The attempt to torch the house had been hurried and amateur, burning for burning’s sake, vandalism more than anything else. They’d managed to do little more than char some furniture. He found food and clothes and equipment, a sawn-off twelve-bore and cartridges, and an ancient revolver that looked as if it had been military issue long before The Sisters. Going round the yard and searching the bodies, he found dozens of shells for the pump-shotgun.
He should have left, but he couldn’t. He hid out in the woods for a few days, keeping a watch on the farm. In time, some locals turned up and poked around and left. Then they came back and buried the bodies. Then some more came and stripped the farm of anything useful. Except the books. They left the books.
Peace, of a sort, settled over the community for a little while, as if the massacre had shocked everyone back to their senses. Adam didn’t hear shooting, anyway. He would probably never know why the Abbots had come under attack; someone offended by their refusal to take sides, or someone trying to scare the other nonaligned farms into taking part in the war, it didn’t matter.
He cautiously scouted out the area around the farm, working further and further out until he found an old overgrown road with a rusting signpost toppled crazily in a nest of brambles. The sign said Lambourn. He looked at it for a long time. Somewhere in the distance, echoing in the damp air, he heard a gunshot. Then another.
He turned away from the road and went back the way he had come.
NO ONE TALKED about what had happened at the Abbot farm. It was as if, by not speaking of it, it had never happened. It was not like the other massacres; the Abbots had been well-liked, and had been trying to stay neutral amid the madness which had overtaken the Parish. It was a shaming thing, and with the exception of a few scavengers, the people of the embattled little farms and homesteads avoided the wreckage.
In the aftermath, some of the families who had tried to stay out of the escalating war rethought their position and decided they were probably safer under the protection of either the Taylors or the Lyalls. Ronnie and Sue Chapman’s family were among them, and they found themselves walking patrols around the Lyall property.
It was actually quite fun. Ronnie was fourteen, Sue a year older, a solemn, quiet girl with auburn hair and freckles. They’d both grown tired of being cooped up in the family compound, and it was exciting to be given crossbows and responsibilities, although Ronnie kept being embarrassing by taking potshots at rabbits and then having to go and find the crossbow bolt.
Eventually, even that began to pall. They grew tired of trudging through the mud and undergrowth for hours in the drizzle. The crossbows were heavy and they made their arms hurt. It would have been nice to go home and get warm and have a biscuit and a glass of milk, but they were afraid of what Mr Lyall might do to them if they abandoned their duty.
“Boring,” said Ronnie, who had taken to holding his unloaded bow by the stirrup at the front end and dragging it behind him.
“Don’t you dare break that, Ronnie Chapman,” Sue told him. “You’ll get a slapping from Mr Lyall if you do.”
The boy unwillingly gathered the bow into his arms. It was almost as big as he was. “Stupid,” he muttered.
Sue glanced at her brother, dressed in a rain poncho two sizes too big for him, hugging the crossbow to him. She sighed.
“What’s that?” Ronnie said.
Sue was suddenly alert, scanning the area around them. “Where?”
“There.” Ronnie pointed and dropped his bow. “Bollocks.”
Sue looked around, saw nothing. “Where?”
“There,” he said, waving a hand in a general way as he bent down to pick the bow up.
Embarrassing. Sue took a couple of steps forward, her own bow raised to her shoulder, and saw a flash of red between two trees a hundred yards or so away. She took a couple of cautious steps to one side and sighted through the bow’s scope. The optics were old and not very good. She could make out what seemed to be a tall figure wearing a red coat and a red balaclava standing against a tree. She watched for a minute or so but the figure didn’t move.
“What is it?” Ronnie said. “Let me see.”
She shook his hand off her arm. “Be quiet.” She took another few steps forward and looked through the scope again. The figure still hadn’t moved. It suddenly occurred to her that her heart was beating hard in her chest. They’d been told not to engage anyone they saw, to come and find an adult and raise the alarm, but there wasn’t any harm in making sure first. “Follow me,” she said. “And be bloody quiet.”
Together, they worked their way cautiously through the undergrowth, Ronnie crashing along and muttering and at one point dropping his bow again. When they had a clear line of sight again, Sue stopped and dropped to one knee and looked down the scope. The figure wasn’t tall, as she’d thought at first, and it wasn’t wearing a red coat. It was standing against the tree with both its arms raised above its head, and it seemed to be wearing a red shirt under its opened coat.
“Someone’s got them standing at gunpoint,” she reported quietly.
“Can you see who?”
“Not from here. Let’s try to work our way around to the side.”
This time, Ronnie seemed to get the idea, moving behind her with exaggerated care until they were level with the tree. Sue examined the scene, could see no one else. She shifted position, looked again, saw nobody.
She stayed where she was, thinking. Ronnie fidgeted beside her and she hissed for him to be quiet. She looked through the scope again, and saw a fox emerge from the bushes, walk right up to the standing figure, sniff its feet unhurriedly, and then walk away.
That was what decided her. “Stay here,” she said, standing up.
“Fuck that,” said Ronnie.
“Do as I tell you,” she said. “And don’t swear; you know dad doesn’t like it.”
She stepped forward slowly, alert for any movement at all, anything out of the ordinary, but there was nothing. She heard Ronnie following a few yards behind, and she sighed.
The figure was a man, and he was standing with his arms over his head because someone had crossed his wrists and nailed them to the tree. He wasn’t wearing a red shirt and balaclava, either.
The two children had seen dead people before, but this was something different, and they stared at the body for some time before Ronnie noticed a piece of board lying on the ground near the base of the tree. There were letters scratched on it, but neither of them could read.
“WHO IS IT?” Harry asked.
“We don’t know,” Wendy said. “Someone cut his face off, there was nothing on him that we can identify. He could even be one of the Taylors’ men.”
“Let’s hope not,” he said. “I’d hate to think any of us would do that.” The Abbot massacre hung, noted but unmentioned, between them for a moment. “Are we missing anyone?”
“I’m asking around, but everyone’s missing somebody, Harry.”
He sighed. “How are the kids who found him?”
“They’re fine. Down in the kitchen having a bowl of soup.”
Children... “Whose bright idea was it to give kids bows and send them out on patrol, Wendy?”
“I don’t know.” She looked uncomfortable. “The Taylors...”
“I don’t give a flying fuck what the Taylors are doing.” He sat back and ran his hands through his hair. “Jesus fucking Christ, Wendy. This thing is bad enough without us using children. No one under seventeen’s to go out on patrol. Starting now.”
“Harry...”
“No one under seventeen, Wendy. I’m not having children killing each other.”
“But it’s okay if we do it?” she asked deadpan.
He gave her a long, level look.
“Just wanted to know if it’s all right to shoot first if one of their fifteen-year-olds points a shotgun at me.”
“Fuck off, Wendy.” He looked at the board lying on his desk, reached out and picked it up. It was spattered with blood, but
the word on it was clear.
“Maybe it was his name,” Wendy suggested.
“Do we know anyone called Wayland round here?” he asked, tipping the board to the lamplight and examining the name carved deeply into it.
“There’s Wayland’s Smithy,” she said.
He looked at her over the top of the board, then put it back on the desk. “No more kids with guns, Wendy. All right?”
“Yes, Harry.” She turned and went to leave the study.
She’d reached the door when Harry said, “Saddle up a horse for me.”
Wendy turned, her hand on the door handle. “Harry?”
“Saddle me a horse.”
“You’re not going out there on your own,” she said.
“That was what I was thinking, yes.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“You don’t even know where I’m going yet.”
“Doesn’t matter; I’m not letting you go out alone.”
“You’re happy enough to let kids go round shooting each other,” he pointed out.
She glared at him.
“I’ve been riding around here since you were three years old,” he said. “On my own, quite a lot.”
“You’re being an arse, Harry.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “But it’s my arse. Now are you going to get a horse ready for me or am I going to have to do it myself?”
“I should let you do it yourself,” she told him. “Bloody fool of a Lyall.”
IT WAS EASIER – although much more risky – to travel alone these days. A large group of armed people was obviously safer, but they also attracted a lot of attention and were more likely to come under fire. Harry kept to lesser-used paths and tracks, threading his way through woods and along the edges of old fields, took his time. He crossed his own property, made a meandering dogleg along the edge of the neighbouring homestead, and the next, and made his way, little by little, around Taylor territory.
Finally, he came to the Ridge Way. The old track looked deserted today; he’d heard that farmers and travellers from further east and west were cutting far to the south to avoid this part of the Chilterns.
Not to the north, though. He took his binoculars from his saddlebag and looked out across the Vale. Parts of Abingdon seemed to be burning; on its outskirts, he saw what he thought was a very large group of people marching down an old main road. It looked like things were no better down there than they were up here.
He turned the horse off the Way, walked parallel to it for a few miles until he came to an old overgrown glade filled with bushes and saplings. In the middle, almost hidden by weeds and overgrowth, was an old long barrow, a chambered stone tomb from the Stone Age. There had been legends about this place for centuries, how Wayland, the blacksmith of Norse legend, haunted the place and you could sometimes hear the sound of hammer ringing against anvil as he forged swords for the gods. There was a story that if you left a horse tethered here overnight, with a silver coin for payment, you could come back the next morning and find that Wayland had shod it for you.
“Shall we give that one a try, old son?” he asked, patting the horse’s neck gently.
He got down, tied the reins to an overhanging branch, and looked around the glade. It was only a few miles from home, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been here. He flipped back the hood of his coat, took his shotgun from the sheath attached to the horse’s saddle.
There was no outward sign, at first glance, that anyone had been here in a very long time, but Harry was in no hurry. He walked around the tomb, keeping his eyes on the ground, noting where stalks of grass had been bruised underfoot and then sprang back, broken twigs on overhanging bushes, some of them too high off the ground to have been broken by wolves or foxes.
At the entrance to the tomb, the undergrowth seemed to have been pulled aside and then carefully put back.
“Hello?” Harry called. “Anyone home?” No answer. “I’m not looking for trouble.” No answer again.
He pushed his way through the grass and bracken and brambles, down a corridor of waist-high stones, to a large rectangular hole. He called again, again got no answer, and ducked inside.
There was a little ring of stones on the earth floor, just inside the tomb, with a pile of ashes in the middle. Harry stirred a finger in the ashes, but they were cold.
Back outside, he did a circuit of the Smithy, then another a little further out, then a third. The fourth time round, he found a place where the undergrowth had been disturbed by a large creature of some kind but then rearranged to hide the fact that they’d passed through. He almost missed it. Following the path, he came on a place where a latrine pit had been dug and then carefully covered up with twigs and leaf litter. The fact that it had been covered at all should have been enough, but he poked around in it with a stick long enough to find human turds.
Back at the Smithy, he paused and looked about again. He was on the far western edge of the Parish here, a long way from any trouble. People mostly avoided the place, a vague superstition about Wayland keeping them away without being conscious they were doing it. That alone suggested that whoever had been living here was a stranger. He thought about the piece of board with the name carved into it, the corpse nailed faceless to a tree. There were few enough people round here who could read and write, and the thought that any of them could have done this made him shiver. He really hadn’t known his neighbours, though. And that was the scariest thought of all.
Chapter Twenty-Two
MAX’S BREATHING IMPROVED, his temperature fell – although not by much and he still wouldn’t wake up properly. Nell watched her mother moving as if in a dream, sitting red-eyed and tousle-haired beside the bed. It had been days since she had washed or changed her clothes and she seemed constantly on the verge of toppling over. No one could remember, exactly, when Rose had last left the house. The place seemed haunted by her.
It was left to Nell to take care of the day-to-day running of the house, making sure the kids were washed and dressed, making sure they got ready for bed in the evenings, reading stories to them, sitting up with them when gunfire woke them in the night. She saw less and less of Patrick, and braced herself for the day when she would never see him again.
When he did make a rare appearance at the house, slumped silently at the kitchen table, eating cold roast chicken with his hands or simply fast asleep, his clothes were torn and awry and his face was smeared with dirt. He didn’t want to talk, which was fine by Nell because she didn’t want to have a conversation with him.
One morning, though, she went down into the kitchen and found him standing there, shotgun in hand. He looked as wild-eyed and haunted as his mother. “You’ve got to come and see this, Nell,” he said.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she told him. “I’ve got breakfast to get ready.”
He stepped forward and took her arm and started to urge her towards the door. “You’ve got to see this.”
She shook herself free. “What’s wrong with you? Look at the state of you.”
“Nell,” he said urgently. “Come on.”
She sighed and grabbed a coat from the hook behind the door and followed him out into the yard.
If there was one thing the war had brought to the Taylor homestead, it was order. The place had always been amiably disordered but still capable, like her father, but now it was obsessively neat. Everything was squared away, tools in sheds and animals in their pens and outhouses. Everywhere, people were moving with a purpose, repairing equipment, cleaning weapons. Over in the forge, Alan Curtis the blacksmith was making crossbow bolts from old lengths of rebar. It was not, Nell realised with a sinking heart, her home any longer.
To one side of the compound, a small, heavily-barred door in the wall led through into a brick-walled herb garden where four hands were standing guard. Beyond that was another door. Patrick opened it and stepped aside to let her through.
“Oh!” She put her hands to her mouth.
&n
bsp; Years ago, Max’s father had dredged out and extended the little pond that lay adjacent to the property and stocked it with carp he’d traded for. Carp basically cruised the bottom of ponds eating rubbish and turning it into protein; Nell had never liked the muddy taste of the fish or the thousands of fiddly little bones, but the pond and its self-sustaining food source had been her grandfather’s pride and joy, and after him it had been her father’s.
Now the pond was still in the morning light, its surface carpeted with motionless glistening bodies, some of them of a considerable size.
Patrick walked up and stood beside her and together they looked at the vista of dead fish. Dotted here and there were the corpses of ducks.
“Jesus,” she murmured.
He held out an ancient cardboard box with words she didn’t recognise printed on the side. The top was open, and she could see the torn ends of clear sachets.
“Weedkiller,” he said. “There’s hundreds of these things over there.” He nodded along the side of the pond, where she could see a considerable pile of boxes. “Someone did it last night. Must have taken them hours. Poured this stuff into the pond right under our noses and watched our fish die.”
She couldn’t process what he was saying. “Weedkiller...?”
“There’s an old B&Q over to Wantage,” he said. “There’s not much left, it’s been stripped of everything useful. I was over there a couple of months ago with dad to see if we could find something. There’s tons of this stuff.” He shook the box. “It’s no use to anybody so it’s just sitting there.” He bent down and picked something up off the ground, a length of board with the word WAYLAND carved into it. “This mean anything to you?”
The carving looked fresh. She shook her head.
He threw the board away. “If this stuff seeps into the well, it’ll make people sick,” he said. “We’ll have to find a new source of water. Fucking Lyalls.”
She shook her head again. Ambushing people, shooting them, that was something she could understand. This was different. It felt... wrong. “I don’t think the Lyalls did this,” she said. She looked at the board lying in the grass.
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