I was thinking about how, coming out of the woods, we’d struck two of the coppers in the search party. I’d asked them whether they’d come upon any scent of ‘their quarry’, and one of the two had said, ‘The quarry? That’s over yonder, en’t it?’ which had made me think John Lambert might yet escape them.We’d just given up a hunt of our own: for young Mervyn. Our best hope seemed to be to find him and hustle him into saying what he knew, but Mervyn was not at his set-up and had evidently not returned to The Angel, for we’d come across Mrs Handley who’d told us that she was also searching for him. She had not been over-anxious, though: the boy was allowed the run of the woods and fields, and would often tramp off to East or West Adenwold and stay out all day.The cricket game was being played against a great wall of grey sky that was darkening by the minute, and which made the players’ whites seem to glow. A woman I’d never seen before stood by the pavilion twirling a lacy parasol, and I thought: That’ll have to do duty as an umbrella before long.
