by Lorna Gray
I knew I had lately been travelling rapidly. Now I wasn’t. I appeared to have exchanged the heat of a sweating tarmacadam road in a village for this violent brightness of open sky and the crisp tang of fresh grass. I had swapped the sensation of racing downhill on a bicycle for an unyielding mat that pressed hard against my side. It felt upside down for a moment, like it was pressing on me from above. Then gravity swirled itself back into its correct alignment and my head hurt and I could hear the faint ticking as a bicycle wheel span slowly towards a halt near by.
I lifted my face from the hard-baked ground. Blades of grass stuck to my skin. It appeared that the weighty bicycle had succeeded in unseating another female rider. I was sprawling any old how on the side of a gentle slope. Every limb hurt. It was as if the force of gravity were stronger than normal, making the pressure of lying here agony. I wasn’t alone, either. There was a shuffle about two yards behind and a rustle of footsteps drawing close. There was the faint glint of something small and metallic being lifted from the grass not far from where my right hand was helping me to ease myself upwards, followed by further footfalls beating an uneven retreat to silence. My head was sounding a final verse of that old refrain. He’s deranged.
I knew who he was. And I knew why I thought the object he had lifted had been metal. It was because I had seen the blade flash from his hand only moments before, to miss me by a cat’s whisker as I plunged recklessly down the slope on a collision course. It had been one of those insane split-second choices. Injury from a weapon or to act for self-preservation. The choice had been immediate.
I turned my head and found the other one. The man who had inspired this mad dash. Richard was a few yards away, suit jacket unbuttoned and closer to getting up than I was. He said something to me, but I didn’t catch it. I concentrated on beginning to push myself up into something closer to a sitting position and regretted it. Everything hurt, or at least I knew there was pain without quite being able to decipher the feeling. This, I told myself quite sternly, was all a matter of choice. One had, quite simply, only to decide to set it aside and everything would relax and ease back into its normal balance. I sat up a little straighter. No, I had to concede, it really did hurt. And not surprising, either, given the pace of my descent on that final slope to collide deliberately with Paul Abbey and drag him and his knife away from Richard. That had been my choice between injury and self-preservation; Richard’s injury or my comfort. The bicycle lay on its side about a yard away, one wheel still spinning because only seconds had passed since I had last noted it.
Something moved. It was close by. Abbey hadn’t gone. I turned my head, leadenly it seemed to me. Then Richard was moving. Perhaps it was him who had caught my eye in the first place. He was saying something to me, and then again more strongly, and he was up on one knee and his mouth was twisting as he shouted at me violently, and I was recoiling, disbelieving, cringing as he lunged across the grass as if to strike. He was on me with a thump before I could do more than cower away and this time there was absolutely no doubt whether my mind was capable of deciphering pain.
He had hold of me. My cry meant nothing. He was dragging me round, using his body to lever me against him into an excruciating curve so that my view was no longer the pump house and a pretty little streambed but uphill, through long grasses to where thistles stood high on the skyline. His hands had turned me face down beneath him, yanked me there, really. For a moment he only had one hand clamped about me. The other was reaching up behind him against the sky, palm uppermost and open as if in the act of fending something off, or in supplication. Only there was nothing there and I couldn’t see very much anyway because of the sun. I could feel the way his arm was flung wide through the twist of his upper body as he shouted, and I felt that because of the way his lungs moved. I still couldn’t hear a thing. Or at least I could, but I couldn’t register it long enough to remember it.
It occurred to me then to wonder if perhaps Abbey really hadn’t gone. I only had the briefest, cringing fraction of a second to consider this and to anticipate fresh pain before the upraised hand changed its mind about its plea and dropped down beside me. Then his head dropped as well and his weight crushed me and smothered me until the only part of me that wasn’t covered by him was the part that was being pressed into the cruel, unyielding ground.
There was a single jolt. It ran through every one of his muscles and into mine. Just as I was beginning to believe I might never have the chance to breathe again, I felt the pressure ease slightly and the twist as his torso turned once more to trace again that run of the stream bed downhill. Then my ribs ground against a stone as he turned to look the other way. I could feel his chest moving in short, hurried snatches for air, but the renewed pressure of his weight on mine was almost suffocating. His right hand was the only bit of him I could see. It had landed palm down against the rough, dry stalks beside me. It had shifted slightly as he’d twisted to look the other away. There was blood on it. A raw graze like a burn that was running red just beside my face.
Abruptly the weight lifted. The hand helped to thrust him to his feet. I was barely stirring beside his dust-stained shoes when his other hand reached across his body to tug me to my feet in my turn. I was standing very close against his left side. I couldn’t help it since his left arm firmly clamped me there. He had turned again to look downhill. I followed the line of his eyes that were narrowed against the glare and I could see the shocking contrast between the dark green foliage of a redwood that rivalled the one near my cousin’s cottage and the lichens that coated the corrugated roof of the pump house. If that was the way Abbey had left, he was long gone.
Richard’s gaze moved back again, deliberately passing just above mine, and then swiftly travelled onwards to the rise with all the thistles. I watched him as he watched the landscape. His expression was that of a mind performing endless, very rapid calculations. I could feel the tremor where his hand had tightly closed upon my upper arm, pinning me against him. The other hand was flexing into a fist and then releasing again; trying to ease the pain, I thought. He twisted back towards the pump house. And was finally ready to intercept my gaze on the return.
He was like himself, but not quite. His mouth moved. I could hear after all. He remarked, ‘That entrance of yours was a touch dramatic, don’t you think? You could have just said hello. Or rung your bicycle bell.’
‘He had a knife.’ My mouth was dry. And something was wrong with that statement, only I couldn’t think what. I couldn’t understand why Richard should be looking like he was torn between reading a threat in every blade of grass and frantic about it, and trying not to laugh.
His eyes moved on again. That hazel gaze resumed its search once more, only this time the pattern changed and his attention finally settled upon his wounded hand. He was staring at it, serious now, turning his hand this way and that as though he were expecting the blood, and yet surprised to find it there.
I found myself staring too and shrinking slightly as I said blankly, ‘He was moving in. You hadn’t seen it and he was going to – I don’t know what. But I had to do something.’
‘So you ran him down with your bicycle.’ There was something rather dry in the way he said that and his arm was wrapped like iron about me, but I didn’t believe he’d even noticed. His attention was fixed on something high on the hillside now, as though preoccupied and his mouth was only going through the motions of speaking to me.
Suddenly, though, his mind sharpened. His voice broke into the roughness of a reprimand and he told me with some force, ‘You should have stayed back. What the hell is the point of me being as I am if someone like you ends up being called on to do it too?’
The abruptness of the change stung. Jolted me back into life, really. I’d thought we were making light of it. That was what one did, wasn’t it, whenever something had happened that was starkly frightening, only it was easier to pretend that it had all been a bit of a close shave? None of this was quite what I’d thought. Every nerve
ending was suddenly fully alert and I felt it when his head turned to check behind through the twist in the grip that was clamped hard around me. As his gaze turned back, that all too brutal honesty added sternly, ‘You should have trusted … you should have left me to do what needed to be done.’
Then I felt the sharpening of his concentration on the hillside beyond me as a fresh tightening of muscle that ran all the way through my veins to my heart. It came at the moment that I found my hands were bracing in a probably futile attempt to ease myself out of the curve of his arm and he said with a quick concession into ordinary reassurance, ‘Hush now. I know.’
And any idea I had that I had returned to full awareness of my surroundings was first corrected by the bloodied right hand that moved across to touch mine – for a brief moment I’d been able to forget it, but not now – and then I realised someone was coming downhill at speed when Richard raised his voice to speak clearly over my head. It was done with a considerably brighter tone than the one he had lately used on me. ‘Good morning. A timely arrival, I think.’
Despite his tone, I felt the impulse to put himself between me and this new threat course through the iron grip of his arm, and then the sharp suppression as he checked the feeling as absurd. I soon knew why. Because it wasn’t Abbey who had arrived slithering at the end of a descent from that thistle-topped ridge. It was Matthew Croft, with Freddy just behind. This was their land and Richard must have been watching their approach all the time we’d been talking. It came to me abruptly that this was the first time these two men had met in a very long while.
And Richard, at least, had been expecting Danny to be part of this new arrival and come ready to perform the introductions. I thought Matthew Croft had noticed it and was determined to get through this meeting on his own good manners because he explained mildly, ‘Danny couldn’t stay. He came up to the house to tell us that you’d found signs of occupation in our pump house and to ask Eleanor to telephone PC Rathbone, and then he thought it best to get on to the Manor to see that things were as they ought to be there. He sent us down here not a moment too soon, it seems. That fellow’s gone now, I think. Was this man actually living at the pump house? Danny wasn’t clear. And did he attack you? I mean, I assume you didn’t initiate that?’
‘I didn’t initiate that,’ Richard confirmed. Something tugged at his voice as he sidestepped the presumably unintentional implication that, as far as history was concerned, people mightn’t always be too sure who was the aggressor when talking about disputes involving a Langton. Richard tipped his head towards the pump house. ‘Abbey emerged from beneath a shrub shortly after Hannis disappeared on his errand to your farmhouse. He was brandishing a log at me and, from the way he hefted it, I suspect the same kind of impulsive, panicked idea of ambush must have come to that man’s mind once before as he cowered by a different brick hut.’
He meant when the passerby had been poor Bertie Winstone. I silently added to the list the name of Abbey’s wife on her quest to reclaim the Colonel’s keys.
Matthew Croft’s eyes were performing the same intense survey of the silent landscape that had occupied Richard a few minutes before. Richard’s grip on me eased at last as he turned to look as well. I thought Richard might have been concerned that the other man would have something to say about his own trespass here, rather than merely Abbey’s, but Matthew was determinedly ignoring it. I took the opportunity to step away and retrieve my fallen bicycle.
Richard intercepted me just as I was dragging it off the ground – everything really did hurt. His voice had the faintest trace of his old self in it when he asked in genuine surprise, ‘Where on earth do you think you’re off to?’
I gave a guilty start when his hand met the saddle to ease its journey into being upright and in the process restrained it. And I must have nearly dropped the impossibly heavy bicycle because his other hand – the injured one – had reached for the handlebars. Suddenly I was recoiling; this was too much. I intended to take the bicycle to that neat little gate cut into a hedge on the far side of the pump house and go away because I was wise enough to recognise that real incidents like this were hard, brutal things that required room to breathe and I’d made a mistake. I shouldn’t even be here. Richard had remarked himself that I didn’t want to be called on to test just how far I would go for someone I cared about. And Duckett himself had observed that taking a life changed a person. I hadn’t quite taken it that far, of course, but I certainly hadn’t played the part of bystander just now. I’d acted whether I believed I’d been right to do it or not, and, in all honesty, I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t do it again.
And something had changed in a way that felt like a continuation of the wretched bewilderment I’d experienced as Richard had plunged towards me. Richard had told me once that it was impossible to be prepared for nastiness, but I couldn’t even put a term to the kind of blind incomprehension I’d felt as he’d shouted at me. In truth, it had felt like an echo of my terrible urge to stop Abbey; a kind of justified retribution, as if my own actions had thrown Richard’s out of all normal balance and I was the enemy here. I think I’d felt, for a terrible moment, that the violence that must truly dwell within my world had finally been unmasked. Now I was calm enough to see that the fear had been the irrational dread of panic, but the memory of that momentary sense of finding everything utterly altered by my own actions was inescapable. It was a match for the present disquiet of knowing that shock was fading, but still something felt terribly awry.
So I wanted to leave this place, all of these disorientating contradictions of what I believed and how the danger to Richard had required me to act, only all the while he was holding the bicycle and that hand was near mine and I couldn’t change that without surrendering the bicycle, which I had a peculiar idea was a symbol of control. The feeling was compounded by the way all my groceries were scattered on the ground around my feet in a giddying arc.
That hand moved, just once. It made me flinch and I managed to say through a snarl with my head turned very firmly now towards that gap in the hedge, ‘I’m leaving now. You don’t need me here. And anyway, I’ve got to get home—’ I stumbled over that telling word, because it was the Manor that had fixed itself in my mind as home. ‘I mean, I’ve got to get back because your father wants his shopping and don’t think I don’t know what you were saying back there. You’re just the same as everyone else. All along everyone’s been making me feel small and cowardly for refusing to intervene. Only I’ve done it now. I saved you and still you’re ready to explain all the reasons why I’ve got it wrong. But you know that this time it’s you who’s wrong because, actually, I didn’t get involved for your sake just now. You’re the man who makes a career out of violence. I was trying to save Paul Abbey from you.’
I didn’t quite know where that had come from. Nastiness was the only alternative I had to crying. In a way I was impressed that no imaginary words had slipped in. Because all of it was made up. All the same, for a moment triumph reigned in a burning throat. Then Richard stirred. He didn’t argue. He didn’t even sound annoyed. He didn’t touch me, either. He adjusted the nature of the stillness that possessed him as he stood there holding the bicycle so that it couldn’t topple and take me with it, and I felt the rise of his protectiveness once more as he said on a note of realisation, ‘That’s all fine. But you should know you’re trying to run off in the wrong direction. Emily, did you hit your head?’
The truth dragged my head round. ‘Yes, but—’
Beyond Richard’s shoulder, Matthew Croft took a small step forwards. He remarked idly for the benefit of no one in particular, ‘The first time I met Miss Sutton, she was standing in a crowd like this and Bertie Winstone had just bled all over her arm. I took care to spend a not inconsiderable length of time talking about nothing very much before inventing a few usefully distracting errands into the kitchen.’
That grisly hand retreated out of sight.
Then I lurched away from the idiotic blundering of
shock. I forgot all about the bicycle, so it was a good job Richard had a hand on it still because I was running shaking hands over my face and through my hair as if to wipe away the shadow of bewilderment and exclaiming, aghast, ‘Richard!’
This was because my eyes had regained their sense of scale and distance and I remembered now the real mistake I’d made.
Now my mind was lurching back into working properly again, I could make out the distant point far to the left where I had emerged from the woodland beside a vicious hawthorn. It was quite a different part of the field from the small gap in the hedge I had lately been rushing for. This field stood at the end of the well-trodden deer track that led from the gateway where Richard had parked his car. Slightly nearer was the rise where I had first made sense of the disturbance that was distracting the horses. And there, at that point beyond the scattered debris of my shopping, where anthills crowned a little knoll, was the spot where I had set my bicycle at the slope and careered down the last few yards into the middle of a fight in which I should have had no part.
There had been no hesitation in Abbey as far as I could recall. They’d broken apart and Abbey had stepped back and was in the process of stepping in again. At the time I think my plan may well have been to reach out a hand at speed in the hope of dragging danger away from Richard. Now I could see that I’d made the error of not quite allowing for the fact that in the three seconds it took me to close in, it was quite enough time for Abbey to not be quite where he’d been when I’d started. In fact, he’d been in quite a different place, such as directly beneath my front wheel. And Richard had stepped blind into me to take his share of the collision when we all went crashing down. No wonder he thought I’d overstepped the mark.
Particularly when the weapon Abbey had retrieved as he had clambered to his feet had not been a knife. It had been a gun. And Richard’s wound had come as he had enfolded me within the safety of his body and Abbey had opened fire.
