The Holm Oaks

by P. M. Hubbard

  When I got out at Burtonbridge, it was dark as pitch and trying to blow the roof off the station. I pointed the car out of town for the Marlock direction, but that only made it worse. It must have been coming straight in off the sea. I was still five miles or more from home, and right in the middle of nowhere, when I found the tree across the road. It was on a straight stretch, and I saw it in plenty of time, but the road was blocked completely. No one else had found it yet. There were no lights. By now it was raining hard. Even with the car stopped, the rain came at the windscreen as if it had been shot from a gun. I opened the door, but shut it again at once. I had a raincoat of sorts, but my town clothes were no good against this. Getting the best observation I could through the rain-clogged glass, I started to back the car. It was on the second time back that I put her driving wheels in the ditch, and I knew at once that it was going to be no good. I tried, of course, and only dug her grave the deeper. It would have to be a tractor in the morning. I was not going to leave the lights on. There would not be anything out in these conditions, and the tree screened the car completely from one side and effectively from the other. I put my torch in my pocket and climbed out into the weather. I locked the car and walked back to the tree. Even for a pedestrian it was a pretty comprehensive obstacle, and I did not know what condition the main branches were in after the fall. I decided to go round through the fields. By the time I was back on the road again I had given up all thought of keeping any part of myself dry or any of my clothes clean. I put my head down and made what speed I could into the weather. Every now and then I needed a hand over my mouth if I was going to breathe. It was not dangerous or frightening. It was very tiring and ghastly uncomfortable. I remembered now that I had not given Elizabeth any time for my return.

  She would not be worrying. There was nothing to think about, except the exhausting putting of one foot in front of the other.

  It must in fact have been rather more than five miles to Marlock, and there was another quarter of a mile to go from there. I heard the roaring of the sea on the beach long before the dark mass of the wood showed up on my right. I looked down the road ahead, but the Wainwrights were showing no lights. I opened the gate and turned into the track along the side of the wood. The rain had stopped and here the trees gave me shelter from the worst of the wind. The wood roared in all its branches. After the tarmac, the track was full of potholes. My trousers and shoes were long past worrying about, but I did not want to break an ankle. I got my torch out and switched it on. All along in front of me, a few yards from the side of the track, the white posts and shining wire of Dennis Wainwright’s fence stood out against the blackness of the wood. I was still not half-way along when my torch picked up the eyes inside the wire. There were quite a lot of them. They looked reddish and moved very fast.

  I found myself standing dead still before I knew I had stopped. The eyes were still ahead of me, but the track stretched before and behind me into the darkness, and not far on my right the wind would be whipping up into foamless waves the unseen waters of the mere.

  The more sensible part of my mind fastened on to the massive details of the fence. I have said it would be impermeable to anything much bigger than a cat. Whatever the eyes belonged to, they were very much bigger than cats. I pointed the torch at the wire about five yards ahead of me and started to go forward again. It was a moment or two later that something raced along the thin edges of the wood and shot through the torch beam. It was glistening wet and leggy, and ran zig-zag through the undergrowth. I had still not brought my mind to a sensible focus when I took the boar full in the light of the torch. He was enormous and reddish-brown, and as rangy as a mastiff. He carried huge tusks, and one of them, as he ran, flew a long streamer of something ripped out of the wood.

  I was too tired now to think with any great coherence. After the big boar I saw several sows and later what looked like younger boars. The torch picked them up momentarily as they went charging through the dark tangle behind the shining wire. Whatever sound they made was lost in the roar of the wind. They were creatures of nightmare rather than ordinary beasts. I had had something to do with pigs at one time of my life, but never anything that looked and ran like this.

  I went on down the track, flickering my torch sideways in the roaring darkness. I saw no more pigs. I still did not know what they were or where they came from. All I knew was that for his own obscene reasons Dennis Wainwright had turned them loose in the wood. He had fenced it and turned it into a private zoo for these creatures to run about in.

  There was a light in the kitchen but nowhere else in the house. A note on the table said, ‘Supper in the fridge.’ I undressed completely and piled my sodden clothes in the sink. I ate something without much enthusiasm. Then I put the lights out and went to bed. I slept like the dead for exactly an hour and woke to find the wind screaming its head off round the house. It was only towards morning that I slept again and began to get the nightmares.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  They came in a recurrent series, never exactly repeating themselves, but each one using some of the same elements and springing from the same desperate apprehension as its predecessor. I was impeded, always, by a wire fence higher and impossibly more complicated than Dennis Wainwright’s. Each time I knew it was going to be there, but I could not remember who had put it there or when. Sometimes I was trying to get through it to something urgent beyond. Sometimes I was shut in by it, with unspecified dangers running about in the darkness behind me. Every time I woke up, or half woke up, in the middle of an inconclusive struggle with unnaturally elastic strands of wire.

  I must have threshed about a lot and wrestled with the bedclothes, because it was cold that finally woke me. I had had nearly all the covers off me. It was a grey morning, still very early, and completely quiet. The wind had blown itself out, but left a chillier air than we had had yet. There was a moment of blankness, and then a cold wave of horror as tangible as cramp. I got up and ran across the landing into Elizabeth’s room. She was not there and had clearly not been to bed at all. Her tape-recording gear, which she always kept together on a side table, was not there either. I ran back into my room and started to dress. It took a very long time, partly because I never seemed able to make up my mind what to put on next. I ran downstairs on stockinged feet, looking for my boots. As I started to put them on I said, ‘Tamworths’ aloud.

  I suppose I had been trying to think what they were all the time, but last night my conscious mind had been too tired to make my subconscious give it up. Those creatures were Tamworths. They are a domesticated breed, but to the uninitiated eye more like wild pig than any domesticated creature has a right to be. Above all, they are rangy and fast-moving. I did not know if they were in fact any wilder than any other breed of pig. I had never had anything to do with them.

  I looked round for a weapon and took up, of all things, an alpenstock. Why we had an alpenstock in the hall of the Holt House at Marlock I cannot think, except that it had always been in the hall wherever we lived ever since it came back from wherever somebody had first acquired it. It was in fact a very useful weapon, long, strong and iron-shod. I went out of the front door, down the flagged path and across to Dennis Wainwright’s new concrete stile. I no longer ran. I found it increasingly difficult to face what I had to do, and whatever had happened had happened hours ago. Elizabeth had left my supper in the refrigerator and her note on the table not, as I had assumed, when she went to bed, but at dusk, when she went across to the wood with her tape-recorder. That was all of twelve hours ago. I climbed the stile, banging my iron-shod stick on the concrete with a clatter that went through the silent wood like a challenge. The debris of the storm was everywhere. I noticed, just before I lost it in the wood, the steady grinding roar of the swell breaking on the beach.

  I went straight down the central path with no very clear idea in my mind. The dark earth was soft everywhere and in the hollows clinging mud. It was crossed and re-crossed with the marks of cloven feet. Som
e of them looked very big and deep. I did not hear any movement anywhere in the wood. I thought the herd was probably still asleep. It had not long been daylight.

  I came within sight of the far stile, saw nothing on the path and turned back. About half-way along I struck off right-handed towards the northern side of the wood. Everything was wet, and before long my clothes were soaked almost to the waist. I made no more noise than I could help, but any sort of animal would have heard my movements a long way off. I was listening all the time for sounds behind me, despite the fact that it was on the northern edge of the wood that I had seen the herd rampaging last night.

  I peered about me, not wanting to see anything different from the dark earth and tangled green. I was getting near the place where Elizabeth, according to her own account, had thought she had found nycticorax roosting. It was not far from the edge of the wood, and the ground was a little clearer. I saw something under a bush on my right, but did not go to see what it was. A moment later I almost stepped on the microphone with a trail of broken wire attached to it. It had been pushed down into the mud. After that I could no longer help looking at what I saw. Some of it was long strips, like the one I had seen the boar carrying on his tusks when he went charging through the torchlight. It was all scattered over quite a wide area. I tiptoed through to the edge of the wood, trying not to step on anything. Towards the edge, I hurried, but was brought up short by the wire, as I had been in my dream, although I had always known it was there.

  I turned left-handed and went along for some way inside the fence before I turned back again towards the central path. At some point not far from the path I saw more blood and golden hairs, this time on the end of a single heavy stick. I picked it up and pushed the offending end deep into the mud. I was almost at the end of the path when I heard grunts and obscene scamperings away in the wood over my left shoulder. I still had my alpenstock, but had lost all apprehension of danger. A minute or two later the roar of the sea was so loud that I could not have heard movements except very close at hand.

  It was only after I had climbed the stile that I started to run. I ran shouting half-way across the open space towards the Holt House before I realised there was no one there to shout to. Then I dropped to a walk, but I was still very short of breath. I tried to decide what to do, but was faced with the obscenely ridiculous difficulty of not knowing whom I ought to send for. When I was near the gate, Stella came round the north-east corner of the wall. She was carrying a suitcase and had plainly just got out of her car. She said, ‘Hullo, Jake. Where’s Liz?’

  ‘She’s in the wood,’ I said.

  She nodded and walked on up the path into the house. Then she put down her suitcase and turned round. ‘Liz in the wood,’ she said, ‘at this hour?’

  ‘Yes. It is early, isn’t it? You must have come down overnight.’

  She said, ‘Jake, what’s the matter? Is Liz really in the wood?’

  ‘Liz is dead,’ I said. ‘Dead and more than dead. She’s in the wood. I said so.’

  Stella said, ‘Sit down, for God’s sake. I’ll get you something.’ She came back in a moment with a glass. ‘Get this down,’ she said, ‘and stay where you are. Who do I phone?’

  I looked at her blankly. I still did not know. ‘I suppose the ambulance. And the police. Get the police, Stella. They’ll know what to do, anyhow. Say there’s been an accident, and Liz is dead in the wood.’ She looked at me for a moment, standing over me with her head thrust slightly forward and her eyes fixed in their fierce, intense stare. Then she nodded and went to the telephone.

  When she came back she said, ‘Jake, what is all this? What do you mean, more than dead?’

  ‘Pigs,’ I said. ‘Wainwright’s put a herd of Tamworths in the wood. You’ve seen he’s fenced it? They must have attacked Liz when she went in with her tape-recorder. I suppose she didn’t know they were there. They’ve broken her up.’ I looked up at her. I think my mouth and eyes were both wide open. ‘Stella, they’ve broken her up completely. She’s torn to ribbons. I had to walk—’

  I put my head down between my knees and felt the blood come back. Stella said, ‘Pigs. Oh my God, pigs.’

  The police came half an hour later, apologizing for the delay. The road was blocked beyond Marlock, they said. They had had to go back and come in by the other road through Seele. Later, when they were busy in the wood, I phoned the Marlock garage and asked the man there to get the car pulled out of the ditch and driven to the Holt House. By the time he had her out, the tree had been cleared and the road was open.

  I told the police, when they asked me, what my movements had been and what Elizabeth had been doing in the wood. I did not, of course, know exactly when she would have gone out there, but it would have been at dusk. They took it all down and went off to talk to Dennis Wainwright.

  Stella moved into her room and took over the running of the house. She ran it much better than Elizabeth and made much less fuss about it. Whether or not it occurred to her that the arrangement was socially improper, we neither of us thought it worth mentioning.

  The local Inspector came to see me next day. He was a big man – all country policemen are still fairly big men, though very few of them are any longer simpletons – with a pair of lifted eyebrows that gave him a permanently puzzled, deprecatory expression. He said the correct things briefly and got straight down to the heart of it. He said, ‘I’ve been seeing Mr Wainwright, sir. I thought I’d better let you know the position – as we see it, that is. It’s open to anyone to take a different view, of course. Now. The wood’s Mr Wainwright’s property and you’ve a private right-of-way across it. That’s right, sir, isn’t it? Just a private right-of-way, no public footpath?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The wood used to go with this property. When my uncle sold it to Mr Wainwright, he reserved a right of passage through the wood from this house to the road. I took over that right with the house, when my uncle left it to me.’

  ‘That’s right. Now. Mr Wainwright fenced the wood and put stiles at the end of the footpath. That was within his rights, of course. Then he put these pigs in. Seems an odd thing to have done. Do you know why he did it?’

  His eyebrows came down suddenly. The effect was curiously topsy-turvy, and made him immediately formidable. I said, ‘No, he didn’t consult me. We saw he was fencing the wood, of course. We didn’t know what for.’

  He nodded. ‘Well, there you are,’ he said. ‘Pigs are not animals you’d call normally dangerous. Not even this sort. Tamworths, they call them. I can’t say I’ve ever seen them before.’

  ‘Nor me,’ I said.

  ‘No. Well, as I said, for all they look a bit unusual, I can’t find any evidence they’re normally any wilder than other sorts. Of course, pigs can turn nasty on occasion, like anything else. But as I say, you wouldn’t call them normally dangerous animals.’ His eyebrows came down again and he looked hard at me. ‘Now, sir,’ he said. ‘Mr Wainwright puts this herd in his wood. Mrs Haddon goes in, exercising her private right-of-way. Whether she went off the path on her own, or whether the pigs chased her off it, we can’t say. But—’

  ‘We can,’ I said. ‘You can take it that she went – where she was found – quite deliberately. There was an interesting species of bird roosting in the wood there, and she hoped to make a recording of its voice.’

  ‘Ah, that was it. Well, anyway, the pigs turned on her and killed her. We can’t say why. Now as far as the civil courts go, it’s for you to take advice on any remedy you may have against Mr Wainwright. That’s if you’ve a mind to. But so far as we’re concerned, there doesn’t seem to be any cause for action, unless Mr Wainwright did what he did deliberately. It’s a matter of malice, do you see? He’s within his rights putting his pigs in his own wood. But if he does it out of malice, with the intention of hurting you in your exercise of your right-of-way, that’s different. If he set a trap, like, to catch whoever used the path. The question is, did he? Do you know of any reason why Mr Wainwright should ente
rtain malice towards you? He doesn’t admit any himself, as you might suppose.’

  I looked at him and thought. It was still, after all, reasonable enough for me to be confused. I remembered telling Elizabeth to avoid Dennis Wainwright and his stick as she would a sabre-toothed tiger. I thought of Mr Absolam and Mr Greenslade. I saw in my mind’s eye a stick, lying apart from the rest of the mess, with blood and hairs on it. I said, ‘I don’t know about malice. There had been some talk of his cutting the wood down, you know. We asked him not to. Then the authorities stepped in and stopped him. He would have been upset about that. It was after that he fenced the wood. But I don’t see how you could prove malice. It’s not as if he put a tiger on the path or killer dogs in the wood. We might have had no trouble with the pigs, I suppose.’ I shook my head at him sadly. ‘No, Inspector,’ I said, ‘I shouldn’t like to examine Mr Wainwright’s motives too closely, but I can’t possibly prove malice. I don’t like Mr Wainwright, and that’s the truth. And after what’s happened—’ I shook my head again. ‘But I can’t prove malice, not deliberately malicious intention. Nor could you.’

  He got up. It was not part of his job to look relieved, and he must have been born looking puzzled. He was almost certainly, in fact, a little of both, but he did not show it. He said, for the second time, all the proper things. He said, ‘There’ll have to be an inquest, of course. But we shan’t do more than offer formal evidence. You’ll understand that, sir?’ I said I should, and he went off, leaving me to my freedom, my efficient sister-in-law and, to tell the truth, a considerable amount of delayed shock. The wind got up again and blew steadily from the west. So far as I knew, the pigs still ran about in the wood, but I did not go there. I had not given Dennis Wainwright’s letter a thought. I wrote and told David about Elizabeth’s death. He wrote back a very correct and sympathetic letter, but did not ask me for further instructions. I walked on the beach in the afternoons and there, two or three days later and a mile to the west of anything, I met Carol Wainwright walking to meet me.