by Guy Sheppard
‘That bell summoned the lord and lady of the manor to attend mass in church every Sunday. Its rings carry all the way to the house.’
‘So why should that matter?’
‘Because she’ll hear you.’
*
I sat up in bed and looked all about me. My tatty one-eyed greyhound heard it, too. It took a desperate man to feel ungrateful when a dog roused him from his slumberous torment. Someone was scraping a chair about or opening a drawer in the desk in the closet behind the red arras, I fancied. I sat with a sheet pulled close to my eyes, listened bravely. Next moment, my three-legged hound jumped off my counter-pane and trotted across the bare wooden floor as far as the curtains.
Heroically, later, I set off on tip-toe after him. I picked up a shoe and waved it about as a preliminary to action.
‘Who’s there?’ I cried.
Instead of a thief, the closet was deserted, a swan’s feather already returned to its inkwell on the desk’s otherwise bare surface. Yet dreaming was I not and absolutely was I not too drunk. One quill from a collection of old pens and paper had rolled on the floor, that’s all.
But who was I to deny that the dead ever wrote to the living?
15
That I was hungry I could not refute, yet recognised the want of something in the hunger. At first I paid it scant attention, nor did I check my stride. Shielding my murderous eyes from the glittery hoar-frost that had left everything so white and ghostly after the night, but egged on by the gleeful prospect of killing something, I stole along the edge of a stony field with my shotgun at my shoulder. Dark thoughts took wing in my head.
It was the aim of my walk to unburden myself of another, equally physical but pressing deficiency.
After O’Leary’s interment, I really should have left Coberley Hall immediately. Instead, here I was seeking to pinpoint a strange, sad lack which the after-effects of the funeral had infused in me – a seductive, pensive, but alluring deprivation whose attraction I should have been able easily to resist. I could only say that it had nothing to do with having missed breakfast.
I scanned the day’s clear blue sky ahead, all the better to decide where best to begin my rough shooting.
What more indubitable feeling of the power of life over death could there be than to hold a still warm bird killed by my own hand? What clearer proof?
‘Nevertheless, I am disappointed,’ I told myself, looking along both barrels at my first crow. ‘I cannot understand why it should be so incumbent on me to feel my wife is still alive when she is not. Like a hunger.’ Of course, after ten years of marriage any man might have been expected to be so affected by his loss as to sense, almost bodily, the absence of another in himself, but since coming to Coberley Hall I had begun to feel strangely sick to my stomach with excitement. Was I then literally incapable of digesting that I had watched her breathe her last?
No medium ever told me any different.
*
Death birds, people called them, but cocky, black harpies would have been more apt since those crows were soon on to my little game. The cheeky scavengers strutted about the frozen earth with ungainly hops just out of range.
As for rabbits, they were gone in a flash of their fluffy white tails.
I was feverishly ejecting two spent cartridges from my hot gun when I saw a familiar red Land Rover with a white roof turn my way onto the headland. Bumping about in the truck’s open back were the usual white plastic bags of grain, I observed, as the driver drove madly along. He was going from one feeding station to another around the edge of the field. It was Peter Slater.
Fancying myself as a man of the land, too, I hung my shotgun over my arm and strode casually but not unimportantly down the track to bid my fellow sportsman good morning.
‘Get in the truck.’
His shout was so horribly imperious that it was not unreasonable to suppose that he was talking to his dog, not me. As a result, it was a moment before I did what Prince did, obeyed and climbed into the cab.
Peter spat out his cigarette but kept hold of the door for me.
‘You shouldn’t go around scaring the birds like that, Mr Walker, I’m damned if you shouldn’t. There’s only one more shoot before the end of the season and that’s for the beaters. They won’t thank you for ruining their big day.’
‘Sorry, I’m sure.’
On my very own estate, it turned out, there was a rigid date about what to slaughter before and after. I would have to bag my melancholic crows some other time, it seemed.
‘We going somewhere?’ I asked, as the door slammed shut in my face.
‘You and I need to talk.’
‘What about?’
‘Sullivan O’Leary.’
*
A few seconds later we drove off at high speed. I could swallow the peremptoriness of his demand but not my pride. Hanging on to the loose door handle for the sake of my guide’s greater and more urgent mission, I gritted my teeth. With Prince on my lap and two paws in my groin, I rode on very bad springs at some sacrifice to my bladder.
‘Who lives there?’ I inquired when we sped by a bungalow at the top of the field.
Peter swung the Land Rover round a sharp corner. Then he stopped by a gate to look both ways at the lane.
‘Joseph Jones’s brother moved there after his premature retirement from the priesthood.’
There was always something gloomy about an abandoned building, I thought, as though the soul had been sucked out of it. But coming with this outwardly intact, although thoroughly empty home, was the uncomfortable suggestion of restless regret and unfinished business. It was the sight of all the ivy that had subsequently come to choke its honey-coloured chimneys, I supposed. I wanted to stop and tear it all down.
But not long was I allowed to stare.
Before I could peer past the fir trees at some rusty red barns and long wooden sheds within the gated yard, my impatient trucker roared off down the lane.
‘It’s a strange place for a priest to end up,’ I said, looking back.
Peter smiled.
‘Father O’Connell was in an unbalanced frame of mind when he holed up there. They say that he had an altogether stubborn inclination to disbelieve in the certainties of life and death. In the absence of full proof, he refused to believe that someone’s feelings entirely passed away with their body. Although of uncertain meaning, the character, truth and emotions of the deceased could live on after them, if only in the one who had last loved them most. In short, he doubted if the dead always died.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘The Vatican took exception to his heretical writings. The Church mistook his interest in the aftermath of death for something truly monstrous. But that’s another story. Right now I need to show you something.’
*
Peter’s bumptious behaviour did little to allay my feeling of having just been kidnapped. Any man who drove so recklessly with no consideration for his passenger’s coccyx did it not because he was strongly desirous to reach his destination, but to relieve the storm in his own head.
‘This it?’ I asked, as we skidded to a halt at the crossroads in the middle of Chatcombe Wood.
Least of all did I expect our chance meeting to evoke in my friend some grim compunction or otherwise useless pricking of his conscience. We were back at the scene of O’Leary’s tragic accident.
Peter lit a fresh cigarette.
‘After you left me with the corpse, Prince and I found more tracks in the snow, Inspector, I’m damned if we didn’t. I took a photograph to show you.’
With that, he reached in his pocket and brought out his phone. On its screen showed the bear-sized outline of heel and instep.
‘Are those claws or toes?’
‘O’Leary left a trail of spent cartridges among the fir cones and needles. No wild boar survives a man with a gun. He set his trap for something bigger.’
Since I was hearing something that I had already decided myself I had to be
forgiven for appearing ungrateful.
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because I’ve seen it before, years ago, Inspector.’
I looked him in the eye.
‘Yeah, no, I don’t know. I’m afraid you’re going to have to be a bit more specific. Come to that, why wait a whole week to tell me?’
‘Lord Hart would prefer it if I never told another living soul.’
‘So inform the police, not me.’
‘You are the police. I even think that is why George is determined to have you stay on in Coberley Hall.’
‘No he isn’t. Is he?’
‘Hear me out and judge for yourself.’
‘You talk as if you two share a secret?’
‘Doesn’t mean his lordship can force me to stay quiet now, does it? It’s been over thirty years.’
‘So tell me, why have you?’
*
‘It was a very hot August in ’79 when George invited me to visit Coberley Hall. I’d never stayed in the country before and so I didn’t know what to expect, but let me tell you, Mr Walker, nothing could have prepared me for the state of that house or him, I’m damned if it couldn’t.
‘Dressed in grubby black trousers – part of his school uniform, no less – he held a bloody rag to his freshly cut lip. He urged me to enter ever so quietly.
‘ “Sorry, old chap, but Pater’s in one of his moods.”
‘I’d first met George and his brother the year before at the local Grammar School. Two fresh-faced fourteen-year-olds, they had been transferred from a private college because their stepfather had decided that they were both a total waste of his money. In the beginning, I thought them country toffs with silly affected accents, but when George and I came to sit next to each other in Latin class we discovered that we both loved guns.
‘Upstairs, the house was filled with an odd afterglow. Each time I paused by a window to peer outside, my view was blocked by a thin white sheet that shut off the outside world with its dim translucence.
‘ “It’s on account of weed killer and insecticide spray off the field,” explained George in a hushed voice. “Pater suffers from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. His doctor has told him that he might not live another five years.”
‘We had to glide through the house like ghosts, which wasn’t easy when every bare floorboard creaked and groaned. We had to avoid offending Joseph Jones at work in his office. Passing from one shabby room to another, everywhere I looked was covered in cobwebs and dust.
‘ “Doesn’t your mum look out for you?” I asked, zipping up my new blue anorak right up to my chin because, despite being summer, the house felt horribly cold.
‘George licked his split lip.
‘ “Mater ran off with her lover a month ago, old boy. Pater’s been absolutely beastly about it since.”
‘ “But that’s not your fault.”
‘ “Just got to soldier on, old chap. That’s what I say. Had a bad effect on Philip, though.”
‘But all that was forgotten when we set foot in his bedroom. In the middle of a table stood a fully reconstructed skeleton of an animal.
‘ “Wow, what a monster!” I said.
‘ “Philip knows a cave where there are all sorts of bones.”
‘ “It looks like a dragon’s head.”
‘ “It’s a badger, stupid,” replied George proudly and began to articulate its jaws and claws. “See how it has all been wired back together.”
‘What surprised me most was how delicate all the bones looked, each poised in the same relative position as in life. He would have breathed his own breath into it if he could, Mr Walker. As it was, he used a drop of blood off his lip to smear the badger’s teeth with a semblance of being.’
*
Peter struggled to hold his shaky cigarette to his mouth. I feared for a moment that he might stop before he’d truly begun.
‘So Philip was a budding palaeontologist, too, was he?’ I asked.
‘Really, to me and everyone else, he was a bit of an enigma, Mr Walker, I’m damned if he wasn’t. I used to pass him in the school corridor on our way to and from biology classes but more often than not he would be laughing and talking to himself. Naturally such eccentricity did not go unnoticed. Other boys were soon saying that he was possessed by demons. But for his brother he was alone.’
‘Considered them inseparable, did you?’
‘I mean they lived in a world of their own.’
‘Go on.’
‘Once we had entered Chatcombe Wood George and I approached a line of poles. The fortified position was further strengthened by a ditch whose counterscarp we had to traverse before we came to its entrance. At the centre of the fort were the remains of a fire.
‘ “This is where Leslie the woodsman lived,” explained George. “He cut the underwood, stripped bark and dug holes for new trees. He did the ditching and hedging and maintained the ride for the lords of the manor just as the ‘woodward’ did for hundreds of years before him.”
‘ “Where is he now?” I asked.
‘ “He’s dead, but some nights he haunts this shed, I’m sure.”
‘Peering into the ruin’s entrance, I saw how someone had indeed recently attempted to make a bed from old faggots of brushwood among all the axes, spokeshaves and saws.
‘ “It’s a tramp, more likely,” I declared, dismissively.
‘ “Whoever it is, they are living wild in Chatcombe Wood.”
‘I looked around. Near the wooden shack stood a large steel tank sprouting weeds over a brick hearth that still contained wood ash and charred logs. Several fence posts, the last that Leslie had left to soak and simmer in creosote for days at a time, floated ready in their bath, as if he were about to return for them at any moment.
‘Suddenly a voice challenged us from among the trees.
‘ “Halt! Who goes there?”
‘ “It’s me, George.”
‘ “Password?”
‘ “The countess.”
‘I whirled round. Draped in a green blanket pierced with twigs and leaves and wearing a Grammar School cap adorned with bird bones, Philip held a homemade pike at the ready. Of course he looked absolutely ridiculous for a boy of fifteen but there was something about his wild, staring eyes that persuaded me to give him the benefit of the doubt. Rather than dismiss him as simply childish, I supposed that he was playing some sort of game to distract himself from trouble at home.
‘ “Who’s that with you?” he demanded.
‘ “You know Peter.”
‘Like his brother, Philip was wan and thin. His bright blue eyes shone in two saucers of dirt through his camouflage.
‘ “You bring father’s gun?”
‘ “No, why? Have you seen something?”
‘He barely responded. I had the impression that he was terribly disappointed not to be able to report anything substantive.
‘ “You’ve hardly been back to the house for days,” said George. “Have you even properly eaten anything?”
‘Philip shot us a glance that was neither confiding not trusting.
‘ “I’ve been busy making more bayonets – to get ready.”
‘ “I thought you said you hadn’t seen anything?”
‘At no time did the brothers really discuss what they were planning, they simply moved like animals through a terrain they knew like the back of their hand. I was the one who tripped, fell and scratched myself on long trailing brambles, I’m damned if I didn’t. Suddenly the view opened out and I could see pretty coloured Polo ponies grazing nearby on the next hill.
‘Philip led us to an old quarry.
‘ “Quickly, look for rocks. Not too large. Fossils make the best missiles,” he suggested with his eyes shining brightly.
‘ “I favour Devil’s toenails,” said George, suddenly warming to the task. “They sit in the palm of your hand like fat little marbles.”
‘Already Philip was clambering over old refrigerators and
rusty ploughs. He was looking to retrieve pieces of metal from what turned out to be a farmer’s illicit scrap heap.
‘ “Look here!” he declared, angrily. “That coil of wire that we put by last time is missing. I left it under that tyre.”
‘ “For sure, someone’s taken it,” agreed George.
‘Meanwhile Philip extricated a large, cast iron pot from a seemingly intact oven. He placed it on his head like a helmet.
‘ “Look,” he said, “I’m a Roundhead in Cromwell’s New Model Army.”
‘Half an hour later we marched back to the beech wood laden with spoils.
‘But it made no sense to return to our fort too soon so we deposited our finds by a newly felled tree and sat in a circle to confer.
‘ “See, this is how you make a bolas out of cloth and stones,” said Philip.
‘It was the first time that he had really acknowledged my existence.’
*
With that, Peter turned the key in the Land Rover’s ignition.
I did not expect him to break off his story quite so abruptly.
‘That it?’ I objected. ‘You hijacked me all the way here just to tell me how to catch rabbits?’
He frowned.
‘Not rabbits, Mr Walker. What began as a game became increasingly feverish and frantic.’
‘So, please, can you tell me what else there was to chase in Chatcombe Wood thirty-odd years ago?’
‘None of us quite knew. That was the thrill of it.’
‘You mean you chose to imagine something exciting to get you started?’
‘Or someone.’
‘Honestly? A manhunt?’
‘We set about tracking whoever it was who holed up in the woodsman’s shed at night.’
‘H’m, yeah, but that was just a tramp, surely?’
A frown became a scowl.
‘In our eyes he was a bogy man. Next minute we were on a heroic mission to rid the woods of some unbelievably evil ogre. We were Saint George in pursuit of the Dragon.’
‘But it’s not, like, you ever actually met a real bogy man.’
‘You misunderstand, Mr Walker, it was the monster in us we wanted. Nothing less would do.’
‘Okay, okay, yeah. But do we believe in monsters any more? No, literally, we don’t.’