He went down the stairs quickly, Dwyer at his heels, opened the front door and went down the path. Scott was waiting for them. ‘Any luck, sir?’
‘You could say that.’ Vanbrugh turned to Dwyer. ‘An
interesting coincidence, isn’t it, Soames and Pope being in touch with someone in the Lake District.’
‘But what on earth would they be doing there, sir?’ Dwyer said. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Vanbrugh said. ‘It’s remote, secluded and they’ll pretty well have the place to themselves at this time of the year.”
‘If theyare there, sir,’ Dwyer reminded him.
Vanbrugh grinned. ‘When you’ve been at this game as long as I have, Sergeant, you’ll learn an interesting fact. That police work is mainly a matter of rather tedious routine, of question and answer, of sitting back, assessing the facts and looking for a pattern.’
‘I know that much already, sir.’
‘But that’s not all,’ Vanbrugh went on. ‘As the years pass you’ll find you develop a sort of extra faculty, an instinct that tells you a thing’s so, even when you can’t actually prove it. It’s a good copper’s most valuable asset.’ He took out his pipe and gripped it firmly between his teeth. ‘Soames and Pope are either in Kendal or somewhere near,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.’
‘And Rogan, sir?’
Vanbrugh shook his head and some of the excitement died in him. ‘Now there you have me. The trouble is, it doesn’t make any kind of sense. Neither does the fact that he’s mixed up with a couple of villains like Soames and Pope. They’re just not his style.’
‘What’s the next move, sir?’
‘Straight to the Yard. I’ll see the Assistant Commissioner and make arrangements for us to leave for the Lake District at once. I’ll get him to fix up full co-operation for us with the County Constabulary.’
‘We won’t reach Kendal before nine or ten tonight, sir,’ Dwyer pointed out. ‘We wouldn’t do much till tomorrow.”
‘You said Soames was nicked in 1958, didn’t you?’ Vanbrugh demanded. ‘The least you can do is get his picture from records and wire it to Kendal together with
that one of Pope. The sooner we get the local men looking out for them, the better. And we’ll need the County Constabulary in on this, too.’
As the car moved away, he sank back against the padded seat, no longer tired, a hollow ache of excitement in the pit of his stomach. He was as certain as he had ever been about anything, that the answer to this whole affair lay in the last place in the country he would ever have thought of looking.
At that precise moment, Soames was crouched in a clump of bushes at the side of the coast road a few yards away from the signpost indicating the way to Marsh-End.
The small green saloon he had hired from a garage in Broughton-in-Furness was parked in a clearing to the rear. The fact that he was here at all was purely accidental. He had been waiting at the side of the Ambleside road for Pope who had gone up the valley on foot to keep a prearranged appointment with Morgan, when the shooting brake containing Rogan and Hannah Costello had come down from Scardale. Soames, his cunning mind working overtime, had simply seized the opportunity.
Rogan was not expecting to be followed. His decision to make a last visit to Colum O’More had been taken at a moment’s notice, mainly because he had wanted to be alone with Hannah and in any case, he carried the keys of the cattle truck and the Morris van in his pocket.
They chose the long way round through Hawkshead, Coniston and Broughton and there was a fair amount of traffic on the road, which was greatly to Soames’ advantage.
Cautious by nature, he was anything but a violent man and he knew just when it paid to take a chance and when it did not. When the shooting brake took the turning for Marsh-End he drove by, then turned and quickly found somewhere to park. Then he moved cautiously through the trees until he came upon the farm and the brake parked in the yard. He returned to the main road at once