by Guy Sheppard
His gaze met mine. Some indirect meaning passed between us. I was left with the distinct impression that I was an idiot if I thought that what had just happened was some commonplace prank.
‘Mr Walker and I can do a tour of the house and make sure everything is secure,’ said James helpfully.
‘No time! Hand him my shotgun.’
‘You serious?’ I said.
James straightened the Panama on Lord Hart’s head. ‘Let me call Rebecca. She’ll know what to do.’
‘Damn it, James, I don’t need any more nursing. I know what this means, the devil I do. I saw someone from my bedroom window.’
‘Are you quite certain it wasn’t another hallucination?’
‘Do stop going on about those!’
James glanced my way and narrowed his eyebrows. For all the frantic whispering, he would not have me hear what his master professed to have witnessed. He did not want me to know things I should not in a seemingly absurd cross-examination of his story.
‘But surely you can’t want Mr Walker to venture out so early on such a morning?’
‘How else will we know anything for certain?’
James secured the shotgun in his grasp.
‘If you’re absolutely sure that you are not sending him on a wild goose chase?’
‘Damn it, man, this head is no joke, it’s a declaration of war.’
*
Soon after, a rider trotted a horse into the yard.
‘This him? This our sheriff?’
‘He’s the one, the devil he is,’ said Lord Hart. ‘Gemma, meet DI Colin Walker.’
With that, the grey-haired groom slid down to the ground and stood there holding the reins. There was a gap in her upper jaw where there should have been molars.
‘Met Sara in the lane. Came at once. You ride, Inspector?’
Rolling my hand with distaste over the animal’s heavy black nose, I let him lick my hand with his wet rubbery tongue. It was like being washed by a gigantic, beslavering bloodhound.
‘I once rode a donkey on the beach at Brighton.’
The cob returned my look and it was dark and deep and utterly desolate.
Gemma smeared a filthy hand down her thigh while she chewed gum.
‘Those shoes you’re wearing aren’t very suitable.’
‘H’m, well, no, I guess not. Then again, I’m only here to decide what best to do with Coberley Hall…’
‘James, fetch my brother’s riding boots,’ cried Lord Hart. ‘Get going, Colin, before any more snow falls and takes the trail with it.’
‘Who says I’m going?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Gemma, altering the stirrup for me. ‘You’re the same build as Philip.’
‘Philip? How come?’
‘Didn’t they tell you? This was his horse Sir Percival.’
So snug a fit did the boots prove, so right against my calves that they could have been made for me. Meanwhile, Sir Percival stood fidgeting by the stone mounting block in the yard, so eager was he to resume his ride out.
Even so, I made a great show of checking the saddle’s girth before I struggled to climb on.
‘Drop the gun in the holster at the front of your saddle,’ said Lord Hart, getting me to fill my pocket with cartridges. ‘It’s a relief, in situations like this, to know that we have someone we can turn to.’
‘So please, can you tell me who or what is suddenly our enemy?’
‘You worried?’
‘Don’t fret, I’m trained to use firearms.’
James passed me the shotgun.
‘Not that,’ said Lord Hart, ‘Sir Percival. My brother knew exactly how to keep him on the bit so you must ride with a light hand.’
I scowled. The great silver arms of my mount’s tack in his mouth, complete with their interlaced rings of curb chain, chinked under his chin like armour. I scratched his unnecessarily enormous ears.
‘It’ll never happen but I’d better make the effort, hadn’t I? Did you know that Lizzie wanted to keep horses?’
‘Planned to come back after all, did she?’ said Gemma.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Sorry, Inspector, but you’re the subject of much gossip in the village.’
‘Well, go on then,’ said Lord Hart. ‘Don’t waste any more time. He’s getting away.’
‘You could be him on that horse,’ said Gemma, whistling at me like a kettle. ‘You could be Philip came back from the grave. He loved that horse to death, that he did.’
‘Shut up, you old witch,’ said Lord Hart. ‘You don’t know what you say.’
*
Only a fool would put on a bold front simply to satisfy his newfound friends, only an idiot would pretend that he was naturally courageous as he rode through the porte-cochere from one courtyard to another on such a nebulous mission. A man like me should at least keep up his display of sang-froid and not break into a total sweat before he was safely out of sight of all witnesses.
More muleteer than Cavalier, I coaxed Sir Percival’s bulging sides with my heels and set off at a miraculous trot after a touch with my crop. I did my best to emulate a dead man’s skills.
*
Somehow it was all down to me to track the prowler, except Lord Hart could not or would not give his suspect a name. I sympathised. That head on the doorstep was an insult to the man, a violation of his property, a blasphemy against everything decent and good.
Full of bravado, I rode along in search of footprints. In the bitter morning I dug my gloves from my coat and pulled them on one by one, but still a reptilian chill flowed through my blood. This coldness was not the general dislike, even aversion, to the chilly house that had so got the better of me last night but another, more specific resentment. Others might have called it a preposterous imposition.
13
In the otherwise virgin snow a thin line of footprints formed a dark and ragged row of holes. I could hardly explain it, but the black trail appeared profoundly lost in the white landscape, which made me feel alone, too. I felt like I had when I had bunked off from school because I had been too fearful to show anyone my burns and bruises. As my horse and I stumped along under a sky the colour of pewter, I kept glancing over my shoulder, relived my past like that of some frightful absconder.
‘It’s not my place to be a vigilante,’ I remarked aloud.
Once hunted myself, I was loath to hunt.
There was little sign of life at Slack’s Cottage and I didn’t stop to inquire. When a man rode shotgun for somebody else he had best keep his business to himself.
Now and again I leaned low off my saddle. Where the ground had cracked and crumbled, the tell-tale indentations grew long and broad, even massive. Somebody had stopped here to empty a stone from their boot but the bare foot was so big it was truly bear-like.
‘Yeah, yeah, it’s just a bit trampled,’ I thought and smiled at the harmlessness of snow.
Meanwhile far above me, jackdaws joined rooks and crows in the treetops by the hundred. Those pompous lovers of carrion posed like sooty fruit on the highest branches. I very much refused to feel that to ignore them was to deserve some grievous disaster or deadly misfortune.
Suddenly there rose from the wood’s black heart a prolonged and plaintive cry. It came from beyond the edge of darkness and obscurity. So stricken was the sound, so painful and soulless and yet so ambiguous, that it filled my ears with a melancholic wail of regret that could have been man or brute. My response was to hurry along the wire mesh fence on my left flank. There, storm poles and stakes reinforced an impressive defensive work that cut one half of the wood from the other. Soon I was inside a great pen, in a dark, intensely private place where game-birds could congregate in large numbers at galvanized feeders that resembled enormous metal mushrooms.
A moment later, Sir Percival dug in his heels.
The more I tightened my grip on the reins, the more he shot backwards.
Then I saw why. Leaning against his Land Rover stood a sto
cky man who held fast to a leggy, black and white spotted pointer by his collar.
Piled in the truck’s open back were bags of corn.
‘You hurt, at all?’ I shouted.
At first he barely moved, only continued to stare wildly into space. The entire bottom half of his best quality tweed jacket hung in tatters. Something had clawed holes in its white lining in spectacular fashion.
His brown eyes blazed at me.
‘Who wants to know?’
I looked into his face and saw the utter exhaustion that came with unreasoning horror.
‘My name is Colin Walker.’
‘Doesn’t explain why you’re on Lord Hart’s horse.’
‘Doesn’t explain why you’re all bloody.’
He wiped his short grey hair with his hand, which made his scalp redder.
‘I’m Peter Slater. I manage the shoots round here. Come carefully, or you might get caught up, too.’
But Sir Percival tossed his head, rolled his upper lip and snorted loudly. He would barely go another pace despite all my efforts.
Why he wouldn’t move soon became very clear. Suspended above the blood-stained snow hung a fearsome sight, I observed. It was a man. His hair had that wild dishevelled look which could have belonged to a scarecrow, but was actually more representative of sudden abject fear. Both his socks had turned red where his boots had gone missing. He’d not long been killed.
I leaned off my saddle and spat violently.
Peter kept hold of his dog which was going mad.
‘Steady Prince. Heel.’
I chanced a second look at the corpse. Mostly bald but with a very black beard, the flesh and blood bugbear did not look more than forty. The wound in his neck was still bleeding him dry. As a result, his flesh turned grey and papery. Vomit slimed his mottled green and brown camouflaged jacket and trousers. Where he had been pinned violently against the tree the circulatory shock had popped both his eyes like corks from their sockets. Much as a suicide would defecate at the end of a noose in their moment of death, so this unfortunate wretch had evacuated his bowels in one last humiliating human function.
I wiped my mouth on the back of my glove.
‘Who is he? Do we know?’
‘His name is Sullivan O’Leary.’
‘What in heaven’s name do you think happened here?’
Peter averted his gaze to the wall of dark trees, stared long and hard into their wider shadows.
‘Ran right into his own trap, I reckon.’
It was true that the dead man had kicked a stick out of its slot that had triggered a branch bent back under tension. Stakes had shot through his neck and groin and left him dangling. But honestly, I found it hard to believe my own eyes. The resemblance to a butcher’s carcass was ghastly. His belly was a raw, bloody slit from which the first portion of his small intestine had been torn immediately below his stomach. The spears that had clawed him open had not just performed some savage enterotomy but a terrible Caesarean. He had been made to give birth to his own guts.
‘But from what was he running?’ I asked.
My craggy-faced companion held on to Prince for dear life as some sort of comfort.
‘Sometimes you find dogs running wild in these woods after they come up from town.’
I glanced at his pointer but it was hard to believe that any dog could be so violent, except to his jacket.
Looking round, I observed something else.
‘See that? The trap is still baited.’
Peter drew madly on his cigarette and squinted at me through its cloud of blue smoke. He fidgeted like someone anxious to prevaricate.
‘Maybe he used meat to catch wild boar? Perhaps that’s what tore off his clothes?’
‘Well, h’m, but is that likely?’
‘Boar have been seen eating sheep in other parts of the county. Mostly they scavenge on road-kill, but very rarely have they been known to attack people with dogs.’
‘Poor fellow. But is he my prowler,’ I asked, ‘because someone dumped a stag’s head on Lord Hart’s doorstep this morning. Naturally, we want to know who. Footprints brought me this far.’
‘Some might say that’s what poachers do in a quarrel.’
‘Would you?’
‘Who poaches people? O’Leary and his lordship haven’t seen eye to eye ever since he was caught selling deer carcases for a hundred pounds a time to local restaurants.’
‘So I’ve heard.’
‘Then you’ll know he was not a good person.’
‘Well, I suppose his dispute is my dispute now. Worse luck. I’m the new owner of this estate.’
I leaned low to offer him my hand. He extended his long, thin neck tortoise-fashion as he raised his chin from the woolly rim of his Arran sweater. Blowing smoke between us, he clasped his bloody fingers on my glove. Really, by now I was in urgent need of a cigarette myself.
‘You that lawman everyone’s talking about?’
‘In a way, yeah.’
‘Sorry we had to meet in such adverse circumstances.’
As it was, O’Leary’s skewered face pointed impossibly skywards. His mouth gaped after occasional snowflakes with parched blood-caked lips as though he were terribly thirsty.
‘Hadn’t we, you know, better lift the poor bastard down.’
‘I think we ought not to touch him,’ replied Peter.
‘On second thoughts, leave me out of it. Honestly, I was never here. No, really, I wasn’t. Right now, I don’t wish to be involved in something so hideously accidental. I’m leaving tomorrow, anyway.’
Peter ignored my hurried protest.
‘You looking for something?’ I asked, swallowing hard.
‘His hat. He always wore a big green hat with a feather trim, but I can’t see it anywhere.’
‘Did O’Leary say anything before he died?’
‘He muttered something about meeting the Devil.’
With that, I left Peter to ring for help on his phone. When a man had bad news to deliver he had best get safely away before any more trouble.
*
‘Sullivan O’Leary!’
The colour drained from Lord Hart’s cheeks. If he was disinclined to believe me at first, it wasn’t for want of evidence.
‘I believe I can say without a shadow of doubt that O’Leary was your intruder,’ I repeated, even as I propped my gun by the fire in the great hall. ‘Clearly he bore you a grudge. That trap might have been meant for you?’
I pulled off my black gloves and unbuttoned my coat. After the icy woods, the flames felt almost too hot on my dead white fingers. At that moment I saw blacken the mullioned windows the querulous darkness which had pursued me all the way from Chatcombe wood. The shadows scratched at the leaded panes as I delivered my verdict. It was the jackdaws again.
‘You meet anyone else?’ asked Lord Hart anxiously.
I told him what I thought. About the wild boar, too. To which he said nothing at first, only sank lower in his chair with a brooding, unsettled frame of mind. He stared at the fire like a man afraid to trust his own decision.
‘Post warnings all over the village. Tell people that something wild is loose in the woods. No one is to take any more stupid chances.’
*
If I deliberately went in the wrong direction when the police arrived, it was because I wanted to know how our trespasser had eluded notice quite so easily.
Frozen footprints led left through the graveyard to a slab of marble. Inscribed upon it in gold letters were a few words:
Treasured memories of Philip Jones 14.10.1964 - 21.11.2012. Aged 48.
Let Fate Do Her Worst. There Are Moments of Joy, Bright Dreams Of
The Past, Which SHE Cannot Destroy.
Whereas moles had left little mounds of earth elsewhere in the graveyard, here I found a whole tumult of subterranean activity had risen to the surface. Globules of light brown soil sat piled in little heaps on the grave where its contents had been turned inside out.
Nearby, two other headstones had been kicked clear of snow. Both Sally Jones 10.1.1937 – 7.5.1981 and Joseph Jones 8.2.1917 – 13.8.1982 had seen snow scratched from their inscriptions by someone’s claw-like fingers.
If nothing else, our visitor had done their best to call into question the dead’s right to some well-earned repose.
*
Soon the icy wind froze the tip of my nose. How it was that the countryside in winter was so much less bearable than the city, I hardly knew. And to think, a brolly had once sufficed. Loud in my head was Sara’s insufferable caterwauling. I’d had to sit her down in the kitchen, since Lord Hart had refused point blank to tell her about her father’s demise. Now no one appeared on the winding narrow road or looked out of the school.
It was, I had to remind myself, still the Christmas holidays.
Nor, as far as I knew, had there been any reports of a big cat or bear escaping from a circus or zoo. It begged the question of what had really befallen O’Leary in the woods. Of what he had been up to I had no real clue.
Otherwise nothing outwardly looked very different. A fussy little plaque on the wall of Yew Tree Cottage in the centre of the village boasted that it had once been its bake-house and laundry. At the far edge of habitation, a diesel generator throbbed somewhere among the sheds of Dowman’s Farm. Suddenly a dark-haired man who looked very Italian crossed the filthy yard on his way to a tractor. As he did so, he shouted me a loud ‘good morning’. A moment later a police helicopter skimmed the trees with a most appalling clatter. Its searchlight was tracking the edges of the fields most diligently.
Otherwise, to my own dubious progress it appeared indifferent.
Reassured, I returned the same way I had come, but after the farm I turned right down a very steep hill to cross and re-cross the little river Churn. Beyond lay Close Farm. By now I had left only a few posters to distribute. I left the swollen stream behind me and progressed back up the road. With its elegant Palladian portico set behind its high garden walls, the rectory was up for sale, its itinerant rector no doubt administering to an enlarged benefice to save money.
‘Now that an uncertain state of affairs has arisen there ought to be someone on hand to calm people’s feeling of shock and awe,’ I told myself. ‘They ought not to be left alone to disbelieve or suspect the very basis of their lives without some spiritual guardian in the aftermath of such a terrible scare. They should not be forced to admit without his help the most unsettling possibilities imaginable.’