‘Sir! I’ve got half of it.’
His eye had fallen on the letters ‘eer’ penned in a neat hand near the top of the card and right beside the jagged tear. On the line beneath it was the word ‘view’ and below that the letters ‘ane’. At the bottom a single ‘d’ was visible. He handed it to Madden.
They were both on their knees on either side of a heap of old newspapers and magazines mixed with scrap paper. At Miss Kaye’s suggestion, Billy had brought the wicker basket out from behind the counter and tipped its contents onto an empty space on the floor beside the shelves.
‘There’s more room here.’
Pink in the face with excitement, she had hovered about them until the sound of knocking had reminded her that it was time to open the library and she’d gone to unlock the door, admitting two elderly ladies to whom she’d given a brief explanation of the goings on inside, and who themselves now stood a little way off watching open- mouthed as the two men sifted through the paper.
‘Ane…’ Scowling, Madden turned the letters into a word. ‘That could be “lane”. And “view” has an apostrophe after it. It must be the name of a house.’
As he put the fragment of card to one side, Miss Kaye gave a gasp. She was standing close beside him, bending down.
‘There!’
She pointed, and Madden saw a tiny corner of white pasteboard showing beneath the edge of a sheet of carbon paper. He drew it out. Picking up the other portion of the card, he fitted the jagged edges together. Billy watched with bated breath.
‘We’ll need to use your telephone, Miss Kaye.’ Madden spoke calmly.
He handed the joined sections of the card carefully to Billy who received them with shaking fingers. Hardly able to believe his eyes, the sergeant read what was written on them:
H. De Beer,
‘Downsview’,
Pit Lane,
Near Elsted.
30
‘Right, Inspector. Let’s get this over with.’
Sinclair nodded to Braddock, and the Midhurst policeman gave a grunt of acknowledgement. He turned to Sergeant Cole, who was standing a few paces away at the edge of the trees with the others, and signalled with his hand. The sergeant murmured something to the men and they set off down the slope.
‘It doesn’t look as though he’s spotted us,’ Braddock muttered. He settled his cap on his head. ‘When you hear my whistle, it means we’re going in.’ He strode off after the men.
Sinclair drew in a deep breath, expelling it slowly. He watched as the men split into two groups, one party heading for the front of the cottage, which was enclosed on three sides by a yew hedge the height of a man’s head, the other taking up position at the rear, behind a wooden shed. Eight in number, they included five detectives – the men who had happened to be closest to the station when word of Lang’s address had been received – and three uniformed officers. The force had been hurriedly assembled on Sinclair’s orders and bundled into a pair of cars. But not before two of the detectives, the most experienced, had been issued with revolvers.
‘I’ve no reason to think Lang carries a gun,’ the chief inspector had told his Midhurst colleagues. ‘But I’m not taking any chances.’
Remembering his own words now, he glanced at Madden, who was standing beside him, with Billy Styles at his elbow. Before leaving Midhurst he had requested, and received, from his former partner an explicit undertaking not to involve himself in the police operation that was about to get under way.
‘You needn’t be concerned, Angus.’ Madden had been amused. ‘It’s the last thing I want. Just show me this man in handcuffs. That’s all I ask.’
Reassured, but unwilling to leave anything to chance, Sinclair had found a moment to take the younger man aside. ‘You’re to stay with Mr Madden at all times,’ he’d warned Billy. ‘He’s not to put himself at risk. Do I make myself clear?’
Coming downstairs from Braddock’s office, the chief inspector had found his old colleague waiting in the CID room with the detectives already gathered there. Word of how Lang’s address had been acquired had already spread among them, but seemingly unaware of the glances being cast his way, Madden had been standing with folded arms in front of the poster of the wanted man, his gaze fixed on the eerily white face with its staring eyes.
Realizing that only a direct order on his part would prevent him from accompanying them, Sinclair had taken the next best option and suggested they go together in Madden’s car, taking Braddock and Styles with them. Travelling at the tail of the convoy, they had driven west out of the town, following signs to Petersfield, but soon turned south onto a minor road that led down a valley overlooked by a long wooded ridge. The address provided by the library’s records had not been difficult to locate. Shown as a mere track on the Ordnance map, Pit Lane, as the name suggested, had once led to a chalk quarry, now abandoned. It was at the edge of the Downs, no more than a mile from the hamlet of Elsted.
‘One of my blokes thinks he knows that cottage.’ Braddock had leaned over from the back seat to mutter in Sinclair’s ear. ‘He’s got a girl in Elsted. They walked past it once. She told him it belonged to some old lady who’d had to move into a home and was up for rent. That was six months ago.’
‘Why wasn’t it on the estate agents’ lists?’ Sinclair had wondered.
‘Can’t say for sure, but she might have advertised privately, in a newspaper. What’s this now?’
The inspector had frowned as the cars ahead of them drew to a halt; there seemed to be a hold-up. He was about to get out to investigate when the convoy moved on again and they saw that there were road works in progress. A group of men wielding picks and shovels were standing aside while one of their number waved the cars through. They had stared at the police uniforms visible through the windows.
A mile further on the cars had slowed once more, this time to turn off the paved surface onto a narrow rutted track, unmarked apart from a white signpost on which the name ‘Downsview’ appeared, accompanied by an arrow. It led over a saddle in the ridge, on the far side of which a cottage could be seen situated a little way down the slope. Brick-built, in the style of the region, it looked out over a wide expanse of rolling pastureland towards the distant Downs, whose green rounded crests were hidden by mist and low-hanging cloud.
The cars had pulled up short of the house, at the edge of the tree line, and Sinclair had climbed out with Braddock to study the situation. At once they had noticed a trickle of smoke coming from the chimney on the tiled roof. Sinclair had given orders for the men to get out and gather at the edge of the trees. As they were doing so a light had come on in the kitchen at the back of the cottage and the figure of a man had been glimpsed through the window.
‘We’ll enter from both sides, front and back.’ At a nod from Sinclair, Braddock had issued the necessary orders to his men. ‘No talking until this is over. Not a word – is that clear? When I blow my whistle, move! And you needn’t bother to knock. Just get in there and grab him.’
Watching now as the men below moved silently into place, Sinclair felt a quickening of his pulse. A sideways glance at Madden showed him to be equally tense, gazing down, narrow-eyed. The men at the back of the house were already in position; the rest, led by Braddock, were padding along the side of the cottage, heads bowed. Reaching the corner of the hedge, they turned right and disappeared.
‘This is it, then…’ The chief inspector found himself suddenly short of breath. ‘Shall we move a little closer?’
Deliberately, without haste, they walked down the grassy slope to where Sergeant Cole and two of the detectives were concealed behind the shed at the rear of the house. The sergeant was peering around the corner. Hearing their footsteps he looked back, eyes bright with anticipation.
‘No sign of him.’ He spoke in a whisper. ‘But the light’s still on inside.’
At that moment the silence was split by the single piercing blast from a police whistle. Cole reacted like a
