by F. G. Cottam
The blood was very bright. He supposed it was thus because the bird was young, its fresh blood dripping on to the seedy relics of his own care-worn existence. He belched and smelled beer drift sourly on his breath. He took the bird’s head from where it had dropped on to the table in a smear of gore and placed it in the dish. Its eyes wore a startled look in death.
He had not yet removed his hat. Nor had he taken off his coat. Now he did so, hanging both on the hook from which he had taken the secateurs. He opened a drawer under the table and took out a bulb of lighter fluid, pinched off the teat and sprinkled the fluid over the stuff in the dish. He bowed his head and said a few more words, then used one of the candles to ignite what he had prepared. It flared into brief and pungent life. Feathers crackled and the bird’s eyes hissed and popped.
You honoured the old gods. It was all very simple. Events like that taking place on the high slopes of Kilimanjaro, calamitous events, did not happen by accident. They were both a punishment and an admonition. Mankind had grown arrogant and careless and would likely pay the heaviest possible price.
Yes, you honoured the old gods. They had known that in the ancient world. Even when the sum of human knowledge had been compiled in the library at Alexandria, when the answers to every possible question had been within the reach of the scholars there, they had remembered in ancient times the oldest and most universal rule: if you wish to survive and prosper, you honour the gods. They demand it.
His sacrifice was a tiny gesture in the scheme of things. But the ritual was enacted every seven days and he never neglected to perform it with due deference and solemnity. He celebrated and, most importantly, he believed.
Modern piety concerned itself with the happy-clappy Christian God of the New Testament. If people believed at all, they tended to believe in the touchy-feely compassion and kindness of Christ.
The older gods were not so accommodating. They bore grudges. They had long memories. They were unforgiving and gleeful in their mischief. They were vain and spiteful and merciless, and it was Andrew Carrington’s considered judgement that you ignored them at your peril. It was an article of faith he kept to himself. But it was one he was convinced, during the course of his academic life, had been conclusively proven to him.
She was lying next to him in her narrow student bed and she was smoking. It was her first cigarette of the morning, but the air in the confined space of her college room seemed still hazy and grey from those she’d smoked the previous night. He had enjoyed their evening out. He had enjoyed the sex, when it eventually came. She was good at it and enthusiastic too. It had been work, but he was someone who took pride in doing his job thoroughly.
Things were somewhat different the morning after the night before. Left to his own devices, he’d have been literally up and running by now, pounding the pavement with a heart-rate monitor strapped to his chest. Instead he was lying next to his pale, slightly sinewy and really rather pretty one-night-stand while she smoked and he wondered why the university didn’t insist on proper smoke alarms. He ran his tongue around his teeth, doing a dental autopsy of stale booze.
‘Will I see you again?’
She shrugged her slight shoulders and tapped ash into the ashtray on the bedside table next to her. She didn’t look at him. ‘If you want.’
‘You’re not involved with anyone?’
‘Answered that question last night, Paul. More than once, actually.’
He wasn’t actually called Paul. His name was David Baxter; he was twenty-seven years old and a private detective. But he had a youthful face and a body he took scrupulous care of. To her he was Paul, a graphics student from Richmond, and that was all she was going to get.
‘Really fucked you up, didn’t he? That guy you were involved with?’
‘I don’t like that phrase – makes it all sound like some sort of business arrangement. It wasn’t. Not for me, anyway. I fell for him. He turned out to be the wrong guy to fall for, but that’s how it was.’
‘Was it the age difference?’
‘I don’t really want to talk about it. Not to a stranger.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Sorry. You know what I mean.’
‘I don’t think I do, Isobel.’
She sighed, puckered her pretty mouth around the filter of her cigarette and dragged harshly on it, exhaling in an explosion of pale grey against the grey haze she’d already created. She said, ‘It was nothing to do with age. He led me on. He used me. He was living with someone and they had a daughter. It was happy families.’
‘It couldn’t have been. He wouldn’t have slept with you if it was.’
She chuckled. The sound was un-amused. ‘Whatever. He used me and then dumped me. But I got my own back. All came as a complete shock to that smug bitch he was living with.’
Paul, who was really David, had painstakingly researched his case before his encounter with Isobel. He knew that Tom Curtis and Sarah Bourne had lived as good as man and wife. They’d had a daughter, Charlotte, seven years prior to their splitting up last autumn. The girl lying next to him had engineered the break-up.
That much was clear cut. But nothing else was. He considered himself a fair judge of character, but couldn’t really understand why Curtis had strayed. He’d followed Sarah a few times when she’d taken her daughter and later picked her up from school. She was an exceptionally good-looking woman. She was successful and sophisticated, with an elan the girl lying next to him would never possess. Why had Curtis risked losing that? What had prompted the betrayal?
Maybe it was as simple as the sex. Isobel Jenks was young and fit and hot in the sack. Variety was the spice of life and some men thought only with their dicks in moments of impulse or weakness. His profession reminded him of that almost on a daily basis.
‘He taught a course?’
‘It was a summer school thing, a residency in ecology in a protected area of Scottish woodland. He lectured in the morning and there was fieldwork in the afternoon. It was all really idyllic – picnics in the gloaming, country pubs with babbling brooks outside them and folk music inside when it got dark. All that stuff was going on. He was nice and good-looking and I thought he was lonely.’
‘Really?’
‘That was his thing, the loneliness. That was how he hit on me, though obviously I didn’t realize that at the time.’ She lifted herself from the waist and screwed the butt of her cigarette into the ashtray beside her, exposing the pink nipple of one of her small breasts as the duvet ruched down. Baxter felt a pang of arousal in his groin.
‘Why are you so interested?’
‘I’m interested in you.’ It wasn’t a total lie.
‘Holiday romance,’ she said. ‘To him, anyway, though I only realized that in hindsight. I thought it was the real deal. I thought Tom Curtis was the real deal. More fool me, eh?’
‘He never contacted you, even after you phoned his wife?’
‘She wasn’t his wife.’
‘As good as, by the sound of things.’
‘If she’d been his wife, he’d have been an adulterer.’
‘No argument there.’
‘Why are you interested in this stuff?’
‘I’ve already said, Isobel. I’m interested in you.’
‘No, by the way. I’ve never heard from him again and don’t expect to.’
His brief had been to check out Tom Curtis, which he’d done pretty thoroughly. He’d already filed a detailed report. Curtis was one of the best in the world at what he did. He had an international reputation that would probably justify the term renowned. But it was an esoteric line of employment and it had not made him rich or even comfortably well-off.
In career terms, his former partner and the mother of his child was much more successful. She was one of the busiest and best paid make-up artists in the world. Her working life comprised fashion shoots and movie junkets and seriously well-paid advertising campaigns. Her exclusive contract with the cosmetics company she promoted alone brough
t in sixty grand a year.
They had met at art school. They had both been on the painting course. Baxter had invented a pretext for visiting Charlotte’s school and had seen her illustrations on her classroom wall and so knew that she had inherited the talent to draw from one or both of her parents.
There was no man in Sarah Bourne’s life. She balanced work and motherhood successfully. She drove a nice car and wore fashionable clothes. She exercised at the gym a lot and generally took care of her appearance. Baxter had concluded that this was more to do with image than vanity. She had no choice but to be an advert for what she did. People would judge her skills on her appearance. It was a prejudice that went with the territory. She seemed comfortable enough with it.
Curtis struck him as more enigmatic. He clearly doted on the daughter he was not currently permitted to see. He took work that was nomadic by its nature. He gave guest lectures and ran courses like the one that had facilitated his disastrous liaison with Isobel Jenks. But his engagement with the world seemed a bit half-hearted. There was something remote about him, as though he was almost a figure out of his time.
That was a fanciful way of looking at it. But Baxter trusted his ability to read character and had been unable to pull Tom Curtis, despite this, into the clear sort of focus in which people could be properly scrutinized. It was a puzzle. He was a puzzle.
Probably it was just his profession. Forests were still and silent places – weren’t they? – built by nature for seclusion. There was a sense in which they harboured shade and secrecy. Even a copse of trees was cover, a place of concealment. There was little older or more steadfast in nature than a tree.
The way people went about their work gave you clues as to their characters. Some men were aggressive deal makers. Some were methodical. Some were showy and spectacular in their office dress and accoutrements or habitually fast at the wheel of their company cars.
The physical nature of what Tom Curtis did had endowed him with an enviable physique. Otherwise his work offered few clues about him. But then planting trees seemed less like a job to Baxter than some sort of ancient, arduous ritual.
In the bed next to him, Isobel said something he only half-heard.
‘What?’
‘I said he should have been more grateful.’
‘Why?’
‘The first time we went to bed? He didn’t exactly seduce me over a candlelit dinner.’
‘Go on.’
She sat up, squirming free of the duvet, her breasts pertly revealed, her skin sallow and her shoulders slight. He could see the dark roots in the smoke-bleared light showing against the scalp under her bleached crop.
‘I couldn’t sleep, one night. I went for a walk in the woods. It wasn’t dangerous. It never goes fully dark in the Scottish highlands in summer. You might come across a fox or an owl, but there’s nothing there that preys on humans.
‘I came across Curtis, naked, seated cross-legged in a clearing on the forest floor. His eyes were open but he must have been dreaming, must have sleep-walked his way there. He was listening intently. Had that attitude, anyway – kept nodding his head. Except that nothing was being said to him because there was no one there to say it.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I sort of hauled him to his feet and guided him back. He came to, kind of, on the route back to the huts we were staying in.’
‘Why did you think he should be grateful?’
‘It was high summer, like I said. But it was so bloody cold at the spot where I found him I could see my breath. There was hoar frost on the ground. He wasn’t wearing any clothes. I think if I hadn’t found him there he’d have died there of hypothermia.’
‘And so you seduced him, after you wrapped him in a blanket and made him a mug of cocoa.’
‘No. I didn’t. We got into bed and he fucked me. He fucked me like a man possessed. Since you seem so interested, that was how it began.’
FOUR
Saul Abercrombie sat and stared at the stained-glass depiction above him from the interior of the church at Raven Dip. It was overcast outside, still relatively early on a day that had broken dankly. He had trailed a path through dew on the quad on the route there. But for the noise of the engine, he had travelled in silence.
He sat on a shooting stick, its point precisely wedged at a spot where stone flags intersected on the floor, his increasingly skinny butt secure in its small saddle. He had a picnic blanket wrapped around his shoulders against the chill. The church interior was always cold, even when the sun shone outside and bathed the building in light and warmth, as it seemed unlikely to do today.
The shooting stick was a memento of sorts, a relic from the short season of trying to blast clay pigeons from the sky of a decade earlier. It had been one of the many pursuits he had tried and failed to enjoy successfully in the company of his dead wife. There had been power boating and an attempt at riding to hounds most notable for what he still thought of as the fancy dress. There had been a box for the ballet at Covent Garden.
The blanket was a happier reminder. They had enjoyed picnicking together. He had owned for a while a mill house in Cambridgeshire and he had chilled wine from a net moored for the purpose on the bank where the River Cam wound its way through the property. They had eaten and drunk and listened to an old solid state Roberts radio tuned to a station that stuck rigidly to its playlist of soul classics. Sly and the Family Stone had provided their soundtrack, Marvin Gaye and Roberta Flack and the Isley Brothers.
‘What’s goin’ on?’ Saul crooned to himself. He pulled the blanket around him, staring still at the stained-glass image. It was a good question. It was one he would be obliged to answer in part, but only in part, when Tom Curtis returned to them later in the day. He had promised. He had given his word of honour to the man entrusted to deliver on his forest dream. ‘Brother, brother, brother,’ he said, now, to nobody in the empty church.
How often had he and Susan done that? How many times had they sipped river-chilled Chablis, listening to Marvin while the Cam gurgled by and the evening gathered securely around them? In his mind they had done it in an endless cycle of idyllic summer nights. In actuality, they had probably done it on no more than half-a-dozen precious occasions.
Those picnics had made his wife happy. But making her happy had been a long way behind making money in his list of priorities and most of the time she had spent at the mill house had been endured by her alone, he being on trips and their only child away at boarding school.
His business life had been one long litany of money-shots, no-brainers, done deals and fire sales and ball-breakers. He’d been so fluent in the language of boardroom machismo he’d forgotten how to communicate in any other way. Profit subsumed everything. Claret on the carpet, suppliers manacled by contract clauses, partners in enterprise permanently yoked to a junior role. Everywhere he looked he was looking only for the bottom line of a balance sheet.
It had taken the cancer to stop that.
First had come the ominous suspicion that something was wrong with his throat. He’d had trouble swallowing. His tongue had felt numb. His mouth no longer told him accurately whether a drink was hot or cold. The timbre of his voice changed. It roughened. There was a sense in which his speech came to feel somehow blurred. And he was tired. For the first time in his life, he felt bone-weary and the weariness was constant.
He’d had an operation almost as soon as the diagnosis was confirmed, in New York eleven months ago. That had been kept secret from everyone. No one knew; not Francesca and certainly no one who worked for him. It was an absence of only a couple of days from his email and Twitter accounts. His retreats, his stints in rehab and his trips to remote places were so much a feature of his life that no one thought to become suspicious.
The surgery was a success. They got the whole of the growth out of him, every cancerous cell. Six months later came the all-clear. And then in February the symptoms started to re-establish themselves and he was soberly told that this
time surgery was not an option. There was nowhere left to cut. Another invasive procedure would kill him. Chemo was a balance between the time it bought you and the havoc it wreaked on the quality of your remaining life. His prognosis was bleak, his case hopeless and his prospects terminal.
Saul swallowed with effort, gathered his blanket around him and thought about the picture he looked at – the narrative of it, the guy in the steel suit who had come out on top in the rumble with the creature his broadsword had decapitated. Recently decapitated, the gore still dripped from the creature’s severed neck. The blow hadn’t been delivered in death to secure a trophy. It had been the fatal last act of the fight.
How accurate was the depiction? Saul thought that in all the important particulars it was probably truthful enough. The guy wouldn’t have been dressed like that, though. The guy detailed in stained glass looked like one of Arthur’s Round Table dudes in a picture by Millais or Holman-Hunt. Saul was familiar with the style because he owned a bunch of those paintings himself. The courtly medieval world of the Pre-Raphaelite school was romantic and seductive. In this particular instance, chronology made it no more than a glamorous lie.
Warriors had dressed like the stained-glass dude in the time of the window’s creation and the artisan who made it had figured on rendering what he knew from life. The real event had taken place 300 years earlier, and though the human protagonist had certainly been of noble birth and martial inclination, he would have been dressed differently. Saul figured animal skins and jewelled broaches and probably more facial hair than on a self-respecting member of the Grateful Dead.
No chivalric code to observe, that far back in history. No notion of courtly love. That came later with the French, their manners and their madrigals and wimpled damsels prone to bouts of distress. This guy had been different from all that. No grail quest to distract him from his mission. That was for damn sure.
Armed differently too, probably, Saul figured. He thought a round wooden shield and maybe a double-bladed battleaxe rather than a sword. The guy would have been expert in the use of arms, lethal in combat and colossally strong. He’d have been completely determined. And he’d have been quite unbelievably fucking courageous.