by David Mark
‘… of course, the family could have helped out but they’re the sort who make you pay a higher price emotionally than they ever do financially and I think it would have killed her to have gone cap in hand …’
Betsy plays catch-up in her head. He’s telling her about his ownership of the wood. The realization collides with another thought which ricochets off, and a moment later the importance of this particular woodland is sending off great neon flares in her mind.
This is where Maeve was found, she realizes. This is where she died.
‘There’s a stand of holly bushes down that little snicket,’ says Jude, pointing with his head and turning to make sure she’s doing OK. He looks at home here, a spring in his step like Marshall’s. ‘It’s called a hagg.’
‘What is?’
‘A stand of holly trees. These are big brutes. Tall as firs. It’s something farmers don’t really bother with any more but the branches make a great winter feed. There’s a grant you can apply for if you’re willing to show other farmers how best to do it, but it hasn’t made its way up my to-do list yet. A hard job. Scratched to buggery I was last year. Worth it, though.’
Betsy isn’t sure what’s required of her, so just keeps following him, pushing through the sharp, sticky trees like a jungle explorer. Flies keep landing on her sweaty neck and her feet are starting to ache inside her unsuitable trainers. She tries not to think about how cheery he seems as he treads through the place where his wife died.
‘This is where we had the drama with the pigs,’ says Jude, pointing out a tangle of bracken and fallen trees. ‘Friend from up the valley – she asked if she could wild-graze. The pigs I mean, not her personally. They’re good for a wood, turning the ground, chewing up the nasty bits. They’re also escape artists and love getting up to mischief. There was a couple of saplings just there and they went through them like a lawnmower. Turns out it was to cause a distraction. We found the biggest of the brood sunning herself on the river bank, looking like a Brit on holiday.’
He stops long enough for her to catch up. Without speaking he takes her hand. He’s bone dry and Betsy feels embarrassed at how clammy her palms are.
‘I can hear water,’ she says, and her voice is swallowed up by the trees. She has the feeling of being in a greenhouse on a hot day, as if there isn’t enough air and the leaves are sucking something vital straight out of her lungs.
‘That’s the burn,’ he explains. ‘Drops down into a lovely little pool. There’s trout. Big fat lazy ones that might well have wallowed for centuries. It’s a bit scary taking a dip for the first time – you can never be sure there isn’t a monster down there waiting to take a good slurp of your ankles.’
Jude leads them to a sparse stretch of wood and pushes back a spray of spindly branches as if opening a door in a posh restaurant. She ducks under his arm and finds herself at the water’s edge, watching the clear water tumble down over green-furred rocks to splash joyfully into a deep, dark pool. It looks to Betsy like real ale, not yet settled in the glass. She follows the river with her eyes, watching as it tapers and then veers to the right, following the treeline. Dragonflies hover among the myriad insects that form a speckled haze above the surface of the water.
She looks to Jude, and finds him closer to her face than she had anticipated. Embarrassed, she giggles and starts to babble about it being pretty, and how it would be nice to picnic here, and then he is reaching past her, eyes never leaving hers. She spins on the spot, half slipping, and sees him reach inside a hollow a little way up the trunk of a silver-black tree. He withdraws his hand from the hole in the trunk, holding a lethal-looking implement. Betsy stiffens, instinctively, and Jude gives her a soft smile, his eyes crinkling.
‘This one’s a billhook,’ he says, handing it to her. ‘These are secateurs. I’m not talking down to you, I just don’t know what you know. You know loads of stuff I don’t. Anyway, just down there a little way there’s a tall, spindly tree with thousands of white flowers on it. They look a bit like lace. Do you know cow parsley? Hogweed?’
‘What do you think?’ asks Betsy, laughing.
‘OK, I was going to say it’s a bit like that. But anyway, there’s none of that here so there’s no risk of you not getting the right one. They smell amazing. I just need you to lop the flower heads off. The higher up the tree you can reach the better. Honestly, don’t look scared, it’s a nice job and you will smell like summer by the time you’re done.’
‘Where will you be?’ asks Betsy, noticing a tone in his voice that indicates imminent departure.
‘I’ve got some of the less pleasant jobs to worry about,’ he says, his manner indicating he would rather be here, with her. ‘Got to try and get the mini-digger up the track while the weather’s good enough not to clog up the tracks. I’ll need it come winter but I won’t be able to get it up here. Forward planning – I’m trying to get better at it.’
‘A lot of what you say goes over my head, Jude, I think you should know that,’ says Betsy, feeling foolish. There’s an excitement fizzing inside her suddenly, a desire to do well, to impress. She glances at the blade in her hand: a great curve of shining steel ending in a point that could cut flesh like paper.
‘I won’t be long,’ says Jude. ‘If you get done before I’m back just enjoy yourself. I’ll leave you Marshall, just in case you get a bit jumpy. No reason you should, it’s a lovely wood. I’ve put a lot of myself into this place over the years.’
She suddenly doesn’t want him to go. She has so many questions and yet, in truth, no desire for answers.
‘Marshall. Stay.’
Betsy looks down and Marshall settles down in the long grass at her feet, pink tongue lolling happily. She looks up and Jude is already disappearing back into the wood; shadows dappling his back. He doesn’t so much leave her sight as become completely absorbed by the forest: his outline disassembling into leaf and shadow and bark.
‘Well Toto,’ says Betsy, looking at the dog. ‘Looks like we’re not in Durham.’
SIXTEEN
Betsy follows the smell of summer and honey until she finds the white flowers. They’re familiar. The scent, too. She’s drunk elderflower gin, she remembers. A bright, fizzy sort of flavour.
‘Come on then,’ she mutters to herself. ‘Just lop some heads off. How hard can it be?’
She giggles at that, imagining Jude coming back to find her embarrassingly thumbless and the woodland churned to potpourri.
With her back to the river, her feet planted on a patch of damp grass that leads down to the water, she selects a spray at random, and with a note of apology, neatly decapitates it with the secateurs. She doesn’t feel confident in using the billhook. She drops the floral head on the grass at her feet and selects another. Soon she finds a steady rhythm: picking, cutting, dropping, losing herself in the pleasant monotony of it, working up a pleasing sweat, setting herself the target of reaching higher, pushing further through the greenery. She drifts into a state of near-meditation, listening to the crystal splashing of water upon water; the high drone of the bees; the mosquitoes, pausing only to slap at her damp skin when something tickles at her exposed places.
An hour passes. More, perhaps. Betsy realizes it has been a long time since her mind has been so quiet. There is a timelessness to this place, a near mystic sense of permanence, as though this little wood could be the fulcrum around which the whole world turns. If she were to lie down among the ferns she fancies she could see dragonflies big as eagles fighting in the skies with archaeopteryx and pterodactyls, and surprises herself that her mind is able to offer up such rarely used relics of her vocabulary.
She stops to catch her breath. Wonders whether it is safe to drink the water from the pool. Feels a brief pop of irritation that Jude didn’t think to bring a drink, then immediately chides herself, wondering who the hell she thinks she is to be so ungrateful. Her thoughts take on a familiar pattern and she does nothing to stop them, carefully picking her way further down the riverbank towa
rds the pool. The surface is a mirror. It makes her think of playing cards: the Queen of Hearts reflecting back upside down. Beside her, Marshall noses her hand, demanding a stroke. She rubs at his ears. This is OK, she thinks. This is nice. I like this.
Marshall stops, suddenly. Hunkers down. Betsy, on impulse, stops perfectly still, half shielded by the overhanging branches of some silver-green tree. Across the pool, a group of brown trees stand sentinel over a steep, bracken and pine-needle strewn floor. The forest beyond the water is sepia in tone; the greenery seeming to have bled itself dry. It makes her think of rust and bloodstains.
Somewhere a little way up the slope, she spots movement. The bees stop their frenzied humming; the songbirds briefly halt their calls. Betsy stares, unsure what to expect. She wonders if perhaps a deer may be making its way gingerly towards the water. She wonders if she will be able to suppress her squeal of delight if so. Or a bear. Could a bear be snuffling its way through the branches? She isn’t entirely sure she believes Jude about the absence of grizzlies.
Marshall emits a low growl, taking his role as guard dog seriously. Betsy lowers herself to a crouch, listening intently as the shadows take on more obvious outlines. She hears low voices. A man and a woman. She’s doing most of the talking. And then there are shadows dappling the surface of the water and she is watching as two figures push through the trees.
Soundlessly, Betsy shuffles back, one hand pressed to Marshall’s back. She knows at once that something is wrong. From her position among the long grasses, half obscured by reeds and the great, sweet-smelling mound of elderflower heads, she takes in the curious apparitions across the river. The woman, leading the way, is athletically built and her thigh muscles, bulging against taut black combat trousers, are tree-trunk thick. She wears a short white shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and has tied the tails just above her midriff to expose a stomach so tanned and toned it makes Liz think of fresh clay scored with a pizza wheel. She has a blonde Mohawk; the back and sides of her head speckled with a day’s growth of dark hair. She’s glowering at the water as if it has just insulted her mum. Just behind her is a short, stocky man, his face a sweaty beetroot disappearing necklessly into a black T-shirt. He’s grunting. Even from here, she can tell that he’s half done in from his exertions. And Betsy can see why. Across his shoulders, where a Waitrose mum would wear a pashmina on cold days, he is struggling with the weight of a huge, dead ram.
Betsy sucks in a breath as the message reaches her brain. He’s carrying a sheep. A big muttony mass of muscle and wool. A ram: fleece so thick with black blood and flies that it looks to Betsy as though it has been bludgeoned with a pot of jam.
‘You could have took a fucking turn.’
‘I did the hard work. Stop moaning. We’re here.’
‘I’ve been bitten through to the bone.’
‘Count your blessings. Might do you some good. Maybe it’s a radioactive one and you’ll wake up with sheep powers.’
‘Ha bloody ha. What’s the point of all that muscle if you’ve got me doing the lifting?’
‘I’m largely decorative. And you’re doing fine. I’ll pick you up – you keep hold of the sheep …’
‘If I didn’t love you!’
‘Aye, but you do.’
‘Here, grab hold.’
Betsy watches, her hand pressed into the sweat of her bare arm. She knows she’s done the right thing in making herself scarce. She would not profess to be an expert on rural matters but she fancies that something about what she is witnessing is very, very wrong.
‘Just drop it in – that’s what he said.’
‘Seems wrong, Donna. Nice spot like this.’
‘You reckon? You’re easily fooled, babe. More violence in a wood like this than you’ll find on the worst streets in Glasgow. Lift up a rock and you’ll see something eating the guts out of something else. Peek into a nest and you’ll see baby chicks pulling caterpillars apart with their beaks. I watch Bambi and all I see is a horror movie waiting to happen.’
‘You’re fucking great company today, girl.’
‘It’s the heat. And something bit me somewhere unmentionable.’
‘My heart bleeds. I’m wearing a necklace of bites …’
‘Heave it then. Go on. Give it the full John Cena.’
With a grunt of exertion, the man shrugs the dead ram into the perfect stillness of the pool. Betsy feels a shower of rank pond-water spray across where she lays. She raises her head, watching the dead animal. It disappears, momentarily, then bobs back up; a drowned cloud: a woolly island spoiling the picture perfect serenity.
‘And this’ll do the trick?’
‘Dunno, Mick. But it’s what we’ve been asked to do. So it’s done. Shame Punch wasn’t around. Would have been nice to get a look at him.’
‘Better us than the others. You’ve seen how Rufus is itching for an excuse. Hard to keep him on a leash.’
‘I know family’s family but he sickens me, Mick. Not a good bone in him. Evil all the way through. It’s going to end in blood.’
Mick doesn’t reply. Just stands there, staring at the sheep, slowly sinking into the depths. He looks dejected, as if he’s disappointed in himself.
‘Seems a low move, if you’re asking me,’ he says, as the woman joins him. ‘I mean, this is where she died, innit? You leave flowers. You leave a teddy. You don’t leave a dead sheep.’
‘Not our place to worry, babe. Money’s good. And this is better than unleashing Rufus, isn’t it? A bit of dead livestock and a few broken windows is always going to get my vote over burning the house down while he’s nailed to the roof …’
Beside her, Betsy feels the low throaty rumble of a dog tensing to strike. She pushes him down. Whispers, softly, in his warm pink ear. ‘Easy, Marshall, easy, easy …’
Marshall swivels his head and gives her what she takes as an enquiring look. It demands to know why she is lying here, scared and furtive, while these two take liberties on Jude’s land. She feels the hot coils of guilt fastening themselves around her belly. Surprising herself, she glances down at her left hand. She’s holding the billhook. Holding a length of steel sharp as a Siberian gale.
There is a sudden shout from across the river. She glances up and sees that Mick has his hand to his eyebrow, his face a great twist of pain.
‘Jesus, that felt like a bullet!’ hisses Mick, taking his hand away long enough to show off a crimson smear of blood and a rapidly swelling eye. ‘Shite – another inch and that would have been my eye …’
‘Where did it come from?’ demands Donna, glaring around. She squints across the pool. ‘Howay then! Got something to say have you? Have you?’
She turns the other way, glaring directly at where Betsy lies, prone, trying to blend in with the earth. Eyes move across her hiding place like searchlights.
The sound of something slashing at the air: the thwack of stone upon flesh.
‘Fuck! Fuck, they’ve done the other one!’
Through the grass Betsy sees Donna turn back to her companion, who is now holding the other eye. She hears stone strike stone, then ricochet into the water with a splosh. Donna jumps back, raising a hand to her Mohawk, where a distinct hole has appeared.
‘You cheeky bastard!’
‘Stones, Donna!’ screams Mick, gesturing at his face with his index fingers. ‘Stones!’
‘I know he’s chucking stones you silly bollocks, I just can’t see where he is!’
‘He wants you gone, you prick!’ yells Donna, addressing the dingle in general. ‘No more warnings, no more little hints. Gone. Next thing that goes in this pool will be twice as pretty and no less dead, I swear to … aagh!’
She jerks back, clutching her kneecap. The sound of stone hitting hard flesh makes Betsy think of a horse being whipped.
‘Come on,’ hisses Mick. ‘We’ve done what we had to …’
‘He’s there,’ growls Donna, her face red with pain. ‘Somewhere just over there.’
‘Donna, come
on,’ says Mick, again. Twin lumps are growing on his eyebrows and smears of blood are marking his cheeks. ‘Another time.’
Betsy watches them plunge back into the woods, breaking branches and crunching through dead bracken. She stays still until the last of the shouts and echoes have died away. Then, slowly, she raises her head.
Jude is perhaps twenty feet further down the river, slowly climbing to his feet. He has a length of black elastic dangling from his left wrist. From his right hand, small stones fall like pennies.
Beside her, Marshall wriggles upright and bounds, energetically, to his master. Betsy has only a moment to study his face before he sees her and alters it to one suitable for company. He looks terrifying. The set of his mouth, the white fire burning in his gaze; he glares at the dead animal in the pool with such ferocity that Betsy momentarily thinks of his eyes as the barrels of a sawn-off shotgun: everything within his gaze should prepare for violence.
He flicks on a smile as he sees her. ‘You’ve worked up a sweat,’ he says, softly, as she approaches. ‘Good job on the elderflowers there. Built enough to hide in.’
‘Jude, that was really intense – who were they … they did it on purpose, I don’t …’
Jude gives a little shake of his head. ‘Public right of way. You get all sorts of dickheads ambling through. Trying to be funny, I reckon, though they might not laugh so loud next time.’
‘No, they were talking as if it was personal, as if it was a message … they mentioned a person called Punch. Who’s Punch? This is where you get your water, isn’t it? And where Maeve …’
Jude puts a cool, rough palm upon her face. Looks into her. ‘It’s OK, Betsy. I swear.’
‘Jude, don’t treat me like I’m made of sugar, if you’re in trouble I want to help you!’
He smiles, grateful. ‘We’ll talk later, I promise. We’ve a mucky job now. You can help, or Marshall can walk you home.’
