We made a shelter with broken off branches, and because there were no leaves on the trees yet thatched it with dried ferns. When it was finished I discovered that it was quite invisible from only yards away. Perhaps we had done better at our survival lessons than I thought.
I set the two snares, trying not to think about being famished with hunger, I had no real worries about my health, nor for that matter that of the baby. I was at least half a stone overweight from lack of exercise and good eating since my arrival in Canada. Patrick, on the other hand, had absolutely nothing spare on his frame upon which to live. Right now he was examining some fungi growing on a dead birch tree. They looked like the blackened hands of long dead corpses.
“Not recommended,” he observed, pulling a face. “Wonderful things if you’re looking for guts ache or the screaming hab-dabs.”
“You can eat some fungi,” I pointed out, purely out of mischief.
“I’ll rush out and buy a book about it,” he said, and sat down heavily on the trunk of a fallen tree.
“D’you want more morphine?”
He did. This time he gave himself the injection, a rather fragile ploy to discourage over-reliance as he hates sticking needles in himself. Then he slid down and rested his head on the tree. A little while later I heard him singing softly to himself, an Irish tune by the sound of it.
I banished from my mind’s eye the precise, delicate movements as he had given himself the injection, and pictures I had seen of drug addicts, and concentrated instead on my surroundings. My mind seemed to open. There is nothing like hunger for sharpening awareness. I smelled strange earthy scents and that of crushed vegetation, and felt the eyes of hidden creatures watching me from branch and stem. The trunks of the budding birch trees shone in the late afternoon light with an almost luminous glow, the same light glimmering on the foliage of the spruces and on Patrick’s hair. I loved him, this man of mine, and had a ghastly premonition that Fraser had preyed upon his greatest weakness.
*
In the morning both snares were empty. There was a small pool near where we had camped but it was stagnant; black fetid water that neither of us even wanted to wash in. We struggled for a short distance to where we could hear more water trickling, hoping to get a drink, but this proved to be the tiny stream that fed the pool and it tasted horribly metallic. Finally, in desperation, we went all the way back to the pool where we had fished. The water was pure in this but the fish weren’t biting.
We had by now fallen into the pattern that had been adopted during survival training. It was our own concept, a constant surveillance of each other for exhaustion, bad temper, call it what you will, anything that looked like giving in. This idea worked well for we had different strengths and could feed, as it were, off each other.
One thing upon which we were quite in phase was the importance of retaining a sense of humour. This kind of humour, an absolute requirement of survival, didn’t come easily to me as I had never had to live off my wits before. Patrick had started to drum into me the necessity for the right attitude on a previous exercise we had been on together during which I had fallen into a mud-filled ditch. My first reaction to this homily had been to jab him in the ribs with the dummy rifle I was carrying. (They don’t trust writers, female, with real ones on assault courses.) He had side-stepped, of course. Even at nearly forty he still has reflexes like a cat.
In a way, participating in training with Patrick was worse than the real thing for there were others present to witness him not carrying my pack for me after I had fallen over for the umpteenth time, or refusing to kill the rabbit that was to be my supper. No one else, needless to say, dared lift a finger. Once, when we had survived to day four and were found, captured and removed to a barn by sundry anonymous servicemen for a little testing of our remaining resilience, Patrick had stared stonily with the rest while all my clothes were removed and I was taken outside and thrown in a river. It was then that I had realised that he was being tested much more severely than I was.
And later, much later, I had laughed.
“You’re day-dreaming,” Patrick said, rolling up the fishing line.
“I was thinking about — “
“You’re supposed to be keeping watch.”
“Sorry.”
We re-traced our way to the campsite and more than once I caught myself looking at several kinds of fungi growing on tree stumps. Hunger gnawed inwardly like a disease that sapped energy and the will to live.
“A cup of coffee,” I said as I slid down into a ditch. “Laura Secord ice cream, hot muffins with butter —”
“Shut up!” he said in the voice that had been one of the reasons for my divorcing him after the first ten years.
Pure bloody-mindedness kept back my tears. Then, on the edge of the glade where we had our shelter, I walked into his outstretched arm, like a band of iron.
“Someone’s been here,” he hissed through his teeth.
Chapter 18
The glade steamed peacefully as the sun evaporated heavy dew. From where I was standing I could not see our shelter, even though I knew where it was. I could see nothing untoward at all, nothing that hinted of human presence.
Patrick pointed to a depression in the ground right in front of us. The soil in the bottom of it was damp and in the dampness was the impression of a shoe. We were both wearing trainers, the kind with wavy patterns on the soles, but this footprint was plain and smooth, probably a size nine, and made by the right foot of man of medium weight.
Patrick went closer and indicated where the left foot had bruised the foliage of a ground-trailing fern. He mimed how the man had crouched down initially then swivelled slightly on his left foot before standing up again. Drawing me down alongside him he showed me a meandering trail of damaged vegetation where the intruder had left the glade, going in the direction of the brook we had tried to drink from that morning.
“I saw shoes like that the other day,” Patrick said quietly. “I thought I’d imagined it so didn’t say anything to you. He came through the smoke and looked down at us. He was in a hell of a panic — just came and looked and then tore off again.”
“So he checked up again.”
“At a guess he was ordered to. He might have assumed that the police took our bodies away — that’s if Fraser wasn’t caught and said he’d hidden them. But coming this far, I don’t like that at all …”
There was no need for me to ask if running away was the solution because I knew that it wasn’t. Whoever it was might have detected our shelter, and even if he hadn’t he might have noticed where we had trodden down the undergrowth.
“For Rachel we stay here,” Patrick said. “There simply isn’t any choice.”
For Rachel, I reminded myself that night. We had rebuilt the shelter in a strategically better place, tucked into the angle made by two large stones. Beneath it, within my reach, Patrick tried to sleep. The bruising and swelling of his chest were quite frightening and the tight bandage caused almost as much pain as the injury. But without it he could feel his broken ribs grinding together.
For five hours I sat with the knife clutched in my right hand. Uppermost in my mind was the worry that the intruder had guessed we were still alive and had gone away to fetch reinforcements. Worse, I was not at all convinced of the existence of Rachel, someone who until the crucial moment Fraser hadn’t even mentioned. There was after all no need to murder the operatives of D12 if they could be made to look complete fools by indulging in a self-inflicted incarceration in the Canadian backwoods. The result of that would be nearly as bad, character assassination. We would be thrown out for incompetence.
I knew how to use the knife. The marines sergeant who had taught me how to kill people had been softly spoken, built model railways for his son in his spare time and had a weakness for pink marshmallows. He knew all about the disadvantages I possessed as a woman and also a few advantages I had over men, some of which had already occurred to me. Put crudely, to disable a man, a weaker
woman went straight for the most vulnerable region. Men were so sensitive about this area, he had assured me solemnly, that even male enemies sometimes hesitated before utilising tactics so low. Women, apparently, had no such inhibitions. He had appeared to approve of women’s lack of inhibitions generally and had thoroughly enjoyed showing me how to combat rape.
From the way he was breathing I knew Patrick to be asleep. I was almost certain that he was unaware that I knew how to despatch an enemy effectively with a knife. Whilst not actually forbidding me to tell him, Colonel Daws had made it known that certain aspects of my training ought to be deliberately kept vague, even with Patrick. Pistol and rifle practice were one thing, knives quite another. Knives were furtive and slightly kinky, not for women to know about. Strange really, this British thinking. It’s amazingly easy to kill with a knife when you know how. Too easy.
An owl hooted nearby. Then it flew across a lighter part of the sky where the moon had risen behind hazy cloud. It was like a large silent butterfly. I watched where I thought it had perched but there was no movement, no sound. Then a twig snapped.
Owls don’t snap twigs.
There was only the one patch of light high in the sky. It was as if our glade was a dish filled with night, the tops of the trees the rim. I tried to see into the gloom but my eyes played tricks with me, the blackness shifting and dancing, forming itself into shapes that might or might not be there. Hunger was replaced by a choking sensation.
My blind rush to escape was almost overwhelming — and then the knife passed out of my possession. It was extraordinarily reassuring the way a warm hand slid down my arm to the wrist in a tactile request.
When the powerful flash lamp was switched on we both kept quite still, dazzled by the beam, impaled on it. The man holding it came closer. I could hear his feet brushing through the grass. This must be a person of flesh and blood, I thought wildly, it was only mild starvation that was causing me to picture lights that moved by themselves, an unseen power crushing the vegetation.
“Stand up!”
The voice was harsh, clipped and imbued with an authoritative tone that suggested he was armed.
Patrick grunted with pain as he stood up.
“And you!”
“I’ve sprained my ankle,” I called back. The beam was full on me, Patrick above me in the darkness.
“Get up!”
I made a play of struggling to my feet and then allowed my right foot to give way beneath me so that I fell sprawling. The torch beam followed me down.
There was nothing upon which to congratulate myself afterwards. I went with Patrick to where the flash lamp lay in the grass, picked it up and shone it in the right direction.
For Rachel.
The man was already dying and in the time it took for me to blink slowly the knife was no longer in his neck but somewhere else and then Patrick was wiping it on the grass.
For Rachel.
“Ingrid.” He spoke patiently.
I swung the torch beam from Patrick’s eyes and sat on the ground. “Sorry.”
He took the torch from me and by its light began to turn out the dead man’s pockets. I really had the shakes then and sat on my hands to keep them still. We had killed a man without first finding out who he was. Would a court accept a plea of self-defence? Was a small knife thrown with almost surgical precision a more potentially deadly murder weapon than a hunting rifle? That lay in the undergrowth where it had dropped from the intruder’s dying hands.
“I feel like filth,” I said to the forest. “All my thoughts are concerned with self-justification and saving my own skin.”
The body had no identification papers, not even a wallet containing credit cards. The pockets held ammunition for the rifle, a handkerchief, a photograph of a woman and a flick-knife. Patrick held this out for me to see, springing the blade almost under my chin with a hideous slicing click. The woman in the photograph was Margaret Howard.
*
“A Rolls-Royce to a bent pin this was Lanny’s rifle,” Patrick whispered, examining it. “He couldn’t resist stealing it. I’d guess that he was happier with the knife.”
For the rest of the night we huddled together for warmth under the thick jacket. Once or twice I dozed and then must have slept heavily for about an hour. When I awoke the sky was getting light and my legs were numb. I sat up, fuddled, and realized that I had been asleep with my head in Patrick’s lap. He was leaning back, staring unseeing into space, eyes red-rimmed. The peaceful way he met my gaze told me that he had given himself more morphine.
“We can’t stay hidden,” I said.
“We must, just for a few more days.”
“You’ll have a serious infection by then — there isn’t any more antibiotic.”
“As I said, we’ll pull out if either of us becomes ill.”
“Do you really trust Fraser?”
“Not altogether. There was a lot he didn’t tell me, but I believe Rachel is very important to him.”
“Are you sure he didn’t play on your own yearning to be a father?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not even thinking about it.”
“No — because I’m sure.”
“Patrick, your whole career might hinge on this.”
But he only smiled at me.
This was the last proper conversation that I can remember. Afterwards, I suppose, we exchanged words, comments, questions and answers, and we might have even talked to ourselves. I know that as far as I was concerned, the difference between pretence and reality — a training exercise, no matter how rigorous, and the real thing — came home to me at this point.
The word reality haunted me. Reality was being in real pain from hunger all the time, feeling disgust at the smell of my own unwashed body, losing my temper when I fell over; the veneer that I liked to call my maturity stripped further away with each passing hour.
That morning also the snares were empty and I know that I sulked. We covered the dead man with stones and branches and started walking, a twisting, turning route to confuse anyone who might follow. After a little while we left what I soon came to realise had been easy to traverse country and entered virgin forest. We were forced to follow more game trails but sometimes it seemed to me that we were going round in circles.
The weather was on our side, the sun warm. There was a light breeze, just enough to keep us cool and the insects from making our life a misery. But as soon as we stopped they buzzed around us in murderous hordes. I think it was at this time that I ceased to see any sense in what we were doing.
Before we became too tired we bivouacked. Patrick set the snares and then we sat by the side of a tiny rivulet, drinking from our cupped hands.
“There’s one more shot of morphine,” I said.
“Please don’t tell me things I already know.”
“I wasn’t being defeatist — just telling you it’s there when you want it.”
Silence.
“I’ve been here before,” he said a while later, referring to life after the Falklands War when he had coped by taking small white pills given to him by the doctor. After taking one he had sat around slightly stupefied but free from the relentless torture of his smashed legs. Or he had drunk whisky to the same effect. Or, if circumstances forced him to remain lucid and sober, he had thrown himself into feverish activity. Once, at home, his mother Elspeth told me how he had emptied his Smith and Wesson into an elm tree in the Rectory garden and killed six rooks which had been clamouring over nest sites in its branches.
There was nowhere to fish so we ate instead the worms we would have used for bait. There was nothing else, even if Patrick had consented to use the gun. Birds sang hidden in the trees during the day, and all night frogs and crickets kept us awake.
For me the days began to merge into one another. We found a place where we stayed for a day and then moved on because Patrick fretted that we were being followed.
Unwelcome, slightly crazed memories still jolt me awake
at night. I can remember Patrick seeking warmth, affection perhaps during one of the long nights, and how I pushed him away.
“I’ve switched off the alarm clock because it’s Sunday tomorrow,” he said, snuggling even closer. “You’ve just come to bed smothered in perfume and nothing else.”
“A trailer for a forthcoming attraction?” I asked, too tired to concentrate on what I was saying.
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“I don’t fancy you with all those bristles.”
“No?” Holding his breath he shifted position, forcing me to rearrange my own limbs.
“You’re not serious,” I told him.
He presented me with a fait accompli, leaned over and kissed me intensely; bristles, unwashed, the foul breath of semi-starvation. I gave him a shove and he desisted, as tense as a steel spring with anger. Time went by.
“That’s real love,” he said suddenly.
“I do love you,” I whispered but he didn’t respond.
By the morning he was feverish, shivering, his skin burning hot to the touch. My reaction to this was anger. There was an inevitability, a hopelessness about our plight that in the cold light of day resembled ineptitude. Not for the first time it seemed that the entire assignment in Canada was tainted with failure.
I can remember shouting at him and after a while he agreed to use the compass to take us back to the road. Up until this morning we had guided ourselves by the sun but now it was obscured by clouds.
All day we walked.
We walked all the next day as well with me leading him now because he kept wandering off the narrow trail and bumping into trees. I was looking after the compass too for he kept dropping it. Dazedly, and why I do not know, I checked it when the setting sun emerged from clouds, glowing redly over low hills, all this reflected in a lake, not a road in sight.
Death of a Raven Page 17