by Claire Peate
Tomorrow! In twenty-four hours I would be back in my brightly-lit box of a flat and all this would be over. I’d be at work on Tuesday. Urgh.
I pulled on my dressing gown and padded down to the phone in the hallway. From the kitchen I could hear Henna still clanging and banging the pots, stashing them away quickly in the backs of cupboards.
I tried Gwyn’s number again. It rang and rang and Gwyn didn’t pick it up.
Downhearted but not done yet, I headed back to my room to get dressed.
I knew exactly what I was going to wear. I’d packed my absolutely favourite dress that I now carefully took out of my suitcase and put on. I examined myself in the mirror and knew that I looked pretty good. Really good, if I had to be honest with myself. I sincerely hoped Gwyn would answer that goddamn phone and be at the party tonight to see me.
The dress should, by rights, be hideous. It was made of gold and brown velour, which is a gruesome material at the best of times and was made especially worse as it was in really dodgy colours; but somehow it looked good. It clung to all the right places and disguised all the bad places and had a plunging neckline and skinny braid belt. I’d found it in a chichi boutique near Bond Street when I was going sale shopping with my sister a couple of years ago. She was busy trying on nice looking things and I picked this hideous-looking dress off the rail and went to while away the hours waiting for her by having a laugh. But for some reason it looked completely fabulous on and I ended up buying it. Despite it setting me back over two hundred pounds. In a sale.
The cost didn’t matter though, according to the various magazines I get. Apparently the important thing is cost per wear and in that case it was an absolute snip!
The curtains were drawn, the lights were dimmed and music was stacked up next to the stereo with someone’s indie pop compilation currently playing. I checked with Organiser Laura to see if it was “optimum fire lighting time” and found out that it was.
“Just something ornamental, though,” she added, seeing me start to pile on an entire tree-worth of logs, “it is still August.”
I struck the match well away from my beloved velour and set it to the kindling, watching out that my oh-so-flammable dress wasn’t anywhere near – the Tarzan-and-Jane half singed and torn look was so last season. Within a few minutes the fire had caught and I stood back proudly admiring my work. I was really getting the hang of this countryside lark – sunbathing on picnic rugs, building fires and horse riding. I was nearly as countrified as Laura and soon I’d be twirling a strand of hay in my mouth, one mud-encrusted kitten-heeled foot resting on a five-bar farm gate, watching the world go by while cows frolicked in the fields below.
The lighting was kept dim, which suited the room and also suited Henna. The standard lamps cast a soft yellow light but the corners of the room were still in gloom – blurred and indistinct; I could barely see up to the roof beams. The furniture was all arranged on one side, away from the dance floor area that Henna had designed and was now demonstrating how to use while Laura looked on, appalled. There was no way a representative of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces was going to embarrass herself on a dance floor she told me as I stood and admired Henna strutting her stuff.
There was a more than plentiful supply of alcohol arranged by Laura on the nearby sideboard. Gin, whisky, vodka, many, many beers along with two litre-sized bottles of lemonade.
All that was missing were five policemen and one farmer. I tried Gwyn again.
Still no answer.
Louisa was sitting on the sofa drinking gin and tonics, leafing through a five-year-old copy of Country Life that featured the house we were staying in. It turned out my guess about the people who lived in the house hadn’t been too wide of the mark. The couple who lived here (unmarried) were both painters (I knew it) and had two children who were called Araminta and Jocasta, who sat in stylised poses in a number of the photos draped over chairs or idling on mossy stone benches, looking like the models they so clearly wanted to be. So not far wrong at all.
There was nothing to do now until the boys arrived. I milled around the drinks table for a minute, trying all the different crisps, before sneaking into the bay window as I’d done a couple of nights ago, hidden by the thick curtains. I don’t know what I was expecting to hear – the strangled cries of ravaged farmers or wails of heartbroken lovers – but there was no way I would hear anything over Madonna, who was pounding out of the stereo. And although a big blue-white moon was out over the valley, I still couldn’t see more than a few yards from the window. And in those few visible yards there were no farmers staring up at the window now. Or jilted lovers either. Or big cats, for that matter. Nothing. I wondered whether anyone or anything could see me though, lit up in the house. Because I had the eeriest feeling that I was being watched. At one point I could have sworn I saw movement right at the edge of my circle of vision, shifting quickly on the edge of the light out towards the woodland in the empty sheep field.
It was nothing. I had an overactive imagination, that was all. I shivered slightly and went back into the room, helping myself to another goblet of wine and settling in to an armchair next to Henna.
All the girls were wearing their party gear. Henna had emptied what must have been an entire bottle of concealer on her face to cover the emerging toxins, and looked a bit like Mr Potato Head. She’d sensibly gone down the TITS! route and refocused attention on to her not inconsiderable chest. Louisa was half-wearing a blouse, practically unbuttoned to her knees, tight jeans and stiletto boots. Laura had put aside the combat trousers in favour of plain brown trousers and T-shirt combo, so instead of looking like a Territorial Army girl in the field she looked like a Territorial Army girl off-duty at a party.
“Did you see anything out there?” Louisa asked.
“No. No farmers. No lovers.” I didn’t mention the fact that I’d seen something shifting and moving in the gloom. After all it could have been a sheep. Or any manner of completely harmless animals. Why worry anyone?
“No big cats out there then?”
“A ha ha ha.”
“Hey, Henna, how’s your article going for the newspaper? When will they publish it?” Louisa asked.
“It’ll be in next week’s supplement,” Henna said proudly, sipping her wine with gusto, “that’s unless there’s a more pressing story to be had, in which case it goes back a week.”
“Are we going to be in it?” Laura asked.
“Oh yes.”
“Well, it’s all good I hope.”
Henna snorted loudly and took another gulp of wine.
“I wonder if we’ll actually see a big cat if there’s one out there,” I mused.
“Perhaps tomorrow on our hike,” Laura said. Louisa, Henna and I kept our heads down, none of us wanting to be the one to tell her there was no way we were going on a hike tomorrow when there were police helicopters, marksmen, news reports and leaflets from people in authority all suggesting, quite strongly, that there might be something out there. Besides, were we really going to be in top form tomorrow morning for a hike? Better to slog on over to the Crossed Keys and have lunch there. At least that way we might get a chance to see Gwyn again.
“Well, I’ve got my camera to hand so if a big cat comes along…” Henna did a mock “click” of a camera. Heart-warming. I’m sure my parents would enjoy opening up the Sunday papers to see a close-up picture of their daughter’s severed and mangled legs with the caption “Rachel Young: Tragic Cat Attack Victim”.
We sat in silence again, watching a log catch fire and shift and settle in the grate. Should I tell them about Tomos and the bloodstained clothes? Mention the deep gashes on his arm and the fact that he was seen coming from the direction of the latest attack? Perhaps I should.
There was a rapping at the door. We all leapt.
“Christ!” Henna clutched her chest. “What’s that?”
“It’s the policemen,” sang Louisa, dancing over to the door.
“Are they using their trunc
heons or something?”
“They’re probably just used to knocking loudly on doors, being policemen,” Laura said matter-of-factly.
“Wait!” I stopped the hen in her tracks. “Are you sure it’s the policemen?”
“Of course it is!” Louisa looked incredulous.
“It might not be you know. It could be anyone. Don’t you think we ought to arm ourselves?” But she had raced out of the sitting room and was opening the front door.
“Hello! Come in, come in! Oh!”
23
It was the policemen. We all got up off the sofas and started to mill around looking party-like and relaxed. Which we stood a much better chance of doing when we were sitting on the sofas – but such is the way of things.
Louisa led the way back into the sitting room and shot us an odd sort of a look, like “Look at this!” When she stepped aside we saw why.
Five well-built policemen had turned up.
Plus one.
From the minute he stepped over the threshold of the Hen House, all of us girls were made very aware that the extra man, Josh Mitchell, was solely the property of Louisa and no one was allowed to talk to him. Or look at him. Or even stand near him.
He was a marked man.
He strode confidently into the room, shook a few hands and said a few hellos before Louisa whisked him off to the drinks table and opened up a beer for him.
“Oh my God,” Henna whispered to me, “he is gorgeous”
“Not my taste,” I whispered back honestly. He looked a bit too self-confident for me – too much floppy blonde hair and manly-swagger for my liking. He was good looking, but he knew it. He was also incredibly tanned, which I doubted came naturally from days spent outside roaming in the Welsh countryside. How could anyone legitimately get that brown in the UK except in a tanning salon?
But the answer was he wasn’t native. Within minutes of the men arriving, we found out that Josh Mitchell was nothing less than a big game hunter with the Kenyan Wildlife Association. Open mouthed, we learnt that the local police force were under so much pressure to capture the animal causing the recent killings that they had drafted him in as a specialist to deal with the potential big cat problem. He’d be around for the next couple of weeks, and so far they’d been “on safari” in the Welsh valley without a sighting of the animal.
“Fuck me, so there really is a big cat problem then,” Henna put it succinctly while we opened up a bottle of wine. “There’s no way the Welsh police are going to fork out on a South African hunter for a figment of the public’s imagination.”
While the policemen were sorting out their drinks, Laura, Henna and I huddled together on the opposite side of the room and were toasting our good fortune. Louisa abandoned the hunter for a minute and tottered over to us.
“This is the best hen do ever.” She hugged Laura who beamed back. “You are a genius! Policemen, hunters, farmers – what more could a girl ask for?”
“Male models? Actors?” I said. Really, the list was endless.
“Pah!” Louisa laughed. “No way. These are real men not some poncy actor types. They have guns, for God’s sake. Oh, just look at Josh’s forearms. He’s amazing, isn’t he? Apparently he’s from Milton Keynes but that doesn’t really count because his parents moved over to Kenya to farm when he was four. He loves it over there – says he hates the British weather…” and she floated back to her hunter, passing him a bowl of cheesy puffs.
At ten I tried Gwyn’s number for what must have been the twentieth time that night but, as before, it just rang without being picked up. I wondered where he was. Surely farmers didn’t work this late into the evening? Did they?
Maybe he was hurt? Maybe that mad farmer, Tomos, had called round to Gwyn’s house earlier in the day with an old sharpened bread knife, concealed it behind his back, asked to come in, and when Gwyn’s back was turned…
Perhaps I should mention something to the policemen? Perhaps I really should tell someone. Tomos could have found Gwyn snooping into his business and now maybe Gwyn was in real trouble? No, Gwyn would be just fine. Tomos wouldn’t have stabbed him with a bread knife. Gwyn was probably in the pub, an outbuilding or anywhere for that matter. What was so odd about him not being at home? I was just being melodramatic. Besides, when I looked round the room I didn’t fancy passing on my concerns to the others and necessitating any action which would involve prising drinks out of hands or indeed prising the men out of the clutches of the women. Everyone was far too absorbed in getting to know one another. I could hear snatches of the conversations within the babble, all of which centred on big cats and the hunting of them. Henna had practically got her notepad out, she looked like she was taking on board everything that she heard, ready to write her column in the morning. Laura was looking more animated than she had done all weekend, discussing weaponry with a scary-looking policeman who was staring at her chest, while Louisa was laughing and flirting with the hunter, laying her hand on his shoulder and trying to look coy. I poured myself another drink and went to join a couple of policemen by the crisps.
There was a certain inevitability that a gorgeous blonde Kenyan hunter would not be left to one girl for long, and by around half past ten the inevitable had indeed happened and a group had gathered round Josh and Louisa, listening agog at what he had to tell us about Big Game hunting in Africa.
“So have you actually seen the wild cat here in Wales yet?” Henna asked, breathily.
“Well, ma’am, strictly speaking it’s not a wild cat. There haven’t been wild cats living in this part of the UK for years.”
“He’s right,” one of the policemen added. “Last one was killed right outside my house nearly three hundred years ago.”
“We’re not looking for your native cat,” Josh continued, in his odd, twangy accent. “What you probably have here is an escapee from a zoo. Or maybe the offspring of an escapee. Judging by the attacks on the animals and from the tracks I’ve seen.”
“You’ve seen tracks?” I squeaked, hand suddenly clammy on my wine glass. Tracks were very real. Sightings could be disputed, attacks to animals didn’t seem to be conclusively made by a big cat, but tracks? They couldn’t very well be disguised. Tracks were tracks.
“Oh yes. I’d say you’ve got yourself a puma. Full-grown by the looks of things.”
“A puma!” There was a hush over the room as everyone had now gathered round to listen to the hunter.
There was a puma in the countryside.
Outside.
Outside here.
Tearing things in two.
I turned the music down. It wasn’t entirely appropriate for Kylie to be singing “I should be so lucky” while this conversation was going on.
“So, what actually is a puma?” Louisa asked the question we all wanted to ask but didn’t want to appear stupid for asking it.
“Well, technically speaking it’s not even a big cat…”
“What?” More disappointed faces.
“The puma is the largest of the small cats, but don’t get me wrong, it’s a vicious beast. It can stand about a metre high, one and a half metres in length…”
“And that’s not a big cat?” I asked, returning to the group. In my eyes it seemed pretty huge. I couldn’t imagine the size of the ball of wool needed to occupy that cat’s attention.
“Is it black?” Henna asked.
“Can be, but this one’s tawny coloured, brown and orangey. Well disguised in the heath scrub you have round here, which is probably why it’s managed to evade us so well. These cats have every chance of survival once they’re let into the open. There’s abundant food for them and no natural predators. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more than one to be found round here.”
“How do you know what colour it is?” I asked.
“I found hairs on a bramble.” Josh crumpled his can and tossed it into the bin.
“Oh my God,” we all said in unison.
“Have you caught any cats in the UK before?�
�� Henna gushed.
“Two. A puma in Greenwich, London…”
“In London?”
“Yup. The other was a Eurasian lynx which we found in Somerset.”
“Did you kill them?” Louisa asked in a small voice.
“No, ma’am. The puma we shot with a sedative and it went to London Zoo, but the lynx was in a poor way when we found it and it died once we’d got it back to the veterinary practice.”
“So you aren’t going to kill our puma here?” Henna asked. Did he know she was a journalist?
“We’re going to try our best not to kill the animal. We’ll use sedative darts again, but if something goes wrong…”
“Something goes wrong?”
“Like we miss it or the dart doesn’t connect properly, then we may have a wounded animal on our hands and that’s when it becomes a serious problem. That’s when we’d kill it.”
Louisa had had enough of sharing him with us. Wrapping an arm around his waist, she escorted him over to the drinks table.
I stayed where I was, sipping my wine and staring at the ornamental fire. Their plans for the puma sounded awful. Now I began to feel rather sorry for the little big cat. After all it was only trying to make a living for itself out here.
Gwyn! I’d completely forgotten him in the excitement about the hunter. I ducked out of the lounge and picked up the phone again and dialled his number. Still no answer. Perhaps he was at the pub? Perhaps he lay dying…
Stop it.
I poured myself another glass of wine (my fourth?) and flopped down next to a rosy-cheeked policeman called Joe.
I must have been rather drunk by this point as I remember him asking me what I did for a living and me launching into a long dialogue about my career progression in business management and where I could take it in the future. I was drunk enough to think that it might be interesting for someone to hear about modern business management theories, but I was sober enough to recognise that within a couple of minutes his eyes were glassing over and he was starting to look for an excuse to leave the sofa. I changed the subject back on to more familiar territory, feeling guilty at so obviously having bored the pants off him.
