by Paul Torday
As we turned off the main road and drove back along the country lanes, I wondered about Mr Khan’s immediate plans for me. This was more than just a dodgy marriage ceremony to get someone an immigration visa. And whatever was going on, I was a witness to it. Would they pay a witness to their schemes, whatever they were, and then let him go with a pat on the back and a wave of the hand? I wasn’t at all sure that that was Mr Khan’s style. I wondered whether I would ever leave the house if I didn’t wake up and do something.
As the Range Rover’s wheels scrunched on the gravel and drew to a halt, I was as ready as I would ever be. Kevin got out and went around the front to open the passenger door for Mr Khan. I got out too, smiled at Mr Khan, nodded in a friendly way at Kevin and then kicked him as hard as I could just below the kneecap. As he shouted out in pain, and reached down to clutch his damaged leg, I punched him in the stomach and then drove my elbow into the bridge of his nose. He fell over, one hand clutching his shin and the other feeling for his nose, which was beginning to spout blood. The whole process gave me a moment’s satisfaction; then I reflected that it had come at a price, probably around ten thousand pounds. As Kevin kneeled on the gravel I reached inside his jacket, found the gun I had noticed earlier and took it out.
‘That’s us settled up for the moment, Kevin,’ I told him. Amir jumped out of the other Range Rover and came running towards us, while Mr Khan struggled out of the car. I could see David was holding on to Adeena’s arm. She was staring at me in astonishment.
‘Don’t try anything,’ I warned Mr Khan and Amir. I held up one hand, palm outwards. The other now held Kevin’s gun.
I hurt like hell after the unaccustomed exertion and my ribs were on fire. I backed away, and Mr Khan and Amir stopped, hesitating. The electronic gates were slowly closing so I pelted down the drive and managed to slip between them before they shut. When I glanced over my shoulder as I turned into the main road, I saw that Kevin had been propped up against one of the Range Rovers, a handkerchief to his nose. I didn’t think I had long.
As soon as I was out of sight I took the first footpath that led away from the main road, and within a couple of minutes was approaching the edge of a small wood. They were certain to be after me in a few moments. I had only just entered the wood when I heard a car roaring past along the road.
I did not slacken my pace but jogged as quickly as possible along the rough and muddy path that led through the narrow belt of trees. I came to a crossroads where another footpath intersected the first, and on instinct turned left and downhill, because that was where there was the most cover. Soon I found myself walking along a green and brown tunnel formed by overhanging branches. There was a constant flutter of leaves, drifting to the ground in the mild breeze. The sun had come out and its light played on me through the branches. I heard birdsong, and once or twice saw the white scut of a rabbit bounding out of my way.
After ten minutes or so I emerged from the woodland. I stopped for a moment at the edge of the trees, realising that I was still holding the gun in one hand. I was not your typical rambler out for a walk: wearing morning dress and holding an automatic pistol. I looked at the gun. It was a Sig Sauer P220, the weapon of choice for gun club target practice and professional assassins. I stuck it in the waistband of my trousers.
The path now led along the side of a stubble field, and then over a stile in a long hedgerow of blackthorn. I thought I had probably lost my pursuers, and with a lightening heart climbed over the stile. I would make my way along this network of footpaths until I came to a village, and then get a taxi, or catch a bus, to the nearest town and from there back to London. I was keen not to meet up with Mr Khan and his employees again.
As I stepped into the next stubble field I became conscious I was not alone. I found I was at one end of a long line of men, all dressed in army surplus camouflage or jeans and wax jackets. Some of them were carrying flags, others had sticks in their hands, and there were a number of dogs running about: spaniels, mostly. The man nearest me saw me and hissed, ‘Bloody walkers.’ Then, louder, ‘Would you please stop where you are for a minute, sir – we’re in the middle of a partridge drive.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m not an anti. I won’t spoil anything. I’ll just walk down the hill in line with you until you get to the end of the drive.’
I knew I would be safer walking with all these beaters than I would be on my own if anyone was following me. The beater nearest me gave me a venomous look, but at that moment the man in the middle of the line raised a red flag, the signal that the line could start moving off downhill. I supposed he was the keeper. I walked slowly with them, keeping in line. Then I picked up a fallen branch and used it to tap on the sides of the hedgerow as we went. I thought I was doing rather a good job as a beater, in the circumstances.
As we advanced down the long slope, partridge started to emerge in front of us: singles, then twos and threes or even larger groups, rising out of the stubble or from the hedgerows, where they had been invisible a moment before, flying away from us and gaining height and speed as they did so. At the bottom of the field, still a couple of hundred yards away, was another hedgerow running at right angles to the one I was walking along. From behind this now came the noise of shots being fired, and I realised we were approaching the line of guns. More and more partridge swarmed out of the stubble and bushes in front of us, and I saw several fall.
The keeper raised the red flag again and we all stopped, while the dogs flushed out the last few birds in front of us. The shooting from the other side of the hedge did not seem particularly accurate. Then a horn sounded, and the shooting stopped also. Now was the time to leave. I made my way through a gap in the hedgerow in front of me, scrambled across a ditch on the other side, and came face to face with Freddy Meadowes. He had a shotgun under his arm, his big moon face was beaming all over, and he was bending down to retrieve a red-legged partridge from the mouth of a liver-coloured springer spaniel.
‘There, Mildred. It’s dead!’ He managed to take the bird from the dog’s mouth, although it seemed inclined to engage in a tug of war. ‘Thank you, old girl, that will do.’ He straightened up with the partridge in his hand and saw me. For a moment his features expressed extreme surprise, then his beaming smile returned.
‘My God,’ he said. ‘It’s the Leader of the Pack! What the hell are you doing in my beating line? And why on earth are you dressed like that? Are you getting married, or something?’
I said the first thing that came into my head.
‘It’s a bet, Freddy. I’m doing it for a bet.’
Six
Freddy roared with laughter. That was his answer whenever he was confronted with any situation that was less than straightforward. The appearance of someone in a tailcoat in the middle of a partridge drive definitely fell into that category.
‘Leader, I never know what you’re going to get up to next! We’ve finished shooting for the morning, so you’d better come back to the house with us and have a drink and a spot of lunch. Unless, of course, you are keeping your bride waiting at the church?’
‘No, no one’s waiting for me, Freddy, and I’d love a drink if there’s one going. I don’t want to crash your party, though.’
‘Not a bit, not a bit,’ said Freddy. ‘You’ll know everyone, I expect. Eck Chetwode Talbot will be there. You must know him, he was in the army like you.’
Freddy turned about and I walked along beside him. I could see other guns converging on a row of Range Rovers and Land Cruisers parked by the side of a lane a few hundred yards away.
‘No, I don’t know him,’ I said. Freddy’s assumption that everyone who had ever been in the army must know everyone else was not untypical of people who had never served in it themselves.
‘Bertie Razen? Caspar Weingeld? Charlie Freemantle? Willy McLeod?’
‘Never heard of any of them, Freddy.’
As a matter of fact I had been here before. I now realised why the landscape had looked fami
liar when I glimpsed it through the tinted windows of Mr Khan’s Range Rover. Freddy had asked me down to shoot a year ago, in November. It was pheasants on that occasion, not partridge, but I remembered the contours of the valley. We must be just around the corner from the country retreat I had been holed up in for most of the weekend. I wondered whether I could get Freddy to tell me anything about the house and its owner – he was bound to know something.
I had first met Freddy across the card tables at the Diplomatic. On that occasion I had looked at his big, beaming face and listened to his conversation, which consisted mostly of expressions such as ‘Jolly good’ and ‘I say, what frightful cards you’ve given me’ and had jumped to the conclusion that he was both rich and thick. An hour or two later, when he had gutted and filleted me through a series of bluffs and double bluffs, in an extremely canny display of poker playing, I was forced to revise my opinion. Freddy was one of those people who, whatever their apparent lack of intellectual qualities, know how to hang on to their own money and how to prise it away from other people. In fact it was on the second occasion we played together that he took so much money from me he felt obliged to ask me shooting. ‘I tell you what, come and shoot a few pheasants with me down in Oxfordshire next Saturday,’ was how the invitation was phrased, ‘unless, of course, you have a better invitation?’
I hadn’t, I thought. ‘Why not?’ That was how I got to know Freddy.
Freddy put his dog in the back of his Range Rover, tossed the partridge to an older man who was bracing up the shot birds and hanging them in a game cart, and motioned to me to get in the front passenger seat. As I did so, another man climbed into the back of the car. Freddy introduced us.
‘This is Eck Chetwode Talbot. He and his wife Harriet have come down from Yorkshire for the shooting.’
The new arrival leant forward to shake hands with me.
‘Richard Gaunt,’ I replied. ‘Will your wife be joining us?’
‘No, she’s gone to visit her mother, near Cirencester, for the day.’
‘We call Richard the Leader of the Pack,’ shouted Freddy as we drove away. Eck Chetwode Talbot raised his eyebrows.
I shrugged and said, ‘It’s an unfortunate nickname that Freddy likes to use. It’s a long story.’
It wasn’t far to the house and I remembered the place as soon as I saw it: a comfortable-sized, double-fronted Victorian house. As we arrived, men in tweed plus twos and shooting coats were being decanted from various vehicles. There were nine of us including me. We all straggled into the house, depositing boots and guns, or in my case mud-caked shoes, in the entrance hall. Then we assembled in a long room that was used as a library and drawing room, where a substantial collection of bottles and glasses was arranged on a side table.
‘Help yourself,’ shouted Freddy. ‘Take no prisoners.’ After a few moments someone handed me a glass of white wine that I hadn’t asked for. Freddy was busy making sure his other guests had what they wanted to drink, so I found myself talking to the man called Eck.
‘Forgive my asking,’ said Eck. ‘But do you normally dress like that when you go shooting?’
‘My day started out rather differently to yours,’ I replied. ‘I had to assist at a wedding, but afterwards I somehow found myself mixed up with the beating line and then I bumped into Freddy.’ Even as I spoke I could see how profoundly unsatisfactory this explanation was. I tried to change the subject: ‘Freddy and I play cards together sometimes.’
‘Everybody knows Freddy,’ said Eck.
‘What’s that?’ said Freddy, appearing at my elbow clutching a pint glass tankard full of gin and tonic and lumps of ice. ‘Everyone knows Freddy? Not at all. I’m terribly shy and don’t get out much.’ He roared with laughter at his own joke, then said, ‘Leader, I need a satisfactory explanation of your presence here. Not that I’m not delighted to see you, but do admit it, you were a very odd sight in the middle of a hedgerow.’
‘I’ve been staying with your neighbour,’ I explained. I realised that I needed to be careful about what I said. I couldn’t possibly let this crowd know that I’d agreed to marry a girl from Afghanistan for money. My reputation was already dubious. Yet there was really no way to account for my behaviour over the last forty-eight hours; even if some of the events that had occurred had been outside my control.
‘My neighbour? Which neighbour? What’s the name of the house?’ asked Freddy.
‘A man who calls himself Mr Khan. Although I think he might also be known as Aseeb. Do you know him, Freddy?’
Eck gave me a very sharp glance as I spoke, but before he could say anything Freddy said, ‘Khan? He’s the new tenant at Harington House. An odd story: the house used to belong to a well-known local family. Things hadn’t been going right for them for a long time; then one of the children inherited and burned through most of the remaining cash, so they had to sell up. It’s a few years since they left now. About five years ago some City boy bought it with his bonus. Did the place up. No expense spared, our window cleaner tells me.’
Freddy lifted the tankard of gin and tonic to his lips and gargled for a moment. When he had lowered the level of the liquid by an inch or two, he went on:
‘Then this one went tits up, along with a lot of others last year. Sorry, Eck, I know you used to work in the City too: tactless of me to bring the subject up. Anyway, the bank repossessed the house. I bought the land, apart from about five acres of gardens and woodland next to the house itself, but they couldn’t sell the house, not at the price they were asking. I wasn’t interested. I mean to say, I’ve got a house already, haven’t I?’ Freddy laughed again. ‘But you can always use a few more acres for your farming. Anyway, since then Harington House has been let. Your chum Mr Khan has been a tenant for about six months, as far as I am aware. I’ve never met him. He’s obviously well off, travels a lot; I don’t think he is often there. How on earth do you know him, anyway? I wouldn’t have thought he was your speed at all.’
‘We just bumped into each other somewhere,’ I said. I could see that Freddy would have liked a fuller explanation, but then he looked at his watch.
‘Oh Lord, we’d better go through and have lunch. I promised the keeper we’d be back out again by two. Come and eat something, Leader.’
‘I’d love to, but may I then ring for a taxi to get me into Oxford?’
Over lunch I was stuck between two complete strangers, but everyone was friendly, as people in shooting parties so often are, and the conversation did not require much effort. Just as we rose from the table and everyone was getting ready to go outside for the rest of the afternoon’s sport, the man called Eck asked me an odd question:
‘Did I hear you say that Mr Khan might also be called Aseeb?’
‘That’s what I gathered. Do you know him?’
‘I might have met him somewhere,’ said Eck. ‘It’s an unusual name.’
‘Not common in Oxfordshire,’ I agreed.
Eck reached into his pocket and found a small diary with a pencil tucked into its spine.
‘Give me your phone number, if you don’t mind. I might ring you. I’m curious to know if your Aseeb is the same man I used to know.’
He was suddenly very serious and I could see he wouldn’t be put off. I gave him my home number and we said goodbye. Another man was hovering beside me. He had been on the other side of the table at lunch but too far away for us to have spoken.
‘Did someone mention your name was Richard Gaunt, or have I got that wrong? My name is Charlie Freemantle, by the way.’
‘Yes, I’m Richard Gaunt.’
‘Sorry to bother you with such a personal question, but didn’t you used to walk out with a very sweet girl called Emma Macmillan?’
I felt a sharp stab of remembered pain when I heard the name.
‘Yes, but that’s all over now. Do you know her?’
‘I’ve met her. She’s a very attractive girl. I’m sorry you’re not with her any longer. I suppose that means anyone can have a c
rack at asking her out now, doesn’t it?’
‘I suppose it does,’ I said.
‘Come on, everybody, hurry up,’ roared Freddy. ‘This isn’t a cocktail party – we’re meant to be shooting things!’
I waved goodbye to Freddy and shouted my thanks across the room.
‘Come again, Leader, but do try to dress in something more appropriate to the countryside next time.’
As they left, I spotted a phone on the hall table, sitting on top of a telephone directory. Within a few minutes I had arranged for a taxi to pick me up and take me into Oxford. There I bought a pair of jeans, a tweed jacket and some new shoes, and put all the clothes I had been wearing into a carrier bag and stuffed them into the first litter bin I could find. I kept the gun. Then I walked to the station and took the next train to Paddington.
On the train I sat and stared out of the window. It had been an odd couple of days, to say the least. On the whole, I could not look back on my behaviour with any satisfaction. Even the temporary thrill of punching Kevin a couple of times had dissipated. It seemed to me I had, without much reflection at all, sold my soul for ten thousand pounds: a Faustian bargain of the most useless kind, as I was unlikely ever to be paid. The thoughts kept rattling around my head. So I did what I always did when what remained of my conscience gave me trouble: I tried not to think. Outside rain streamed across the window.
Nature abhors a vacuum and into my empty mind came thoughts of home and family. It had been raining the last time I had been home. I remembered that very well: the sheets of rain descending from low streamers of dark grey cloud as I drove down the winding road, trying to avoid the occasional sheep that strayed in front of my car, through the remote green Cumbrian valley towards my parents’ house. I had left the army: my last two leaves had been spent with Emma and I hadn’t been home for nearly two years. I felt strange about seeing my parents and my little sister again, but I longed to be with them too. Home would make me feel better.