‘Just a death rattle,’ Blake says, a tremble of laughter in his voice indicating his fright and relief.
There’s silence again, another frozen moment in which, this time, it feels like everybody’s too scared to re-engage in case they precipitate some new shock. Then Beansy comes to the rescue.
‘Venison tonight, folks?’
II
The light is beginning to fade as Sendak takes a walk through the main building, running off his mental checklist item by item. The bedrooms are clean and prepared, folded linen and fresh towels piled up on each bunk in a neat and compact stack next to the pillows. In every corridor, the floor tiles are freshly waxed and have been polished until they are partially reflective, giving a satisfying squeak as they come into contact with the rubber tread of his boots. The shower cubicles are all operational: no leaks, no drips, no busted safety thermostats on the twist-grip controls. Hot water is issuing on demand from every faucet. The heads are spotless, spare paper rolls in every stall. The tampon and sanitary-towel vending machines are fully supplied, and those new high-speed hand-driers working just as the rep said they would, which is convenient, as it saves him tracking the guy down and killing him in his sleep like Sendak said he would.
He makes a second circuit of the dormitory blocks, ensuring all of the fire doors in the link corridors are closed but swinging freely, and that none of the fluorescent tubes are blown or flickering. He replaced all of the batteries in the smoke detectors last month, and tested the fire alarm two days ago.
He checks the conference rooms and the library, his route then taking him through the reception area, where he makes sure all redundant notices have been removed from the pinboard and the water fountains are running free. Dollars to doughnuts they’ll be clogged with chewing gum within twenty-four hours, but the best you can do is deal with the shit you can control. Sendak then proceeds to the games hall, where he goes into the store cupboard and tests the circuit-breakers, then into the main dining room, finishing up at the kitchen, where Mrs McKenzie is slicing mushrooms on an island worktop. Sendak looks at the containers full of chopped onions, peppers and tomatoes, ranged in front of her chopping board, and allows himself a hidden smile of satisfaction at her unfailing work-rate. Her husband dropped her off but twenty minutes ago. She is the human Cuisinart. She’d have dinner for forty prepared before Mr McKenzie made it back to their home in the village of Tornabriech, just twenty miles away.
‘I don’t know how that man of yours survives without you when you come here for three days at a time,’ Sendak tells her.
Mrs McKenzie’s chopping action doesn’t slow or skip a stroke as she replies.
‘Donnie?’ she says with a chuckle. ‘I’m only worried he gets done for speeding in his haste to get home. Three nights of take aways and seventy-two hours’ uncontested possession of the TV remote. It’s when I’m around that he struggles.’
‘Now, I know that ain’t true. Man cannot live on Sky Sports and Indian takeout alone.’
‘Has anyone done a controlled trial? I’m sure Donnie would sign up. When are our guests due to arrive, incidentally?’
‘Any time soon. What you got planned for them?’
‘I thought we’d dice them and make them into pies, as usual. If you handle the slaughter, I’ll do the actual boning and preparing the meat.’
‘Okay, but I think you should have a back-up plan. The authorities are gonna start to get suspicious if they keep sending us schoolkids and all they ever get back is pie.’
‘Ach, Sergeant, you’re never done worrying. But you do have a point, so I was thinking veggie lasagne instead.’
‘Sounds good to me.’
Sendak makes his way outside through the dining room’s external doors and begins a circuit of the outbuildings, taking an anticlockwise route around the compound. Shit, still calling it that. He used to think he would have to come up with a different way of thinking about the place, shake off the military terminology he couldn’t help applying. That was before he accepted that after fifteen years a soldier, he’d be thinking in military terminology until his grave, so he may as well make it work for him. Hence he got comfortable letting everybody call him Sarge, and hence his playing in character a little sometimes for the paying guests.
He goes first to the barn, where he lets his horses, Loki and Mercury, eat from his hands for a few minutes, before tidying away some spilled bales and securing the ladder to the storage gallery. Then he takes the long route, along the gravel path, past the sports field and up the hill to the generator shed, where he makes sure it’s fuelled and ready to kick in should the mains power drop out for any reason. Next, he makes his way back to the side of the main building, where he reads the dials on the twin oil tanks and ascertains that the fuel reserves stand at roughly what he estimated, confirming that there are no leaks, and pleasingly that there has been no further over-burning since he made those recent adjustments to the heating systems.
Finally, he clears a few broken branches from the ‘courtyard’, as he likes to think of it - it’s really just a clearing, hemmed in on three sides by trees and on the fourth by the front of the main building - which gets used as a car park by visitors, or a turning circle for buses and fuel trucks. Then he trots up the wooden steps on to one of the pine decks that flank the entrance, where he leans against the handrail and watches the sun dip towards the trees atop Ben Trochart.
Everything is in order, as he knew it would be. Nothing overlooked, as it never is. Doesn’t stop him checking, though; nothing ever will. Staying fastidiously in command of the shit you can control is never a failsafe against the shit you can’t, and nor, in his experience, is it any consolation later on, but what choice does he have? In Sendak’s world, the most he can do and the least he can do are exactly the same.
The low rays scatter red light, giving a rich tint to the colours of the forest and the hillside for a short while before they will all be turned to charcoals and blacks. He looks at his watch, which he has been relieved to observe has continued to work normally throughout the day.
It’s only just gone four. It’ll be fully dark by five. There’s no cloud, no wind either, and a crispness to the air. Gonna be cold tonight, cold and clear, and he likes that. Not cold like back home in the Chicago winter, scary-dangerous cold: just cold, the kind of cold that makes the lights from the building take on a welcome glow, makes the food taste better, the beds feel snugger. Yeah. Nights like this, weekends like this: this is what he loves about this place; this is why he stayed.
Somewhere in the distance he hears the grumble of an engine and the squeak of air-brakes. He smiles. Nobody ever appreciates how much that hairpin bend sign ain’t kidding. That’ll be the bus, then.
Their destination suddenly appears through a break in the trees beyond another stomach-lurching bend. It’s one of those places you simply cannot see until you are upon it, and as Kane has seen only one road sign to indicate its proximity, it makes for a somewhat unheralded, if still very welcome, end to the journey. Not having a clue how much of the drive remained had made the last ten minutes feel like an hour. The kids had calmed to a numbed and dozy near-silence. Their early high spirits would have died a natural death anyway, but the fire, airborne ex-deer and close-skirting-of-a-five-hundred-foot-plummet-to-certain-death combo had fairly put their collective gas at peep.
The driver had, with a credible display of conviction, expressed his intention to stop the coach and abandon the journey at Inns of Cluach, the nearest village after what young Adnan had described as ‘the Volvo-to-venison interface’. Surveying the considerable interior damage, including the loss of the skylight through which a large dead animal was now jammed, he threatened to declare the vehicle unfit for purpose, though Kane could only imagine what manner of vehicle the driver did consider fit for the purpose of transporting this shower right then.
There was a very tense little interlude, with the coach parked in the village’s disused petrol station and the kids di
sgorged into a snaking gaggle precariously close to the roadside, throughout which the continuation of their whole trip remained very much in the balance. The scales were tipped back in their favour by a combination of factors.
One was the intervention of Guthrie, who appealed to the guy’s sense of duty and obligation in his own inimitable fashion: ie piously sincere to the point of aggression. He explained, quietly and at length, the tragic circumstances underlying why the St Peter’s kids were on this trip, and in a gambit that evidenced either remarkable audacity or a complete lack of self-awareness, beseeched the driver to therefore be that bit more forgiving of their behaviour than he would normally consider it reasonable to ask.
The other factor was the intervention of Kirk Burns in climbing unbidden on to the roof and hauling down the dead deer, at a stroke removing the aspect of the vehicle’s condition that the driver was least looking forward to addressing. Kane wouldn’t claim that this was of itself decisive, but it certainly made it easier for the driver to do the right thing.
They had to leave poor Prancer at the side of the disused forecourt. Given the driver’s very evident squeamishness, Kane thought it wise not to relay the irrepressibly insensitive Beansy’s less-than-half-joking suggestion that they ‘bung it in with the luggage and eat the fucker when we get to Fort Trochart’.
His mate Deso had then, in Kane’s opinion, gone one better.
‘Fuck that,’ he argued. ‘Stick its heid on the engine grille, then write in its blood up the side of the bus: “St Peter’s Gleniston - Don’t fuckin’ mess”.’
The coach comes to a halt in a wide clearing before a pine-fronted, one-storey modern construction, a fibreglass signpost at the head of a short path identifying it as the Fort Trochart Outbound Facility. The sight of big double-glazed panes inset within expanses of interlocking nutty brown wood piques feelings of rich relief and pleasant surprise in Heather Ross. It’s not just school parties that come here, she remembers. When it’s not full of urban weans being acquainted first-hand with what mountains and rivers look like, it probably plays host to City types learning how to pretend they don’t hate each other for the sake of corporate morale, and those people don’t like their back-to-nature experiences too authentically Spartan.
She had been braced for faded seventies functionary brutalism, envisaging flakingly aged Formica fittings, off-white NHS-style bed-sheets and a sour smell off the shower curtain. Instead, this place has something of the Scandinavian woodland idyll about it, though she guesses it might be pushing it to expect outdoor hot tubs and a fridge full of gravadlax. A moment’s fantasy, picturing herself lolling in a wooden tun beneath a glorious tumult of bubbles as steam escapes into the cold clear air of a pine-scented glade, is brutally punctured by the image of Beansy and Marky sploshing in either side of her, making their own flatulent contributions to the froth, and trying to see her tits through her bathing costume.
Never lose sight of what you’re doing here, she reminds herself - not even for a second.
The coach’s doors open with a hiss, which sounds like the pressure release they’re all feeling from being stuck inside it so long. Kane gets out of the double seat and steps aside to let her be the first off the bus. Guthrie, meanwhile, steps into the aisle and starts barking out instructions.
‘I want you all to wait for the driver to empty your bags from the luggage hold, and then once you’ve retrieved your belongings, I want you to form an orderly line outside the premises.’
Heather climbs down the stairs and feels a restorative drop in temperature. The air is still and cold and smells quite deliciously of pine. After several hours of diesel fumes, over-applied body spray and recycled farts, it’s so refreshing it’s almost like she’s drinking it. She takes a couple of big, deep lungfuls, watching the wisps of her breath linger in the failing light before evaporating. Then she walks around the side of the vehicle and faces the building.
There’s a man standing on a raised area of decking, short and black, elbows rested on a wooden balustrade, casting an evaluative gaze towards the coach. He stands up straight and begins walking as soon as he sees her. He’s wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt though it must be about two degrees, and despite the casualness of his attire, something about him quietly and un-pretentiously states ‘military’. She has to revise her impression as he approaches, because the nearer he gets, the taller he appears. He’s not huge, maybe about five-ten, but the proportionate effect of his stocky build made him appear shorter from a distance. There is a thin scar snaking from in front of his ear around to the back of his neck, less obvious on his skin than where it carves a passage through his shaven hairline.
‘I’m Sendak,’ he says, extending a firm and taut brown hand.
‘Heather. Heather Ross.’
‘Welcome to Fort Trochart. You guys had an interesting trip?’
Heather glances back at the coach. She can’t see the top of it here on the ground, but is guessing he had a different view from up on the decking. She also guesses he doesn’t miss much.
‘A fire, a minor crash and a woodland fauna fatality. Welcome to St Peter’s.’
Guthrie is standing in the centre of the reception area, holding up a sheet of A4 paper.
‘Now, just everybody hold your horses. I’ve drawn up a room allocation list, so I want you all to wait until you hear who you’re rooming with, then do not proceed until everyone in your group is—’
As soon as they hear this, the kids charge purposefully past him towards where Sendak just indicated the bedrooms to be located, wielding bags and rucksacks to buffet each other out of the way. Guthrie is like King Canute, being swamped by the waves.
‘Listen, come back this minute,’ he demands, with a conspicuously diminishing faith in the chances of this happening.
Heather sends a roll-eyes amused look towards Blake, seeking him as a confederate. Blake acknowledges it with a bashful smile, but feels uncomfortably exposed in doing so. He’s reluctant to be seen to undermine Guthrie, and tends to be far more obedient and deferential towards him than the kids or his staff have ever been. The deputy head just invests so much respect and authority in Blake - neither of which he feels he is due - that he feels obliged to repay it in kind; it’s the least he can do by way of acknowledgment and apology for not being the kind of priest Guthrie would like him to be. What’s really putting him on the spot, though, is that neither does he want to rebuff Heather, especially not by coming across as boring Father No-Nonsense.
If it had been Kane, he could have pretended not to see, or even batted it back as another instance of his old friend trying to get him into trouble. Kane knows he’s not Father No-Nonsense; in fact, it’s what else Kane knows about him that has them going fifteen rounds every so often. Heather is different, though. He’s only known her since he became school chaplain, and in that time hasn’t had many opportunities to let her find out what he’s really like beneath the dog collar and beyond the altar. Why he should care so much about this is, of course, the source of a whole other kind of anxiety; one he doesn’t like to think about, but one he has of late spent an increasing amount of time not thinking about.
Kane, who is among the last to get inside with his bag, observes Guthrie’s futile entreaties and places a gentle hand on his shoulder.
‘You’d be easier herding cats, Dan,’ he says breezily. ‘Just leave them to it. Fight the fights you can win.’
‘I’ve allocated these groups with some considerable thought, Stewart,’ Guthrie argues. ‘Best to keep certain individuals apart.’
‘Aye. That’ll work,’ Kane replies with a chuckle.
‘You won’t be laughing if the only bed left for yourself is in a room with young Master Connor.’
Kane catches sight of ‘Master Connor’ amid the throng bustling through the reception area. His first name is Stephen, but even the staff - Guthrie excepted - have been calling him Deso since about second year. He and Philip ‘Fizzy’ O’Dowd are burping loudly in each other’
s faces as they proceed, cans of Irn-Bru and Vimto having supplied the ammunition.
Kane promptly grabs the list from Guthrie’s hand.
‘Come on, everybody, you heard Mr Guthrie. Hold your horses, there’s an allocation plan.’
Blake smiles, knowing this is pure theatre from Kane. He glances to Heather again, reckoning this constitutes safer ground for sharing a joke, but it seems she didn’t get it. She’s looking askance towards the ongoing scramble down the corridor, clearly wondering what trials the sleeping arrangements may have in store.
‘Don’t sweat it,’ says Sendak with a grin. He’s leaning against a wall, sculpted arms folded against his equally sculpted chest, his back flat to the upright to make room and let the last of the stampede pass. Most of the kids have squeezed themselves into the corridor, only a few stragglers bunched up behind the bottleneck in reception. ‘There’s separate accommodation for the adults. Individual rooms, higher spec. Our consolation for no longer being so blessed with youth.’
‘Is it in a remote part of the complex?’ Heather asks hopefully.
‘Indeed, at a greater distance than most nocturnal noise can travel.’
‘I’m already feeling like we’re in very good hands, Mr . . . sorry, I didn’t catch your surname.’
‘Sendak is my surname. For what it’s worth, my first name is Max, but that’s by the by.’
‘Everybody calls you Sendak?’
‘No, but you guys can if you like. Everybody else calls me Sarge. Come on, I’ll show you to your rooms.’
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