by Guy Sheppard
Patrick agreed.
‘My aunt in Gloucester has to collect clean water from a road tanker every morning.’
‘At least on the hills most of us have diesel generators and can pump our own.’
‘Never known such cursed weather. Did you see the ring round the moon last night?’
‘Maybe it’s a sign of worse to come?’
*
Talk graduated to rams and septic tanks, but I found myself strangely impervious to everyone’s boring concerns. When my companions mentioned that the Thames had now flooded Chelsea, the news appeared to relate to somewhere far off in place and time. Never had I felt more withdrawn from the city that I had, until a few days ago, called home.
As for the beater beside me, he was a sad, sallow sort of chap. An old friend of Adrian’s, he had grown droopy moustaches in the style of Genghis Khan. Paul Mitchell was his name and he had once driven tractors for Joseph Jones.
‘This hill gets steeper every year.’
‘You can say that again,’ said Patrick, struggling to regain his breath in the bracing winter air. ‘Doesn’t do any man’s heart good to be so cold.’
*
Frankly it was a relief to leave the guns behind.
I watched them take up position one by one along a line of lonely little wooden posts set in a field as I trudged on up the hill. When killers joined forces for a jolly day out each man still stood alone. I could join in my comrades’ brief attempts at conversation but not their camaraderie.
‘This way,’ said Adrian. ‘We’ll take a short-cut by way of the old piggery.’
Once past the signs saying KEEP OUT, NO COLD CALLERS and strictly NO JUNK MAIL, we were in a yard half left to go to rack and ruin. Great coils of razor wire snaked over redundant galvanized water tanks while empty plastic carboys of creosote and rusty wheelless wheelbarrows rose like demi-bastions of rubbish to keep out or corral something. It seemed highly likely that the tenant’s otherwise ignorant blindness to the steady neglect of their lonely outpost, since that was how it appeared, did greatly facilitate the neglect itself.
Treading a sea of mud, I tip-toed disdainfully by a row of ruinous sheds. From a doorway, Sir Percival poked his big black head out next to the chimney of a rusty barley boiler. Beside him, a pretty coloured mare box-walked in fretful circles. Both hoped that we had come to release them back to the field.
‘Who lives here?’ I asked.
‘Every day his lordship has Gemma pick out the horses’ feet and brush their tails.’
‘So he really does keep them to do nothing?’
Adrian hitched his camouflaged trousers up his skinny buttocks and spat in the grass as he led me round the corner of a decaying barn.
‘Just because a man has lost a life one way doesn’t mean he can’t relive it another, Mr Walker. When his brother stayed awhile in Salterley Grange Sanatorium, George would bring him home to ride his horse whenever he could.’
‘Er, sanatorium?’ I exclaimed. ‘What sanatorium?’
‘Former sanatorium, to be precise. It was rebuilt into flats after it closed in 1969. As the crow flies the grange is one and half miles from here.’
‘Sounds serious.’
‘It was the sort of establishment that nursed convalescents and consumptives. Its hilltop position made the air better to breathe.’
‘So Philip had some kind of pulmonary disease or phthisis?’
‘I can’t say it was entirely that, Mr Walker. Absolutely I can’t. True, it began with panic attacks when he couldn’t breathe as if he had asthma or something, but really it was a progressive wasting disease brought on by an acute stress disorder which affected his lungs. Finally, he wouldn’t eat a thing. Doctors supposed that he was anorexic but he insisted he was damned.’
‘Yeah. I mean should I be worried?’
‘In the end Philip died alone at home.’
‘Doesn’t mean the end of groundless rumour. That sort of thing can dog a family’s reputation forever.’
Adrian’s taut, thin lips tightened and his eyes grew colder.
‘Some people say he went mad.’
‘So tell me, what is the point of preparing someone’s horse for them every day when they don’t ride anyway? Why bother with the pretence when you know you can’t bring them back from the grave?’
‘You wouldn’t say that, Mr Walker, if you thought you could.’
*
I had my stick to beat the birds, if not the knowhow to do the beating.
But not long was I allowed to linger. From barn to wood, Adrian had us fan out quickly. I glanced round, not trusting my shattered senses. Those first volleys from the guns soon bruised my ears. Frankly, it was less a battle than a firing squad. Startled pheasants took wing with a whir. Their beaks issued such peculiar registers of alarm as to laugh at sounding their own alarum.
That’s not to say that my finger did not itch to pull a trigger, too. A second volley followed. Several birds crashed on to the roof of Gemma’s wooden bungalow where loose shot rattled down plastic gutters. Other birds climbed as fast as they could into all four corners of the sky, but being so inordinately clumsy they were far too slow to outfly every hail of lead. One after another they lost wing, head or tail to drop to earth like silent baggage.
Pretty much.
After the guns fell quiet the dogs rushed to retrieve. Which was when I saw Patrick McGuinness slip quickly through the trees with much whistling and swearing.
‘Merlin. Get back here! Bloody dog, I’ll kill you.’
Not content to toss dead birds about in the field, the Labrador had the scent of something. Patrick was livid. So was I. As a consequence, I was more incautious than I should have been when following, because this was no longer about a retriever too excited to retrieve, it was about its owner’s sense of his own rage. Merlin was making him look a fool in the eyes of his peers.
Seconds later he loosed off a shot.
I let out a cry.
Where the snow had been trampled so there was a drop of crimson. A few paces on, there was another one. The slope up the hill was no different. It was blood.
At last I arrived at a crumbling three-foot high dry-stone wall that divided the wood from the fields. Against it, my incensed companion sat very quietly and still.
‘Patrick, what the devil have you done?’ I demanded, but he had not the manners to reply.
I went closer, grumbling. Whereas his short, stout figure had earlier made him appear outwardly benign, he had shrunk and shrivelled to a shadow of himself. His face was pinched and sallow, his mouth twisted and ugly, his startled brown eyes without movement. My first thought was that he had suffered some sort of fall.
I tried whistling Merlin.
Distinctly discomforted, I decided to raise the alarm when I heard a snarl close by me. In the beginning I could not believe my eyes. There was a deer hide in a nearby tree, at the foot of which the dog sat growling. Yet deceived was I not and not for nothing did I dither. A man was crouching very low on the sniper’s wooden platform. I could see instantly that he was not young, though he did not look in any way enfeebled with age or infirmities. His hair was pure silver. Being on the road for so long had stained his dirty leggings, jacket and long rat-coloured cloak, bent his shoulders and reduced him to a scarecrow. Something in his severe abasement caused me to shiver, a shudder that was reinforced when he used his agile fingers to descend from branches among which he was so adept at clambering.
Of my own movements I made not one.
Next moment, the vagabond leapt from the tree and ran. With huge strides he covered the ground all too close in front of me, swept me aside with the sheer physical power of muscle and bone. At every step I heard him sniff and snort to get the measure of me. Suddenly there came a crash and a piece of wall flew through the air as he hurled it behind him with great fury at Merlin.
The stone struck the dog’s shoulder and knocked him sideways. It was an ill-judged blow but still managed to bowl him
right over. I clutched my head and fell on my knees. For a few seconds I was left reeling. My cap went flying. That stone had grazed me, too. I gasped and wheezed for breath, but I did, before I panicked and almost blacked out, see something hideous stare me in the face.
While a large green hat trimmed with a buzzard’s feather tipped off his brow, his one dead-alive eye flashed white as bone. The other eye, peculiarly sore and feverish, burned with a red-rimmed glow that was equally uncanny. I breathed his foul breath.
‘I see where you’re at,’ I said aloud and watched him bound across the field and beyond.
My heart beat at bursting point until I could barely stand at all. But at least I’d fared better than Merlin. He was dead.
*
Raiding Patrick’s pockets for live cartridges and relieving him of his cigarettes, I at once snapped shut the breech on his shotgun and set off in pursuit of my quarry.
‘You’ll not get the better of me that easily,’ I thought.
I waded up to my shoulders in the cover of dead maize where bright yellow corncobs lay rotting on the snowy ground. This was not rich land, but it was extraordinary how different parts of the estate could change from flood to desert in a few days, as if some great subterranean labyrinth of caves leaked rain far beneath all the earth and stones.
Suddenly I felt very alone and exposed. Two noisy lapwings performed dramatic acrobatics in the sky directly above. They soared very high and wheeled very low each time they wove their tight formations against the wide horizon. They were both harlequins clowning about and magnificent daredevils putting on a show. So skilfully did they spin at the point of a feather that they flagged their black and white wings in semaphores all the time they whistled to me far below. As it turned out, their piercing, high-pitched ‘p’weeting’ only emphasised an awful preternatural calm.
I came via the lane to the claustrophobic line of twisted, gnarled trees known as Mercombe Wood. It was mostly oaks and ashes, within which the winter sun hardly shone. Beads of bright orange fungi clung to rain-soaked green trunks like miniature lamps in fairy patterns, alluring but deadly. The most I could hope for was the sound of my own boots each time I put one foot in front of the other.
Sooner than expected, a little white house stood guard at the place where my track divided. Its three-sided, almost circular front was topped with a stone-tiled roof shaped like a witch’s hat. Built of rough stones and crudely cemented together, there was something faintly absurd about its situation which was so secluded.
Once upon a time, an obstreperous turnpike man would have blocked the road junction with his picket fences.
A confusion of muddy bicycle tyre marks went to a gate that led up the former tollhouse’s garden path. Smoke blew about at the top of a chimney, I noticed, but when I banged on the front door, no one responded.
‘Open, damn you and answer for your crime!’
I peeped in at a pointed window and saw a shelf hung with disgusting dead rabbits and pheasants. Various knives lay on an equally unpleasant, blood-stained wooden table where an octagonal lantern contained a candle ready for lighting. Beside the very old lamp rested a vase of fresh flowers bought from some shop or garage. Also on the table I could make out something lettered with the alphabet and signs. Like me, someone considered the dead their unfinished business. It was an Ouija-board.
I was outside the house that had once been lived in by Bert, the deranged gamekeeper, I realised. But no matter how craftily or secretly I stalked them, I met not another living soul. Instead I did, by a circuitous route, only end up back at myself.
*
By the time I arrived at the shoot the other men stood over Patrick’s lifeless form. He still lay where I had abandoned him. Despite the general level of confusion, somebody had thought to close his pitiful eyes, yet even so his lids seemed restive. I could see how he was lifeless but not at peace. I found myself scrutinizing the greyness that crept into his skin for longer than necessary. I really did have to make doubly sure that he was dead.
Moments later, I saw that the one observing me most was Adrian. Since he was being so unbearably attentive, I had to assume that my face registered more ambivalence than I thought. I forgot I was bruised from that stone.
I gave him a hasty, if frosty smile. When someone had just gone head to head with some blundering theropod or Sasquatch in the guise of a man, he owed it to himself to show some restraint in the face of suspicion. It would do me no good to run about yelling and screaming that I had met a bogy man since most men deemed such things not to exist.
I did not want to suffer the same ignominious fate as Bert. Other lesser souls were unlikely to take the time to see the difference between an imagined monster and a real one. Frankly, I had no intention of giving any of those present the slightest excuse to label me a lunatic like he was.
‘Poor Patrick fall off the wall, did he?’ I remarked, lighting another of his cigarettes between my bloody fingers. ‘Those loose stones look lethal. A man could soon break his neck.’
Adrian’s squint was not at all helpful.
‘Where were you when it happened, Mr Walker?’
‘Me? I went in search of Merlin.’
‘Doesn’t explain why you have Patrick’s gun.’
Thankfully an ambulance and police car drove up the lane. At long last the deceased could depart to great relief all round.
A few of us bowed low to the unfortunate man in respectful silence.
Only then did I set my cap back on my head, because after the thrill of the chase came the chill.
19
When a man dropped dead so inconsiderately, it did more than ruin the day for the rest of us, it meant good food went to waste.
‘I’m sorry, gentlemen,’ said Lord Hart, ‘but it’s past two o’clock. Since none of us is in the mood to eat any more, I’ll stop at Upper Coberley and tell Laura Simmons to cancel dinner.’
I disagreed. Should I ever choose to assume a permanent place of honour in such a small community, it was only right that, as someone of consequence, I should see fit to use every occasion, however egregious, to set an example to the locals.
‘Would it not be better to treat our meal more as a wake than a party?’
‘Well, Patrick was Irish,’ declared Lord Hart, about to ride ahead in Adrian’s Toyota. ‘I say we have a drink in his honour, at least.’
Everybody decided to follow my lead. After all, it was not only about the food but the money – the Coberley Estate had already paid for a lavish banquet. Also, had I not kept a stiff upper lip my flighty companions might have mistaken my lack of fortitude for sentiment. On the run from remorse, I was not about to let sorrow, no matter whose, bring me to book, which was not, of course, to say that there was no case to answer.
I had not fled London to suffer someone else’s tragedy.
*
I was trying not to do a slalom down the awfully icy lane when there rose up before me a very old, three-storey farmhouse. If a building had to be too tall for its own good, too overbearing for the tiny country lane that was still only a badly paved farm track, then its entrance could not have been meaner. A little pointed porch adorned the frontage where village cottage met town mansion. I refused to be resentful towards such a fine house on account of its elegance when it was not a patch on Coberley Hall.
‘You all right, old chap?’ asked Lord Hart at the garden gate.
I tore one hand from another and patted my chest.
‘Hem, it’s nothing. I’m good, yeah. I’m fine. Definitely.’
Before me were two rows of flaming torches. The narrow, fiery channel of flambeaux down which I had to pass formed a path as though for some feudal procession.
‘A word of warning, old chap,’ advised Lord Hart, watching me wheeze and gasp in a panic. ‘Laura is lovely, but do avoid her husband. He used to be a university don and is positively vile, the devil he is. Not only is he stone deaf but he won’t admit it. His whole life is not exactly a direct lie yet
still a positive misrepresentation. Suggestio falsi, old chap – some people pretend to be nice. Better hope he doesn’t decide to play the trumpet.’
The man in question was a seventy-year-old, tedious looking individual with a very loud voice who was holding forth about his glorious career next to a roaring wood stove.
‘Oh yes, Oxford nowadays is a factory. Had a graduate come back to see me once. Said he’d been one of mine but I hadn’t a clue who he was. There are so many of them, you can’t possibly remember any of them afterwards.’
I avoided this ghastly academic ichthyosaurus and helped myself to a glass of chilled champagne. For although part of the house had been too brashly built for my taste, with a stylish mezzanine floor and a great glass window for an enviable view down the valley, I was standing on stone flags that echoed like a great mead hall. I found it easy to despise its fashionable décor, but not its comfort.
‘Dear me, poor Mr McGuinness. You see it happen, at all?’
A woman dressed in a long coralline dress and adorned with real diamonds made a bee-line straight for me.
‘Yeah. Probably a heart attack but we’ve all got to go some time, haven’t we?’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ she exclaimed, fixing me with her busy, hazel-coloured eyes. ‘I’m Laura.’
‘DI Colin Walker. I’ve inherited Coberley Hall. I’m here for a short while, looking into boundaries and deeds and things.’
‘Then you and I are neighbours.’
Twenty years younger than her grizzled husband, she displayed the fine cheekbones and long dyed black hair of a still very beautiful woman.
‘Yes, no, I don’t know. Can people be neighbours when they live in two different Coberleys?’ I asked, smiling. ‘We must be a mile apart at least.’
‘In the country a mile is nothing.’
‘So sorry we had to meet in such trying circumstances.’
Laura shot a look at her husband.
‘The ones who should go never do, do they?’
Suddenly she sailed away, resplendent in her figure-hugging dress and high heels.
