearby in the shade. 'If that man over there is Pike, he'll shoot at us from cover. But he can only be on one side of the thicket at a time. The men must be told to advance quickly if they're unopposed. Once they're in the brush, he loses the advantage of his rifle.
But they must watch for the bayonet then.'
Crouched on his haunches in the dugout, Pike began to lay out his things. From the capacious leather bag he drew his uniform — shirt, breeches, tunic — and placed them on the broad step cut into the rear of the excavation. His neatly rolled puttees were added to the pile. Next came the gas mask.
His movements, measured and unhurried, gave no clue to his mental state, which for many hours had been battered by doubt and indecision. His normally stony emotional structure was fractured by extremes of feeling that produced at almost the same instant a hot flush of impulse towards action and an icy realization of the dangers that hung over him.
Travelling on his motorcycle from Rudd's Cross the day before, he had several times been on the point of turning back and returning to the hamlet. To the garden shed and Mrs Troy's cottage where a situation now existed that required his urgent attention.
But his need drew him on, and in the dark recesses of his soul this seemed to have its own logic. He had no other business than the one he was engaged on. It was the sole aim of his wasted life and, seen from that perspective, even the need to protect himself paled into unimportance.
Nevertheless, his agitation had already produced small but significant changes in his behaviour. He had begun his journey from Rudd's Cross in the usual manner, following a complicated route of back roads and country lanes, avoiding major thoroughfares. But after an hour he had lost patience and, with a recklessness foreign to his nature, had joined the main road, taking the coastal highway to Hastings, then swinging north towards Tunbridge Wells. Bent over the handlebars, and with his cap pulled low over his eyes, he had ridden at a steady thirty miles an hour without incident until he reached a turn-off that took him westwards into Ashdown Forest.
It was late afternoon when he arrived — still daylight — but he strode uncaring through the woods to the site of the dugout, his bag hoisted on his shoulder.
His thoughts were fixed on the hours that lay ahead.
Above all, on the following evening. Everything else was shunted to the back of his mind, to be dealt with later.
On reaching the dense thicket he found the brushwood he had used to camouflage the digging undisturbed except in one corner where some of the branches had fallen into the pit. He examined the spot carefully. Although it seemed likely that wind and rain had shifted them, he spent the next twenty minutes searching the area for any signs of a human intrusion. A footprint. A cigarette stub. He found nothing to arouse his suspicion.
His sleep that night was troubled. For the first time in years an old nightmare returned and he had woken drenched in sweat. The air inside the dugout seemed stifling and he had climbed out and stood motionless in the thick brush listening to the night sounds: the stirring of leaf and branch, the distant cry of an owl.
He remembered nights spent in the woods with his father. The waning moon, close to the end of its cycle, hung low in the eastern sky.
At first light he rose, determined to regain his poise, and settled at once into a routine of small tasks on which he could fasten his mind. He had the whole day to fill.
First he cleared all the brushwood, now yellowed and browning, that he had used to camouflage the dugout, gathering it into a large bundle which he later dragged through the thicket until he was some distance from the site of his digging where he began to distribute it — a piece here, a piece there — to make it seem like casual deadwood. Midway through it occurred to him there was no point in what he was doing. He didn't intend filling in the dugout later, or attempting to hide it, as he had on Upton Hanger.
The police must have found his earlier excavation.
They would know what to look for now. Yet in spite of this he completed the task he had set himself before moving on to another.
Twice during the morning he had paused to scout the surrounding landscape. He had chosen the patch of stunted oaks and dense underbrush because of its featurelessness and lack of any practical use. No one could have any reason for entering it, he reasoned. (None but himself.) Crouched at the fringe of the bushes, he had scanned the woods and stretches of open land encircling the thicket. On the second occasion he had caught a glimpse of a figure moving through the trees. It appeared for only a few seconds and then vanished. He remained with his eyes fixed on the spot for several minutes, but saw nothing more to attract his notice.
At one o'clock he broke off to heat a tin of stew on his spirit stove and brew a mess tin of tea. Then he cleaned and put away his utensils and began to unpack his bag.
Examining the gas mask he frowned at the discovery of a small tear in the canvas hood beside one of the straps. Obsessively tidy, he would have mended it on the spot if he'd had needle and thread with him. The first time
