Keith looked over Sir Henry’s left shoulder and kept expression off his face. The deal sounded good. He had pitched the value of Sir Henry’s guns low; and he was sure that he knew what the other wanted and could therefore inflate the value. Sir Henry was ready to shake hands and Keith was tempted to clinch the deal. But his curiosity, which Molly called his hunter’s instinct, was against such an inconclusive outcome. Also, a still better deal might come along. And Sir Henry had a son whom Keith had never met and yet despised. Finally, Keith had been directed to the tradesmen’s entrance.
Keith never went back on his word. So he decided not to give it. ‘I’ve already had enquiries from some of my best customers, following that piece in The Scotsman,’ he said. Sir Henry’s eyes shifted focus at the mention. ‘I don’t want to offend any of them. If I let you jump the queue you’ll have to throw those two guns in for free.’
The Shadow Home Secretary gave Keith a glare which reminded him of a muzzle-flash at dusk. By now Keith could read him like a book. Sir Henry loved to do a deal but disliked parting with money or money’s worth. Mean or not, he was determined. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We have a deal.’
‘I’ll sleep on it,’ Keith said. ‘Good morning to you.’
*
Keith slaved through the following weekend, fretful at being confined to the house while the weather held fair. On the Sunday night Wallace and Janet returned and took over the shop and, for two more days, Keith concentrated on clearing the backlog of guns for overhaul or repair. By Wednesday morning he was struggling with the last, a Darne which showed that most malignant of maladies – occasional misfiring while seeming to be mechanically perfect. He traced the deformed component at last and was assembling the gun for, he hoped, the last time when the telephone gave its double shrill. He turned Mozart off.
‘Calder.’
A man’s voice came on the line. A young man, Keith judged from the tone. ‘Mr Calder? This is Brian Batemore. You don’t know me, but –’
Keith sighed and broke in. ‘Your old man’s been on the phone to me every day for nearly a week. Tell him I’m still not prepared to commit myself.’
‘It’s not that,’ the voice said quickly. ‘It’s more . . . personal.’
‘Hold on.’ Unseen, Keith smiled. He put down the turnscrew in his hand and took the phone over to the window. He fetched the litre bottle of Guinness which had been awaiting his attention and settled down in his worn armchair ready for a long chat. There were worse ways to pass the time than to look out over his sunlit garden while riding, metaphorically speaking, one of his many hobbyhorses. ‘I’ll be as personal as you bloody like,’ he said, ‘and you can hang up any time you want. I’ve been seeing your name in the papers from time to time, and from what I read you’re a prick of the first water, you and your Hunt Saboteurs’ Association. Me, I don’t give a fart for hunting. I’ve told the Master often enough that if he wants to justify the hunt’s existence they’ve got to be seen as an effective method of fox-control; but they’d rather leave plenty of foxes on the ground for the sake of their next day out. They expect everyone else to leave their foxes alone and never mind how many chickens or lambs or game-birds they kill.’
‘Well, then –’
‘But you, you’re worse,’ Keith said. ‘You can still hang up whenever you like. I’ll say this for the hunt. No fox, chopped by hounds, lives for more than a second, despite what your propaganda makes out, and I don’t know any other method of control which can be counted on to be anything like that quick, not even lamping with a rifle. And the hunt is pursuing a perfectly legitimate activity. You and your rabble break the law to interfere with that activity and you don’t care a drop of bat-piss for the fox. You’re acting out of malice, and then preying on class-hatred and the sympathy of the ignorant when you get your smelly little arses into trouble. To my mind, if it’s all right for you to break the law because you don’t approve of hunting, then it’s fair enough for the hunt supporters to knock seven colours of shit out of you when they catch you at it.’
He paused for a sip of his Guinness. He could hear a faint, whispered colloquy at the other end. ‘Finished?’ asked the voice. It sounded amused.
Keith decided that this was a subject on which he could speak for three minutes or for three hours but not for any period in between. ‘For the moment,’ he said.
‘Well, I’ve heard you out. Now, you owe me a listen. You know the Foleyhill Nature Reserve?’
Keith did. ‘Don’t call it a nature reserve,’ he said. ‘That implies some sort of official status. Call it a sanctuary, if you must dignify it. I didn’t know you had anything to do with Foleyhill.’
When the man spoke again there was an exaggerated patience in his voice. ‘The Foleyhill sanctuary, then. And you know now. We’ve got a problem out there.’
‘It’s a problem you’re making for everybody else,’ Keith said. He was off again. In addition to his strong feelings on the subject, he was remembering other reasons for disliking Sir Henry’s son. He was, for instance, on Wallace’s list of Cash Only customers. Keith made a mental note to ask Wal whether this denoted insolvency, disapproval or merely the suspicion than any animal rights crank would be unlikely to settle a debt to a gunshop. ‘You and your kind,’ he went on, ‘you’ve been brainwashed by Walt Disney. You expect all God’s creatures to snuggle up together. What you’ve done is to provide a safe haven for foxes, carrion crows and every other dam predator. So there’s damn-all else in your bloody sanctuary and your vermin goes raiding over the boundaries for food. The shoot on Fallowfield had to cut down on their pheasant releasing by five hundred this year, because it wasn’t worth rearing more chicks than they could protect, just to feed your wildlife. So that’s five hundred creatures, thanks to you and your sanctuary, which don’t get a chance of life in the wild. And a good chance, too, because they never did recover more than forty per cent in a good year.’
‘We might be agreeable to a planned programme of control,’ said the voice.
‘You what?’
‘Some of our members are arguing that nature needs a bit of a hand to keep her balance. We’ve been doing a bird-count and we don’t like the answers much. We might look for help in a control programme if you’ll advise us about something else.’
This sudden reversal of entrenched attitudes took Keith’s breath away. He was silent until the voice at the other end asked anxiously, ‘Are you there?’
‘I’m here,’ Keith said. ‘What did you want advice about?’
‘Roe deer.’
‘Ah. From what I hear, that’s a different matter. You seem to have a small number of bucks, each holding a good-sized territory for himself, his doe and her fawns. The surplus population are pushed out into the moor and the farmland, where there’s inadequate cover for them. The farmers aren’t any too pleased, but it makes for good stalking for the rest of us. And the population occupying the forestry on Foleyhill should be at an acceptable level. What’s your problem?’
‘Two problems. The owner’s getting uptight about damage to trees by the roe. And we think we’ve got a poacher.’
‘That’s not so good. The cure is a winter cull of does. But if the poacher knocks off the territorial bucks, you’ll get an increased population and a lot more fraying damage while the territory’s in dispute. Roe damage isn’t always as bad as it looks. And roe aren’t always guilty of what they’re blamed for. You’d better get expert advice.’
‘Would you come out and look at it for us?’
Keith hesitated. He knew the ground well, had shot the farms round about and even poached occasionally in wilder days. A guided tour might be interesting and even useful. On the other hand, he was a busy man. ‘Why not try my brother-in-law?’ he asked. ‘He knows more about roe deer than they know about themselves.’
The voice did not seem to have a high opinion of Keith’s brother-in-law. ‘Ronnie Fiddler,’ it said, ‘is an arrogant, pig-headed, bigoted oaf.’
‘Yo
u know him? Get him to help.’
‘Only by reputation. You’re less biased –’
Keith laughed. ‘You can say that after the tongue-lashing I just gave you?’
‘That might have put me off if I hadn’t heard you speak and read your articles. Ecology, conservation and so on. Okay, so you sound off a bit. But at least you see both sides. Most people take up extreme views and stick to them. So what do you say? Will you come and take a look with me?’
Keith glanced round at his workbench. It looked unappealing. Outside, the sun was shining and there was a cooling breeze. On the lawn, Molly was teaching Deborah to walk with the dogs in anxious attendance. It was a cosy and tranquil scene and Keith would have liked to join it. But the dogs needed something more robust in the way of exercise if they were to be fit for the hard work to come. The spaniel, Tanya, especially – it would probably be her last working season, poor old thing. And, Keith admitted to himself, he too could do with some exercise. It had been a sedentary summer.
‘Give me time to eat,’ he said. ‘Could you pick me up around two? My wife may need the car.’
There was another outbreak of whispering. ‘I’m pushed for transport myself,’ said the voice. ‘I may have to be dropped.’
‘All right,’ Keith said. ‘I’ll meet you at the old quarry about two-thirty.’
He hung up. He slapped the Darne back together, hoping for the best, and went to find his walking boots.
Chapter Three
The area known as Foleyhill is something of a geological oddity. Situated where the fertile plain of the south-east Border country begins to merge with the tract of undulating moorland beyond which lies Newton Lauder, Foleyhill bulges like a wart on an angel’s nose, a few square miles of broken, rocky ground, unfit for cultivation except for a few areas of forestry.
After a mile on an unmade road Keith came to the old quarry. It seemed to be deserted.
A shoulder of discoloured stone had been left protruding from the wing of the quarry, but Keith knew from earlier, illicit visits that a track ran round the shoulder to where a second, smaller face had once been opened. Looking for a cool place to park, he reversed his car round into the track, parking where he sensed the shade would reach within an hour or so. Somebody had been less patient or would need his car again sooner, for Keith could see a headlamp and a rim of dark blue wing further round the curve. He let the dogs out of their bed in the hatchback’s boot. The young labrador romped ahead of him back to the quarry, but the old spaniel took her time, working the stiffness out of her bones.
Keith had not heard another car, but a young man in a fringed shirt and leather hat was waiting in the quarry.
‘Mr Batemore?’ Keith asked.
‘Mr Calder?’
Neither man offered to shake hands.
‘I’ve seen you around Newton Lauder,’ Keith said, ‘but I didn’t know who you were.’
‘It was good of you to come, but we don’t exactly encourage dogs in the . . . sanctuary.’
‘They’re trained gundogs. They won’t disturb game, if you have any, unless I tell them to. And unless and until you get an interdict I can walk them through here any time I want to.’
‘All right. You don’t have to be so scratchy. Just as long as they behave. We’ll walk this way and I’ll show you some of the problems.’
A second track, little more than a path, led from the end of the road over a low hump of rocky ground and down between two plantations of conifers. They turned off and followed a small stream to where it emerged into low, damp ground.
‘Here’s some of the damage.’
Keith squatted and examined the damage to the small trees with care. He sniffed the bark. ‘You can tell your landlord, or whoever it is that’s kicking up about the damage, that you’ve got voles – here at least. Show me some more.’
They squelched through the boggy ground and Keith said, ‘You ought to have snipe here. You would have, given a little work and some dung to encourage the invertebrates.’
They studied another area of vole-damage. Keith looked up the long slope to where Foleyhill was crowned by more forestry and a mixed copse of large hardwoods. ‘There used to be tawny owls up there. Are they still around?’
‘They are. And no way do you get to shoot them.’
Keith sighed. ‘I wouldn’t wish to,’ he said. ‘If you want to be a conservationist you’d better learn a little about ecology. Let the forces of nature do the work. The owls could control the voles for you, but they don’t like covering long distances without a perch. Try putting in a line of posts down the hill for them to perch on. When they find there’s a supply of voles down here, they won’t have to hit the other birds so hard up at the top. Now, come over here.’ Keith led the other man to a tree which shone whitely, stripped of bark to a height of three feet. The ground beneath it was scuffed. ‘This is a roe-buck’s “fraying-stock”, sort of boundary marker. But it’s the only one I can see.’
They set off on a diagonal climb up the slope. After a hundred yards Keith stopped and looked down on top of the plantations. ‘You can see the feeding-damage from here,’ he said. ‘It’s not very much and it’s evenly distributed. The extra growth on the neighbouring trees would just about make up the difference.’ They climbed again. The rocky slope had a cover of old heather. ‘There’s plenty of grit,’ Keith said, ‘and the choice of two streams. If you did some heather-burning – in small patches, mind – you could have grouse here.’
‘And every poacher for miles around.’
‘What, for God’s sake, is the good of having a sanctuary and then saying you don’t want birds in it in case they attract poachers?’
‘You may have a point there.’
They reached the trees near the first crest. The dogs were panting like steam-engines and the two men were sweating so that midges made a cloud around them. ‘A place like this should deafen you with birdsong,’ Keith said. ‘And it still could, if you let some sunlight in to encourage the underbrush and got somebody to thin out the crows and magpies, and maybe the foxes. Chrissake, you’ve got fewer wild creatures here than down on the farmland.’
‘There’s something I want to show you over here,’ the young man said.
They walked through the deep shade, silent on the accumulated leaf-mould, sometimes scrambling over loose boulders. Towards the further margin of the trees were some natural clearings and here they followed a deer-track through bracken and nettles. A lonely blackbird gave his alarm-call. The last clearing opened out on to a view over a hundred square miles of moor and farmland.
‘What do you make of this?’
From a limb of a large tree hung the carcass of a roe-doe. A start had been made to slitting the belly but it seemed that the poacher had been interrupted. Keith stood and looked at it from a few yards away. ‘Shot by a crossbow,’ he said. ‘The bolt’s still in it. Out of season too. Something must have frightened him off.’
‘There’s no crossbow here.’ The young man sounded puzzled.
‘Well, there wouldn’t be, would there?’
‘There was one nearby when we – I – found it this morning.’
Keith thought back to his own youth. ‘My guess would be that he was starting to gralloch the deer when he heard you coming. He ducked into cover. As soon as you’d gone he retrieved the crossbow. But he wouldn’t want to be caught with it on him. Maybe he hid it and hasn’t come back for it yet. We’d better take a look around.’
‘I suppose so. Seems a pity to waste the meat, once it’s been killed. Couldn’t you. . .?’
‘Hardly worth it,’ Keith said. ‘It’s been left too long. The blood will have set into jelly by now. Still, I suppose it would feed the dogs.’
He pulled his knife from his belt and put a hand on the carcass. The young man took several steps to one side, as if he were afraid of being splashed with blood.
A movement, seen from the corner of his eye, made Keith turn his head. A girl had come out of the tree
s. She had red hair and a dark tan, which looked wrong to Keith’s eye – in his experience, red hair went with a pale skin that seldom tanned well. She wore the same kind of cowboy hat as the young man. No, he corrected himself. Not cowboy. The kind of leather hat which was sold in all the markets in France.
And she was pointing a camera at him.
As the implication of the camera rammed past all the others, Keith ducked away to hide his face. And in that moment came a noise. He was struck an appalling blow on and in and through the right shoulder. He was unconscious before he hit the ground.
*
Some time later, perhaps an hour but he never found out, Keith drifted back to the surface of consciousness. He was lying in the same place, in a pool of his own blood which hummed with a thousand flies. A rough bandage seemed to have been tied round his shoulder and around the arrow which still transfixed it. Between shock and the effect of loss of blood he was incapable of making sense of these circumstances. Although he was lying in the sun the world looked grey and he was aware of a deep cold. The rasping flannel on his face he recognized as the tongue of the younger dog, the black labrador, which had been licking anxiously at his face but now sat back, conscious of a job well done. The older dog, the liver-and-white springer, lay a few yards off, whining occasionally but awaiting his command.
Through the fog which clouded his brain Keith thought that he could hear men’s voices. He tried to raise himself but a tearing pain, worse than anything in his life before, flashed from his right shoulder through his whole being, and although he did not know it, he began to bleed again. He opened his mouth to shout. He managed only a croak but that was enough to raise the agony again. Consciousness faded away and then returned, palely. The voices were there still, but fainter. He thought that they were further away, but he could not be sure.
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