Mordaunt, if it was he, would be an hour ahead of us but on foot. I calculated his route as a trek across rough ground in the dark. The summer night was damp and much cooler by the time we reached the deserted gate-house of Bly, its long driveway between lime trees leading to the main courtyard and house. Sergeant Acott saluted his inspector and spoke softly.
“No sign yet, sir. He must either cross the road from Abbots Langley or take the lane from the village. He hasn’t done either yet—and both are being watched. What’s more, he could hardly penetrate these woods without a light—and we haven’t seen one.”
“Major Mordaunt served with scouting parties of the Queen’s Rifles in the Second Afghan Campaign,” said Holmes quietly. “You will not see him. We shall not get a sight of him until he reaches us.”
A few stars were out. The landscape was almost dark except where the tallest trees and the hedges caught what light there was in the sky. We passed on foot through a strange white-onblack world like a photographic negative. Acott with his constable remained at the gates as we approached the forecourt of the empty house.
Holmes and I knew the lie of the land as well as any of the others. Acott posted another two men to keep surveillance on the house. Four more were to lie low at different points in sight of the lake. With one lantern between us, its shutter almost closed, Holmes and I with Swain and the sergeant followed the shadows of the rear lawns until we came to the locked stone structure of the boat shed in its walled rose garden. Among these smaller formal gardens, Holmes took a general survey without making a sound or casting a shadow. I followed him to the door of the stone shed, whose simple lock he had picked with his pocket-knife on our first visit. He tried the handle and found it still locked.
“Excellent,” he said softly to one of our uniformed constables. “Stand out of sight by the corner of the wall. If anyone should approach, alert us. You will have time to get round the far side of the wall. I do not think he will come this way now, but we must know at once if he does.”
Not five seconds later the lock clicked and the door eased open. Here was the same stone interior, facing the dark lake. The grimy window panes still danced with their mad race of little flies in a dimmed blade of lamplight. It was impossible to risk the reflection of a lantern on the white-washed stone interior.
“He will not come here now,” Holmes repeated softly. “He has been. See for yourself, Watson. A man who would keep pace with the scouts of the Queen’s Rifles on campaign must cover forced marches over the worst terrain of barren hills. He would cross the fields from Abbots Langley to Bly at night as light-footedly as a huntsman with a pack of beagles. He has quite literally stolen a march upon us.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Look up there on the brackets. The oars have gone. The boat that looked as if no one used it can be used after all. But only by the man who can get at its oars. Only by the man who could open the lock on this shed. Therefore, only by Major Mordaunt. I daresay Miss Jessel might purloin the key, but she is otherwise engaged.”
In the uncertain starlight we followed the path taken long ago by Victoria Temple, Mrs Grose and Flora on the afternoon of Miss Jessel’s apparition. It now occurred to me that Mordaunt was certainly armed. He had used a gun to put down his dog. No gun was found in his house, therefore he still had it with him. I had not packed my Army revolver because I had not supposed I should need it at a spiritualist séance! Gregson had not stopped to draw a handgun, knowing his plain-clothes men in Eaton Place would be carrying their police pistols. Holmes seldom bothered with firearms. As for “Mr Swain” with his poetry books and his geology! I doubted if he knew one end of a gun from the other. Our manhunt might yet turn into an awkward business with an armed and determined fugitive.
We moved cautiously over dew-soaked turf towards the lake’s edge. The lily pads showed pale in the starlight. About five minutes later I saw the place on the bank where the shell of the white boat in its cradle would have been, if it had still been there. It was presumably concealed, for there was no sign of it on the water. Could Mordaunt have crossed to the island already, for that was presumably the “crossing” that Maria Jessel had meant? Holmes had been right about that.
A rift in the night clouds struck a starlit gleam from the lake and lightened the background. The surface of the water was a flat calm. Ahead of us the shore was a sweep of lawn to the water, trees massed together further on. A plantation of beech and spruce rose behind the laurel and overhanging rhododendron. I made out the irregular silhouette of ash trees and sycamore standing high, sometimes reaching out low across the water for twenty feet or more. The shoreline would soon become inaccessible as the bank with its tree roots dropped steeply and unevenly to the lake. The path ahead of us now turned inland, skirting this wide shrubbery and coming back to the water’s edge well beyond it.
“There is nothing for him here,” I muttered obstinately. “He should make for Holland or France.”
“Let us not jump to conclusions.”
“If he gets here, Gregson will have him. You may depend on that.”
“I do not depend upon it. In any case, Gregson will do no such thing. I should intervene if he attempted it. Major Mordaunt must lead the dance a little longer.”
A cloudbank rolled across the stars again. We neither saw nor heard an alert from the constables posted to keep watch. But if we could not see any sign of Mordaunt, there was as good a chance he could not see us.
Several minutes later Inspector Swain caught us up again.
“Messenger from Bly village, Mr Holmes. About an hour ago, a man crossed the little bridge where Quint’s body was found. No one’s come back that way and no one’s come up past the gate-house. I’d say he went through the trees, about twenty minutes before us. Being so far ahead, there’s a good chance he didn’t see anyone following. Our men have orders to close the shutters on their lanterns, lie low and watch. You and I can move ahead.”
As a cloud covered the sky above us, we edged across the grass to the first lakeside trees. A half-moon had begun to rise beyond the firs, shedding a cool but fuller light on the water. This was where the path curved inland: rhododendrons and tree trunks made the water’s edge impassable. I must do my companions and their Essex policemen the justice of saying that neither movement nor glimmer betrayed their presence. Swain had trained them well.
It was either Holmes or I who tipped a two- or three-pound stone with a foot and caused a splash below the bank. There was no response. As we stood quite still, however, a white shape like a large fish or a small whale slid out under the overhanging foliage. Mordaunt, for surely it was he, was just visible, stooping a little in the shadows and hauling at a length of cord. Reflected moonlight brightened and the cord became the painter of the boat which had once been lying in the wooden cradle.
Mordaunt had launched this craft easily. I caught the slippery suction of his boots in soft mud as he pushed it out and boarded it over the stern. He took his seat in the bow, his silhouette clear against a moonlight glimmer on the water.
Was this the fairy craft which had taken Miss Temple and the boy “spooning” on the lake? Moonlight made it seem daintier than the hull in the cradle, but I knew it was the same. There was room for an oarsman in the bow facing a pair of passengers in the stern with a picnic-hamper behind them.
Such a scallop might be moved easily and lie concealed under the overgrowing shrubs and trees, as this had been. Neither the gardener nor the groom would use it or even see it. With its oars locked in the shed and the key to the shed in his pocket, it was in Mordaunt’s sole possession. Perhaps no one else had crossed to the island since the death of little Miles. Perhaps Mordaunt crossed every week without being seen, though there seemed little reason for that.