by Guy Sheppard
I was soon asthmatic, sore-throated, hoarse. For a while I paced up and down the long gallery, as did Countess Lucy when she took her winter strolls.
‘Did you ever see such gloom?’ I declared, upon meeting James downstairs in the entrance hall. ‘Will it ever be safe to leave?’
‘It’s only a few dust devils, sir.’
‘That it? Really? That’s your explanation?’
James rolled his head at me in sad, perpetual motion.
‘They are whipping up exceptional storms in the Sahara, sir. They’re mixing sand with power station emissions and it’s all drifting our way very high in the atmosphere.’
‘Blind forces, more likely.’
‘Excuse me, sir?’
Even to put my hand to the front door was to feel the life-blood begin to drain from it.
‘Heaven knows, it can’t do a man much good to go out in such a pea-souper, can it?’
‘You feeling quite well, sir?’
‘What do you expect when someone flings sand in the face of God?’
James held up my coat for me to enter my arms.
‘So what are you going to do, sir?’
‘There’s a house I must see on Wistley Hill.’
‘Do you good not to spend overlong indoors.’
‘Whoever said I did?’
James fixed me with his slate-grey eyes as he helped fasten the top button of my coat quite vigorously.
‘Excuse me, sir, if I spoke out of turn.’
That was the trouble with servants, they were far too fond of taking exception, they were always trying to catch their betters out with their own weasel words as if everything I said was bothersome excuses. He would imply that I was somehow in hiding when he had to know that I could have left days ago if that was what I’d intended.
*
The smog was more clinging than I anticipated. In no way was it a trap, exactly, yet I could not walk far but a sense of being trapped came over me. Then, darting across the busy main road, I began to feel my way along the kerbside until at last I came to a junction at the source of the Thames called Seven Springs.
Scratchy wipers worked ceaselessly to wash away the red desert sand from the windscreens of cars, buses and lorries that crawled in maggoty momentum up the hill. Twice I nearly fell off the totally inadequate grass verge into the path of blinded drivers.
Not that I cared.
‘What the devil!’ I cried.
The red-tinged mist coalesced into a figure right in front of me. More specifically I became aware of a shadowy silhouette that blocked my way, something that appeared seven feet tall in my otherwise shrunken, myopic world and which fast assumed all the presence of a Wild Man. With it came much growling and slavering. Even someone who already had all the creatures of hell in his head hoped never to meet the very thing he was thinking.
I knew him at once. The putrescent odour of rotting beech leaves and wood smoke on his filthy rat-coloured cloak filled my nostrils. On his head was a green hat trimmed with a buzzard’s feather. He was of indeterminate age, powerfully built, disfigured and recently wounded in the arm. Spurs jingled on his boots and the silver handle of a dagger protruded from his belt. His long grey hair fell to his shoulders and his look was guarded and devious.
‘You!’ I cried, raising both fists. ‘It’s hell not knowing what you want.’
He shambled past me like some sort of sandman. I could believe my eyes but none of my other senses. He was distinctly anthropomorphous. While somebody could go mad for dreams alone, they could not deny the proof of their deepest fear – if ghosts literally existed, so could monsters.
I launched myself after him in a fury, when a voice called.
‘Drenka! Inside!’
*
Suddenly one thing interrupted another. A dog began to bark furiously. I had strayed into a long layby for lorries at the side of the road, I realised. Growling and whining, an Alsatian sat at the top of six wooden steps of its horse-drawn home and blocked its entrance.
I looked down. At my feet lay the bear that I had just fought to a standstill.
Yet insane was I not and most surely did I have a witness. A small woman dressed in a multi-coloured quilted coat descended the steps of the red caravan.
‘What’s this?’ she asked severely. ‘Would you fight my best work with your fists?’
As large as myself but completely inert, the bear’s chiselled jaws now gaped very wide in a grin. An amber bead filled one startled eye while enormous black claws at the tip of each paw were poised in mid-air very convincingly. Only a hopeless fantast would have felt his heart stop beating when he touched it, only a dreamer in love with his own crazed vision would have still grasped at something so obviously wooden and lifeless.
I gave my fraudulent opponent a kick in the groin. Santa’s tiny bells jingled on its ankles while every aspect of its hideous smile was a mocking reflection of my unnatural state. Painted in large gold letters across a nearby board was an advertisement: FOR SALE. BEATA’S GARDEN STATUES.
‘Whoever knew of anyone selling such grotesque carvings at the roadside?’ I protested.
Beata laughed.
‘It’s a delight, in a way, to see you so credulous.’
My wood-chiselling friend laid her crabby fingers on my arm and felt all the way up to my face.
‘I sense someone very important.’
Which was when I realised she was not nearly as blind as I wanted to believe.
‘All I sense is you in my way.’
‘Really, Inspector, is that all you have to say?’
It was too late to duck by or ignore her.
‘How do know who I am?’
‘We travel this way every New Year.’
‘We?’
‘My son and I.’
‘From where?’
She blinked her damaged eyes at space.
‘We come from Eastern Europe.’
‘Honestly? How long have you been parked here?’ I asked charily.
‘The same as you, give a day or two.’
‘You seem to know all about me.’
She waved at the lit windows of a converted single-decker bus at the end of the layby.
‘There’s much talk of you in the diner, Inspector.’
Again the Alsatian bristled. He would not stop snarling from his shack on wheels for a single second, lest I stray any closer. Swinging from the caravan’s ceiling, a brass oil lamp flashed in the light from a stove, I noted. Someone was placing a log in its furnace. Whatever hunched and lumbering passenger caused the whole vehicle to rock, they struggled to move about the untidy assemblage of rugs, stools and cushions without banging their head every time.
I felt the woodcarver squirm in my grip on her arm.
‘See here, madam, I don’t wish to find you or anyone else anywhere on my estate stealing wood for your wares.’
Beata picked up her chisel, ready to finish carving her latest clever simulacrum.
‘Shame on you, Inspector, for not buying it.’
‘Another day, perhaps.’
‘How many more will there be, do you think?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Can’t you smell it?’
‘Smell what, exactly?’
‘That’s the smell of The day of Judgement.’
I gave a snort and wiped my runny eyes.
‘I smell carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and ozone. If that’s, like, God’s angry breath, so be it.’
From inside the caravan came the sound of more wheezing. It could have been asthma or chronic bronchitis.
My inquisitive sculptress sent wood chips flying at me as she resumed work on the toppled idol.
‘Is it true what they say, Inspector, did you refuse your wife a Christian burial?’
‘Doesn’t mean I don’t hold her very close to my heart.’
‘No, but do you?’
‘Every day and every night.’
*
I resumed m
y hurried climb up the hill but had only the vaguest idea of where I was heading when I chanced upon a rough stone track that left the road just short of its summit. Along one side of the pot-holed driveway someone had taken the trouble to plant thousands of snowdrops, I observed. Since the labour had been so great, so was the extravagance. When something was that excessive it exceeded the bounds of common sense. Since it was so profuse it had to have been either an obsession or the expression of a very real, heartfelt love of all things living.
So far did the ghostly white border stretch into the distance that it was logical to assume that somebody resided at the other end.
I wiped my sore eyes and smiled.
When Joseph Jones had given up his ambition to reside in a romantic Gothic pile in order to escape the unbearable mists of Coberley, he had clearly chosen a place with a view high over the valley. Two wooden seats sat side by side looking out from the path I was following. Because they were so small against a vista so vast, they had an air of defiance about them. They looked like the last two chairs left on the planet.
It was a similar story when I did a detour off the driveway to inspect a few empty stables. Dumped at the entrance to the yard, a large yellow tipper truck’s rusty metal bucket spilled over with rotting fir cones in rank rainwater. Close by, a bulldozer leaned precariously on its side because one set of seized caterpillar tracks had sunk into the bank’s soft soil. I climbed into the cabless driver’s seat and reached for its jammed controls. I could have been back in the 1950’s, could have been on my trusty tractor ready to carve out roads and reshape fields to build the future that one man had planned for himself and his family. This graveyard of machinery had once been marshalled to advance the greatest dream.
*
Shortly afterwards I was deafened by the most blood-curdling cries. With their tails aloft, a pair of pernickety peacocks flew out the fir trees and strutted across the house’s gravel courtyard. They paraded about in their own special pageant just for my benefit. ‘So this is where you little devils prefer to hang out rather than Coberley Hall’s own lawns,’ I said aloud. By them this semi-derelict place was still regarded as home. How could I deny it? There was enough left behind to render the illusion stronger than the reality.
I shooed the traitors away and descended the path through a high laurel hedge into a small garden. A less curious man might have passed right by, only a shed door stood ajar to the elements, I discovered. Rusty metal plate-work peeled off its wooden doors like ragged brown paper. Actually a former British Railways fish van, it had lost its steel wheels and now looked sadly earthbound so far from its rails. Inside shiny white, insulated walls, dozens of dull-eyed corpses hung by their necks. Just to touch a bloody beak or two was to spin each pheasant or partridge in one last twist on its skewer.
I left the meat store how I found it. There were so many interactive levers and bolts on a second van that it looked locked for ever.
For a moment I stopped to listen.
But that was just another peacock uttering its awful shriek somewhere, I decided.
If ‘The Firs’ had been Joseph Jones’s fresh start, it had also been nothing like Coberley Hall. No seventeenth century girandoles twisted in agonised turns on the walls to light the rooms, no elaborately, black-painted Jacobean chairs stood round its dining table when I peeped in through a window.
The front door of this plainest of Cotswold stone houses stood wide open, so without so much as a knock I went in. It was as though the great man himself had completely changed his mind about his former home and all its history which he had once held in such rapture. His whole soul had revolted from it, apparently.
‘Anyone there?’ I cried, pausing in the presence of a few stuffy prints of hounds and huntsmen that hung on the living room’s wall.
Peter Slater rented this house now, but he wasn’t here.
*
I pulled out a bottle and two glasses from a tasteless 1980’s chromium plated drinks cabinet. If somebody couldn’t do the decent thing and show up on time, he had to expect his whiskey to suffer.
Pretty much.
But absolutely was I expected because someone had lit a fire in the grate with a lot of old correspondence. A smouldering collection of letters and notebooks slowly curled into black, wrinkly ash and then crumbled to pieces.
I took hold of some brass tongs in order to stir the hot embers. Even as black-edged paper resurfaced and with Peter nowhere to be seen, I began to retrieve some smoking remains in no particular order. The initials JJ, embossed in gold on a slowly burning, brown leather cover, brought to my attention some torn up pages from a diary:
May 12, 1981: Beat the shit out of George with an iron bar. This conflict with my stepsons is like a war.
Fragment: …since Sally bled out at the roadside I hardly feel safe in my own home.
Fragment: It’s always the same! If I don’t want to be with HER why on earth did I dig up her bones?
Fragment: As soon as I try to sleep I see Sally’s car hit the tree and glass slash her throat. If she did swerve to avoid someone she didn’t stand a chance…
May 10, 1982: Thirteen Herefords with their calves left their winter sheds for the spring grass today. After all my hard work in the winter it was wonderful to see them kick up their heels and buck like broncos. I’ll miss rearing stock. The bull has been sold to France. The rest will go soon. I’ll miss the four-week-old calves the most…
Undated: It’s Sally’s fault both boys just laugh in my face when I tell them to call me lord. She never taught them any discipline.
August 1, 1981: Had just popped into the Hall last night to fetch my toolbox at ten o’clock when I saw her dart across the flagstones in the courtyard. She knocked on the window. Rat-tat, ratatat, rat-tat-tat. To my utter astonishment Philip and George let her in. Imagine the surprise on their silly faces when I walked in on them in the kitchen: they were about to feed her like a stray animal!
August 21, 1981: Her name is Esti Dryzek. I catch sight of her big blue eyes momentarily but her gaze simply floats past me. At seventeen she’s the same age as the twins and already treats them like brothers. No wonder Gerald Turner kept so quiet about her. The old fox! She hardly ever says a thing in my presence, but drifts from one room to another in an eerie, rather beautiful silence. Hard to believe she’s only a girl from Poland and not some angel come to tempt and torment me.
Undated: I sleep better up at ‘The Firs’.
Undated: Is Esti the future that Sally failed to provide? That barren bitch gave me nothing.
Fragment: Now SHE has her house to herself SHE can leave me alone?
August 2, 1982: Every night I’m dreaming of Sally’s blood-soaked face when I wake up at the sound of someone trying to get in. I sleep with my gun on my chest in bed nowadays. IT will not take me with it, not in this life… I’ll blow its brains out before I let any bogy man walk through my door.
Fragment: The rudimentary stove was still warm when I kicked it over, there was still a piece of skinned rabbit sizzling on its rusty lid… Whoever’s living wild in Chatcombe Wood knows how to survive, like a soldier.
Undated: …won’t say where she went. Her knotted hair smelt strongly of wood smoke and her toenails were filthy black. Caught her creeping back into ‘The Firs’ with her shoes off. She met someone, I’m sure.
Fragment: SHE must take no for an answer. I love Esti, not her. Damn the consequences, in this life at least.
Undated: Just because I’m sixty-five doesn’t mean I’m too old to have a love of my own. Esti spent all today again planting snowdrops…
August 12, 1982: No one knows that the baby will be a girl – it’s Esti’s and my secret.
May 30, 1982: …those boys are like a millstone round my neck. If they want me to act like a father to them they should obey me, they should know their place. Fact is, their real father died at sea and can do nothing for them.
Undated: Drafted a new will at my solicitors today. The boys won’t
like it, but it is my only chance to put things right. No man is safe in Coberley Hall, no man should even try to call himself HER master… Believe me, I’m doing them a favour.
Undated: …George and Philip blame me for the death of their mother. If I hadn’t been so vile Sally would never have been on that road so late at night to see her lover. Fuck them. They expect me to give them everything but they won’t get a penny.
*
Still no call from Peter. No answer when I ring.
Retracing my steps past the long line of dazzling snowdrops, I hastened by the two wooden garden chairs that looked out over the valley. Whoever chose to sit there now had only the flowers for company.
*
Many a man might have counted their blessings and gone home, but not me. Not yet. Not ever. I refused to bury my head in the sand.
Instead I marched left over the hill and turned right into the long tree-lined road that led to the Shooting School. Skid marks covered the frosty forecourt. Otherwise there was absolutely no sign of any living soul. The neat brick house stood silent amid the immaculately mown lawns. I pressed my nose flat to a window.
‘Peter? It’s me, DI Colin Walker. You’re right, we should tackle this thing together. You say we’re cursed. Or maybe the fact that we both know who he really is means something. Bogle, bogy man, bugbear, how expedient it might be for others to blame everything on the supernatural when it lets them off the hook?’
But something wasn’t right. Inside the workshop I could make out the workbench on which Peter usually repaired his guns. For an unbearably fussy man who liked to keep all his accessories in a smart, baize-lined wooden case, he had left his armoury in some disarray. At best, I would have said that he had quit the place in a great hurry. A brand new, white bore snake lay gathering dirt on the floor where someone had ground its fluffy white cloth into the carpet with his heel.
I strode about trying more windows and doors and then walked out to the range. But literally there was no one about to blast clay pigeons from their traps that day. He could have been plucked from the face of the Earth.
