Our order of various grades of dog-food was delivered that week by Quentin Cove – to Hannah’s distress, because it was yet another reminder of her Dougal’s absence, although she helped with the fetching and carrying. When the last bag was stowed in the store Quentin, at Beth’s invitation, took a seat in the kitchen. I joined them for coffee while the girls went back to work.
‘Taking it badly, is she?’ Quentin said. ‘I’m sore vexed for the lassie.’ I noticed the slip back towards the language of his childhood on the farm and took it for a sign that his concern was genuine.
‘She’ll get over it,’ I said. ‘The not knowing is the worst. Are you getting by without him?’
Quentin helped himself to more sugar and cream. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘We’re managing. It’s a quiet time of year. But, truth to tell, I’m glad to get back to running the farm. It only takes four men to keep the factory working and I’ve moved them around to cover for me. If it works out we’ll maybe leave it that way. That’s if young Dougal doesn’t come back,’ he added quickly.
‘Do you think he will?’ Beth asked him.
‘I’ve no way to tell. I saw him go off in yon wee car on Sunday morning. I thought he was maybe heading to see Hannah or some other lass – you know what these lads are – but he was wearing jeans and his working boots. He came back later to change his clothes.’ Quentin Cove paused and looked thoughtful. ‘Leastwise I heard his car – there was no mistaking the sound of it. I never needed to watch his comings and goings – he’s a worker, I’ll say that for him, so that I could always trust him to take time off to go beating or do his courting or whatever and I’d know that he’d make it up when it suited him. Did you ken that his cottage was broken into?’
‘The things people do!’ Beth said. ‘Do you suppose it was somebody who’d heard that Dougal was missing?’
‘That I don’t know. I doubt it. On Monday, when he didn’t show up for work, I took the spare key that I’d kept and went across to see had he maybe slept in or fallen ill. From outdoors it looked all right and tight, but the inside was all . . . all tapsalteerie and when I looked around I could see that a window had been forced. There was no sign of Dougal. That’s when I decided to report him missing. I’ll tell you this, between these four walls.’ Quentin lowered his voice. ‘I’m not wishing any ill on him, but I can do without his kind around the place. There!’ Looking rather pleased with himself, Quentin bit into one of Daffy’s rock cakes.
‘We know what you mean. If she wasn’t so heart-sore I’d say that’ – Beth paused and chose her words – ‘the best thing for Hannah would be not to see him again.’
Quentin nodded and changed the subject. ‘It didn’t put you out, not being able to train on my land?’ he asked me. ‘I’ve seen you on Lincraigs.’
I said that we were getting by. But Ardrossie had been a valuable standby when rabbits were in short supply around home and I wondered whether another arrangement would be possible. ‘Who did you let the rough shooting to?’ I asked.
To my surprise, Quentin showed a trace of embarrassment. ‘You’d not know him,’ he said. ‘A lad from Anstruther. Maybe I can make it up to you. They’re nearly finished felling on Gifford Hill. That’s where most of the rabbits have been coming from. One of my factory staff has ferrets, but many of the rabbits are lying out and some of the buries have more holes than you’d believe. I want them cleared out and the factory could make use of the meat. How do you fancy shooting over ferrets on Saturday?’
‘Very much,’ I told him. Several of the dogs could still do with steadying to rabbits, while those dogs being trained as workers rather than field triallers would be the better for experience of working around ferrets. It was sometimes an extra selling point.
‘I’ll have him phone you.’
‘I didn’t know that Gifford Hill was yours,’ I said.
‘It belongs to Marksmuir. It’s been let to Ardrossie since my granddad’s time, but it’s not good land and on a north slope so I leased it for the forestry. If I’d known that I was leasing it as a nursery for the bloody rabbits,’ Quentin said, ‘begging your pardon, Mrs Cunningham, I’d have let them keep their money and gone on growing neips for cattle on it. Which is what my father aye did.’
Later that day, when I was helping with the preparation of the main meal, I took up a handful of the small cubes. Then it came to me that what I was holding in my hand might contain a trace of Dougal Webb’s mortal remains and I dropped them hastily. But dogs must be fed and I had had no great fondness for young Dougal. I let the evening feed go ahead. No such thought had occurred to Hannah but I noticed that Daffy only took up the cubes with the scoop provided for the purpose.
Chapter Five
Henry elected to come with me to Gifford Hill. On the Saturday, he lent a hand with an early session of feeding and walking. As soon as we were sure that Beth (helped by Sam), with Hannah and Isobel, could easily cope, we loaded four dogs and both guns into my car and set off, right on time. It had rained in the night but had turned into the sort of day that makes comfortable dressing problematic – warm in the sunlight but with a cold breeze when the wandering clouds hid the sun, and with a threat of showers. It would be cold up on the hill but warm work climbing it.
Forestry work on Gifford Hill was finished. The ground was now bare except for the few outcrops of rock which had previously only been visible as gaps in the conifers. Even the stumps had been pulled and heaped on the huge bonfire that was now reduced to dross and ashes and charred lumps of root, but smoke or steam still drifted into the cold air. Gifford House, home to Mrs Macevoy of dubious reputation, stood boldly out of the landscape, its walled garden an oasis in the desert.
Jack Gilchrist, Quentin Cove’s employee and ferreter, was waiting beside a motorbike and sidecar in the road below. He had only been a voice on the phone to me, but the moment I saw him I remembered encountering him more than once when he had been acting as a beater on various shoots, usually in the company of Dougal Webb. He was a cheerful, tubby little man. With his big ears and prominent teeth he looked rather like a rabbit himself, so that I half expected his ferrets to take him by the neck; but they were well-kept little animals, very affectionate but very much under his thumb. He had already worked the small, isolated burrows and a dozen paunched rabbits were cooling behind one of the few surviving sections of hedge to prove it.
A common error would have been to hunt the spaniels first, pushing any lying-out rabbits underground ready to be bolted again by the ferrets. But Jack had found, as I had over the years, that unless you can spare the time to wait for anything up to a couple of hours before putting in the ferrets, the rabbits may prefer to face the ferrets underground rather than the danger above. Even the sound of shots would be less of a deterrent. If a ferret killed underground we might have been faced with a lengthy lie-up. We decided to walk quietly up to the largest outcrop, which was also the highest, and work our way down. That way, the bag would only be carried downhill. We would then finish with a hunt in the open.
The hillside had originally been planted ridge-and-furrow and then had been further disturbed by the rooting out of the trees, so that the ground had been left in a wildly uneven state. Rather than make frequent trips to the bottom and back up over the difficult going, I put leads on all four dogs and took them along. Each caught the scent of many rabbits and became eager to start the hunt, but they were there to learn restraint.
The rocky outcrops had been fragmented by age and weather. The rabbits had entries or exits through long fissures as well as between and below fallen boulders. Jack’s purse-nets could never have attempted coverage. At each outcrop, I found a secure place for the screw-in anchorage and attached the dogs. The ferrets went in and I had time to glance at the spectacular view over the sparse chessboard of winter countryside. When the rabbits began to spurt out, Henry and I attended to their slaughter. For all his advancing years, Henry was still an excellent shot. Then I would free one dog and do the picking-up and out
would come our knives for paunching.
The operation began well. The dogs soon realized that this was not an occasion for riotous behaviour and performed rather better than adequately. The ferrets came back to hand with very few lie-ups. Although at that time of year the rabbit population would have been at its lowest, our game-bags were getting heavy.
It was too good to last. We were just finishing at the third of the rocky outcrops, which happened to be nearest to the house, when a stout female figure emerged through a side-gate in the garden wall and hobbled towards us in unsuitable shoes, picking her way as best she could over the bumps and hollows. From Daffy’s description of her hair, which was red and so lacquered as to look synthetic, I could guess her identity.
Mrs Macevoy was in a state of high indignation. We were disturbing the tranquillity for the sake of which she lived so far from civilization. What was worse, we were doing it at the weekend and close to her house. We were upsetting her cats. She was going to call the police. When I had managed to convince her that our activities were perfectly legal, she switched ground. We were being cruel.
That was too much for Henry. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘the rabbits would not live for ever and they do not die in their beds. Which of the methods open to them do you think they would prefer? Myxomatosis? Starvation? Freezing to death? Or being taken by a fox or one of your cats?’ Mrs Macevoy emitted a squawk of protest but Henry rolled on. ‘Do you realize, madam, that more wildlife is killed by domestic cats than by the entire field sports fraternity, and more painfully? So who, then, is being cruel?’
For some reason that defies analysis, when Henry speaks people listen. Mrs Macevoy listened with her mouth open. Whether she was convinced, whether she even took in Henry’s argument, I had no way of knowing, but I thought that she was going to turn on her unsuitable heel and totter back to her house.
Jenny (short for Gentian) had been helping with the pick-up, but while I was distracted she had started to hunt. She was always a fast mover. (Beth called her Twinkletoes.) She was also a friendly little dog. When in ebullient mood and if she felt that she was getting less than her fair share of attention, she would pluck at one’s trouser-leg as she went by, as if to say, Look at me – aren’t I beautiful?
Jenny chose that moment to appear from nowhere and to give a tug at Mrs Macevoy’s skirt as she passed by. It was no more than a friendly gesture, but the woman chose to let out a screech. ‘Your dog attacked me!’ she announced. ‘Look!’ She exhibited a very small hole near the hem. It looked to me like an old cigarette-burn – Mrs Macevoy’s fingers were stained yellow – and I was sure that Jenny, who had never left behind a visible tooth-mark, had only touched the other side of the garment.
‘Rubbish!’ I said.
She rounded on Henry and Jack. ‘You saw?’
They shook their heads. Jack was grinning.
Her face flamed. ‘Get out of here, you bloody men. I’m going to call the police.’
I am not proud of what came next. I can only say that Mrs Macevoy had exhibited all the traits that I most despise, in particular uttering the word men as though it was a dire insult. I can only put up with stupidity allied to bad manners for just so long. ‘How much attention do you think the police will pay to a woman who shopped her own husband in order to sell the story to the gutter press?’ I asked politely. Evilly inspired, I added, ‘Isn’t he due out soon?’
She turned white and then back to red. Without another word, she turned and made off back towards the house, stamping her way so that she almost fell.
‘Not a nice woman,’ Henry said without lowering his voice. He shot a sly glance at me. ‘But perhaps she feels that she is politically correct.’
Henry knew that the words politically correct are to me as a red rag to a bull. In any other context a reference to politics implies a whole field of deviousness and expediency. There would have been no need to devise such a phrase as political correctness except as a more acceptable way of saying I know it’s rubbish but I want it to be true so you must believe it anyway. Outdated attitudes were changing without the extra leverage, and the label of political correctness was now too often being used to damn attitudes which had been adopted because the experience of a thousand generations had shown that they were what the majority wanted, rightly or wrongly, to believe. But this was not the time for a dialectic argument. Some day soon, I would take my verbal revenge. ‘Shall we get on?’ I suggested coldly.
‘In due course,’ Henry said, grinning. ‘We seem to have another visitor.’
I followed his eyes. The tiny but indomitable figure of Mrs Dundee was struggling up the uneven slope. I greeted her arrival warmly and introduced her to Henry – partly to give her time to recover her breath, but I had genuinely liked the old thing.
‘Would you like another rabbit?’ I asked her. She looked relieved and I guessed that that had been the object of her climb. ‘Take a brace,’ I said. ‘In fact, two brace.’
‘You hae plenty?’
‘Far more than we need,’ Jack said.
I noticed that her cheery smile had vanished, leaving only the goblin looks. Had she been so haggard when we met not long before? I thought not. She was holding a plastic carrier-bag which gaped open, exposing several handfuls of kale and a turnip which had been partially nibbled by sheep. She saw my glance at it and bit her lip. ‘I lost my morning job,’ she whispered. ‘My afternoon work doesna pay. And I’m no old enough for the pension just yet. My Jimmy will see to’t when he gets hame soon frae the sea. Meantime, I maun just get by.’
‘You don’t have to explain,’ I said. ‘But have you been to the Benefit Office? Nobody’s left to starve, these days.’
‘I’ll no tak charity.’ The occasional rabbit between friends, it seemed, was neither here nor there. ‘My Jimmy left me some money when he was last ashore, but he didna hae muckle and it’s a gone.’
‘Please take this to tide you over.’ I found that I only had a fiver on me so I handed that to her. Henry matched it. She thanked us gravely and turned away, back down the hill.
‘I didn’t know,’ Jack said simply. ‘But I’ll see she’s never short of a few rabbits till her boy gets back.’
I brought Jenny back under command and we finished gathering the slain. When these were paunched and the guts disposed of down a rabbit hole, Henry’s game-bag and mine would have been more than filled. We were about halfway back to the car but none of us fancied repeating the stiff climb if it could be avoided.
‘Hang on a moment,’ Jack said. ‘We need a pole.’
Henry and I gladly took seats on the stones and rested our wearying legs. Getting about on that sort of surface was as tiring as twenty times the distance on level ground. Jack was quite right. A heavy load of rabbits is most easily carried slung on a pole between two men. The foresters had done their work well and there was very little in the way of loppings left lying, but Jack was heading for the area where the bonfire had been. I watched him idly and saw him single out a long branch from the partly burnt fringe, produce a large knife and begin to trim off the twigs. Then he stopped and stared. He turned, sheathed his knife and hurried back towards us.
He arrived breathless and shaking. ‘There’s a dead man,’ he said, gasping. ‘Leastwise, I think there is. It’s that brunt you can hardly tell.’
Although the unexplained disappearance of Dougal Webb had kept the possibility of a dead body in our minds for several days, now that the possibility had become a probability our first reaction was disbelief. Henry and I wanted to see for ourselves.
We left the guns and our heavy game-bags with the ferret-box and I sat the dogs to guard them. ‘Probably some farmer’s way of disposing of a dead sheep,’ Henry said as we hopped and staggered across the uneven ground.
‘I hope so,’ said Jack shakily, ‘but I don’t think it.’
The bonfire had been built on a relatively flat area, from all the otherwise wasted limbs and roots and loppings. The heat met us twenty yards off. Fr
om among the smells of warm earth and conifer logs I scented others and I judged that it had been fired by the most usual method – paraffin and a few old tyres. There was also another smell, familiar but so out of place that it was like a blow to the face. The centre of the fire was now a hump of white ash and charred roots and around the edges was a ring of unburned twigs and branches. Part-way in from one edge was the body.
It was certainly dead. I could understand Jack’s uncertainty. The body was curled and partly consumed, almost indistinguishable from the scorched and shapeless roots, but it had once been human. I had seen burnt bodies during the Falklands War and I was in no doubt of it.
Henry was in agreement. ‘No point standing here gawking,’ he said. ‘We’d better call the police.’
Jack looked unhappily in the direction of Gifford House. ‘I’ll not go knocking on that woman’s door and asking to use her phone,’ he said firmly, ‘and that’s definite.’
‘No need.’ Henry patted his pockets until he found what he wanted. ‘Thought so,’ he said. ‘I have my mobile with me. There should be a passable signal up here. Nine-nine-nine, you think?’
‘It’s hardly an emergency,’ I said. ‘He’s not going anywhere. But it’s the only number I can remember offhand. Should we be getting back to the dogs?’
Henry had already keyed in the number. He made a brief report to the police before answering me. ‘We’re warmer here,’ he said.
Jack was more practical. ‘They rabbits should be hung up or laid out to cool,’ he suggested. He looked at Henry. ‘You can bide in the warmth if you like.’
But Henry came with us. He admitted to me later that his eyes had been constantly drawn to the gruesome sight among the ashes and he had no wish to be left alone with it. We decided that the police would prefer us to disturb the whole scene as little as possible, so instead of carrying the rabbits down to the car we laid them out to cool and then found ourselves the best seats we could among the bumps and hollows.
Twice Bitten Page 7