“A walk?” Pendrith stared at him, bug-eyed. “What the bloody hell are you talking about? We need to get a move on, get back to London.”
“He thought that Dayton was driving to London,” Merlyn interjected. “Past tense. Looks to me like he doesn’t think that anymore.”
“Then where the hell is that bloody man going?” Pendrith asked.
“No idea.” Merlyn shrugged, then jerked a thumb toward Hugo. “Ask the Yank.”
“Follow me and I’ll tell you,” Hugo said. He opened the passenger door of the Cadillac and rifled through the glove box, pulling out a flashlight. He flicked it on, testing it, then off. “Let’s go.”
Ignoring Pendrith’s mutterings, Hugo led them across the driveway toward the pasture. He pushed his way through a rusty kissing gate and waited for them to follow. When they did, he set off in the direction the sign pointed, parallel to the wall that surrounded that side of the farmhouse. They began walking.
“So what’re you thinking?” Pendrith asked, as he trailed behind Merlyn.
“It’s just an idea, nothing more,” Hugo said, “but as Merlyn pointed out in the car, if he’d been going to London we’d have caught up with him.”
“Maybe he took a wrong turn,” Pendrith suggested.
“Maybe, but he doesn’t seem to have done so yet. And a sign at the end of this drive points toward Stevenage, which is right beside the A1 that we all came in on. So even if he didn’t know that was the right direction, the sign would have told him so. And in my experience, people who are not good with directions look extra hard for signs.”
“So if he didn’t accidentally turn the wrong way, you think maybe he went somewhere else on purpose?” Merlyn said.
“That’s possible,” Hugo said, “but where? Harper ran from us and came up here on the spur of the moment; he fled here. He didn’t have time to plan an itinerary, to map out where he was going and when. And he can’t now take the risk of showing up unexpectedly at a place where people will recognize him.”
“Which is pretty much anywhere,” said Merlyn.
“Right,” Hugo agreed.
“So what?” Pendrith called from the back of the line.
“So maybe he didn’t leave the farm,” Hugo suggested. “Or even come here in the first place.”
“Then whose car did we see?” Merlyn asked.
“I don’t know. We’ve been assuming it was his, but it was dark and all I saw was a small car.” Hugo smiled tightly, then said, “at least, I think it was a small car.”
“But that chap Drinker,” Pendrith insisted, “he said Harper had been here and bloody well shot him.”
Hugo grunted, deep in thought, and the threesome trudged on as the night’s quiet settled over them like a cloak. They walked for five minutes, their eyes used to the dark now, but even so they occasionally stumbled on the uneven ground. Once, Merlyn froze in her tracks, startled by the sudden call of a nearby pheasant. She was quickly reassured by Pendrith and they moved on in silence again. The path followed the outside of the crumbling brick wall, and sometimes Hugo wondered whether the three of them could just push it over. But the downside of the wall’s fragility meant that any attempt to climb it could be dangerous.
After a quarter mile, Pendrith stopped. “Where the hell is this getting us?”
Hugo clicked on the flashlight. He ran the beam of light along the narrow trail, starting at his feet and directing it along the worn track. The smell of wet earth beneath their feet and the tumble of black trees ahead of them gave Hugo the sensation of being lost, a hapless wanderer in a strange land.
Which, he thought, I pretty much am.
Beside them, the dark silhouette of the wall curved off to the right, but the path went straight ahead, bisecting the lumpy pasture. Hugo turned the beam onto the wall and, twenty yards away, saw that it ended in a tumble of ivy that dangled down from the bricks and roped itself around a waist-high wooden fence designed to keep cattle from wandering onto the property.
“Here we go,” he said.
He climbed over first, putting out a helping hand to Merlyn, who took it, and to Pendrith, who ignored it with a grunt of what Hugo took to be outrage. All safely over, Hugo looked toward the back of the house. They were standing at the edge of the garden, at least sixty yards from the house that sat as a gray hulk rimmed with white from the lights of the police activity out front.
Hugo led the way, flicking the flashlight on every few seconds, just long enough to know the way was clear. After just a few paces, Pendrith piped up.
“What the hell are we looking for?”
“An outbuilding with lights on,” Hugo said, “or a tree house with people whispering in it. Use your imagination.” For a former MI5 officer, Pendrith had a very blunt investigative edge, Hugo thought.
“I see a pond, how’s that?” Pendrith said, stopping to point. Hugo ran the light to his left and saw a circular pond thirty yards across. A gentle bank sloped about two feet to a heavy-looking surface, and Hugo assumed it was covered in duckweed, or maybe an unbroken layer of lily pads. He moved closer, eyes straining in the dim light. A few feet from the pond, his ankle flexed as he stood on what felt like a dip in the lawn. He ran the light over the ground and his stomach tightened.
“Guys, stay where you are,” he said, his voice low and urgent. He took two steps back and then aimed the flashlight at the surface of the pond. At the edge he’d just backed away from, the dark water sucked in the beam, telling Hugo there was a gap in the reflective greenery on its surface. He moved to his left, to the edge of the pond, and knelt. The weed-free patch of water was ten feet away, and he kept the light on it as he pulled a coin from his pocket. He took aim and lobbed it underhand toward the patch, following its flight with the beam from the flashlight. The coin arced over the green close to his feet and fell toward the dark water, landing with a gentle plink and seeming to hover on its surface for a moment before skittering away from Hugo, apparently along the surface of the water, before disappearing from view.
“There’s something under there,” Pendrith said from over Hugo’s shoulder.
“There is,” said Hugo. “And I’m afraid I know what it is.”
“You do?” Pendrith said, as he helped Hugo up. They stood side by side looking at the pond, then Pendrith spoke again. “That was the roof of a car, wasn’t it?”
“That’s my guess,” said Hugo.
“The question is, whose car?” Pendrith muttered.
“A car?” Merlyn moved forward and touched Hugo’s arm. “Oh my god. Is there someone in it?”
“That,” said Hugo grimly, “is the other question.”
It took thirty minutes for the police to shift their battery of lights to the back lawn and for a tow truck to appear. Hugo, Pendrith, and Merlyn stood to one side, enduring the suspicious looks of the police who were busy orchestrating the extraction of whatever lay beneath the surface of the pond.
“You have some explaining to do,” Detective Chief Inspector Clive Upton had told Hugo, happier to wag his finger at an American, Hugo thought, than at an MP or a frightened-looking civilian. A pretty, frightened-looking civilian. Upton had been furious at first, stalking across the lawn behind Pendrith, who had gone to fetch him. But the senior officer circled away from the tire tracks almost instinctively and directed his attention at the small amount of visible evidence before turning to Hugo. And even then, after the initial outrage that someone other than one of his men had found a crucial piece of evidence, a new crime scene maybe, Upton had calmed down and nodded along as Hugo explained why they were there, sticking as close to Pendrith’s version as he could.