by Fiona Walker
‘Under-ten gymkhana race champion, Arthrington Show, Petra Shaw riding her evil loan pony Cecil to glory.’ Petra sighed fondly. ‘We shared an ice-cream, then Dad took me and my sister to see E.T.’
He is a toy-boy, she realised, as she led the mare back to the fence to use it as a mounting block. That was a first for the Safe Married Crush. Knowing Bay was younger made it feel safer. He was late thirties to her mid-forties, still whooping it up on country shoots while she was war-torn and rationed.
They cantered along the edge of the sheep field, crossing through to adjoining pasture and riding single file along a wide, elder-flanked dry ditch, then scrambling up to the narrow gate that led back onto the track.
‘Nineteen seventy-seven.’ Mo put in the code. ‘Year Sandy and Viv Austen got married.’
‘The Queen’s Silver Jubilee,’ Gill remembered nostalgically, holding the gate open for the others. ‘It was my first year at the girls’ grammar. We took part in a carnival procession with floats pulled by tractors. I was dressed as Boudicca.’
‘I was four.’ Petra rode out onto the track, pulling her vibrating phone from her pocket. ‘In fairy wings at an Ilkley street party.’
‘I was minus two,’ Mo calculated, following her.
‘Minus ten.’ Bridge burst through the gate last, making them all feel old as she added: ‘My mum got a Blue Peter badge for drawing John Noakes up Nelson’s Column.’
Unlocking her screen with fat riding-glove fingers on the third attempt, Petra saw the text was from Bay with a familiar spike of adrenalin.
‘You all right, pet?’ Mo was watching her. ‘You’ve gone very blotchy.’
‘Show!’ Gill beckoned for the phone.
‘We’ve been spotted trespassing.’ She showed them the picture text that had just arrived, a blurred close-up of her balancing on his hunt jump, remounting the Redhead. Get off my bloody land, gorgeous. Bx
‘How did he get a bum shot like that?’ Bridge said, leaning across to look at it.
‘Drones,’ Gill said darkly. ‘Sanson Holdings has dozens of them, and Bay’s always wanted what they have. They’re probably watching our every move.’ Her eyes rolled from the woods to the hills to emphasise the point.
‘Phone camera.’ Mo quashed the notion. ‘Bay, or his dad, always drives around the farm before breakfast. I thought that was his Defender parked up by Ten Ash Thicket. Best say sorry and keep my name out if he asks about the gate codes.’
‘Why should Petra say sorry?’ demanded Bridge, pulling a pre-rolled cigarette from behind her ear. ‘He lets the fecking hunt gallop all over it.’
‘He’s the MFH. They’re usually following him,’ Gill muttered. ‘Apologise now.’
Torn between embarrassment at being caught falling off and jubilation at being called ‘gorgeous’, Petra texted back an unapologetic Off! x
Don’t do it again. Bay had a lightning thumb. See anything odd?
W@?
Had visitors last night. After the storm. Lamping deer.
Petra would have liked to think that an instinctive bond of sisterhood stopped her grassing up the nappy-changing blonde from the estate, but the rest of the Bags were riding off and it was too complicated to type with one thumb on horseback. Carly, with her C tattoos, hadn’t looked like a poacher.
Soz! she texted, aware that her witty repartee needed honing. The Redhead danced and spun impatiently, triggering a long row of accidental exclamation marks. At least they weren’t kisses.
The others had set off at a fast trot now, eager to make up for lost time, the working day about to begin. Pocketing the phone and taking a heavenly gulp of early-morning air, warm horse and refreshed crush, Petra set off in pursuit at full tilt, whooping loudly.
3
Lester managed to deflect all talk of picnics, pensioner days out and blind dates for at least twenty minutes, largely by keeping his mouth crammed with shortbread so that all he could do was look thoughtful and shrug.
‘Look at you bending my ear!’ Pip said brightly, taking her mug and plate to wash at the cottage sink. ‘Can’t keep the Captain waiting!’
Lester glanced at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece. Jocelyn Percy loathed unpunctuality, but the chances were he’d be too discombobulated to notice when he was woken up with a tray breakfast and the papers. The old boy slept much longer these days, and took more time to gather his wits.
Lester felt a pang of regret that he would almost certainly be the last of the three of them left. It should have been Johnny. Huntsman to his whip to the Captain’s master. Every autumn, the trio would charge at dawn through the local landscape after Fosse foxhounds, like the Three Musketeers in rat-catcher, then hunting pink against a lowering sun as winter stole through the hills. When Jocelyn had resigned his mastership and his son-in-law had accepted the role, the heir had never been more apparent. Johnny Ledwell had been an extraordinary horseman, his knowledge and eye for breeding unrivalled, first cattle, then hounds and later horses.
For the first time in many months, Lester found himself reliving the awful day that the police had arrived to tell them Johnny was dead. The Captain, who had taken the news of human and horse tragedies many times in his life, had seemed broken by it. He’d always had a terrible temper, but after that day it had found a whole new level, one he mercifully used very rarely.
Following Pip outside, Lester watched her trot off through the arch towards the main house to prepare the Captain’s kippers and start the long routine of getting him up, a task now akin to unloading a square bale from a trailer by hand and trying to manhandle it into the round feeder. He could guess why she put off going inside until the last possible moment: the guv’nor had always been insufferably bad-tempered before midday. In the five decades that he’d checked the yard every morning at eight thirty sharp, a stickler for detail, his roars of fury had regularly been heard across the valley. Lester would give anything to hear that sound echoing around the stone walls again. To hear it accompanied by Johnny’s gruff tenor respectfully telling him to pipe down would be a celestial chorus even more heavenly than the exquisite ‘Ombra Mai Fu’ now singing out of his feed room. Nobody had ever dared challenge the Captain as Johnny had, not even his wife, and certainly not Pip Edwards with her non-stop chatter. She’d finish him off with her talk of charabancs and seaside trips.
He wiped shortbread crumbs from his lips, buttoned up his coat and went back into the feed room to collect an extra bucketful for the ones he knew Pip would have missed. Heading out through the yards, grateful to have his beloved silence back, he set off to check the foals properly and fill their water buckets.
The scream from the house stopped him in his tracks.
*
Carly heard a distant shriek, but the horse riders were far from view, and all she could see was tiny white clouds in a blue sky, matching the white sheep on a green field, like one of Ellis’s drawings.
They had reached the point where Manor Farm’s land met that of the Compton Magna Stud. Ahead, across a park-rail fence, familiar horses were grazing. Where were the foals?
‘Horsie!’ Sienna didn’t seem to care, clamouring to be let out of the buggy. Carly stooped to unclip her.
Thwack, thwack, thwack!
Trailing behind, Ellis was smacking a hedge with a familiar purple stick.
‘I told you to leave that where we found it!’ Carly scolded, beckoning him towards her, growling when he raced away.
The sense of foreboding she’d felt all morning was stronger here, her chest corseted. She took a deep breath and blew out hard to try to dislodge it. It could never again be as bad as when her mum was ill, Carly reminded herself. She’d known straight away, before even the official diagnosis, that she would lose her before Jackson was born. This was distant fire by comparison.
She could smell the poo stain and longed to rip off the T-shirt and wash it in the stream that trickled beneath the hedge boundary.
A yelp made her swing around again, exasperated.
‘What you doing now, Ellis?’
‘It wasn’t me, it was the dog!’
‘What dog?’
‘In the grass. I din’ mean to hit it.’
She hurried across to see. Lying behind a high bank of reeds, half submerged in red-stained stream water, was a huge dog, its brindle coat covered with blood. It looked close to death. ‘Ellis, go and help your sister give the horses their carrots, yeah?’
‘Did I kill it?’
‘No, you didn’t, baby.’ She tried to keep her voice calm as she took in the dog’s stillness, the skeletal ribs and open wounds. Eyes white with terror, it cowered away but couldn’t move far. ‘You found it. That’s a very good thing. Now go to Sienna.’ He pottered away, already in full battle cry.
The little boy’s hedge-whacking whip had caught the injured dog across its side – Carly could see the stripe on its muddy coat and touched it gently and apologetically, surprised by the soft warmth – but the injuries were far worse than anything a small child could inflict. Its throat and sides had been gouged multiple times, the blood clotted now, proud flesh showing, one white-pawed brindle leg twisted completely the wrong way. Yet its eyes pleaded with her, bright copper dulled by pain, its will to live fierce.
‘Oh, you poor thing, what happened to you?’ She crouched closer, reaching out to comfort it, the dome of its head velvet against her palm. Her hands were burning now, her heart hammering, blood rushing too loudly in her ears for her to hear an approaching engine.
Ash would know what to do. He’d been raised around dogs – his family had packs of them. She fumbled for her phone, but there was no signal.
Somehow the big dog managed to drag itself fractionally closer, head pressed harder against her fingers, refusing to be let go.
‘This field is private property,’ drawled an angry voice. ‘Just what in hell are you doing?’
Spinning round, Carly wanted to weep with relief at the sight of a toff in a flat cap and polo-shirt towering over her, even if he was looking furious and filming her on his mobile.
‘Me and my kids found an injured dog. It needs to go to a vet.’
The man stepped forward and took no more than a cursory look at the animal before glancing across at the buggy and the two small figures feeding the last carrot to the stud horses. ‘Better get your children out of the way.’ Then he turned back to retrace his steps and, for a horrified moment, Carly thought he was just going to leave the dog lying there dying.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Put the wretched thing out of its misery,’ he explained, striding back along the field edge.
‘You can’t do that!’ She hurried after him. ‘We need to fetch a vet.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he snapped. ‘That animal was brought here by a bunch of city psychos who wanted to film it shredding a hare or fox, or in this case fighting to the death with a stag. I found him all bled out in a game copse earlier. Nobody “won” this time but it’ll already be on a private video share channel, I can guarantee you.’
‘The dog still deserves a chance!’ She marched after him as far as she dared without losing sight of her children, then stood and shouted at his broad-shouldered back. ‘Please don’t kill him.’
‘It’s the kindest thing,’ he barked over his shoulder. ‘It’ll be dead inside an hour whatever we do.’
‘You’ve got a car here?’ She’d spotted the roof of a Land Rover on the other side of the hedge beside a stile.
‘And a gun.’ He disappeared out of sight to open the tailgate, telling the dogs inside to stay there.
‘You wouldn’t use that in front of little kids.’ She stood her ground as he reappeared.
‘Which is why I’m now going to take your name and address so you can remove your children and we can talk about the trespassing later.’ Gun resting on his shoulder, he flicked his phone on again and waited for her to dictate them, blue eyes unexpectedly attractive. They homed in now on the poo patch on her T-shirt.
‘No!’ Carly’s hands felt as though she’d plunged them into scalding hot water, stinging with shocks. ‘You, mate, will help me pick up the dog, put it in the back of your car and take it to a vet to try to save its life.’
‘Or what?’
‘We’ll all stand and watch it die together and you can explain to my kids why you won’t help save it. And then I’ll share that on bloody YouTube.’ She got out her phone and started videoing him.
His mouth pursed irritably, but he clearly knew she had far more powerful weapons than he did: a deep respect for all animals, a fierce mother love, three children under five and a 64GB memory card.
*
Pip had screamed more from protocol than fear. Wasn’t it what you were supposed to do when you found a corpse? It was all too exciting and unexpected to think straight. And upsetting, of course. Poor Jocelyn. Such an undignified way to go. Almost as bad as his wife. Pip’s second death since her parents. She was becoming an old hand now, although on reflection the length of the bloodcurdling scream had been amateurish.
Had she found the Captain dead in his bed, as she had her own father, she might have contained herself, but her octogenarian boss hadn’t died in his sleep. Instead he was wedged nose-down between the clarets and Malbecs at the bottom of the cellar steps, the eighty-fourth birthday-present slippers she’d given him last week still bearing their price-tags on the soles. She’d bought them in the summer sales, a size too big but, in his favourite Black Watch tartan at a bargain price, they had been too good an opportunity to miss.
She and Lester waited for the ambulance in the big farmhouse kitchen, with warm sweet tea on tap. The drawing room could come later when they rounded up the suspects and revealed the murderer.
‘Must’ve tripped,’ Lester muttered, his face still bone white, which, given his ruddy complexion, was like seeing Ayers Rock covered with snow.
‘Or been pushed?’
He didn’t appear to be listening. ‘Fetching more wine.’
‘I left a bottle of claret out as usual. Maybe he had company.’
‘He didn’t.’
‘I always said I should come back later to see him into bed. He found the stairs so hard. Maybe he saw a ghost.’ She imagined that bulldog face lifting in brief, frozen valediction at the sight of Ann in full hunting gear.
‘Heart attack’s my guess. That’s how his dad, the Major, went. Watching the Derby, he was, saw his horse win by ten lengths. Good way to go.’
‘Tell that to Emily Davison!’ She let loose a brittle sob, thinking it the right moment. But the obstinate tears wouldn’t come: it was too soon – she was too pumped. ‘At least there wasn’t blood. I can’t abide blood.’
Lester was familiar with shock. His own came as no surprise, its cold sense of unreality, its heightened sensations and slowed-down time. He’d seen a great many lives end, most of them four-legged ones that he’d shared from joyful, slithering birth to all manner of deaths, waved off in the kennelman’s trailer. The Captain had been saying his adieu for a long time. When a man lost interest in his horses, he lost interest in living. Johnny had been the same by the end.
He could see Pip was struggling to take it in, now cooking the Captain’s kippers – she always ate in a crisis – but instead of dropping them into the pan boiling on the Aga, she put them into the toaster and sat down again.
The secret was to be practical and keep busy.
‘We must let the family know,’ he said matter-of-factly.
‘He hasn’t been declared dead yet!’ Pip seemed to be expecting blue lights, action and an attempted resuscitation when the ambulance finally arrived.
‘Nothing a paramedic can do.’
They’d already tried to dislodge him and lay him down, but rigor mortis had started to set in. It was going to be a hell of a job to move him: he wasn’t a small man, and all Pip’s home baking had widened him so his dressing-gown belt now knotted at the frayed ends.
Under Lester’s beady gaze, Pip pi
cked up the phone handset that lived by the Aga and ran her eye along the list of numbers written on the noticeboard in big black figures so that the Captain could read them. He made a lot of calls, shouting at his bookie, his solicitor, his family – his deafness made him bellow at everyone – and the handsets regularly ended up in his food, bed or chair, or just went missing, unearthed days later in an unsavoury state. Pip had abandoned giving them more than a cursory wipe because he’d just shout at her for that too. This one was as sticky as a toffee apple.
She called Alice first, adopting her best breaking-bad-news manner. A voicemail message greeted her.
None of the grandchildren were answering their phones at home or on the move. As each outgoing message told her they were unavailable, she pieced together what she could remember from recent family visits – wasn’t it this week Alice was overseeing Pony Club Camp on a windswept Warwickshire hill? Tim was loco vinum all month, visiting vineyards in South Africa; Pax was on holiday with her husband and kids in Italy.
Pip started to relax. This wasn’t really happening until somebody said it was. It was still her drama. Having left messages to ask each in turn to ring her urgently, she set the phone down. ‘Shall I call Ronnie?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘In that case I’ll make more tea.’
*
It had been a task to squeeze two adults, two kids, a baby, a double buggy and three dogs – one on its last gasps – inside a Land Rover already rammed with gun racks and gamebird feeders. The posh landowner, who Carly now knew was called Bay, had been forced to abandon a pile of plastic tubs by the field entrance to make their emergency dash, but at last they were on their way. The big dog was now wrapped in a tartan rug on the floor between the bench seats, on one of which Carly perched, trying to cuddle a wailing Jackson while reaching down to staunch fresh bleeding: the deepest cut above the dog’s shoulder was now issuing a rising red tide. Mother and child were covered with blood as well as poo, the ultimate unsavoury hijackers.
‘Still hanging on in there?’ Bay called back.
