“You feel it too, do you?” Joe replied, his lips barely moving.
Was their quarry waiting for them to leave the area so that he could continue on his journey without them?
“Well, we have his mount. He abandoned it in the tavern yard,” Marcus whispered. “Unless he is up for a bit of horse theft, which is something we can arrest him for, he has to either try to get his horse back or take a long walk. Either way, he is doomed to failure.”
“If he is waiting -”
“Oh, but he is waiting,” Marcus drawled.
Now that the game had changed, all of his previous exhaustion had vanished in an instant. In its place was a ruthless determined not to give in.
“What do you want to do?” As Joe spoke, he scoured the trees for signs of movement.
“It is, I think, an hour before dawn. We are going to find somewhere to hide, and will lie in wait. If our man doesn’t make an appearance, then it is safe to say that we have lost him,” Marcus replied. “However, we have to assume that he lives around these parts somewhere. For now, all we need to do is find out where.”
“He has the box on him,” Joe warned.
“I know,” Marcus replied. “So he has to meet someone to hand it over, doesn’t he? At some point, he has to come out of the undergrowth. When he does, we will be waiting.”
“How do we know that the woods are wide, but not very deep?” Joe asked with a frown.
“Because you are going to lie in wait for him here and I am going to go down the road. Then I will double back, take a good look at those woods, and see what is on the other side. If I see him, I will try to flush the bastard out.” He didn’t wait for his colleague to reply and stalked back toward the village. Within seconds he had vanished into the shadows.
Marcus set to work. Keeping to the shadows, he manoeuvred his way around a long row of houses which bordered the edge of the woods. He vaulted over a low stone wall and quietly made his way into the trees to begin his search.
It didn’t take long to find his quarry. Luckily, the man was walking steadily through the trees toward him. Marcus buried himself in the undergrowth and waited. Rather than approach, he eased closer and tried to get a good look at the man’s face. To his disgust, the tree cover thwarted him. It was too dark. With still no idea of whom the man was Marcus decided to follow to see where he went. He needed to know which house he occupied in the village because from the confident way the man strode through the undergrowth; there could be little doubt he was a resident.
“Now, where did you get those from?” he whispered, eyeing the dead rabbits slung over one shoulder. “How did you get those so quickly?”
Something wasn’t right. The cloak the man wore was the same. The build exactly right, but there was something wrong with this man only Marcus couldn’t decide what it was.
Why was he walking around in the middle of the night if he wasn’t their escapee, though? As soon as he had reached the village, why did he not lie low somewhere and wait until morning?
It was highly unlikely that there would be more than one man walking around a village like this in the middle of the night, Marcus mused.
“It has to be him,” he breathed.
If it wasn’t the man he was after, why was he walking around in the middle of the night, using the woods as protection? It was certainly an unusual time to be hunting game.
Marcus watched the man stop, and take a careful look around. Once assured he was alone, the man resumed his journey. Minutes later, he disappeared into the back of a somewhat run-down house on the outskirts of the village.
“Home,” Marcus murmured as he watched the door close.
Settling back against a tree, Marcus waited to see if he would re-appear. To his surprise, he had been in position for only a few minutes when a short, rotund man appeared several feet away. Unaware that he wasn’t alone, the stranger studied the back of the house. He didn’t approach, or do anything other than study the property. Seconds later, his blistering curse shattered the silence, and he disappeared back into the trees.
Now, who are you?
Shaking his head in disbelief, Marcus set off after his new target.
CHAPTER THREE
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t our elusive Benjamin Parkinson,” a cold voice drawled into Ben’s ear.
Ben made his face as expressionless as possible and sighed. He took a long sip of his ale and placed his mug carefully onto the battered bar before he turned to face the magitrate’s assistant.
“What do you want, Carruthers?” he demanded coldly.
“We know about the brace of pheasants you stole from the Priory,” Carruthers declared officiously.