Fair Game

by Sheila Radley

The fact was that Martin wasn’t at all sure he could identify the place where he’d last seen Laura. Not in the darkness, anyway. Besides, all he needed to do was to reassure himself that she was not lying hurt out there.

  ‘Have you seen young Laura, since the drive finished?’ he demanded.

  Len Alger was instantly defensive: ‘Who?’

  ‘The housekeeper’s daughter. You must know her.’

  ‘What if I do?’

  ‘She was running about in the bushes during the drive, between the beaters and the Guns. You were following the beaters, weren’t you? Did you happen to see her, after the shooting stopped?’

  ‘No, I didn’t!’ Len Alger turned truculent. ‘I’ve got more to do than take notice of bloody kids. She’d no business to be at the shoot anyway. If …’

  ‘If what?’

  Alger, his craggy face half-shadowed by the peak of his cap, seemed not to hear. But evidently he was thinking.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said, in a much more co-operative voice. ‘I reckon I did see her. When the shooting finished I could hear them poxy saboteurs hollering, and I went to help Mr Glaven get rid of ’em. On the way, I happened to see these two, messing about with each other behind a tree. The Harbord girl and her boyfriend.’

  Tait’s spirits rose. ‘Do you know him – the boyfriend?’

  ‘I know him all right.’ The keeper’s voice was vicious. ‘He’s the idle young bugger who’s supposed to help me with the pheasants. Darren Jermyn.’

  ‘And you’re sure the girl with him was Laura?’

  ‘’Course I’m sure. Here, wait a minute …’

  Len Alger bent stiffly into the Landrover and emerged holding a loop of thick string from which hung a brace of pheasants, a cock and a hen. Each end of the loop was fastened round the neck of a bird, just below the head. Alger smiled an ingratiating smile and held up the pheasants in his left hand, their finely feathered necks elongated by their dangling weight, their long claws extended. Paired by the string, their limp bodies seemed to snuggle together in death.

  ‘Yours, sir,’ he said with smarmy civility.

  Tait was taken aback. ‘Did I shoot these?’

  ‘Don’t matter who brought’em down, sir. It’s shooting party tradition, the keeper always hands a brace to each of the Guns at the end of the day.’

  The man’s horny right hand hovered, half-outstretched for a farewell shake and the hoped-for receipt of a good tip.

  Tait looked with repugnance at the birds. Their feathers were still beautiful in death but their heads, flopping down over the string, were cruelly bloodied.

  He thought again of Hope Meynell.

  ‘I trust you enjoyed the actual shoot, sir?’ the keeper was saying pointedly, thrusting the dead birds towards him. ‘Apart of course from the very unfortunate accident –’

  Tait curled his lip and turned abruptly away.

  ‘Stuff’em,’ he said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Next morning, a low sun shone out of a sky washed blue by days of rain. The countryside glowed with the last of the autumn colours – hawthorn berries crimson, bramble leaves rose-pink, oak leaves buff as chamois leather, field maples incandescent.

  Douglas Quantrill was in good spirits as he drove through these splendours on his way to Chalcot House. He would have hated to waste such a day as this on paperwork in his office. And though the wounding he was going to investigate was tragic, at least the victim was still alive.

  He was sorry for the Glaven family, of course. His overwhelming feeling, though, was relief that it wasn’t his daughter who’d been shot. Considering the gravity of Hope Meynell’s condition, he took no satisfaction in having been right about the dangers of shooting parties. But Martin Tait had been very subdued when he came to visit Alison last night, so perhaps the arrogant prat had learned something from the experience.

  There was a further reason for Quantrill’s good humour that morning. His sergeant, Hilary Lloyd, was with him; and just as Alison brightened his domestic life, so Hilary’s presence lit up his working hours.

  He was no longer infatuated by her, as once he’d been. Her thin dark elegance and occasionally dazzling smile no longer disturbed his dreams. To be honest – he was embarrassed to recall it – he’d probably made a bit of a fool of himself over her. But now, though he still felt a secret joy when he was with her, he prided himself on treating her with nothing more revealing than a slightly rueful affection.

  As he drove, he told her what he knew about the shooting.

  ‘Let’s hope there’s enough forensic evidence to make it clear who fired the shot,’ he said. ‘If we have to rely on information, we’re going to get very little out of the Glavens and their friends.’

  ‘Bloodthirsty lot,’ said Hilary. ‘Yes, I know – shooting on private land is a lawful activity. I’m a police officer, so I have to uphold their right to do it. But I’m seriously prejudiced against people whose idea of entertainment is to go out and kill birds.’

  ‘People like Martin Tait?’

  ‘Especially Martin Tait.’

  They shared a snicker at the expense of their future boss. As a countryman, though, Quantrill wasn’t prepared to let his sergeant get away with her blanket prejudice against people who shoot.

  ‘Sporting landowners do a lot more for the environment’, he said firmly, ‘than those who don’t shoot. Take the land on either side of this road …’

  On their left was the outer edge of the Chalcot estate, with its traditionally farmed patchwork of smallish fields bounded by tall old hedges and overtopped by high autumnal woods. It was the kind of countryside Quantrill had grown up in, not only a pleasure to the eye but teeming with wildlife.

  On the right of the road, a thousand newly drilled acres sprouting a green designer stubble of winter barley extended towards the horizon. This land was part of the empire of a faceless agri-business company, and the local manager’s brief was clearly to maximise profits. Hedges had long since been ripped out, ditches replaced by drainage pipes, ponds filled in and most of the trees felled. Resident wildlife was restricted to whatever worms and insects could survive regular drenchings with pesticide.

  ‘Intensive farming’s been the ruination of Suffolk,’ Quantrill pronounced, giving his own prejudices an airing.

  He saw no reason to admit that traditional farming doesn’t pay. He could have explained to Hilary that the only people who can afford to farm organically are those like the Glavens, who don’t need to make their living from it. But there was no point in spoiling his argument.

  ‘Is that what you’d prefer for the whole county?’ he demanded, jerking his thumb at the unnaturally flattened earth. ‘Because that’s how it’d be, if it weren’t for farmers and landowners who shoot. They’re the ones who maintain woods and ponds and hedges. They’re the real conservationists. If saboteurs understood anything about wildlife, they’d support game-shooters instead of trying to stop them.’

  ‘Conservationists? How can you say that, when they kill birds for pleasure?’ objected Hilary. ‘That’s what gets to the saboteurs – well, to the protesters, the idealists, anyway. It gets to me, too. I don’t understand how you can condone killing of any kind, not when you see the reality of it in our job. You say you hate shotguns, but here you are applauding the people who use them.’

  ‘It’s their land management I’m applauding, and their interest in wildlife. They don’t shoot because they’re bloodthirsty. They simply enjoy exercising their skill with a shotgun.’

  ‘That must be a great comfort to the pheasants …’

  Quantrill sighed, knowing he could never make her understand. ‘Look, I’m in favour of game-shooting because it’s traditional. It’s part of the pattern of country life. If shooting and hunting and fishing were made illegal, that would be rural England gone.’

  Then he added, to tease her: ‘Beats me why a townie like you ever came to work in this division.’

  ‘Beats me, too,’ said Hilary crossl
y. ‘It’s not fondness for country life that keeps me here, I can tell you.’

  She had always guarded her privacy but it was rumoured at the nick that she was involved with a doctor from Saintsbury hospital. Quantrill would have liked to know something about the man, preferably to his disadvantage; but as long as she continued to work with him at Breckham Market, he wasn’t going to push his luck by making enquiries.

  ‘Now if it had been one of the Guns who was wounded at the shoot,’ Hilary meditated aloud, ‘there’d have been some justice in it. It’s all wrong that it should have been a girl onlooker – but at least it wasn’t an innocent young protester.’

  They had reached Chalcot village, and Sunday morning bells were ringing out from the church tower. The graveyard wall was overhung with almost-bare lime trees, and the quiet road was slippery with decaying leaves.

  Quantrill slowed to a stop, waiting patiently for some elderly church-goers to make their way across from the opposite side of the road. Not all drivers were so considerate, though. A chromed-up Daihatsu Fourtrak backed out abruptly from the driveway of a bungalow next to the butcher’s shop, and one old lady almost lost her footing as she scrambled out of its way. The thick-necked driver accelerated off without giving her a glance, to a muttering of police disapproval.

  ‘According to Martin Tait,’ said Quantrill, resuming their theme, ‘Hope Meynell was as much of an innocent as the youngest protester. It was her first time at a shooting party, and she hated the idea of watching pheasants being killed. She wouldn‘t have been there at all, if Lewis Glaven hadn’t insisted.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Hilary was indignant. ‘That was downright cruel. Why would he do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s one of the things we need to find out.’

  Quantrill had arranged a rendezvous at 10 a.m. at the gates of Chalcot House, and he was there almost exactly on time. Two members of the scenes-of-crime team, Ed and Mick in their police Landrover, had caught him up in the village and followed his car. Of Martin Tait there was no sign.

  Typical, thought Quantrill. He wouldn’t put it past him to be lurking round the next corner so that he could emphasise his status by arriving last.

  Sure enough, the four detectives had hardly had time to exchange greetings and sniff the crisp air before Tait rolled up. He was wearing his country gentleman outfit, and driving a Range Rover.

  Quantrill went to meet him. ‘Tired of your BMW, were you? Or is this your second car?’

  Tait seemed impervious to the jibe. ‘’Morning, Doug,’ he said. He nodded a greeting to the other men and then went straight to Hilary – they’d known each other since he was a sergeant fresh from police college – and gave her an affectionate off-duty peck on the cheek. It was more than Quantrill had ever presumed to do; but then he didn’t belong to the cheek-pecking social classes.

  ‘Good to see you again, Hilary!’ said Tait, not at all put off by the coolness of her greeting. ‘I’ve borrowed a four-wheel drive because the track across the estate’s too muddy for cars. Of course, if Doug insists on being independent …’

  Doug didn’t insist. He wasn’t best pleased to have arrangements made for him, but he had more sense than to risk getting his own car bogged down and having to accept a tow. He drove as far as the yard at the back of Chalcot House and then he and Hilary transferred to the Range Rover for the rest of the journey. The Landrover bumped along the track behind them.

  Quantrill had never before been on the Chalcot estate and it was exactly as he’d imagined it – a time warp, a small piece of leafy, traditional England, hidden away behind its high enclosing walls. It was full of pheasants, their copper and bronze and red and green colours echoing the sunlit landscape as they wandered and pecked about.

  ‘Stupid birds,’ complained Martin, braking just in time as a cock pheasant decided to strut handsomely across the track in front of his wheels. ‘They’ve no traffic sense at all. I know you disapprove of shooting them, Hilary, but you must have seen plenty of feathered corpses on the roadside. Pheasants are much more likely to get themselves killed playing last across than they are to be shot.’

  Martin had had a bad night. He was sure that all the other members of the shooting party were holding him to blame for Hope Meynell’s wounding. He would be their natural suspect. For one thing, he was an outsider; for another, he wasn’t an experienced game-shooter.

  But he’d spent the night going over the scene of the shooting in his mind’s eye, and he was sure that his last shot couldn’t possibly have reached the place where Hope was found. What was needed, to clear his own conscience as well as to quell rumours, was proof. And thankfully, he could rely on the position of the pegs to provide it.

  He’d already explained the theory of a pheasant drive to his passengers, and had just told them how invaluable the pegs were going to be to their investigation. They had reached the edge of Belmont wood, and he had stopped at the entrance to the main ride. It was where the vehicles had been parked the previous afternoon, and the leaf-strewn grass was churned by tyre marks.

  He could see some distance up the open ride, to where the hawthorn thicket, its berries bright in the sun, put a bend in the track and blocked the view. The track itself was much more heavily scored than when he’d first seen it, because of the rescue activity that had followed the shooting. Otherwise the ride looked much the same, except that the encroaching shrubs that narrowed the grassy centre had lost a lot of leaf overnight.

  And except that the pegs were missing.

  His own number five peg, and those of Will Glaven and Joanna Dodd, would be out of sight from here anyway. But numbers one to four ought to be in full view, measured out along the track; and there was no sign of them.

  Did that mean his own peg was missing too?

  Martin put his foot down and roared along the ride, sending up agitated flocks of fieldfares and redwings from the berried bushes where they were feeding. A few wary pheasants, survivors from yesterday, rocketed up in alarm as he passed.

  Ignoring his passengers’ complaints about his driving, Martin did a controlled slide round the bend in the track and stopped abruptly.

  Ahead of him, the ride stretched at least two hundred yards to the far side of the wood. The bushes where young Laura had hidden were on the right, and the bushes where Alison had tripped and Hope had been shot were on the left. But the pegs that should have been in the centre were missing.

  Martin jumped down from the driving seat, ran along the track and tried to discover where his peg had stood. But last night’s rain had washed away his footprints, and he couldn’t find a single empty cartridge case. It was as if the shoot had never been.

  His colleagues, including Mick and Ed, joined him. He was explaining the problem when a bellow of rage issued from the woodland edge.

  ‘What the bloody hell d’you think you’re doing? This is private property – you’re trespassing. Get out!’

  The gamekeeper, rigid with anger, was striding stiffly towards them out of the bushes. He was carrying a shotgun in both hands, and as he came he cocked it.

  Martin waved back the others. ‘I know him. I’ll deal with him.’ He advanced towards the oncoming keeper. ‘Put up your gun, Alger,’ he called.

  The keeper hesitated in mid-stride, peered short-sightedly, and at last recognised him.

  ‘Oh – it’s you …’ He didn’t bother with yesterday’s ‘sir’, but he lowered his gun. ‘’T’weren’t loaded,’ he grumbled, breaking it as proof.

  ‘Just as well,’ said Martin. ‘I’m Detective Sup –’ He remembered not to advance his promotion within earshot of his colleagues. ‘… Detective Chief Inspector Tait. We’re here to examine the scene of the shooting. And what I want to know is, what happened to the pegs?’

  Len Alger gave a creaky shrug. ‘Same as always. I took’em up after the shoot and put’em back in my shed, ready for next time.’

  ‘On your own initiative? Or did someone tell you to?’

  ‘I don’
t need telling how to do my job!’

  ‘And what happened to the spent cartridges?’

  ‘I collected them an’all, same as usual. Mr Glaven likes the estate to be left clean after a shoot.’

  ‘Look,’ said Martin in a more conciliatory tone, ‘we need to know exactly where the pegs were sited. Mine was number five. Can you show me where you hammered it in?’

  ‘No, I can’t. Mr Glaven said whereabouts he wanted number one, and I stuck the rest in forty yards apart, same as we always do at Belmont. I can’t be expected to point out the bloody spot.’

  Martin made a last attempt to gain the man’s co-operation.

  ‘We’ve got a bit of a problem,’ he said. ‘Unless we know exactly where the pegs were, we’re not going to be able to work out how Miss Meynell came to be shot. And we all want to know that, don’t we?’

  ‘Makes no odds to me,’ said the keeper. ‘You were standing on the peg for half an hour – if you can’t remember exactly where it was, how the hell d’you expect me to?’

  ‘Chippy bastard,’ muttered Martin as the gamekeeper sloped off. He returned to his colleagues, who were trying not to look amused.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said confidently. ‘I know how to work out where the pegs were. But first I’ll show you where Hope was shot.’

  He wasn’t sure how far along the ride it was, but he knew he’d have no difficulty in identifying the place. In order to rescue the wounded girl, Lewis Glaven had called up the beaters to slash a wide path through the bushes.

  Martin led the others up the path, their boots scrunching on broken branches and through drifts of leaves. Near the woodland edge he pointed out where he had pushed through a shocked mingling of Guns, beaters, pickers-up and saboteurs and had seen Hope Meynell lying in Will’s arms. For a moment he fell silent, recalling how her beauty had been masked by blood.

  Ed and Mick, in their scenes-of-crime overalls, were already unpacking their equipment and starting work. Shaking his head to clear it, Martin led Quantrill and Hilary back to the ride and up towards the far end. His abortive conversation with Len Alger had reminded him that even though he couldn’t locate his own peg, he had a good chance of finding the last one in the line.