It was six o’clock the next morning when an unshaven man clad in a rough old suit of Harris tweeds, who might have been a tramp or a naturalist set out through the old town gate in the general direction of Folkestone. A burly man in a decrepit Ford car passed him just outside the Ypres Tower. It was Malone also setting out on the search for a needle in a haystack. No sign of recognition passed between the two men. Labar trudged on and in the course of the next hour was overtaken by an early charabanc on its way to Folkestone. He stopped it and bought a lift for half a dozen miles or so.

He had no fixed plan. If anything came of this excursion luck would have to be with him. Away on his right he could see mile after mile of flat country cut into patterns by a complicated series of dykes, and save for a rare farmhouse or cottage almost void of any indication of human inhabitants.