Fair Game

by Sheila Radley

  Quantrill avoided Molly’s reproachful glance. There had been neither starry eyes nor innocence at their hurried wedding, arranged on short acquaintance and at her parents’ insistence because he had been careless enough to make her pregnant. It had been what used to be called a shotgun wedding … And that reminded him.

  ‘I hear Martin’s found himself a new hobby. What was the matter with flying?’

  ‘Nothing, apart from the expense. He intends to keep up his pilot’s licence, but now we’re getting married he says he can’t justify the cost of flying regularly. So he’s joined a gun club instead. He’s a very good shot, you know.’

  ‘So I’ve heard. He should be, he’s police-trained. But that was using a hand gun, and in controlled conditions on a proper shooting range. At this club of his they use shotguns, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, to shoot clay pigeons. I went to watch him last weekend. He hasn’t had much experience with shotguns yet, but he ran up the second highest score. He says it’s very exciting and skilful. He’s really hooked on the sport – in fact he’s just bought his own gun.’

  Quantrill’s insides took a dip. ‘He’s bought a shotgun?’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Molly, catching but not understanding her husband’s concern. ‘That doesn’t sound very safe.’

  ‘Of course it’s safe, Mum! Martin’s terribly conscientious about security, he’ll always keep the gun locked away when he’s not using it.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Quantrill. He made an effort to keep the anxiety out of his voice. ‘Shotguns aren’t just sports equipment, they’re lethal weapons. Quite frankly I’m horrified that Martin’s bought one. I’d be a lot happier if you could persuade him –’

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Dad!’ Annoyed, Alison was on her feet collecting dirty dishes with a clatter. ‘Honestly, I came here this evening thinking how pleased you’d both be …’

  ‘And we are, dear,’ said Molly. She took charge of the table-clearing, giving her husband a glare in passing. ‘We’ll be delighted to see Martin on Saturday evening. Couldn’t he come earlier, though – what about lunch?’

  ‘Sorry, but we’ll both be out for lunch. Martin’s been invited to a day’s pheasant shooting – his first ever – at Chalcot House. How about that! Do you know the Glavens, Dad?’

  ‘Not socially, no,’ said Quantrill stiffly. Molly was ooh-ing and aah-ing, but he had always scorned Tait’s attempts to ingratiate himself with the local gentry. ‘How did he wangle that?’

  ‘He didn’t wangle it!’ Alison protested. ‘He’d once advised Mr Glaven over some cattle-rustling problem. Then we went to the County Show this year, and Martin congratulated him on his prize-winning herd. Mind you –’ She laughed. Despite her protest on his behalf, she evidently had the measure of her partner. ‘– he did make a point of saying he was interested in shooting. But Mr Glaven rang so unexpectedly to invite him, and only last night, that even Martin has to admit that he must be just a stop-gap. He’s pleased, of course, because if he shoots well at Chalcot it’ll mean other invitations. And I’ve been invited too, just to watch.’

  Quantrill’s concern about Martin Tait’s possession of a shotgun receded. Now he had a more immediate worry. He was sure that a private shoot at a place like Chalcot would be well organised, but that didn’t exclude the possibility of an accident.

  ‘You’re not going, are you?’

  ‘Of course I am! Not that I want to watch birds being shot at, but I’m longing to see what goes on at Chalcot behind those high park walls.’

  ‘Well, if you must go, stay right out of the shooting area,’ Quantrill urged. ‘I know you think I’m making a fuss – but with shotguns going off all over the place, anything can happen.’

  Chapter Five

  In Keeper’s Cottage, at the edge of a spinney just beyond the gardens of Chalcot House, Len Alger was spending one of his wakeful nights. The day’s rain had given way to a thick mist that should have enabled the gamekeeper to sleep peacefully for once, in the knowledge that no bastard poachers would be about; but he was a lean, angry man with a lurking stomach ulcer, and he couldn’t rest.

  ‘Go to sleep …’ his wife begged wearily, trying to hang on to her share of the bedclothes as he twisted and turned. But Len, with his long bony limbs and long, bony, weather-worn face, was too tense for sleep. There were no end of preparations to be made for the coming shoot, and he resented having to do everything at short notice just for the benefit of Mr Glaven’s useless son, who didn’t give a damn about shooting anyway.

  At the same time, a long-held suspicion was gnawing away at Len’s guts that he was likely to lose his job at the end of the season.

  ‘How can I bloody sleep, with you nagging at me?’ he raged. Unwilling ever to admit any fault in himself, he always tried to put someone else in the wrong; usually his wife.

  Imagining that a hot toddy might appease his ulcer, he jacked himself out of bed, pulled his trousers over his pyjamas for warmth – there was a central heating system in the house, but he refused to pay for its use – and rammed his horny toes into much-mended socks. At sixty-two years old, he knew that his hearing was less sharp than it used to be, and so was his eyesight. Apart from that he considered himself one hundred per cent fit, and he reckoned to pass easily for the fifty-eight which was all he admitted to his employer.

  When Mr Glaven was about, Len Alger shaved closely to hide the tell-tale whiteness of his stubble. He’d never been one for conversation, so his defective hearing hadn’t been noticed yet. And he knew the Breckham Market road so well that it was no problem to drive the Guv’nor to and from the station, even if he couldn’t read the number plate of the car in front.

  But good hearing and eyesight are essential to a gamekeeper, and now the season was about to start he couldn’t hope to go on fooling Mr Glaven. Only this afternoon, doing his round of the traps and snares in Oak Wood, he’d failed to spot the winged flash of blue that gave away a flying jay. Maddeningly, that bloody boy Jermyn was with him at the time and had brought the bird down with his little 20-bore. It was a fluke, of course, but Len couldn’t get over the shame of it.

  ‘You young idiot!’ he’d fumed. ‘Why d’you think I didn’t shoot it? I expected you to observe it and learn its habits. You’ll never make a keeper, you haven’t got the patience. Or the sense.’ But though his outburst had temporarily salved his pride, Len knew that he’d soon have to submit to eyesight and hearing tests. And whoever heard of a gamekeeper with glasses and a hearing aid?

  He thumped down the narrow stairs, careless of the noise he was making, stirred up the ashes of the living-room fire and threw on some kindling. His wife’s little brown mongrel bitch, instantly awake and fearful of doing wrong, stood up in its box and waited, quivering, for a command. In Len Alger’s opinion it ought to live out in the kennels with the other dogs; if it weren’t a useful ratter he wouldn’t give it house room.

  ‘Lie down!’ he snarled, and it subsided immediately, nose on tense paws, ears pricked, its anxious eyes watching his every move.

  He put the old tin kettle on the fire. Mr Glaven had modernised the house by having a small extension built at the back to accommodate a bathroom and an all-electric kitchen, but Len’s rule was that the electricity must be used as little as possible. While he waited for the water to heat he put his old jacket round his shoulders, unbolted the outside door, and took a look and a sniff at the weather.

  It was nearly 3 a.m. The light from the doorway shone on a mist so thick and wet that he could hardly see the wall of the brick-built kennels by the garden gate, let alone the trees of the spinney. The gun dogs – his own two retriever crosses, and two labradors and a springer spaniel belonging to the Guv’nor – started to bark as soon as they heard the door open, but he stopped them short with a roar of ‘Lie down!’

  As he closed and bolted the door he hoped to God the weather would clear before Saturday. Mr Glaven had said that he wanted this unexpectedly early shoot because
his son was making a special weekend visit; but pheasants never fly well in rain, and in mist they just sit about and mope. Len wasn’t going to take any blame for bad weather, but all the same he knew he would feel responsible if the shoot turned out to be a poor one.

  He poured himself a whisky, mixed it with hot water, switched off the electric light and sat brooding by the fire. Even if everything went well on Saturday and the Guv’nor was pleased with him, Len had little confidence that he’d still be in work – with or without artificial aids – this time next year. He knew what was in the wind. Mr Glaven was so taken up with his blasted pedigree cattle that he’d lost his old enthusiasm for driven shoots, and that was exactly where skilled keepering was needed.

  Ignorant people thought that all a gamekeeper did was stroll about the woods with a gun under his arm, killing vermin and frightening off the odd poacher. They’d no idea what hard, knowledgeable work was involved in rearing and protecting gamebirds, and then driving them up over the guns.

  True, the work was easier now than it had been when Len first started, as one of the underkeepers on a big estate where the shooting was let to a syndicate of businessmen. The syndicate demanded quantities of birds and didn’t care how low they shot them, so every spring the keepers had to use incubators to hatch pheasant eggs by the thousand.

  The chicks were very delicate and it was always the devil’s own job to rear them, though that didn’t stop them from driving you mad with their everlasting chirping. They were such stupid little buggers that even though you kept gas heaters going in their rearing huts in bad weather, they’d find somewhere cold or wet to lie down and die in just to spite you. Or they’d pile up in a corner and suffocate, or peck each other to death, or die of the gapes. What with watering and feeding’em, and clipping their beaks, and dosing ’em, and fighting off vermin, the whole summer had been a seven-days-a-week slog for all the keepers from dawn to dusk.

  At Chalcot, thankfully, it was a bit easier. As a single-handed keeper on a small estate, Len was allowed to buy in young pheasants from a game farm as six-week-old poults. They were healthy stock, but even so the blasted birds would still die if they were given half a chance. Once they’d arrived he had to spend every waking hour cosseting and worrying about them, until they grew strong enough to serve their purpose in life by getting shot.

  As always, he had spent the early part of the summer building large pens of wire netting for them, one in each of the woods on the estate. These kept the poults from straying until they were almost fully grown. The pens were sited in wide grassy rides, and each contained a shed where the young birds could shelter from killers like rain and cold. The other killers, the vermin that were determined to burrow or gnaw their way in, had to be kept out by guns and traps and snares.

  Len Alger was proud of his record in keeping down premature deaths, but that was only part of his skill as a gamekeeper. Everything he did was directed towards providing good sport for the guns at the five driven shoots that were the highlights of the Chalcot year. One wood, and its immediate surrounds, would be shot on each occasion. The Guv’nor would plan the shoots in the expectation that each of the woods would yield a bag of 100–120 pheasants, and Len’s skill lay not only in knowing how many poults to put in each wood, but in persuading them to stay thereabouts after they were strong enough to be released from the pens.

  The secret of holding the birds where he wanted them was in the feeding and watering. At each pen there were water tanks and metal storage bins, which he kept filled with supplies that he took in by Landrover. He fed near the pens, and also, as the birds began to roam, in outlying areas round each wood. And as the birds grew, he knew just what proportion of barley and oats and protein pellets to add to the wheat, and more importantly, how much of it to give them.

  The birds had to be kept hungry enough to come back to feed twice a day, but not so hungry that they’d go searching for food elsewhere. You could never be absolutely sure that you’d got it right until the shoot was in progress, but in the whole of his career he’d rarely failed to feel satisfied when he counted up the dead birds at the end of the day.

  If driven shoots were abandoned, though, none of that skill and experience would be needed any more. Mr Glaven would never give up shooting, Len was sure of that; but with his son’s lack of interest, and a keeper who was showing his age, he might well announce that from next season he would shoot only wild pheasants. The days of proper keepering at Chalcot would be over, and Len would be on the scrapheap, without a job, without any transport of his own, and without a home.

  He’d seen it coming, ever since that bloody Jermyn boy had been taken on.

  ‘Seems there’s some sort of training scheme available for school-leavers,’ Mr Glaven had said last July. ‘Good idea, eh? Keeps ’em off the streets and gives ’em some useful experience at the same time. Thought we might take a youngster on, if we can find someone suitable. Just temporarily, of course. You could use a good strong lad to help with the poults, couldn’t you?’

  Just temporarily. Hah!

  The fact was that as long as there was any shooting on the estate, there’d have to be some sort of keepering. Vermin would have to be controlled, signs of poaching would have to be watched for, and food would have to be put out for the wild pheasants in a bad winter. But it didn’t need a skilled game-keeper to do any of that. After a season’s experience, even a blasted boy could do it.

  Sore in mind as well as stomach, his hands shaking with suppressed anger, Len Alger poured himself another toddy. He had hated Darren Jermyn even before he met him. He was damned if he was going to train the boy to do him out of his own job – but maddeningly, Darren had turned out to be a good observer and a quick learner. And Mr Glaven had taken an interest in him, even teaching him to handle a gun.

  Not that Len blamed the Guv’nor. He had too much respect for him for that, and he liked to think the respect was returned. No, he put the blame on Mr Glaven’s son, the blasted Major. Some soldier! Will Glaven was a rotten shot, he missed more birds than he hit and he was too vain ever to practise.

  And that was where the trouble was. Chalcot was a shooting estate, and Len was sure the Guv’nor would have kept up the tradition in order to hand it on to his son, if only Will had been interested. As it was, you couldn’t blame Mr Glaven for losing heart.

  What drove Len mad, though, was the Major’s lordly attitude towards him. Instead of admitting that he wasn’t a shooting man, he made it clear that he thought driven shoots and proper keepering a waste of money.

  ‘Know how much these damn birds cost to rear?’ the Major had drawled at the end of the shoot last Boxing Day, when Len had handed him a brace of pheasants he didn’t deserve. ‘Fifteen quid a beak – and for that I’ve had to stand about all day in freezing mud! It’d make more sense to have’em delivered from Harrods.’

  He was laughing, but Len knew he meant it. Bloody playboy, wanting to do nothing but ponce about on horseback all day. Never a word of thanks or appreciation for the keeper’s skill and hard work … Len Alger hated him, almost as much as he hated Darren Jermyn.

  Resentment, seething in his stomach, rose thickly in his gullet. He cleared his throat explosively and spat on to the dying embers of the fire, making them sizzle.

  To hell with the satisfaction he liked to get from a good shoot.

  It would give him a lot more satisfaction, this Saturday, if something were to happen to spoil the Major’s homecoming.

  After all, if anything did go wrong, he could always put the blame on that blasted Jermyn boy.

  Chapter Six

  In his lodgings in Chalcot village, Darren had had a restless night too. He couldn’t stop thinking about the jay he had shot in Oak Wood.

  Len Alger had said it was just a fluke. He would say that, the miserable old devil. Jays are wary and like to stay hidden in woodland, so they’re difficult to get a shot at. Darren reckoned, from the way the keeper screwed up his eyes when he wanted to focus on anyth
ing, that he probably hadn’t even seen the bird.

  No – there might have been a bit of luck involved in shooting his first jay (he was actually after a took when he found the bright blue wing in his sights and squeezed the trigger) but Darren preferred to call it quick reaction. Mr Glaven had told him he was a promising shot, and here was the proof. It was a cold wet afternoon and his hands and feet were miserably chilled, but as the bird tumbled through the branches he’d felt elated.

  Remembering first to break his gun and take out the remaining cartridge, as Mr Glaven had taught him, he had run squelching into the wood to pick up the bird. Jays are predators, like all their cousins in the crow family, a menace to other birds because they devour eggs and young. But while most predators are black and ugly (or villainously black-and-white if they’re magpies) jays are almost exotic, with pinky-brown plumage, black tails, white rumps, black and white bars on their wings and brilliant blue wing-coverts. Darren wanted two of the blue feathers, one to wear boastfully in the band of his jungle hat, the other to offer to Laura (whose eyes it matched) with love and longing.

  But when the jay was in his big red hands, he changed his mind.

  Darren Jermyn was a country boy, entirely practical about animal life and death. His grandfather, who kept fowls, had taught him the knack of wringing their necks and so he was unfazed when he found the jay still alive. With one wing almost shot away, its eyes staring, its strong beak opening and closing in silent gasps, it was flapping in agony among the fallen leaves. Darren had scooped it up immediately, put two fingers round its throat and ended its struggles with a sharp tug and a twist.

  Its nervous system gave its last twitches, and then the bird slumped, neck hanging, eyes closed. Blood, oozing from its shattered wing and matting the creamy-pink down on its wounded breast, mingled with the rain on his hands. And as the diluted blood trickled through his fingers, Darren had felt a sense of unease.