by Mike Ripley
It was a parade ground voice, but it had been many years since Mr Campion had felt obliged to snap to attention.
‘I’m awfully afraid I am,’ he replied, a vacuous grin beaming out to meet the advancing man.
‘Then I’m your whipper-in, come to collect you on the orders of Mr Marchant. There’s some gear for you in the Land Rover and Gus has put a gun out for you down at the farm.’
The younger man offered his hand in what turned out to be a remarkably strong grip. ‘Name’s Fuller,’ he announced. ‘Simon Fuller. I believe you know my brother.’
‘I’ve met Mr Fuller,’ said Campion, ‘but only once and very briefly. I believe he won’t be joining us, or will he?’
‘No chance. Marcus is a big softy when it comes to guns and country pursuits in general which mean he misses out on what passes for the social scene around here.’
The junior Mr Fuller marched around the front of the Land Rover to the driver’s side. ‘Climb in, it’s open.’
Once settled in the passenger seat, Campion said: ‘So this shoot is on the social calendar locally?’
‘Not really, it’s just old Gus Marchant playing the generous land-owner to remind us poor serfs and peasants of our place. Still, that way you get a good mix of people – mostly locals and good honest sons of the Suffolk soil to boot – plus the odd outsider, or distinguished guest, such as your good self.’
‘Is it a big shoot?’ Campion asked as Fuller started the engine.
‘No, Gus Marchant always limits the numbers on Long Tye Farm shoots.’
‘So there will be nine guns this morning?’
‘That’s right,’ said Simon Fuller. ‘How did you know that?’
‘Just a wild guess,’ said Mr Campion gently.
Simon Fuller drove fast, flinging the Land Rover around the corners of the narrow lanes to the north of the village with gay abandon and a cheerful disregard for any traffic coming in the opposite direction. Mr Campion braced himself as best he could against the sharp metal frame of door and dashboard, and took solace in the thought that he felt slightly safer and marginally more comfortable than he had as a passenger in Eliza Jane’s sports car.
Fortunately the journey was a short one; and within a few minutes of leaving the relative metropolis of Lindsay Carfax, Fuller had turned sharply left off the lane and on to a gravel roadway lined by low hedges. Mr Campion had not flinched at the manoeuvre and had caught a fleeting glimpse of an old-fashioned finger-pointing signpost advertising the way ‘To Long Tye Farm and Saxon Mills ONLY’ – the last word in capital letters seeming to be more of a warning than a direction.
‘These Saxon Mills,’ said Campion casually, ‘would they be wind or water power? Did the Saxons – or the Angles for that matter – have windmills? I’ve a feeling they came later.’
‘No idea what you’re talking about, I’m afraid,’ said Fuller. Then, as if lecturing as platoon of fresh Territorial recruits: ‘Saxon Mills isn’t a mill; it’s a quarry where they used to take out chalk and flints. Not even that, these days, as quarrying stopped years ago. It’s just a hole in the ground of no interest to man nor beast except for maybe a few rabbits. It’s still on all the maps though.’
‘Wasn’t Saxon Mills the epicentre of your hippy invasion last year?’
Simon Fuller took his eyes off the road and stared at his passenger.
‘Where did you hear that?’
‘Actually, a very nice policeman told me,’ said Campion, returning his stare.
‘Well, I’d hardly call it an invasion,’ Fuller said huffily, returning his concentration to his driving. ‘It was just a bloody nuisance having the scruffy beasts hanging around the village. Nobody asked them to come and lie about the place, leaving litter and frightening the livestock. None of the dirty little buggers were from around here.’
‘Two of them died, didn’t they? From an overdose of drugs?’
‘Served them right,’ growled Fuller. ‘I had no sympathy for them then; I have none now. If you choose to live an anti-social life, you take the consequences.’
‘I rather got the impression,’ Campion said, watching the face of his driver carefully, ‘that your summer visitors were students on a working vacation and not really in the revolutionary vanguard trying to overthrow society.’
‘You didn’t have to put up with their noise and their mess and their … lewdness … if that’s a proper word.’
‘A perfectly good one; and Anglo-Saxon as it happens.’
Simon Fuller again concentrated on his passenger rather than the road, fortunately devoid of traffic, ahead but this time with an expression of mild puzzlement.
‘I was brought up to respect my elders and be polite at all times, but I have to say, Mr Campion, that you strike me as an odd cove and not the sort that usually gets an invitation to one of Gus Marchant’s shoots. What on Earth is your connection to Lindsay Carfax?’
‘Slim, if not tangential. I have a wayward niece who lives here and whilst my car undergoes some serious reconstructive surgery in the local garage, my visit has been extended though not, I hope, indefinitely.’
‘Your car is in the Shermans’ garage for repairs?’ Fuller let out a chortle as he changed down the gears and the Land Rover began to slow.
‘I was given to understand it was the only garage in Lindsay,’ Campion answered him.
‘Oh, it is, but don’t expect your car to be repaired this morning because Dennis and Clifford Sherman will be with us. All work at the garage stops when Gus Marchant has a shoot.’
‘They didn’t look like the country-sport types when I saw them,’ said Campion as the Land Rover pulled into the cobbled yard of a long, low, three-chimney farmhouse.
‘With Dennis – the father – it’s a social thing. He likes to be seen with the local gentry; in fact, he thinks it’s his right to be pictured alongside them, his family being a long-standing one in the village, though it didn’t stop his wife running off with a travelling salesman. I’ve heard him, in his cups in the Woolpack, say that Sherman was just as good a name as Marchant, or Spindler, or Webster or even Fuller and I think Gus indulges him. As for the son Clifford, that dumb ox just enjoys blasting away with a shotgun. I always stay upwind of him.’
The Land Rover juddered to a stop and then allowed itself several further spasms even after Fuller had turned off the ignition, as if it were a gun dog returning from a swim in a pond or river.
‘It looks like we’re the last ones to arrive,’ said Fuller and Campion followed his gaze across the farmyard to a congregation of half-a-dozen men wearing boots, padded coats and a variety of headgear ranging from a Russian Cossack fur to an American Trapper’s hat complete with earflaps, although the flat cap of the English country gentleman predominated. The men hovered around a trestle table on which stood a large white urn and a regiment of white china mugs, flanked by a row of gun butts and several boxes of cartridges. Slightly more disturbing than this laid-out arsenal was the fact that in among the ranks of the white mugs, which looked suspiciously like NAAFI issue crockery, stood two bottles of whisky and two of dark rum. ‘Let’s get your gear on,’ Fuller ordered, climbing out of the vehicle and marching smartly to the rear to open the back door.
As Campion joined him, he handed him a pair of wellingtons and one Barbour waterproof, while climbing into a second for himself and pulling a folded tweed cap from its pocket.
‘Everyone except me seems to have a hat,’ Mr Campion simpered foolishly. ‘I feel positively under-dressed.’
‘Thought of that,’ said Fuller reaching into the piles of clothing in the Land Rover. ‘Here we are. Gus put this in for you.’
Fuller handed him a deerstalker, which Campion took with an enthusiastic grin and slapped on his head.
‘How splendid! I’ve always wanted one of these.’
‘I tried one on once, for a bet,’ Fuller said dismissively, zipping his coat and turning away. ‘Made me look like a simpleton.’
Mr Campion straightened his new hea
dgear and said, quietly and to himself: ‘That’s just the look I was going for.’
In the throng around the gun table, Campion helped himself to a mug of coffee, which came in one flavour only – strong, stewed, sweet and filthy brown – but at least, he noted with relief, none of the shooters had succumbed to the temptation of fortifying their coffee with neat spirit. In his experience, gunpowder and alcohol rarely mixed successfully.
‘Filthy stuff,’ said Gus Marchant in greeting, toasting Mr Campion with his own white mug brimming with brown liquid, ‘but I got used to drinking it this way, first in the army and then at interminable parish council meetings, planning meetings, Highways and Byways committees even Mothers’ Union bun-fights. You’d have thought the Mothers’ Union could have brewed a decent cup of coffee, but it all came out like this muck so I grinned and bore it and now find it almost palatable. I see Simon has kitted you out sartorially, though I doubt you’d ever make it as a pin-up in Country Life. I’ve put out a gun for you, one of my Berettas, so I know it won’t blow up in your face.’
‘That is more than kind.’
‘Not at all. Actually, I prefer to have people use my guns. Some of the locals turn up with fowling pieces and blunderbusses from God knows when, which terrify me let alone the wildlife. One old farmhand once showed up with an old punt gun he could hardly lift and asked if I had some black powder and a pound of carpet tacks for ammunition!’
‘It’s good of you to put up with us,’ Campion said politely. ‘I’m sure you don’t have to.’
‘One has certain responsibilities and duties when one is the main land-owner in a small community,’ said Marchant, puffing out his chest. ‘Traditions have to be upheld and things are expected of one; it comes with the territory. There’s a phrase which is still used …’
‘Obliging Nobbles,’ chirped Mr Campion.
‘What?’
‘Oh pardon the schoolboy humour. It’s how I was taught to translate Noblesse Oblige by a very irresponsible French master many, many years ago; in fact so long ago, France was probably still called Gaul and divided into three parts.’
Augustine Marchant stared at the odd, bespectacled and deerstalkered figure before him and cleared his throat loudly.
‘Er … well … er … yes, that’s the sort of thing I mean. There are some things one just has to do in a rural community when one owns most of the land and, in any case, an organised shoot like this cuts down on the poaching.’
‘Noble, worthy and practical,’ Campion said sweetly, ‘and I am truly honoured to be invited along, though I doubt I will pose much of a threat to your herd of partridges – or whatever the collective noun for partridges is.’
‘Just enjoy yourself; that’s the main thing, old chap. If you bag anything for the pot, that’s a bonus. It’s the least we can do after what happened to your car.’
‘My dear Mr Marchant, you cannot possibly be blamed for the mindless vandalism of others.’
‘But I take it as an affront, Campion. It took place in the heart of our village and on my property. That makes it my business; that makes it personal. Now, let’s get you that gun.’
Their guns unloaded and broken open to prove it, the shooters moved off in single file down a muddy track running with the farmhouse and its kitchen garden on their left and a ploughed field of dark brown earth on the right. A bird’s eye view, Mr Campion thought, could mistake them for an infantry section moving up wearily up in to the front were it not for the cheerful banter being exchanged along the column. At its head, Gus Marchant discussed tactics over his shoulder with Simon Fuller, whilst other voices, which Campion faintly recognised from the bar at the Woolpack, agreed that a morning’s shooting at Long Tye was infinitely preferable to a day at work or entered into a debate on whether partridges were best hung for two or three days before cooking.
Behind Campion, the Sherman father and son marched in silence apart from the occasional unsettling giggle from the young giant Clifford at nothing in particular. At the gun table, the Shermans had acknowledged Campion’s presence, though with little grace; or at least Sherman Senior had whilst his son, wearing an army surplus parka which made him look like a criminally minded grizzly bear, merely stared and grinned inanely.
‘Ah, Mr Campion, your car’s coming along nicely,’ Dennis Sherman had greeted him. ‘We’re just waiting for some parts to come from Ipswich, so there’s not much we can do this morning.’
‘As long as things are in hand,’ Campion had said neutrally.
‘Oh they are, they are,’ Sherman had said with something of a sneer. ‘There’s nothing at all for you to worry about – especially not with Gus Marchant picking up the bill.’
At his side, his son tried and failed to supress a snort of laughter.
‘I would hate to think that Mr Marchant’s generosity has been mistaken for a carte blanche,’ Campion had replied sternly, though he felt that the deerstalker he was wearing did not exactly add to the air of gravitas he was trying to achieve.
‘I’m not sure what you mean, Mr Campion.’ Sherman’s tone had wavered from drunken sailor belligerence to Uriah Heap humble. ‘Mr Marchant is a person of some importance in Lindsay Carfax.’
‘Even a muddle-headed incomer such as me can see that,’ Campion had grinned. ‘I feel quite guilty about being taken under his wing.’
‘Like you say, Mr Marchant can be generous,’ Sherman had agreed. ‘Many would say too generous.’
‘And unless tempered with moderation, generosity can lead to ruin, as dear old Tacitus said. Or was that ‘candour’ not ‘generosity’? Or was it both? I forget. My goodness, one knows when one is getting old when one forgets one’s Tacitus …’
Dennis Sherman had scowled in confusion.
‘’E’s off his head,’ his son had sniggered and his father had been quick to snap: ‘Clifford! You watch that mouth of yours!’ Then to Campion he had said: ‘Be best if we join the others now.’
Mr Campion had nodded enthusiastically.
‘Oh yes, a-hunting we must go, mustn’t we?’
And he had kept his face fixed in a vacant smile despite the fact that the junior Sherman’s shotgun was levelled at his stomach for far longer than was comfortable; or accidental.
At a five-bar gate which gave access to another large, ploughed field of large red-brown clods of earth, the shooting party was met by two elderly gentlemen, each holding an even more ancient Labrador on a lead of baling twine. These venerable men and their venerable beasts, Marchant explained, would be their beaters for the morning and would flush out birds from the Saxon Quarry – as he called it – while the guns moved south to north across the fields in fifty-yard stages. If Reuben and Zachary, their very experienced beaters, did their jobs, birds would flock across their sights from right to left in abundance and Reuben and Zachary would earn their traditional brace of bottles of Scotch (Reuben) and Navy Rum (Zachary).
As Mr Campion was a guest and new to the terrain, he was to be given poll position on the far right of the line of guns and Marchant frowned at the mutterings of the shooting party when they suggested, sotto voce, that the safest place behind a new gun – especially one who seemed to think he had come on a stag hunt – was not to the right or left, but behind.
The nine guns spread out across the field, automatically adopting a safe spacing between themselves; Campion on the right wing, Marchant on the far left. When satisfied that the line was in the correct position, Marchant gave a last briefing. They would hold this line and a whistle from Reuben or Zachary, now both out of sight down in the Saxon Mills quarry would indicate that the first beat of birds was on its way. They would shoot as long as they had targets, but on no account was anyone to step out of the line to collect shot birds. Only when another whistle blew would they advance fifty yards over the field and reform the line for another beat, and so on until they had traversed the field. All kills would be collected from where they had fallen at the end of the shoot and divided equally among the guns.
Should there be birds surplus to requirements, then partridge pie would be on the menu at the Woolpack for the foreseeable future.
Campion took up his position at the far right of the shooting line and planted his feet firmly in two deep plough furrows, some twenty feet from the hawthorn hedge which formed the boundary of the field and which, he presumed, hid the mysterious Saxon Mills beyond and below. From the pocket of his borrowed Barbour, he selected two cartridges and shook them gently by his ear for the required rattle of loose birdshot, as was customary, before sliding them into the twin barrels of his shotgun and gently closing the breech. He glanced along the line of guns and saw that the others were also performing the cartridge-shaking ritual, which always reminded him for some reason of his old factotum Lugg when confronted with the task of changing a light bulb. Lugg would hold the defunct bulb to his ear and shake it until he heard the tinkle of broken filaments. Only that way would he be convinced that the bulb’s illness was terminal and that it had glimmered its last.
His fond remembrance of an old and slightly cantankerous friend was interrupted by the blast of a beater’s whistle, the bark of a dog and the rustle of wings beating through the undergrowth down in the quarry beyond the hedge and then a small squadron of birds appeared flying almost parallel to the line of guns and the instincts of the hunters snapped into place.
Campion’s first snap shot peppered only air but his second barrel scored, sending a bird tumbling and as he broke the Beretta to reload, he ran his eye along the line as the guns crackled and the smell of cordite assaulted his nostrils. As far as he could see, Long Tye Farm’s partridge population was not under threat of extinction from the shoot’s combined marksmanship and, in order to blend in, when two more birds emerged from the beat directly in front of him, Campion made sure he missed both. After a third volley – one hit, one miss – the sky emptied of targets and Gus Marchant gave the order to ‘break guns’ and advance across the field.
After forty or more stretched paces across the wide plough furrows, the hedge to Campion’s right became sparse and less tangled, offering a tantalising glimpse down into Saxon Mills which Mr Campion found impossible to resist. Another ten yards and he found himself able to peer over the edge and in to what Simon Fuller had described as a flint quarry, now overgrown and forgotten except by game birds.