by Rebecca Tope
She went quickly after the man and caught him as he queued at the counter. Timmy joined her, looking as if he was braced for being betrayed. Only then did it occur to her that the National Trust staff might take exception to what she was proposing, so she tried to speak softly, while making it appear that she was just idly chatting. ‘Excuse me,’ she began, ‘but my husband has a family ticket with two spare places. If you and your little girl would like it, you’re welcome.’
‘For free you mean?’
His quick, almost greedy, response threw her. Of course, Drew would want some recompense. ‘Well … less than you’d pay otherwise. Our Timmy changed his mind at the last minute, you see.’ She put a hand on Timmy’s shoulder, as he stood meekly at her side. The man dithered and Thea lost patience. ‘Suit yourself,’ she shrugged. ‘That’s my husband there, if you decide to join him.’
The queue moved forward and Thea became aware of suspicious looks from the woman at the ticket desk. ‘It’s up to you,’ she repeated, and steered the boy out of the shop. Signalling to Drew to wait a minute, she went back to the car, some distance away, and liberated the spaniel. Let the men work it out in whatever way they chose. She’d done more than enough in her efforts to keep the peace.
The woods were magnificent. It was May and the leaves were unfolding on all sides, fresh and vivid in their new colours. Sunlight filtered through them, and a mild breeze gave them movement. ‘You did the right thing,’ she congratulated Timmy. ‘This is lovely.’
Hepzibah thought so too, revelling in her freedom, sniffing into tufts of young bracken and then suddenly dashing at full speed down the path ahead of them. Thea resisted the urge to call her back. Hepzie never got lost. Or almost never.
‘Have you been here before?’ Timmy asked.
‘To Chedworth, yes, but not the woods. We were too busy for any sort of exploring.’ She had taken scant notice of the direction in which they were walking, or where they might find themselves if they carried on. The woods seemed to stretch extensively on all sides. There was no sound of traffic. ‘Are we going north, south, east or west?’ she asked him.
He gave her a bemused look. ‘How would I know?’
‘By the sun, or the shadows it casts. Or using a compass. I thought all boys knew how to work that out.’
‘Not me,’ he said firmly, implying that such arcane skills were far beyond the scope of what interested him.
‘So what do you like about it here?’
‘I don’t know.’ He looked around. ‘I thought there might be conkers.’ He scuffed through some decayed leaf mould.
‘Wrong season, chum,’ she said, wondering how this child of the countryside, born to a mother who had loved everything about gardens and growing things, could be so perversely ignorant.
‘We’re going east,’ said a voice behind them. ‘But you can’t tell much from the sun in the middle of the day. You can look for mossy tree trunks. It grows more thickly on the north side, as a general rule. Or find a tree stump and have a good look at the rings. They should be wider on the south side, because that side, where it gets more sun, grows faster.’
Timmy and Thea both gazed at the newcomer in wonder. ‘Thanks,’ said Thea cautiously. ‘I never knew that about the rings. And I can never remember which side moss likes best.’
The man was about forty, she guessed, tall and moderately handsome. He wore a brown anorak and jeans, and looked tired. ‘Sorry to intrude,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t resist it.’
‘Do you work here?’ she asked. ‘For the National Trust or something?’
‘No, no. I just came for a walk. I don’t live around here. It was just somewhere to go,’ he said vaguely. ‘I just got in the car and drove.’
That sounded to Thea like a person running away from something. Combined with the haunted look in his eyes, she detected the makings of a story.
‘Can we find a tree stump, then?’ asked Timmy.
‘Good idea,’ said the man.
But all they could see were small, half-rotted branches, left for insects and birds to enjoy. ‘They probably don’t cut trees down in these woods,’ said the man. ‘Oh, by the way, my name’s Tony. Tony Brown.’
‘Thea and Timmy,’ said Thea, without adding their surname.
‘All starting with a T,’ said Timmy acutely. ‘That’s funny, isn’t it.’
‘Very,’ said Tony Brown.
‘Have you got any children?’ Timmy proceeded to ask, making Thea wince. Wasn’t he too old for this? Hadn’t he learnt where the boundaries were by this time? Was there something the matter with the child?
‘Well, no, actually,’ said the man hesitantly.
Again Thea grasped the hint of a tragic tale just below the surface.
‘Thea isn’t my real mother, you know,’ the boy prattled on. ‘My mother died, and now Thea’s married to my dad.’
At least he gave no suggestion of resentment or unhappiness, Thea noted. There was really no reason why he shouldn’t explain the situation to anybody who would listen.
‘I see. The truth is, I had a little baby girl, but she died before she was born. It was terribly sad.’
‘How could she?’ Timmy enquired. ‘I mean – she couldn’t die before she was alive.’
‘That’s enough, Tim,’ said Thea. ‘I’ll explain it to you when we get home. I’m really sorry,’ she told the man.
‘It was more than two years ago now. I’m almost over it – as far as anybody ever can be. But it’s had a few unforeseen consequences,’ he added wryly.
Thea pushed down the eagerness to know more. The man had a neediness to him that rang warning bells. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. ‘Now we’d better go and find that dog.’ Only then did she notice that Hepzie had been out of sight for rather a long time. ‘Did you see a cocker spaniel?’ she asked Tony Brown.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Come on, Tim. She might be miles away by now.’ She hurried the child along, wondering whether she should be worried. ‘Hepzie!’ she yodelled. ‘Come on now.’
‘You should whistle for her,’ puffed Timmy. ‘Dogs always come when you whistle.’
‘I’m sure they do, but I can’t. You know that.’
‘Well I can,’ and he emitted a reedy sound that no dog would take seriously.
‘She’ll be along here somewhere, digging under a tree or chasing a squirrel.’ They followed the broad well-trodden path between the trees, hoping to catch sight of the plumy black and white tail waving up ahead of them.
The search was an unwelcome distraction from the easy mooching Thea had envisaged. ‘Dratted dog,’ she repeated more than once.
Timmy kept trying with his whistle, the improvement with each attempt worthy of comment. By the fifth repeat, Thea was optimistic that the dog might actually respond.
‘There she is!’ the child cried triumphantly. They had turned off the main path, for no good reason, stepping over dead branches and trampling new undergrowth. ‘Over there.’
And so she was. In a small clearing, the spaniel was sprawled at the feet of a large woman who looked displeased at the attention. ‘Damn it, Heps,’ snapped Thea. ‘Why don’t you come when you’re called?’
‘It’s yours, is it?’ said the woman. ‘Honestly, she wouldn’t leave me alone.’
‘Sorry,’ said Thea. ‘She doesn’t usually behave so badly.’ She looked around, thinking it was a funny place for a woman to be by herself. ‘She might have thought you needed to be rescued.’
A harsh laugh was the response to this. ‘Don’t tell me she’s that clever.’ An expression of despair briefly crossed her face.
‘Why? Are you saying you really are in need of rescue?’
A slow shake of the head indicated a refusal to continue the conversation. Timmy was cuddling the dog, and Thea was more than willing to abandon any further interaction with strangers. ‘All right. Thanks for … well, thanks, anyway.’
‘I didn’t do anything.’ She was a buxom individua
l, in her thirties, with a pale indoor complexion. She wore unbecoming, cheap-looking clothes, and spoke with an accent that suggested the softer, more western reaches of the Midlands. Her brown hair was curly.
‘Come on then, kids,’ said Thea, eliciting a laugh from Timmy. It was a running joke that the reconstituted family included Hepzie as one of the children. Drew winced every time it occurred. For Drew, a dog was a dog and a child was a child. Timmy and Stephanie had embraced the spaniel with considerably more enthusiasm than they would a stepsibling.
They had been in the woods for half an hour or so, first walking eastwards if the man called Tony could be believed. Then the search for Hepzie had taken them in another direction – south, Thea calculated with some difficulty. The village of Chedworth was in front of them, invisible apart from brief distant glimpses through the trees. From past experience, she knew it would take a lot of time and effort to walk it from end to end, and had no intention of trying.
Drew and Stephanie would start lunch without them in the cafe attached to the villa, if they were late back, but they wouldn’t be very happy about it. It was not yet twelve, however, and Stephanie was a child who insisted on reading every word of every information sign in a museum or historic site. ‘We should turn back,’ she decided. ‘But there’s no great hurry.’
Timmy was showing signs of inner conflict. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked him, expecting him to confess to a need for a lavatory. It would not be the first time he’d been caught out in the open countryside, and until very recently he had adamantly refused to pee behind a tree.
‘It’s boring in the woods,’ he complained.
‘So you wish you’d gone to see the villa after all?’
‘No-o-o. Not really. I wanted to talk to that man. He knew things. He must be a teacher, do you think?’
‘I’m not sure. He seemed a bit too outdoorsy for that.’
‘Outdoorsy?’
‘Think about it.’
‘Right. I know – a person who works outside a lot. Like a farmer.’
‘Exactly. Perhaps he’s a farmer.’
‘Do farmers go for walks in the woods?’
‘Why not?’
‘They’d be too busy.’
‘That’s probably true. Well, wouldn’t you like to be an outdoorsy person? It’s fun to grow food, and understand how trees grow and watch birds. Lots of things like that.’
‘I don’t know.’ He looked around him. ‘The birds wake me up really early, with all that singing. It’s annoying.’
She laughed. ‘I love it. The blackbirds are fantastic.’
‘Mm.’
She was keeping a close eye on the spaniel as they walked, fearful of losing her again. When they came within sight of the road that led up to the villa, she attached the lead. ‘Well, we didn’t get lost,’ she said.
They were on a wide track with trees on their left and a small river to the right. ‘That’s the River Churn,’ she said, proud that she remembered the name. ‘Not much of a river, is it?’
Timmy barely glanced at it. Then he brightened. ‘There’s that man again,’ he said. ‘Look!’
The man was walking ahead of them in the same direction, going unnaturally slowly. He turned back as they watched him, and took a moment to recognise them. Thea thought that strange, suggestive of a mind deeply preoccupied with other matters. He smiled faintly, and then evidently decided to turn back on himself. ‘Didn’t mean to come this way,’ he explained in a low mutter, as he passed them.
Thea and Timmy exchanged a look, with raised eyebrows and questioning eyes. ‘Funny,’ she whispered. ‘Maybe he got the direction wrong.’
Timmy giggled. ‘Don’t think so,’ he said.
‘Maybe it’s us that’s wrong. Is that building over there real or just a mirage?’
‘A mirage is actually a refraction of something real, but in a different place from where you think,’ the child told her earnestly. ‘It’s not just imagination.’
‘Is that right?’ She frowned. ‘I don’t think I ever knew that.’
‘The building’s real,’ he assured her. ‘But it’s not the villa.’
‘I know, but it’s the one we passed on the way up to the car park. So that means we’re almost there. It also means we’re heading north,’ she added proudly. ‘Because the woods and the village are south of the villa. Easy-peasy.’
‘It doesn’t seem easy to me,’ said Tim.
‘It will. It’s the same as left and right. You just have to remember which is which. East is right, if you’re facing north. And it’s always a good idea to face north, especially if you’ve got a compass.’
He asked a few more questions, much to Thea’s gratification. They stood in place while she talked him through the points of the compass, and he connected them with references in familiar stories. ‘Now I get it!’ he exulted, finally. ‘Thanks, Thea. I bet Stephanie doesn’t know where east is.’
Thea again looked at her watch, and realised they were almost late. ‘Hey – we’d better—’ She was interrupted by a loud scream somewhere in the woods, south-west of where they were standing. It sounded quite close. ‘What was that?’ she said.
Timmy didn’t answer. He was gazing raptly in the direction of the sound.
‘We should go and see,’ she said, before realising she might be taking a vulnerable child into a scene of horror or danger.
‘It must have been that man. Phone Dad,’ he urged her.
‘Yes. Good thinking.’ The existence of a phone in her pocket was still nowhere near as obvious and familiar to her as the existence of a thumb was to most people. She extracted the gadget, while automatically trotting towards the source of the cry, ears straining for a repetition. There had been great pain and shock in the sound, but nothing to hint at what might have caused it.
Drew took his time answering. ‘Hi,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Are you lost?’
‘No, we’re just down the road a little way, on a path that runs between the river and the woods. Listen, we just heard somebody cry out … scream … and I should go and see what’s happened. But Timmy …’
‘Leave it, for heaven’s sake. We want our lunch. I don’t suppose it was anything important – just someone messing about.’
‘No, it wasn’t. We saw a man. We talked to him. It’s probably him, hurt himself somehow.’
‘Surely the woods are full of people? Someone else will have got to him by now.’
‘I’m going to see, Drew. Stop arguing. And come and fetch Timmy. We’ll come to the corner, where the track meets the road. There’s a big gate. Hurry up. When we see you, I’ll send him up to meet you, and run back on my own.’
‘What about the dog?’
Good question. ‘I suppose she’ll come with me,’ she said. The pressure to go and investigate was building by the second. She danced restlessly on the spot, wishing Drew would understand the urgency. ‘He might be dying,’ she shouted, careless of the effect this could have on Timmy.
‘All right. Calm down. It’s not your problem,’ said Drew unfeelingly. ‘Have you called 999?’
‘No. I have to see what’s happened first.’
‘Okay – if you must, we’ll come and get Tim. How far are you from that gate?’
‘About one minute’s walk.’
It was all accomplished in under five minutes, during which no other sounds came from the woods. Where were all the other weekend walkers? Having lunch somewhere, she supposed. If she and Tim were the only people to have heard the scream, that made it even more incumbent on her to go to the rescue, call an ambulance, stem an arterial bleed, apprehend an attacker … She increased her pace, unsure of which little path she should take into the woods. Too much time had passed; she was no longer at all certain of quite where the cry had come from.
‘Hello?’ she called, trying not to feel self-conscious. Shouting in the open air, where any stranger might hear her, was embarrassing. When there was no response, she couldn’t manage to do it ag
ain.
She was thinking about giving up, and persuading herself the scream was of far less significance than first supposed, when she heard a kind of panting somewhere nearby. Rounding a curve in the path, she at first could see nothing of interest. But the sound came again, and she located a shape in a hollow, some four or five yards off the path. Expecting to see a prone human figure, she had to adjust to the strange sight of a man on his hands and knees, rocking and panting like an animal. Her first feeling was of self-righteousness at her decision to investigate. Nobody else was anywhere in sight. She fumbled for her phone, and had already keyed 999 by the time she got to the man’s side.
‘Hey! What happened?’ she demanded. ‘I’m calling an ambulance.’ Then the call was answered, and she did what she could to explain how to find the casualty. When asked the nature of the injury, she was at a loss. ‘He can’t breathe properly,’ she began.
The man – who had become easily identified as Tony Brown – twisted his head round to look at her, stark panic in his eyes. ‘Knife,’ he choked. ‘Back.’
Bewildered, Thea leant over him, her feet sinking into the leaf mould. There was no sign of a weapon, but she could see a splash of blood on his brown anorak, halfway down his left side. ‘Were you stabbed?’ she asked in horror.
The woman at the end of the phone was listening. ‘Stabbed?’ came a tinny voice. ‘Where?’
‘His back, I think. There’s a bit of blood. Not much. At a guess, I would say it’s just a little way below his heart. Probably got his lung.’
‘Is he conscious?’
‘Yes. But he can’t really talk.’
‘An ambulance is on the way. It’ll be coming from Cirencester. I estimate it’ll take twenty minutes at least. Can you stay with him?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ The call was refreshingly easy compared to some she’d attempted on other occasions. ‘I don’t know what to do, though. He’s on his hands and knees.’ The position was worrying her, making it very difficult to see Tony Brown’s face, and preventing her from performing any of the procedures she’d heard about. He was sagging at the knees, too, his back sloping at a more acute angle.