Chapter Twenty-four

He was the only person to get off the train at Blanting, and he left the padlocked zipping bag with the money in it, in the luggage office at the station. As he left the village behind, and turned off into a field of wheat, following the route he had taken with Anthea, the sky darkened. Presently it began to rain, no more than a few drops at first, but then with thick persistence. Hunter was wearing a dark suit and thin town shoes. As he walked along, skirting the edge of fields, walking over tracks already used by cattle, he trod in mud that squelched persistently underfoot and that once or twice oozed thinly over the edge of his shoe.

After half an hour’s walking he began to feel unsure that he was going in the right direction. How stupid he had been not to ask Anthea to draw a map, he reflected. He felt mingled relief and alarm when he turned into yet another field and came almost face to face with a farm labourer trudging along in sou’wester hat and black oilskin cape.

The man was smoking a pipe. He took it out of his mouth to say, ‘Arternoon.’

‘Good afternoon.’ Hunter tried to move into the shelter of a small bush which immediately pelted him with raindrops.

‘It’s a wet ’un.’

‘It is indeed.’ He spoke with what he felt to be odiously false joviality. ‘I seem to have lost my way a bit. I’ve come from Blanting.’

‘Might help if you said where you were tryin’ to get to.’

‘Of course. It’s the nearest village – over in this direction, I think.’ He pointed wildly.

The man shook his head. ‘Not that way. Bassington estate that way, old Manor House. Nearest village’s Leddenham, couple of mile across the fields, straight as you can go. Then you come to the road, turn right and matter of a quarter of a mile along go sharp left –’

He ceased to listen, waited until the man had finished giving directions which were both long and elaborate, and then offered thanks. The labourer looked at him curiously. ‘You’re welcome. Didn’t come out prepared for weather, eh?’ Hunter laughed feebly. ‘If you’re stayin’ in Leddenham best place is the Black Bull.’ He stuck his pipe in his mouth again, nodded goodbye, and was gone.

There’s a man who won’t forget me, Hunter thought. But at least he knew in which direction the estate lay. He plunged on through thick grass, nettles, brambles, until he reached the barbed wire. The wood was on his right – he had gone a hundred yards too far, that was all.

As he reached the edge of the wood, the rain stopped. He wiped his face and hair with a handkerchief, but water continued to trickle down his neck and to drop from his suit. There was water in his shoes, too, as he trod on bracken up a barely marked path. Suddenly he was in the glade, and looking round he saw that he had come along the overgrown path he had seen leading on through the wood, when they had come here before together.

‘Anthea,’ he called, and called again. His voice sounded strange in the unstirring wood, strange and – although he did not think of himself as an imaginative man – frightening. There was no answer, but perhaps sound did not carry far in such surroundings. He wiped his head and face again. He was shivering a little, possibly with the beginnings of a cold.

Slowly, reluctantly, he began to push a way through the brambles that, as they had done before, sprang back at him. He had only a few yards to go, yet he was shivering uncontrollably by the time he had pushed a way through to where the stone hut stood, and there was unmistakable terror in his voice as he cried her name again.

She did not answer. He did not know what it was he feared, what sort of ultimate betrayal he expected to find inside the hut. She had left the place, changed her mind suddenly about the whole plot – that would be like her. Or it had all been some sort of trick played on him – that possibility had, as he knew, always been present somewhere in his mind. Or she had told somebody about the den in spite of her promise not to do so, some secret enemy, and she lay within the hut, dead.

He did not want to prove his fears, or to know the details of her betrayal if she had betrayed him. He did not want to open the hut door. But had he not already realised that he had reached a point from which there was no turning back? He walked to the door of the hut, and pushed. The door creaked and opened.

The hut was empty. The dust lay on the floor, as it had done before. Anthea had never come here, nobody had come here. Had he not accepted this as a possibility? Yet now that he was confronted with the act of betrayal, now that the hut offered its silent evidence that she had cynically rejected all that they had talked about, he could not believe it. He stumbled to the door again and out of it, walked round the hut looking for footprints (but there were no footprints except his own), leant against the side of the hut staring at the green bushes in front of him, and mouthing unintelligible words. There was nothing to be seen here, and nothing to be done. When he looked round the scene that should have been the victorious climax of their planning, tears came to his eyes and ran down unchecked.

As he left the hut and stumbled away, pushing through again to the glade, thin sunlight filtered through the poplars. The tears were still in his eyes, but as he walked back, stepping recklessly in puddles, smearing his shoes with mud and filling them with water, he sought for an answer to the question: why had she done it? What purpose could there be in a plot which left him with fifteen thousand pounds in ransom money, to use as he wished?

Was there, then, another sort of explanation, one which did not involve betrayal? Had her stepfather discovered what she meant to do, locked her up, and handed over the money in order to have him arrested afterwards while in possession of it? Had Roger Sennett somehow discovered the plot, and told Lord Moorhouse? When he got out of the wood the day was bright and warm. On the dripping branches, in the sunlight, birds sang. He had recovered his faith in Anthea, and he knew what he meant to do.