by Guy Sheppard
‘Nonsense, all I did was walk up the lane.’
While it was true that I had not shaved or had my hair cut lately, I did not think that I looked too unlike my old self. My teeth might have begun to resemble unclean yellow fangs but that was because I had no toothpaste. Living in Coberley Hall was not exactly the height of luxury, it was at times more like squatting in a cave.
‘He definitely panicked at something,’ said Laura.
‘Or smelt it,’ said Gemma. ‘All horses hate the smell of pigs, for instance.’
‘H’m, well, yeah, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘That rumour of an escaped wild boar hasn’t turned out to be true, has it?’
‘Doesn’t mean a horse won’t bolt when it senses something ghoulish, Detective. I’ve had one refuse to move at a dead deer or simply the sight of blood in the road. Are you quite sure you won’t have a cup of tea?’
I ducked as she swung a kettle past my nose.
‘Oh no, yeah, I’m fine, thanks. I’m good. Absolutely.’
With that, Gemma began to root about in tottering piles of unwashed cups, plates and cutlery. Elsewhere, stinking horse rugs hung like tents to dry on doors until the air was as fragrant as an old carpet bazaar. A dozen or so books on astrology sat on a shelf above an oil-fired Aga, I noted. The mess in the kitchen was literally beyond the pale, as was the inconsolable Laura’s bloody sniffles.
‘Actually I have some advice to give you both on account of Paul Mitchell,’ I declared in my haste to change the subject.
‘What about him?’ asked Gemma.
‘His caravan burnt out last night in the farmyard.’
‘Burnt?’
‘I mean it might not have been an accident.’
‘Explain yourself, Detective.’
‘It’s not inconceivable that someone wanted to give him a fright. Meanwhile, that person could be lurking somewhere on the estate, so please lock your doors.’
‘It’s a dread and reverence that puts the fear of God into ignorant people, Detective.’
‘That reminds me,’ I said. ‘Please, Laura, I need to see that photograph of Esti Dryzek and her brother Viktor, if I may?’
‘The thing is, Colin, I no longer have it.’
‘How’s that?’
‘I’ve looked everywhere for it but it’s no longer pinned to the beam in the tack room.’
Gemma, redolent of horse dung, sat down between us.
‘If you ask me, you turning up in Coberley has created a bit of a stir.’
‘How come?’ queried Laura, dabbing more blood off her nose.
‘Some may read it in the stars but I hear it every day in the shouts of the jackdaws and crows. There’s business to be finished, that I do know.’
‘I really don’t understand what you’re talking about.’
Gemma placed her hand on my knee.
‘Today is the day that his lordship goes to the woods to pay his respects every Sunday.’
‘What respects might they be?’
‘After someone dies some people can’t ever forget or forgive themselves, Detective. But then you would know all about that. Would you?’
‘Sorry, but I have to go.’
There were only so many silly, augural pronouncements that any reasonable man could absorb at one time.
‘Back then they all adored Lizzie’s mother,’ Gemma called out before I could reach the door, ‘yet none was man enough to save her from herself.’
‘Save? Whatever do you mean?’
‘Listen, Detective. As soon as Lizzie was born her mother was subject to terrible postnatal depression. That’s how she acquired a taste for the drink. It went on for years until it turned into something chronic, but she wasn’t simply depressed, she was cursed. The after-effects were like a vile malediction. Maybe, as a result, Lizzie got scared, too. That’s families for you. Except her mother was genuinely happy and hopeful once. If you don’t believe me, go and look in Chatcombe Wood. We shouldn’t let subsequent events distort who we once were. Back then she bloomed like a beautiful flower.’
*
Never had so few words impressed me as peculiarly as Gemma’s unexpected but strident challenge, yet I was reluctant to declare myself grateful. When telling me that Lord Hart went to the woods regularly she did not do so kindly, she imputed some sort of blame.
Her taunt stayed with me all the way there – I could not in any way disassociate myself from it. Once within sight of the beech trees, a brisk walk led me along an ancient, stony path shown on the map as the Cotswold Way. Clearly it had somehow gained the dubious right to grant public access to the estate. Who could say who roamed it at random these days?
Forever low in the sky, the wintry sun cast each step I took in long shadow. It fell, too, upon the wind-tanned faces of two walkers who were presuming to traverse my fields. At no small inconvenience to myself, I felt obliged to acknowledge their existence by giving them a wave.
The middle-aged women, both with neatly cropped grey hair and wearing matching yellow waterproof jackets strode brazenly straight at me.
I placed myself at the side of the track and politely smiled, as any sane person might, while I paid homage to the weather. Without a doubt a lord had never before bestowed such beatitude on a couple of perfect strangers. Speechless at first, they suddenly gasped and hugged each other. Next they backed away, but at the last minute, each egging the other on, they ran forward and dodged by me at great speed. They scuttled off, gibbering and exclaiming as if in a foreign tongue.
Yet, armed was I not and most sincerely did I not want any trouble. When two perfectly ordinary folk shied away from a man as though they had just met the Devil, it was not very civil. When people were no longer civil it bordered on the barbaric, they were being needlessly impolite, even insulting.
That was the disadvantage of allowing the hoi polloi to trespass, they were no respecters of property or person.
Frankly it was a relief to seek solitude among the trees.
Pretty much.
*
A hoarfrost had left the track very white and icy. I was teetering most precariously along frozen wheel ruts past empty pheasant pens when I heard a noise.
Rat-tat, ratatat, rat-tat-tat.
With each rhythmical blow, someone did more than make an irritating noise, they tapped a form of Morse code. Each long and short series of raps revealed the urgent need to impart some feeling, news or discovery, someone wanted to share something with somebody else if only they could summon them closer. They were striking a very dead, hollow tree like a table at a séance.
‘Don’t assume for one moment that the fault is all mine! Joseph Jones is the one who unleashed this evil… Him and his damned shovel!’
Once more the tree resounded like a dull knell to dry blows from his dragon cane. The caller’s Panama, not the warmest of headgear in the middle of winter, slipped down one side of his brow at a rakish angle. Meanwhile he hid his eyes behind his tinted glasses like someone afraid of snow blindness. It was George, fortuitously.
Next minute I saw him walk off the beaten track and kneel among the spiky green bluebell leaves. He removed a holly wreath left over from Christmas. Then I saw him collect several dirty jam jars in a bag and throw away their withered flowers.
Whereupon, with great difficulty, he stood up and leaned on his cane again.
‘Everything I did, I did for you, my love.’
Then, as much in anger as despair, he set off homeward. Something about this lonely location would have him pay homage to the afternoon of life.
Immediately I abandoned my hiding place and descended the slope to the tree that George had been tapping. Gouged out the bark were the initials G loves E. From there I could better follow the path to the area to which he had just tended. Beside the clearing stood the remains of a pond, I discovered, but whoever had dug this little ornamental lake had never lined it properly. Its blue clay had sprung a leak from day one. Now it was as dry as a bone.
Soon I
was standing on the very spot where his lordship had wiped away the frosty, black beechmast that had glued itself to a piece of flat stone. No more than two feet square, the grey granite slab had, over many years, grown very dirty. I literally had to scuff it hard with my heel to get it to give up its secret:
In Loving Memory Of Esti Dryzek 22.9.1964-11.11.1989. Aged 25.
We Shall Not All Sleep, But We Shall Be Changed.
Every Sunday after dinner George came to Chatcombe Wood because only here, despite the sorrow of forever going unheard, was he able to stick his neck out by being so honest?
*
On returning to the stables, I met the vet on the point of leaving. He had ruled Pluto out of danger but, predictably, Laura was still being very emotional. A more chivalrous man might have stayed to walk her home but it looked like rain.
I was about to go on when I saw Gemma push an enormous wheelbarrow from the nearest stable.
‘Tell me,’ I said, in the middle of all the awful fuss and bustle, ‘what does anyone, you know, use ketamine for?’
I watched as she upended a great pile of steamy droppings on the muck heap past my toes. Through the gap in her teeth she spat phlegm on my clothes.
‘Ketamine? Why, that’s a synthetic compound used as an anaesthetic and analgesic in horses, Detective. Why do you ask?’
‘No reason. Except I’ve read in the estate’s accounts that Lord Hart buys prodigious amounts of it.’
‘It’s not illegal. When one of his horses cracked a cannon bone a few years ago I had to box rest it for six months. It would have gone crazy if I hadn’t been able to give it ketamine to keep it calm.’
‘The thing is, some people use it as an illicit hallucinogen.’
‘Consider Lord Hart the nightclubbing kind, do you, Detective?’
I shot her the thinnest of smiles.
‘Doesn’t mean a man doesn’t have secret needs.’
‘You see the grave, at all?’
I nodded.
‘Lord Hart still loves her, you know. She was his drug, not ketamine.’
‘And if it’s the only way to stop him feeling cursed, too?’
*
By now the afternoon sun was sinking fast on the hills. Minute by minute, the sky was becoming a vast sea of yellow, red and orange flame that stretched for as far as I could see over the horizon. Not for the first time, I wondered how the heavens could burn so hot but leave the Earth so cold.
I was following a path mobbed by dozens of noisy, dark-winged jackdaws on my way home. As soon as the first birds took off they landed again a little further on, not because they feared my presence but because something else would not let them settle. Against the sky’s afterglow the grey-headed scavengers marked the way ahead by flying only a few feet from the ground. Then, inexplicably, they closed ranks in the air. Like a great, all-enveloping cloak they coalesced into a black column.
My first thought was another man. In fact, my senses told me that I was in the presence of something that lived a more feral existence. But already the fields and trees were too steeped in shadow, I could not see clearly who or what plunged along behind the valley’s treeline and its little singing river. Meanwhile the thievish birds cawed and shrieked most shrilly.
Perhaps because I could think of nothing except my own safety, my brain filled in the rest with the wildest of notions. Next thing I knew I was flat on my back on the ground, I was bumping and sliding downhill on my buttocks – was thrashing my arms about on the icy slope in the most undignified manner until I came to a stop with a bang on a stone.
There I lay looking at the sky like a lizard. My eyes were two dead moons in slits incapable of focus. As a shadow briefly hovered over me, I felt uncivilised, even brutalised, but that was not to say that I was not still the same human being I was a moment ago?
Clearly I had mild concussion.
Before I could smear mud off my face I had to pause because I was so winded. After one final short, high-pitched grunt of hurt and annoyance I gave a guttural growl. Dirtier, damper and altogether more dishevelled, my clothes exuded the earthy smell of morbific matter. My wide nostrils snorted slimy mucus that reeked of hideous caves and rotting leaves. With my rough, asthmatic breathing I roared and snuffled blindly in semi-darkness like a bear. It was a while before the world came together to form anything more separate and substantial than my own awfulness.
I could excuse my feeling of hurt pride but not of oafish clumsiness.
Letting myself out of the field, I staggered across the lane to the gatehouse, rubbing the back of my head. Fiery icicles bled red from Coberley Hall’s grim gargoyles as they glowed in the dying sun. Each monstrous, long-tongued griffin, crowned with frost, peered at me from the edges of the roof where they folded their stony wings on each gable of their ice-palace. Encrusted in crystals, the house’s heart-shaped stone finials turned briefly to glittering globes. When a man’s home froze both day and night he could soon feel robbed of his creaturely comforts.
With trembling fingers, I gripped the iron loop on the door in the porch but not before the obstreperous jackdaws crowded wing to wing on every ridge tile to herald my arrival. They bobbed their beaks, curled their tongues and hopped about with unbesought alarums and excursions. Far from accompanying some wild man home across the stream to his den, my garrulous friends had hard, pearly eyes for me only.
I had to hurry in at once and bolt the door on my unkempt and shaggy resemblance to a scarecrow.
29
That whole dreadful business of the woodland burial continued to unsettle me. I could discount my feeling of general disbelief but not of overall revulsion. I sought to slow my heartbeat and focus my thoughts by listening to the irregular ticking of Coberley Hall’s clocks, but soon came to dread the accompaniment. So oppressively did each sharp, little tick-tack weigh upon me, so tyrannously did a sense of another time hold sway over me that I had to pinch myself not to feel in the grip of some unspecified cruelty or injustice.
Then, eerie silence.
From that dead time arose the sound of humming.
‘What the devil!’ I said irritably and rushed to open my door in a panic.
There was no one there.
Yet deceived was I not and absolutely did I not suffer any daydream. Even my smelly sight-hound lifted his long narrow muzzle to look and listen. Try as I might, I could not block out the irritating tune that was so toyingly playful. Had every carved wooden merman and mermaid in the house combined to serenade me with one siren voice, I could not have found it more irresistibly arresting. There carried on the air the voice of a woman quietly singing. Yet it was not wholly insidious.
If I had not known better, I would have blamed such perverse mesmerism on more of George’s ancient claret. Acting on impulse, I seized my shotgun and pointed its twin barrels before me as I advanced at the red arras.
‘Who’s there?’ I demanded to the closet.
But the three-legged greyhound, with a flip of his whip-like tail, was first in. This was not me refiguring the whole house in conjunction with my own fantasy, this was me in pursuit of the vilest ever enticement. Never mind that the singer had no business to be there, she indulged in some heinous desire to make a complete fool of me, obviously.
I held high my candle to illuminate gaudy, flame-stitch hangings whose zigzag colours dazzled me with blue, green and yellow, but no one sat at the desk or raked the room’s tiny fire. Only the telescope had been angled higher at the stars through the window, I noted.
Meanwhile the greyhound ran straight to the base of some green panelling.
‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me – it’s a rat, isn’t it? No, actually, that might be better.’
Shooing the dog aside, I put my ear to the seemingly solid oak wainscot. It was not a rational thing to do exactly, yet I could not cross the room but something irrational got the better of me. I tried tapping wood with my knuckles. Mine was no full-toned rap, it was hollow. At my fingertips was a
space, hole or valley. A wild foolishness drove me. It told me that if I wanted to see off my tormentor I had somehow to follow behind the panelling.
Seconds later I detected, or imagined I detected, that familiar protest:
‘This dance I can no longer go.
Pray you good madam why say you so?
Because Colin Walker will not come, too.
He must come to, he shall come to,
And he must come whether he will or no.’
Such words should have been sufficient deterrent. Instead a post against which I was leaning suddenly yielded. It swung up and out on an iron pivot to release the panel before me. I was lucky not to drop my candle or plunge through the hole. Then, before I could so much as peer into darkness beyond, I heard the songstress repeat her refrain quite cockily.
‘He must come to, he shall come to,
And he must come whether he will or no.’
She was, it seemed, within my grasp, yet quickly she retreated – she was not so near after all.
‘I have frightened her,’ I told myself happily, ‘with what she considers my clumsy ignorance of her secret ways.’ But still I resolved to pursue and confront her when it meant entering the innermost labyrinth of the house itself – why? Because I felt sure, as I never had before, that only good could come of ending her spiteful game.
*
I felt compelled to brave the claustrophobic darkness whose cobwebs sizzled and shrivelled at the touch of my candle. Scared myself, I tried not to scare. Soon I was gasping for breath in a narrow space streaked with drops of blood which lined the secret walls in painted, perpendicular columns. Here, at its core, the house bled from its internal haemorrhage, it was forever dying from its bleeding heart. The life-blood oozed from its walls in large red and white teardrops for the blood and water of the Passion.
At my shoulder an ancient set of vestments hung from a hook with a frontal to match on a tiny altar.
Once in this hidden, painted chapel I stood very still. I was gripped by a terrible despondency, convinced that my singer had got away from me, yet still I would hear her song in my head, a mere echo of the previous recital. A ladder stood right in front of me. I ignored it and immediately I was overcome with much deeper frustration – a total loss of heart, scarcely less than bitter disappointment in the beginning but soon even more baffling. I returned to the ladder and my confusion diminished. ‘Damn it all!’ I cried and placed a foot on the lowest rung.
