The Hunger Trace

by Edward Hogan

  She put Diamond back in his weathering, and walked out into the day, where the outside lamp still shone, turning the rain to sparks. Up on the horizon, she saw Maggie, dark against the smoky sky. It looked like a two-dimensional scene, like a crude toy from her childhood, as though Maggie were walking on the thin perimeter of a circle cut from card.

  Most days she could see her at this range. She could hold the figure on the horizon between her finger and her thumb.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Maggie was in the Land Rover outside Christopher’s college when the call came. It was Philip. ‘They’ve got the last ibex,’ he said. ‘On the building site where they’d seen him before.’

  ‘What condition is he in?’

  ‘They didn’t say. He’s alive, though. I spoke to the estate agent. Bit of pain in the arse to be honest. Should I go up there?’

  ‘No, I’ll go. Thanks, Phil.’

  Maggie could hear the unmistakable rhythms of Christopher’s boots on the concrete behind the Land Rover. She fastened her seat belt and started the engine.

  ‘What are you in such a rush for?’ Christopher said, climbing unsteadily into the passenger seat.

  ‘Animal stuff,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ Christopher said, rolling his eyes.

  They headed for the estate, winding out of town into the greenbelt. ‘I don’t suppose you fancy coming with me next week then, to look at the deer,’ Maggie said.

  ‘No can do. I’ve got other, erm, plans.’

  ‘Yeah? What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m going out with Louisa and Adamski.’

  ‘Louisa and who?’

  Christopher looked out of the window. ‘Adam.’

  They had reached a T-junction and it took Maggie a moment to make the connection, so thoroughly had she hidden Adam from the reality of her home life with Christopher. ‘Why is he going out with you?’

  Christopher held his hands out, to indicate the stupidity of the question. ‘He’s Louisa’s boyfriend. God. It’s blindingly, erm, clear.’

  Maggie laughed dismissively. ‘Oh Christopher, he’s not her boyfriend. He’s . . .’ She had never said it out loud, and wasn’t about to now. The words that came to mind were not Christopher-friendly. ‘You shouldn’t be hanging around with him, anyway. Neither should she, quite frankly,’ Maggie said.

  ‘He is her boyfriend. He told me so. He’s round there every day. It’s blindingly, erm. He practically lives there. I know true love when I, erm, see it.’

  Maggie tracked back to the memory of Louisa and Adam outside the Strutt. It was a strange place to meet someone like Adam. Maggie herself had never arranged a public appointment with him. It’s not like that, Louisa had said.

  Maggie put the Land Rover in gear and turned left. ‘You said he’s there every day?’ Maggie said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you mean every night?’

  Christopher was becoming exasperated. ‘Both. He stays over. They’re probably going to get a joint account, for Jesus’ sake.’

  Maggie bit, and then slowly released her lip. Things began to make sense.

  ‘This night out has been planned for ages,’ Christopher said. ‘I’m not calling it off now, at the last minute.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to,’ Maggie said, quietly. ‘I’ll go and see the deer on my own.’

  ‘You can’t tell me what to do. You have no, erm, jurisdiction,’ Christopher said.

  ‘I’m not telling you what to fucking do, Christopher.’

  ‘There’s no need for language.’

  The first row of houses on the estate had already been completed, but the rest was a building site. A woman tottered out of the showroom. Maggie got out of the Land Rover, and – to her surprise – Christopher followed.

  The estate agent was clearly perturbed. With her scarf ruffled at her collar, and her shuddering fins of hair, she looked like a pigeon cock on heat. ‘You’ll have to come with me,’ she said, and took them towards one of the finished houses.

  ‘Erm. Oh good,’ said Christopher. ‘I could do with looking at some properties.’ He took a leaflet from the agent, and scanned it. ‘Some, erm, dwellings, I mean.’

  Maggie did not understand why they were going into the empty house. Her apprehension grew when she was hit by the odour of scent glands and dung as she entered the hallway.

  ‘Erm, I like that new house smell,’ Christopher said.

  ‘I certainly don’t know what is going to be done about that,’ the agent said. Maggie noted her use of the passive voice.

  The ibex lay by the French doors in the living room, breathing heavily, the metacarpus of his right foreleg snapped and protruding from the skin, and the infection clear to sight and smell.

  ‘Who brought him in?’ Maggie said.

  ‘Nobody. We found it here this morning. No idea how it got in. It’s certainly made an absolute mess of this living space.’

  Maggie ignored the comment and crouched down by the ibex, who looked out of the window at the future back garden, the churned earth revealing caramel swirls of clay.

  ‘Erm, erm, blimey!’ Christopher said, still examining the property details. ‘Two hundred grand for this flimsy thing. That’s ridiculous. It’s made out of papier mâché.’ He banged on the wall, which shook.

  ‘Please don’t do that,’ said the agent.

  ‘Well. Erm, it’s no wonder he’s used the place as a toilet.’

  The big grey boards of the floor were dotted with ibex shit, some of it trodden in by a workman’s boot. Sweat and heat from the animal had caused a damp patch to form on the wall by the French doors. Maggots squirmed in the wound. When Maggie pressed lightly on the upper leg, the ibex flinched, the noise startling Christopher and the agent.

  ‘Christopher, can you give me a hand?’ Maggie said.

  ‘No way, I’m not touching that dirty article. Erm, it stinks to high Christendom.’

  Maggie took a breath. She turned to the agent, who was hugging herself. ‘Do you think you could call a couple of fellas over to help us lift him into the car?’

  ‘They’re working. We can’t spare men. This is your responsibility.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Maggie. She stood, and started to walk out of the room.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ said the agent.

  Maggie turned and looked down at the woman. ‘I’m going to get a captive bolt gun, or a heavy dose of barbiturates, so I can put this animal out of his misery. Then I’m going to leave him here, because I can’t lift him. There shouldn’t be much blood, but he’ll almost certainly urinate when he’s dead, so you might want to change your shoes before you show the next couple round.’

  She was learning, it seemed, from Louisa, even in her absence.

  ‘I’ll see if any of the men are on a break,’ the agent said, and stomped outside.

  ‘Two hundred thousand,’ Christopher said. ‘Jumping Jesus. For this s-house.’

  Maggie went out to get the drugs from the Land Rover, and came back inside just as the agent returned with a workman. Maggie knelt by the ibex, sedated him and checked the pulse in his neck. Everyone else watched in respectful silence, even the agent. ‘I’ll be back to clean up,’ Maggie told her.

  ‘Don’t worry. They’ll just paint over it,’ the agent said gently.

  Maggie and the workman carried the ibex out to the Land Rover and laid him on the back seat. When the animal was secure, Maggie took her place in the driver’s seat next to Christopher, and cleaned her hands with wet wipes.

  ‘Erm. I’m sorry I couldn’t help,’ Christopher said. ‘I think my disc has slipped.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Is he, erm, going to die, at all?’

  ‘Yes. His leg is broken and badly infected. It’s better that he’s asleep. He must have been very scared.’

  ‘Erm, I know. Did you see her lipstick?’ said Christopher. Maggie laughed, and then Christopher laughed, realising he had made a j
oke.

  The sky darkened quickly as they travelled home; the clouds were oppressively low. Maggie explained her plans to bring the deer to Drum Hill. Christopher approved. He wouldn’t promise that he’d touch them, but he might.

  ‘How do you think the goat got into the house?’ Christopher said, looking behind him at the prostrate animal.

  ‘The ibex? Difficult to say. What I don’t understand is why this one broke from the pack. I mean, how did he end up over this side of town?’ Maggie said.

  ‘Well, he spun round and went through the woods as soon as he saw my torch,’ Christopher said.

  ‘What?’

  Christopher gasped and stiffened in his seat. ‘Erm, erm, erm. I mean. The torch of . . . erm, whoever.’

  Maggie blinked slowly and sighed, but she didn’t say anything. Christopher glanced at her, and then looked away.

  They drove on for a mile in silence. It began to rain. Maggie rubbed her face. She could not believe she hadn’t thought of it before, but she had been so certain it was activists. She imagined Christopher out there in the enclosures with the bolt-cutters, in the middle of the night. The thought made her long for David. Christopher began to cry. ‘I suppose I’m going to get an absolute rollocking, now?’ he said through his tears.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. It’s okay.’

  When they arrived outside the house, she put her hand over his shaking fist on the passenger seat. ‘Did you do all of the releases?’ she said.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ Christopher said.

  Maggie shook her head and just sat there for a while. ‘I’m sorry, Christopher, about—’

  ‘So you should be,’ he said. He cleared his sinuses, and swallowed. ‘You knew they were daemonic all along.’

  ‘I mean, I’m sorry for what I said about that man.’

  ‘Adam?’ Christopher said.

  ‘Adam. It was wrong of me. He’s probably very nice. I’m sorry. It’s good for you to go out.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Erm, what if?’

  The rain hit the roof of the Land Rover like crackling fat.

  ‘And Christopher . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I first came here, to Derbyshire, that must have been very difficult for you,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Looking back, it was abysmal,’ he said quietly. She thought of his kindness back then, and knew from his tone that he did not mean what he said.

  ‘Well, you were nothing but nice to me. I married your father because—’

  ‘Because of financial concerns.’

  ‘No. That’s not why. I married him because we were massively in love. But if you must think in those terms, then you were the Christmas bonus. I knew I’d be happy with your dad, but I never expected to find someone as brilliant as you waiting for me here. I moved away from all the people I knew when I came to Detton. You know what it’s like to be lonely. I couldn’t have managed without you. Whatever has happened since, I want to say thank you for that.’

  ‘I’m not lonely,’ Christopher said. ‘I’ve got friends. More than you.’

  ‘I know.’

  Christopher looked at his feet for a moment. ‘Say it then, if you want to say it,’ he said.

  ‘What? Oh.’ Maggie smiled. ‘Thank you.’

  She kissed him on the cheek and hugged his head. ‘Best bollocking you’ve ever had, eh?’ she said, and he grinned.

  Maggie glanced over at the cottage, its lights strong in the thick darkness of the late afternoon.

  LATE SEASON

  Pheasant, partridge.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It seemed obvious to the people of Detton that their village would be dismantled in this way: slowly and irresistibly turned over and picked apart. No panic, no explosions, just the crushing weight of the world. For the first few days of the flood, the village looked still, its people and vehicles and animals sheltered. The only movement came from the straining, tea-coloured ligaments of flood water, and the things it carried.

  Louisa had seen the signs before most. Trying to fly Diamond at Ladybower had been pointless in the deluge, and she had observed the abnormal level of the reservoir, and the officials taking decisions down in the basin. She was on the road now, heading back through the diversions.

  The problem, as always, was that Detton stood in the delta between two bodies of water. The ancestral barriers held back some of the Derwent’s overflow, but when the River Ecclesthorpe broke its banks for the first time in 112 years, things began to move more swiftly in the lower part of the village. Houses were prised open. In Dewke Street, a patch of cream and maroon wallpaper stripped from a hallway a mile to the north got caught on the windscreen of a Toyota. Terracotta patio tiles, and blue and white bathroom tiles, spun gently into the Bottleneck Brook, where the weeping willows showed high brown stains of their drunkenness. Eventually, bigger debris – a mattress, pallets from the industrial estate – blocked the bridge near the confluence of the Derwent and the Bottleneck, and squeezed the brook like a tube. In the fields, the soil moisture deficit reached zero and the rain had nowhere to go.

  On the radio of Louisa’s Transit, an RSPCA rescue worker spoke of being called to help some horses in a waterlogged field, but finding an elderly couple trying to get their granddaughter out of a car as the levels rose, causing the doors to jam. ‘It creeps up on you, water,’ he said. ‘Everything seems fine. It’s so quiet. Then, before you know it, bang. Trouble.’ Louisa thought of her hawks, and began to make plans.

  The plate glass window of Young’s Ye Olde Sweetshoppe down by the school gave way under the pressure, and the children who lived nearby awoke on Thursday morning to find jars of bon-bons, bullseyes and Liquorice Allsorts floating past their windows. Some of the children were struck by a sense of wonder, but concealed their excitement when they saw their parents sitting on the dry half of the staircase, watching their homes go to ruin.

  Jessop Avenue was the worst hit. The residents waited to be evacuated as discarded clothes, garden furniture, and the bones of shallow-graved pets lodged in the tops of hedges. From his bedroom window, Richie Foxton saw a swan sailing in and out of the windows of the estate agent’s, the red light of the alarm flashing but mute.

  And still there was a sense of calm, even when stories came of the accidents, injuries and deaths across the county. A workman in Hilford died behind the Glow-Worm factory when his dumper truck tumbled into the river. A young man was missing after a night out.

  At the bottom of the hill Louisa saw Christopher clambering into his brookside den, and was glad to rise out of the valley. The van shunted unsteadily, and Louisa saw rivulets coming together like the handles of divining rods, winding past her, and flushing the detritus into the village. An expert on the radio programme explained the ‘vulnerability variables’ at work in flood-related accidents: clothing, intoxicants, being asleep. Many deaths happen in vehicles, he said. People die in shallow, quick-moving water. ‘Males are almost twice as likely to be injured taking undue risks and attempting rescues.’ There had been a time when such a sentence would have drawn a derisive snort from Louisa, but no more.

  The hawks, however, still came first. Despite their favoured location at the summit of the hill, water pooled on the weathering lawn, and had reached within a foot of some of the chambers. The old wooden stables which had served as an aviary in Louisa’s early years at Drum Hill stood on raised ground to the west of her cottage. It had never been an ideal place for falcons, and she had abandoned it years ago, but it was huge, dry and could be warmed for the Harrises by heat lamps run off the outside generator.

  Louisa got to work as soon as she got home, but the hawks were reluctant to move in the rain, and it was an exhausting task. She started with the longwings, loading each into a carrier box and taking two at a time round to the stables. With the hood on her coat pulled up, she did not see Maggie until she was a metre away.

  ‘Hi,’ Maggie said. ‘I saw you moving the hawks, and thought you might need some help.’


  Louisa squinted through the downpour. Maggie wasn’t smiling. ‘I’ll be fine,’ Louisa said. ‘You should go back to the house, stay out of this weather.’

  Maggie did not move. She held out a hand for one of the carrier boxes, and after a moment, Louisa relinquished it.

  They worked together in silence, Louisa erecting fence panel partitions for some of the more temperamental falcons, while Maggie brought Iroquois round from the lawn. The eagle remained calm on her fist.

  Louisa put Diamond in last, lifting his tail, with the little transmitter wire she used to track him, over the block perch. She looked at her watch; Adam was due to arrive in an hour. Before they left, Louisa turned on the red porcelain heat lamps, and the place assumed the feel of a Christmas grotto. She padlocked the door.

  ‘Thank you,’ Louisa said.

  ‘That’s okay. I wanted to talk to you, actually.’

  ‘Yeah, me too. Let’s get dry.’

  Maggie nodded briefly. They walked over to the cottage and went inside. The warmth and quiet was welcome as they stripped off their outer layers. In the kitchen, Maggie sat at the table beneath the coloured light while Louisa made tea.

  ‘I wanted to apologise, first off,’ Maggie said. ‘I was flippant, in talking about Adam. I thought . . . Well, maybe you know what I thought. I hadn’t understood the nature of your relationship.’

  ‘Christopher filled you in, I take it.’

  Maggie nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘It’s understandable.’

  ‘I guess that’s why I haven’t seen you for a while,’ Maggie said.

  Louisa brought the tea to the table and sat down, forced herself to smile. ‘Yeah. Been busy.’

  ‘Sounds like it.’

  ‘It was nothing to do with you, and I’m sorry if it came across like that. You were right in what you said outside the Strutt. I felt strange about it, you know.’