I turned to Clare. ‘There!’ I whispered to her, pointing. ‘He was over there. That man. A dark man. But he’s gone.’
Clare nodded. She couldn’t, I thought, have seen anything of him without the binoculars. But it seemed she had, for her body was tense now, alert. She was staring up at the head of the lake, impatient, ready to take chase against something, anything. But I held her back.
If this man had killed Laura and was hoping to do the same for me, he’d be armed. And though we might have the initial advantage in seeing him first, a bow and arrow wouldn’t be much use, in any sudden encounter, against a gun. Besides, I reasoned — my first surge of anger gone — ideally I should try and take this man alive if I was ever to clear myself of Laura’s murder. How else could I safely take him?
Then I realised I was looking down on a possible means: the well behind the old pumping-shed, where I’d dumped Ross’s dog. The two covers were flush with the ground. If I removed them completely and put a weave of small branches over the hole, and some moss and dead leaves on top of that I would have a very serviceable man-trap. In order to get at the extra rafters for our own tree house I’d had to cut away some of the laurel behind the shed and there was a clear pathway round the back there now.
I took Clare down to look at the well, gesturing to her, explaining what I had in mind. Lifting up the two iron covers I peered down into the darkness. It was ideal. The water, in the recent long spell of fine weather, had dropped considerably and the level must have been nearly eight feet below the ground. The four sides of the well were smooth and sheer. Once inside no one could get out again without help. Yet they needn’t drown, I saw, since just below the waterline there were old wooden railway sleepers, forming an original buttress all round the concrete sides of the well, which would serve as a hand-hold just below the waterline. A man could survive down there quite safely for an hour or two at least.
I hid the metal covers and Clare and I quickly started to collect sticks of old wood, placing them in a cross-weave over the hole. Very soon we had a matrix of decayed beech branches which we covered with a garnish of leaves and moss and twigs, so that after twenty minutes all the evidence of a well there had completely disappeared and it seemed as if there was now a continuous path running between the laurels behind the shed. All we needed then was a bait. And the bait, I supposed, could only be me.
The obvious plan was to make the man feel I’d never seen him, give him a false sense of security, to let him see me for a moment: long enough for him to be able to follow me, but without giving him time to shoot at me. I would then try and lead him gradually down the east bank of the lake towards the trap.
To this end I moved parts of a big fallen beech branch out across the real path between the shed and the lake shore, so that anyone coming up or down that way would be tempted to take the easier route behind the shed in their travels. I made a secure hide as well, in a hollow among some brambles about twenty yards directly south of the shed, so that I could make for this and then lie in wait, with a perfect view of the covered man-trap.
I explained everything to Clare as we progressed in the work and finally I told her that she would have to go back to the tree-house and wait. It would be too dangerous for her to come with me.
‘No,’ she said flatly. She could say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ well enough by now, and, as always, she meant it. I’d long ago learnt how there was no point in arguing with her when she was adamant over something. So I had to take her with me.
We walked up towards the head of the lake, moving very carefully, still keeping to the high ground, where we could look safely down into the valley. The sun was up, the mist well gone. But it was a windy day for a change. The trees stirred, the big beech boughs groaned about us, and the dry reeds by the lake shore rustled angrily in the breeze.
And soon we were stopping every half-minute, rooted to the spot, fancying some malign shape or movement in the sunny undergrowth. A sudden splash of dancing leaves or a pattern of windy shadows became a dark coppery head or a moving arm advancing on us out of the sun. As the wind blew more briskly, the placid trees and the smooth beech branches soon held all sorts of imagined danger. And I realised we were making no progress at all. Just the opposite: I felt we were at risk now. We were being followed, more than likely, the hunters hunted.
Two pigeons burst from a tree immediately above us, their wings beating like gunshots and I stumbled, in heart-shaking alarm, crouching down with Clare, looking wildly around. But there was nothing. Just a windy, sunny silence crowding in all round us which suddenly terrified me. I decided to go back to the tree-house, to sit things out until Alice returned. And it was Clare who had the bright idea then of how we might trap our quarry at no risk to ourselves.
‘Put food in the trap,’ she said.
‘Food? But the man isn’t an animal.’
‘Put something.’
And so it was that when we got back to the tree-house I took her advice. I got the transistor out, brought it down, round the lake again, and stood it right in the middle of the layer of branches over the well. Then I turned it on, the morning music programme on Radio 3, the volume slightly up. It wasn’t food, of course. But then we were hoping to attract a human, not an animal curiosity. If the man was still in the valley there was a good chance he would hear the music at some point and come to investigate. And if he trod anywhere near the transistor he would disappear with the music. The batteries were new. It would last a good twelve hours at least. It struck me as an ideal bait and I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t thought of it myself to begin with.
We took up positions then, hidden in the bramble bush, and waited. They were playing a Wagner opera that morning on Radio 3 — Tannhäuser — and the heavy, teutonic music together with the vast guttural voices boomed and clashed out over the sunny glade like an obsessive threat. I was convinced the man would hear it if he was still anywhere up at the top of the lake, for the wind was taking the sound in that direction. But no one came. We waited for nearly two hours, and still there was no one, and we were far too cramped now in the brambles. It was time to leave, to let the man fall into the trap himself, if he would, the music still ticking away like a fuse for him in the undergrowth.
But just as we were about to move from our hide something stirred in the bushes twenty yards beyond the shed. There was a faint sliding sound then — and we were down, completely hidden again, peering out between the brambles. A minute later there was another sound, a stick cracking, louder this time, but this time from another bush, thirty yards away, halfway up the side of the valley. The complete silence. Only the brisk wind agitating the leaves everywhere under the sharp midday sun.
Finally, after another few minutes wait — we felt like fishermen at last seeing their float dip in the water — the man came into view. Very slowly at first and from quite a different direction from the last sound on the side of the hill. He came from right behind the shed itself, moving along the back wall, hugging cover. He was walking towards the transistor. Then he stopped.
And now for the first time we both got a good look at him. He was thin, just as the masked figure who had shot Laura had been. He was older than I’d expected somehow, forty, perhaps fifty. And his face was not typically African; there was no fat, nothing bulbous about it from the angle we were looking at it: an ascetic face, learned even. There was something haunted and infinitely wary about it. Then he suddenly turned towards us, startled by something. And there was the shock.