Death of a Raven

by Margaret Duffy

  “I’m with you now,” I told him, feeling quite shaky.

  “I’ve got a catalogue. I’ll let you have it tomorrow.” He plodded from the room.

  This exchange had been a demonstration of the real hazard of Patrick’s disobeying orders. Terry might be younger and able to soak up the immense amount of information that I was sure McAlister had been cramming into him, but he could not cope with prolonged tension in a situation where his considerable courage and flair in an active role was not called into play. The day after day tedium of being cooped up with increasingly bad-tempered people who looked to him to protect them virtually twenty-four hours a day could not be permitted to go on much longer.

  I had no doubt that Patrick had reasons for placing himself outside the Hartland household. Equally certain was that he had been on the same mission as the men from the RCMP, to discover why a shot had been fired, and it had suited his purpose to be brought indoors by them. Now you know as much as I do, I thought, and you’ll have to break your own cover. I did not even contemplate that he would do something as simple as knock on the front door and say who he was. The situation was too eccentric for that.

  I went upstairs wondering what Terry had been about to tell me concerning the bugging devices.

  *

  The next morning there was a hint of spring in the air and everyone was in good spirits, Terry included. I made a point of giving him a bright smile to tell him that I had no intention of reporting his lapse to a higher authority. He grinned back. He always knows what I mean.

  The question uppermost in my mind had been answered. Asleep, the night before, I had suddenly become aware of someone in my room. Again, I had not been alarmed. Intruders with malice in their hearts do not normally sit on the end of their intended victim’s bed ravenously devouring what I discovered to be half a cold roast chicken. So I had merely smiled into the pillow and, later, taken him into my arms. He had washed and shaved and, with the radio switched on, both of us buried beneath the luxurious comforter, we had slowly and languidly made love.

  Afterwards, replete in all senses, he must have thought it all out. In a while he had slid out of bed, put on the light and begun to crawl around on the floor. Then I heard him huffing and puffing as he wriggled beneath the bed.

  A hand and arm bearing aloft what looked like a hearing aid battery with two short pieces of wire had come into my line of vision.

  “Is that a declaration of war?” I had asked.

  The head had reappeared wearing a ferocious squint and then gone away again.

  “You look a right lunatic crawling around with nothing on.”

  My nail file had been acquired and utilised to unscrew the minute device and perform untold havoc on its insides. Then he had replaced it from whence it had come.

  “If anyone investigates, it will merely look as though it’s failed.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  Shivering, he had come back into bed. “Terry has a theory that Hartland had them put in to check on Emma’s night time activities.”

  I had already discovered, by a little sleuthing of my own, that Emma slept alone and her husband had a study cum bedsitter in what had originally been servants’ quarters over the garages. Also that Leander Hurley had returned to Ravenscliff on the night of the Wednesday after I had arrived, climbed the tree outside Emma’s bedroom window and stayed until about five the next morning. Her room was next to mine and presumably Emma didn’t care if I knew for she had made a lot of noise during what must have been fairly wild lovemaking.

  “Hartland’s impotent,” Patrick had said.

  “How d’you know?”

  “Terry told me.”

  “So how does Terry know?”

  “Emma told him — in bed.”

  Which was why my smile to Terry had been a bright one but the eyebrows raised.

  As far as I was concerned the mood of slight elation departed with the DARE team, escorted by Terry, on their way to work. I found myself shivering upon perceiving the look Terry received from his commander, the message not losing anything in the distance separating them across the expanse of lawn. However provoked, the look said, you do not drink too much and let off reckless shots indoors. I doubted if it was the last that Terry would hear of it. Patrick had angrily brushed aside my explanation of how obnoxious Lawrence had been.

  I strolled in the garden and pondered on what we were about to do. On the surface of it what Patrick had planned was preposterous, melodramatic and even dangerous. But in order to get skeletons from cupboards, he had pointed out, you sometimes have to dynamite off the padlocks.

  The man that everyone but Terry and I knew as Freddie gazed across at me and, holding a rake, went into a robotic dance routine. This, I realised, was for Hartland’s benefit. He was the last to leave and approaching Emma’s car, keys ready in one hand to unlock the door. Hartland stopped in his tracks. Everyone always does. Patrick is a horribly realistic robot.

  “Get on with your work!” he shouted, and bad-temperedly stabbed the key in the lock.

  Then, the most odd feeling came over me. As in a dream I saw Hartland get in the car and drive away, spraying Freddie with gravel as he speeded past. I saw the expression on my own husband’s face after this had transpired and did not recognise him, only viewed someone less than quite sane.

  The sensation of uneasiness persisted. I walked away from him, no longer feeling the sun’s warmth even though it was now full in my face. Since arriving in Canada I had experienced a feeling of general malaise and had put it down to jet lag. Now I was not so sure. If I was being reduced to a trembling ninny when witnessing my husband in one of his more bizarre roles, it suggested that I was losing my nerve. Even worse, I could no longer face him being near to me while playing the part of Freddie — and the plan he had put forward meant that Freddie and I would get very close indeed.

  I sat on a stone garden seat and, appalled with myself, continued to tremble. In rare moments of real illness and emotional upset I seem to be a spectator of my own weaknesses. So here was a woman getting on for forty who had been entrusted with a little make-believe, the outcome of which would make her the centre of sympathetic attention. Spectator raked ham actor with ruthless gaze. There was no more than had regarded me in the mirror that morning; black bobbed hair, green eyes, a face a little paler than was normal. Nothing to suggest incipient panic.

  I stood up and my ears roared, the lawn, trees, and greenhouse tilting and spinning crazily. Somehow I carried on walking towards the stables where I knew Mark was getting his horse ready for a ride.

  “Faith, the woman’s drunk,” said a voice close behind me, and then laughed when I broke into a run.

  “Who laughed?” asked Mark, leading Marcus, his horse, out into the sunshine.

  “Freddie,” I replied, leaning on a wall.

  “I can’t imagine why Dad employed such a lunatic.”

  “Old Bill recommended him,” I said and stroked the chestnut, remembering how I myself had used the same expression not so long ago.

  “Really? I wonder how much money changed hands.”

  Marcus danced at the shadows, snorting, and then wheeled around with a squeal when a pigeon flew up in his face. Mark, hopping around with one foot in the stirrup, swore and then led the animal down the drive for a short distance to calm it down.

  I watched him. The similarity in name was no accident, the horse had been an eighteenth birthday present. But not the kind of animal, I reasoned, that could be expected to behave itself when ridden perhaps only one weekend in four.

  “You keep away!” Mark shouted when he saw that the gardener was making as if to help him mount the plunging creature. “Clear off!” he yelled. “You’ll only make him worse.”

  I did not stop to witness the outcome of this but quickly ran up the wooden staircase on the outside wall of the building. The door into the loft room must have been ajar for I do not remember opening it, only becoming aware of sitting on a
bale of hay and feeling not scared but sick and faint. Already the plans had gone wrong. Mark had gone out earlier than expected. He was to have witnessed our play acting.

  I gazed around me. Most of the space in the roof was taken up with bales of hay and straw, sacks of animal feeding stuffs, both cubes for the horses — Marcus and Emma’s mare, Queen — and dog meal and biscuits for the Newfoundland, or Newfie as it was nearly always referred to. A thin partition across one end separated the store from where Freddie slept.

  I simply couldn’t believe that Old Bill had inhabited this sleazy corner. There was a camp bed with rickety legs, the blankets on it smelling of wet dogs and mothballs, a chest of drawers, one corner propped up by a couple of books, a tap dripping into a filthy sink with nothing to clean it. This was how a wealthy British family housed their supposedly mentally retarded employee. I seethed, not just because the man involved was my husband but for all people thus treated. It seemed that the padlock on the cupboard containing skeletons was already well and truly off.

  And, of course, the magazines, a great pile of them by the bed. They dated back several years. In spite of myself I flipped through a couple and probably received the same kind of shock that comes to any woman who has previously regarded herself as broad-minded when she first encounters hard porn. Had he really lain in bed looking at these?

  In a kind of daze I flipped the top blanket aside to reveal grey sheets and a pillow lumpy with age. There was a thin mattress of sorts. I slid my hands beneath it and, kneeling at the side of the bed, felt along its length. In the middle but at the foot end was a sock rolled up around something hard. It was the gold Rolex watch I had given Patrick shortly after we remarried.

  I wept, wondering, “Fool, fool, what’s the matter with you?”

  Standing up, I took a knife from the draining board, wiped off the stickiness on a dirty tee-shirt and, back on my knees, examined the floor. There were several loose boards and after prising up three I found what I was looking for.

  At this point the man called Freddie nudged me quite gently on the bottom with a toe.

  “That’s a damn stupid and obvious place to hide a gun,” I said, dangling the Smith and Wesson under his nose.

  “Mark will be back,” announced the man in my life. “He’s just been thrown and hurt his wrist.”

  “No mikes up here?”

  “None. You’ll have to scream quite loudly.”

  “You bastard,” I whispered, surprised by my own venom.

  Grinning at my good acting he lunged at me and bore me down onto the campbed. I think I went a little bit mad myself then without knowing why, and this was what really frightened me. I fought him off, at one point remembering my training well enough to send him hurtling to the floor. And all the time I screamed until he silenced me with his mouth, an altogether too brutish, bruising kiss.

  At the moment that he realised I wasn’t acting and drew away, perplexed, Mark ran into the room and beat him off with his riding crop. Such was the state I was in that, for a few moments, I let young Hartland’s temper run riot. After that few moments Mark himself would have been in danger. Something cold and calculating within me allowed the whip to fall once more across Patrick’s shoulders and then I got up and grabbed Mark’s arm.

  “You filthy bastard,” he mouthed at the sordid figure lying on the floor, backing away, white with anger.

  Somehow I bundled him out of that squalid room and down the stairs. Then I must have fainted.

  Chapter 6

  Perhaps that cold calculating quality within me was the prompting of my writer’s brain, the same mechanism that functioned as a watchdog over my own behaviour and at the same time collected data and memorised faces, mannerisms and information for future use. Whatever the true nature of this phenomenon it carried on quite ruthlessly presenting me with a picture of the world while I was, to all intents and purposes, unconscious.

  I was lying on the sofa in Emma’s room, covered by a blanket and in the company of several hot water bottles. This much I knew to be fact and not dream even though at the same time I felt many miles and many years away.

  “Stalky,” whispered someone, and then closer, “Stalky — Stalky’s coming!”

  Then, perhaps in dream, perhaps in reality, I wept for the second time that day, seeing a skinny boy going through a school gate and out into the street. That was the first school rule he broke on that fateful occasion. The second was to approach a member of the public and shout, deride, jeer and insult him until the infuriated man chased him away. Patrick had run slowly. Stalky, being what he was, travelled behind at a shambling canter, arms waving. At that speed he had seemed even more terrifying to me than when he had crept up on us behind hedges and peered at us through holes in the playground wall, and made signs to us girls that most of us couldn’t understand but which frightened us witless all the same.

  “Oh, God forgive me,” whispered what sounded like my own voice.

  “He’ll have to go,” said Emma, and I heard a door close. Mark sat on one end of the sofa, still breathing rather quickly, a frown on his normally good-natured face. “You weren’t apologising to us,” he said when he saw me looking at him.

  “To Freddie,” I told him. “He didn’t mean it.”

  “He tried to rape you and didn’t mean it?”

  “He resurrected a childhood nightmare without meaning to,” I corrected him softly.

  “Mother’s gone to phone the doctor.”

  “There’s no need. How’s your wrist?”

  “It aches a bit. If it hadn’t been for that I’d have really given the bastard what for. I’d swear in court he threw a handful of gravel at the animal’s hind legs.”

  When the doctor arrived, in her early twenties, black and with the kind of fizzing energy that always makes me feel old and utterly exhausted, it soon became apparent that Emma had not told her the reason for my present fragility. I couldn’t really blame her, no one likes to admit that a member of their staff has violently attacked a guest in their house. Thus I was examined and told there was nothing to worry about. Afterwards the doctor departed. I did not imagine for a moment that we would have to call her out again that same night.

  Freddie had very wisely made himself scarce by the time Hartland arrived home. But it seemed to me, watching and listening while pretending to read in the living room, that the search for him was perfunctory and that Hartland had other more pressing matters on his mind. So he contented himself with bawling out Emma for allowing it to happen and demanding to know of me why I had visited Freddie’s quarters in the first place.

  “I never dreamt that he’d be housed over the stables,” I retorted. “I went up to watch some swallows nesting in the roof.” This glibness came regrettably easily but at least the birds had taken up residence over Freddie’s head, they had been skimming in and out through a broken window. But I was not happy. If Patrick had obeyed orders and worked from within the house then there would have been no necessity for our charade. But he had insisted that he had his reasons and breaking his cover by a fake rape also had a purpose. Would the Hartlands sack him quietly, call the police or hire a couple of thugs to run him out of town?

  “Robin Hughes,” said Hartland, gazing at the man using that name as he entered the room having just arrived with all the others. “That isn’t your real name, is it?”

  “You know it isn’t,” replied Terry. “At your own request you —”

  “Is that so-called gardener one of your subordinates?”

  “Most certainly not.”

  “Do I have your word on that?”

  “Of course,” Terry said, getting just the right tone of injured surprise into his voice.

  “I was told there would be two of you,” Hartland persisted.

  “He is not working for me,” said Terry in a manner that made Hartland change the subject.

  Mark, however, was made of sterner stuff. “So where is he then?”

  “Behind the third spruce tree al
ong from the left. How the hell should I know?”

  “That’s no answer.”

  Terry held Mark’s gaze until the youngster flushed. Further silent scrutiny caused him to jump up from his seat and slam out of the room. Emma and her husband exchanged glances.

  “I’m sorry,” Terry said to them. “But you know I can’t discuss that kind of thing.”

  I turned my back on the room and looked out of the window. It seemed to me that the most innocent parties were the only ones being hurt and that the entire mission was swinging crazily between tragedy, ineptitude and pure farce. And why did I imagine that working deeply in cover was turning Patrick’s brain?

  *

  “Any clues as to whether the writer of the threatening note was a nutter?” Hartland asked Terry after dinner, quite mellow after several glasses of claret.

  “No clues of any sort,” Terry replied, relaxed and carefully polite after one glass. “London postmark — posted in Ealing the previous night.”

  “Where does Fraser live?”

  “Yelverton — Devon. About twenty minutes’ drive from Plymouth,” McAlister answered after Terry admitted that he didn’t know.

  “Has something happened?” I asked.

  “His cars had acid thrown over them.”

  “When?” Drew shouted to make himself heard over the cries of dismay.

  “Yesterday.”

  “Not his lovely Lotus and Range Rover,” Margaret Howard said in a low moan, and suddenly I wanted to know exactly how upset she had been by Andy’s death.

  “Outside the office?” enquired Paul.

  “No, his garage was broken into.”

  “But there are dogs!” This again from Margaret.

  “Apparently they didn’t make a sound.”

  “Then surely that suggests that they recognised whoever did it.”

  Hartland clearly did not want to be drawn into a discussion about Chris Fraser’s dogs. “I’ve no idea. The police are investigating.”

  “But you don’t understand,” she went on. “They’re Dobermanns. Even the post and papers have to be left in a box at the gate.”