Gilgamesh

by Jo Bannister

  It was a serious question, not invective, and I tried to answer it. “No. Not what you and I mean by mad. She’s entirely rational—supremely so: she damn near outthought the lot of us. She knows that what she did was both illegal and wrong; she knew that when she was doing it. There was nothing of the sudden brainstorm about it.

  “At the same time, it’s not normal behaviour—not even normal criminal behaviour. I’m not a psychiatrist, you understand, and never was, but I think the word to describe her ability to plot and carry out those actions over a protracted period of time, apparently unhindered by guilt or any sensitivity over the consequences for anyone but herself, is psychopathy. It’s a disorder of the character rather than the mind; essentially, the psychopath can’t make peace with society. The psychopath who wants something blames the rest of us for the fact that he hasn’t got it and so anything he has to do to get it is, in his own mind, justified. We asked for it; it’s all our fault anyway.”

  Ellen stood up abruptly, hugged her arms round herself, gave me a kind of twitchy grin. “Any time now I’m going to start feeling sorry for her.”

  I smiled back with admiration and affection. “I don’t know whether she deserves your sympathy. I know she wouldn’t value it. But it’s the fact that you can feel that way that’s the difference between you and her. The only one she can feel for is her. That’s a pretty crippling condition.”

  Ellen nodded, and looked away and round the cornices of the room. There was nothing to see up there; it just kept the tears in her eyes from spilling out. After a minute she cleared her throat. “Speaking of which, will you give me one more straight answer to a direct question?”

  “If I can.”

  “Is there any chance of David being fit to ride in the World Championships?”

  It could have been a harder question. This one I could answer without much difficulty and without much prospect of being wrong. “No. Not this year.” It wasn’t professional, but it was true.

  “Right,” she said briskly, rounding on me with something like relief. “Then I know what to do about the horses. First thing tomorrow they go down the fields, and they’re not coming up again until David brings them up.”

  “And Gilgamesh?”

  “Gilgamesh especially. I’m not sending him anywhere she can follow. By the time he’s been at grass for a week he won’t be fit enough to compete again until after the team has been picked. The big bay bastard’s been the cause of chaos enough for one year. Now he’s going on his holidays.”

  And with due ceremony the next morning we led the four horses to the big field under the wood and let them go, and watched for fifteen minutes while they galloped round in an ecstasy of excitement, stamping at the ground and kicking at the sun, their heads high, their manes streaming in the storm of their passage. And we thought it was over.

  Chapter Two

  The days passed and turned first into weeks and then into the full lazy months of high summer, heady with the scent of flowers and the sound of bees. The horses grew fat and complacent in the field beyond our fuchsia hedge.

  The story of what had been happening up on The Brink got out and dominated Skipley gossip for perhaps a fortnight. Then a local minister was seduced in his own organ-loft by a senior choirboy, and the names Aston and Fane dropped out of currency between one meeting of the Mothers’Union and the next.

  Speculation continued a little longer in the eventing world, though I only heard it second-hand now through Karen. But it was whispered, half-ashamed speculation, as if the fancy knew that in some measure its own hearty ruthlessness, its time-honoured tradition of competitors coming back with their back-protectors or on them, had played a part in the tragedy that had overtaken two of its good young riders. And soon that too died away, as the focus of interest shifted from those who would not be at the World Championships to those who would.

  The police search for Sally Fane was not (as they would tell you themselves) called off. But demands on police time are high. Newer crimes supervened, and when the initial wave of enquiries proved fruitless, subsequent waves were less impressive, the pressure diminished as manpower was syphoned off to tackle other crimes. What was for ten days a national issue reverted, after perhaps another month, to being a Skipley CID problem again.

  Slowly and steadily through the summer weeks David’s recovery progressed. As his wound healed, so the communications network that was his central nervous system, shocked into a temporary close-down, began to consider the resumption of normal services. First sensation and then motor function began to spread, tentatively in the beginning but with increasing confidence as time went on. By the end of June he had taken command of a wheelchair, which broadened his social horizons considerably, and was coming home most weekends. By the end of July he had sufficient use of his legs to move about on crutches for short periods that could only get longer as practice and the appalling Sophi built up the strength he had lost through immobility. After three months, though the fine detail of his future remained beyond resolution, the overall picture was frankly encouraging.

  Shock, grief, and shame had struck Colonel Fane at the roots of his existence. He was a proud and honourable man, probably the only man in England less likely than Harry to fiddle his income tax, and his only child was being sought by the police for offences of premeditated mayhem. The strain seemed to sap him like a physical illness, emaciating the narrow-boned face and turning the scrubbed skin to parchment. He was a man in his sixties; after Sally’s disappearance he began to look and act like an old man. He hardly left Standings now, and though both Ellen and I made a point of calling on him, he was not at home to me and received Ellen with such obvious discomfort that she excused herself as soon as she decently could and did not go again.

  Harry went through a period of slightly strained relations with his chief constable over the fact that Sally had been emptying her drawers at home while the dragnet waited for her at Foxford. The rather snide side-swipes which Harry bore stoicly for the first fortnight and with increasing irritation for the next stopped abruptly on the night that two mounted constables and another four on foot were totally submerged under a running battle between National Front and CND supporters after a rally which the chief constable predicted almost no one would turn up for.

  Then one afternoon in August the phone rang. I was working in the garden, at rather less than full steam ahead because of the sun beating on my back and the drowsy murmurings in the fuchsia hedge and the soporific smell of honeysuckle and roses. I considered letting it ring, but Harry had been hoping to finish early and go over to Stratford if he could get tickets for the Royal Shakespeare and book a meal somewhere, so it was likely to be him calling to cancel or confirm. I struggled out of the hammock—it’s a hard life, being a writer—and stumbled inside.

  “Clio? It’s Ellen.” That quickly I could hear the slightly odd note in her voice, a suppressed excitement. “Listen, something’s happened. Can you come over? I’ve got something to show you.”

  She refused to be drawn, so after a moment, a shade reluctantly, I said I’d be up in ten minutes. “I’ll meet you at the stables,” she said.

  I wasn’t really dressed for visiting, even for visiting Ellen. To be honest, I was hardly dressed at all. After a moment’s consideration I pulled a shirt over my singlet, belted it over my shorts, and pushed my bare feet into moccasins. Thus sanitised for public consumption, and leaving a note in case Harry got in within the next half-hour, I pulled the cottage door behind me and padded into the lane. I could have driven—the car was sitting there—but it was a hot day and I thought I could cope with the walk easier than with the petrol fumes. That was a mistake.

  Ellen’s big car, which David had already tried driving on one of his weekends home (witness the small dent in the offside wing and the larger one in the box hedge), was not in its usual place under the coach-arch. I thought she might have driven it into the stable yard for some reason connected with her surprise, so I wandered on down th
ere, looking for her.

  The car wasn’t in the yard, but one of the stable doors was open. To the best of my knowledge, those stables hadn’t been occupied for ten weeks.

  “Ellen?” I stuck my head inside, but there was nothing and nobody there. I walked back up the alley towards the house. “Ellen!” The kitchen door and the big main door under the portico were both locked. I walked round the terrace, tapping windows, but clearly there was no one at home.

  It really was most odd. All I could think was that in the few minutes since she called me something had happened to take Ellen out of the house in a rush; and since she hadn’t thought to leave me a note, it must have been something urgent and important. I immediately thought of David and wondered if she could have had a message from the hospital. I decided that when I got home, I’d phone the hospital and make sure everything was all right.

  I heard a sound then, a dull sound that was stilled before I had time to work out what it was or where it came from. It might have come from the far side of the byre; I was back in the stable yard now. It could almost have been the hatch-cover of the slurry tank. “Ellen, are you there?”

  Long seconds passed, so many I was beginning to think I’d imagined it; there was no one there and all I had heard was the wind in the loose and rusted gutterings. But there was no wind, not even breeze enough to lift the dust lying in the empty yard. I looked up the yard, in the direction of the sound, but all I could see was the brick byre that was almost as old as the house. David’s father, who took his farming more seriously than his son did, had excavated the slurry tank and installed the slatted floor. It was the latest thing in cattle husbandry when it was done. All it was used for now was housing a small beef herd for fattening over the winter. Of course, if David had to give up riding, it might yet fulfil the purpose for which it was designed.

  Then I heard it again, a dull ringing like someone chopping wood heard through an acre or two of dense timber, a soft, slow, hollow, rhythmic percussion. It was a sound I had never heard before, but I recognised it almost at once. It was a sound which had no business here, at this time and in these circumstances, with no one at the house and no one but me in the yard.

  It was the sound of a horse, its heavy hooves unshod, pacing a slow and measured tread on the concrete surface of the yard, out of sight behind the byre. Its stride was so slow, so deliberate, that I could hear each individual footfall, like the beat of a muffled drum.

  I cannot explain the deep unease which grew in me with every throb of that drum. It was an unexpected sound, with Foxford apparently deserted and the horses ostensibly out to grass, but not so very unlikely. If the field gate had been sprung by too energetic a tail-scrubbing, the culprit might have wandered up through the sand school and up the far side of the byre, where Gilgamesh and I had our close encounter that seemed then so violently unpredictable and was anything but.

  But I knew, without knowing how, that nothing so mundane as a weak gate explained that measured footfall out of sight. Unease deepened towards fear. I think it was the very slowness of the beat which struck such chill into my heart. It was unnatural. No normal animal would walk so slowly on concrete, where there wasn’t even a blade of grass to pick at in passing. It was the tenor of a hunter stalking prey. It was the stuff of nightmare.

  I didn’t know what to do. There was nothing immediately threatening about the thing, yet I felt threatened. I could see nothing, but I wanted to hide. The slow, slow stride made me want to run like hell. I cast indecisive glances back and forth. I could shut myself in a stable, where I would be safe enough if it was a loose horse but trapped if it was not. I could run up my side of the byre while it walked slowly up the other, and cross the upper yard behind the house like an Olympic sprinter in the hope of reaching the drive before it reached me. If it was a horse, of course, I couldn’t outrun it. But if it was a horse, why would it want to chase me?

  The note of the hoofbeats changed as it reached the far corner of the byre. As near as damn it, it was already between me and the drive: if it had ever been an avenue of escape, it was cut off now. I stood, undecided still in the middle of the stable yard, and listened to the slow drumming of hooves and the fast drumming of my heart, and the indescribable but quite distinctive sound of my blood turning to water. And still nothing at all had happened, except that I’d heard a horse walking past the byre and responded with a panic attack that even in the middle of it I could not explain or justify.

  Behind the bottom stables rose the original barnyard wall, eight feet of grimed and weathered brick. The sparse end of Foxford Wood ran into a kind of rough heath and died against it like a high tide running out of energy and dying with a hiss against a sea-wall. If there had been a way over that wall—a way suitable for a short, middle-aged woman writer rather than a six-foot, twenty-five-year-old paratrooper—I would have taken it and circled back home through the lanes before whatever was stalking me found a way to follow. But I could see no prospect of scaling it. There was no ladder in the yard, not even an oil drum or water butt to give me a fighting chance. I was trapped in that yard like a rat in a cage, like a moth in a killing-bottle.

  Finally I did the only thing that with dignity I could: I moved to meet the object of my irrational, prophetic fear. I made myself walk from the middle of the yard to the corner so that I could see up the alley towards the house. I don’t know that I managed any great show of courage or confidence; I seem to remember taking a long time to cross those few feet, and stopping a number of times, and actually stepping backwards twice. But if the object was that I reach the corner of the stables before the deliberate horse rounded the corner of the byre, then I achieved it. It had cost me blood, but repaid me in some measure by the tiny fillip it gave my self-esteem.

  There was time—it seemed plenty of time—for two or three more beats of the hidden drum; then it reached the last corner remaining between us and marched ponderously into my line of vision. It was, of course, a horse, and moreover a horse that I knew: the high head, the imperious eye, the rich brown hide darkling into black. It was Gilgamesh: the horse, the horse all our hopes and fears had revolved around since early spring.

  And in the half-second or so after the dark, arrogant head emerged from behind the byre and before the rest of the dark muscled body followed suit, I guessed what Ellen’s surprise was. It was David—not only home but riding, astride his own great horse for the first time in three and a half months. I would never know what difficulty he had found in getting up there, what pain and exhaustion he had conquered, what weak and uncooperative limbs he had to control. But now he was on top he held the big impatient animal to that measured pace with only a rope halter round his head. In his own way, the horse must have been glad to have him back.

  And Ellen! One day soon I would murder her for the minute’s terror she had put me through. Or perhaps it was unreasonable to credit normal people with the sort of imagination which makes someone a writer of thrillers or a nervous wreck, or both.

  I stepped forward with surging relief and a very genuine happiness. “David? Hey, let’s have a look at you up there—”

  The words died on my lips. The horse stepped out of the wall’s eclipse and turned towards me, pivoting as precisely as a well-drilled platoon. Stripped of the customary tack, with only the rope for guidance, he looked bigger than ever, and stronger and, despite the restraint of his stride, more violent. He looked vast and primitive, some ancient Nemesis sent for my undoing.

  Which is exactly, give or take the aforementioned imagination, what he was. Because it wasn’t David Aston balanced on his broad, muscular back, long legs dangling loosely down the burnished flanks. It was Sally Fane.

  Chapter Three

  The last time I had seen her was in the fullness of her triumph at Bramham. She looked very different now. Instead of riding clothes, she wore jeans, a shirt that had gone too long without sight of an iron, and no hat. Her hair was longer and wilder than I remembered, a tangle of curls rioting round
the drawn framework of her face. Her face was thin, sallowed as if with too little sun, and set in iron-hard lines. Her eyes looked down at me from under half-lowered lids, and there was fire and ice and implacable hatred in their depths.

  Ellen hadn’t called me. Sally had.

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know why she was here, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I didn’t know what she was doing on David’s horse or why she had summoned me here when Ellen was clearly out.

  Finally I managed, “They’ve been looking for you.” There was a tremor in my voice. It would have been remarkable if there had not been: my insides were shaking like blancmange. Like a blancmange left to set on the foredeck of a three-masted schooner caught in an incipient hurricane off the Azores.

  “I know,” she said. Her voice was low, heavy but not with any particular meaning. It was impossible yet to judge her intent. Except that she didn’t intend me to leave. She had brought the big horse to a standstill in the narrow alley between the stables and the byre. It might have been six feet wide. There was room to push past the horse, but only if she let me. If she turned him sideways, the space would close, and a body could get severely kicked trying to open it up again.

  I glanced round me, trying to look less anxious than I felt, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to retreat except the stables. There was a door into the byre on this side, but it was never used: the padlock had rusted in the chain holding it shut.

  I said, “Where have you been?” If she didn’t already know she had me trapped, she wasn’t going to learn it from me.

  “Here and there.” It wasn’t meant to be an answer, only a return of serve. She knew she had me all right. She had planned it this way. Another of her careful, well-constructed little plans. Whatever was coming next, she was going to enjoy it.