‘No, I’m afraid not. I don’t remember seeing him.’ She seemed disappointed at having failed them, and watching her reaction, Billy smiled. It was not the first time he had observed the effect of Madden’s personality on a witness, even if his memories of the phenomenon came from many years back. There was some quality his old chief possessed, a gravity, perhaps, some deep well of seriousness, that seemed to draw a response from others. As though they accepted without question the importance of what he was asking of them and the need to help.
‘If he was here at all it would have been yesterday, just before one.’ Madden smiled at her again, encouragingly, but she shook her head.
‘You’ll have to ask Agatha, I’m afraid. Miss Murdoch. She was working here, at the counter, all morning. I was mostly in the stacks, putting books away.’ She gestured towards the shelves. ‘But why yesterday, particularly?’
‘We think he’s leaving the district for good.’ Madden buttoned his coat, nodding to Billy, who had folded the poster and put it away in his pocket. ‘He was seen with a book that might have been borrowed from a library. It occurred to me he might have come here to return it, but it seems I was wrong. Thank you again.’
He lifted the flap on the counter for Billy, who nodded his own thanks and followed. As they moved towards the door she addressed them again.
‘Leaving, did you say?’
‘Yes, we think so…’ Madden paused. Billy was at his shoulder.
‘Then he might have said so… to Miss Murdoch, I mean?’ She spoke hesitantly. ‘He might have told her he was going away?’
Madden stared at her for a moment. He seemed surprised. ‘I didn’t think of that,’ he admitted. ‘I should have. You’re quite right – that’s exactly what he would have done.’ To Billy, he added, ‘He’d have wanted De Beer’s name removed from their list of subscribers.’
‘I asked because if he was here yesterday, and told Agatha that, she would have taken his card out of the index and torn it up. Deadheading, she calls it.’ Miss Kaye smiled.
‘Yes, of course. I see.’ Madden shook his head in chagrin. ‘So we’re a day too late.’
‘Oh, no… not necessarily.’ Miss Kaye’s green eyes sparkled. Her face had lit up. ‘If Agatha tore up his card, the bits will still be here, with the waste paper.’ She pointed at the wicker basket behind her. ‘It’s only emptied once a week.’
It was Billy who came on the first piece. Sifting through a stack of old periodicals, holding up each in turn and shaking it, he was rewarded by the sight of a torn shred of pasteboard, blue-ruled like the cards he’d already seen in the index, slipping out from between the pages of one of them.
‘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.