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 greyhound loosed from the traps.
‘Come on!’ he cried, springing forward.
‘Less than an hour ago – you’re certain of that, are you, Mr Meadows?’
Telephone in hand, Sinclair directed his question towards the rumpled figure on the settee. Receiving a nod in reply, he spoke into the receiver, ‘He hasn’t had time to get anywhere, Arthur. Not to the channel ports, certainly, nor to Southampton. But I want them all alerted… Yes, I’m aware it was done earlier today. But this is a specific warning. We know he’s on his way. And I want it spread wider. Bristol. Liverpool. Anywhere he might take passage from.’
The chief inspector paused to listen, biting his lip as he did so, and then peering at Madden, who was standing with folded arms by the fireplace, a frown etched on his brow. Beside him, Billy Styles knelt on the hearth: he was carefully sifting through the ashes in the still smoking grate, though with little expectation of finding anything. No trace of their quarry, no single piece of physical evidence that could be tied to Gaston Lang, had been discovered so far: not in the sitting room, where they were, nor anywhere else in the house, which still echoed to the tramp of detectives’ feet. All they knew for sure was that Lang himself had been there not an hour before. And now he was gone.
‘Yes, a Mr Henry Meadows…’ Sinclair had begun speaking again. He glanced at the man on the settee, who, in the middle of trying to tuck in his shirt, half rose, as though answering to his name. ‘He works for a solicitor in Midhurst called Bainbridge. The owner of the cottage is a client of Bainbridge’s and he dealt with the lease. It was advertised in a local newspaper. Lang, or De Beer, as they knew him, called at the office unannounced – this was in early August – and made an offer. Apparently Bainbridge wasn’t keen on the business – Lang had no references – but after he made a cash offer and agreed to a deposit he let him take it. On Friday Lang rang up and announced he was leaving. Although he was paid up to the end of the year, he didn’t ask for any money back. But Bainbridge thought he’d better send out one of his clerks just the same to do an inventory. Meadows says they were supposed to go through it together, but Lang told him when he got here that he was leaving right away and he’d have to do it on his own. My guess is we missed him by half an hour, no more.’
The bitterness of the pill he’d had to swallow showed in the chief inspector’s tense expression. Angry and thwarted, he’d needed all the self-control he could muster to deal with the hapless Meadows, who, shocked by the sudden eruption of detectives into the cottage and the rough handling he’d received, had proved to be a witness of limited value.
‘This car he left in – what make was it?’ Almost before the clerk had recovered his senses, Sinclair had begun pressing him. ‘What model?’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I really couldn’t say…
Fair-haired, and tending towards plumpness, Meadows had been helped to the settee and given a glass of water, but neither had settled his nerves. Discovered in the sitting room by the detectives who’d burst in at the front, he’d been thrown to the floor and pinned there for several seconds, and although it was soon realized he was not their man, the experience had rendered him all but speechless for precious minutes, leaving the chief inspector to pace the sitting room while he waited.
‘I’ve never owned a car, you see. I get about on a bike…’
Still gasping, Meadows had paused to fumble with his tie, pulled askew in the struggle, and only belatedly become aware of the glare he was receiving from Sinclair.
‘It was black, though… the car, I mean. Mr De Beer had taken it out of the garage. He was putting his trunk in it when I arrived, pushing it up on the back seat.’
‘His trunk, you say… can you describe it? Size… colour… anything?’
Meadows’ fleshy face had turned redder. Near tears, he’d stared back at his tormentor.
‘It might have been brown, sir, but I’m not certain. It was just a trunk…’
Sinclair had already imparted this information to Chief Superintendent Holly in London, asking that it be passed on to the authorities at the ports, including customs officers. ‘The car’s obviously a four-door sedan, not that that helps much.’
With a glance at his watch now, he brought their conversation to an end.
‘I must ring this fellow Bainbridge, the solicitor in Midhurst, and tell him what’s happened. He may have other information. We’ll be here for a while. I want a forensic team to go through the place. It looks as though Lang’s wiped it clean. But we might find a fingerprint somewhere.’
As he put down the phone, Braddock entered. He’d been to the garage to see if anything had been left there by their quarry. A quick shake of the head told Sinclair his errand had been fruitless.
‘There’s no need for you to stay, Inspector.’ Sinclair reached for his pipe and tobacco. ‘You can take the uniformed officers back if you like. But return the car, if you would. We’ll need it later.’
Meadows stirred unhappily on the settee. ‘What about me, sir? Can I go? I ought to report to Mr Bainbridge.’
‘You can do that in a moment, when I ring him. But I want you here just now. You may remember something useful.’
The chief inspector hadn’t meant his words to sound harsh, but Meadows flushed on hearing them and his misery seemed to increase. Unaware of it, Sinclair caught Madden’s eye and gestured towards the front door, inviting him to step outside into the garden.
‘We had him in our hands, John. And now, by God, we’ve lost him.’ Waiting only for the door to be shut behind them, Sinclair gave vent to his frustration.
‘Don’t assume that, Angus.’ Seeing the distress on his friend’s face, Madden sought to assuage it. ‘They may still get him at one of the ports.’
‘I very much doubt it. He won’t try to leave now. He knows we’re looking for him.’
‘Are you certain of that?’
Sinclair shrugged. ‘You heard what Meadows said. He wouldn’t wait for a moment. He was getting out.’
Eyes cast down, the chief inspector studied the small patch of garden before them. In the dying light of afternoon, grey as lead, the sodden lawn, bordered by shrubs and flower beds, had a dank, unwelcoming look. He’d been fumbling for some minutes with his tobacco pouch, trying to fill his pipe, but as though defeated by this simple task, he abandoned the effort and thrust both back into his pocket.
Madden grunted. ‘So you think he learned about the search going on in Midhurst?’
‘It’s the obvious explanation, isn’t it?’ Sinclair grimaced. ‘The word would have spread fast enough. Perhaps he was there himself, in town. He’s got the luck of the devil, this man.’ He shook his head bitterly. ‘He’s been carrying a bottle of chloroform around with him in his pocket since yesterday. Does that mean he had a victim in mind? Or was it just a precaution? Either way, all I can hope is that we’ve scared him off. But I can’t see him walking into any trap now. Not Gaston Lang. He’ll find another place to lie low and wait for the fuss to die down. It’ll be up to someone else to catch him. If they ever do.’
Lifting his gaze he stared out over the hedge towards the distant Downs.