Refuge

by Richard Herley

  Suter raised the captured L85 and snugged it into his shoulder. He had left his shotgun in one of the corridors; would go back for it when this was resolved.

  The stock and handgrip were slippery with sweat. This model had a reputation for lax quality control. He was familiar with it, and had handled several during the painstaking assembly of his armoury, during his long trawl of the barracks and guardrooms of Northwood and Pirbright and Aldershot. His thumb checked that the selector was set to automatic fire. Simultaneously his index finger found the safety bolt above the trigger and pushed it all the way to the left.

  Lit by October sun, vivid, surreal, the youth’s glaring head, neck and red plaid shoulders seemed, instead of retreating, to be swelling to fill the fly-specked field of the four-power telescope. The skull had been scraped blue. From behind, the ears looked absurdly prominent, an emblem of ugliness.

  Five yards, no more, of unrestricted view remained.

  Suter centred the shoulderblades and habit took over.

  The violent reciprocation of the gas-powered piston, the rotation of the bolt, the hammer-blows of exploding propellant, took him by surprise. It was his fault: he had presented badly. The recoil had turned the weapon against his shoulder and flung the rounds like a diagonal line of grape-shot across the intervening space. His eye received a crazily graticuled image of mortar courses and lichened bricks high in the wall. Looking aside from the rifle, he regained sight of the red jacket just in time to see its wearer crashing headlong. A scream reached his ears. The Kalashnikov clattered to the ground.

  Even as Suter came up, the youth was still writhing, groaning now, trying to crawl towards the corner of the generator house a yard or two away. The AK47 had been forgotten. With his right boot, Suter warily pushed it yet further aside.

  Judging from the two big holes in his jeans, the youth’s left thigh and buttock had each taken a hit. The leg, dragging uselessly, lay at a most alarming angle. The head of the femur, probably also the pelvic girdle, had been smashed. There would be vast internal damage. Blood was not just haemorrhaging, but surging, from the lower hole. Suter must have severed the femoral artery. Without the sort of attention once available in the surrounding buildings, such injuries were terminal.

  Suter took another few steps and stood blocking the way. ‘Where d’you think you’re off to?’

  When he tried to look up, the doomed youth’s eyes registered fear and perplexity as much as pain. His contorted features were those of a small child on the point of bursting into tears. The injustice Suter had dealt him was so monstrous that it could not be comprehended.

  Utterly bewildered, he managed to say, ‘Why’d you do it?’ and fell forward once more.

  Like the conversation with Muriel Taylor the previous day, like everything that had happened since, this exchange of words had the elastic quality of a dream. Suter wondered if he had again spoken too loudly. This was the first time since 2017 that he had spoken to any male other than his cat and, of course, himself.

  He dropped to his haunches, the muzzle of the L85 close to the youth’s bumpy, phrenologically dubious cranium.

  ‘You shouldna done it,’ the youth groaned. ‘I know I’ve sinned. Help me. Help me. Get God to help me. You can do it. I know.’

  Get God to help him?

  Suter examined more closely what he could see of the youth’s face. His cheek was pressed against the asphalt, the lips distorted. His one blue eye stared at the ground, too close to focus, filmed with agony.

  Suter asked him, ‘Who am I?’

  ‘I’m sorry for what I done.’

  ‘Tell me who I am.’

  ‘Bex said … that old woman … Bex said … you was an angel from heaven.’

  ‘An angel?’ Now it was Suter’s turn to be perplexed. He suddenly remembered Muriel’s unanswered prayer, her bitter remonstrances.

  The youth groaned again.

  ‘Which angel?’

  ‘St Michael.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  Surely this wasn’t happening. Surely he was mad, as he had imagined himself to be when standing by the copper beech: for the name summoned to mind the four-square church tower at Shanley and its complement of mysterious, overhanging, weathered gargoyles; it recalled the arrival of Bex at Michaelmas, the feast of St Michael and All Angels, the twenty-ninth day of September, the quarter-day when magistrates were elected and outstanding rents fell due; it even recalled the putrid, sodden clothes-labels of the man in the river, a man whose height and build and colouring had been just like Suter’s own. But no, no: he was here, and he was perfectly sane.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Bex … I … you … I only did it ’cause … Steve … he … you shot him too … fuck it, Bex told us …’

  ‘What did Bex tell you? That I was St Michael?’

  At that moment a new wave of pain overtook him. He began uttering animal sounds, horribly low and disturbing. Despite all further attempts at questioning, he could no longer utter an intelligible word. The contents of his pelvis, the organs, the bowel, the spinal column there, had been destroyed. Pain was turning him into a beast before Suter’s eyes.

  Suter knew that he should take out his pistol and put an end to it. But he could not forget what this youth and his two companions had attempted, and he could not forget the open doorway of the linen-room on the sixth floor and the work done there by the hand-grenade meant for him.

  He rose, resplendent, to his feet. Brilliant in the sun, a big pool of blood had already accumulated. The youth would bleed to death. Any suffering he endured in the mean time was no more than his due: for Muriel, for all the others unseen.

  So certain was Suter of the rightness of this verdict that he took a couple of steps back towards the doorway before coming to a halt and unfastening the leather flap at his hip. He reconsidered for an instant before allowing the kilogram weight of his GP-35 to lower the blued steel of its barrel.

  A moment later, when he had pulled the trigger, he found that his hands had altogether stopped shaking.

  8

  The valley where Suter lived had been formed by glacial action fifteen or twenty thousand years before. As the ice-sheet had retreated, so the valley had flooded, forming an immense wetland contiguous with the Middlesex plain and the marshes of the Thames.

  Restoring it had been one of his earliest projects. In 1805 an engineer named Jessop had imprisoned the river system with his Grand Union Canal: Suter decided, two centuries later, to set it free. On 2 May, 2019, he accordingly set out for the yard of a public works contractor at West Hyde, a mile or so from his new home. Here he found a mass of chain.

  Working upstream for a distance of twenty-five miles, he dealt with each of the thirty-eight locks in turn. Using a bargee’s key – a sort of cranked spanner – he first opened each set of downstream paddles, emptying out the lock, then opened the downstream gates, flung chain across and yoked the beams. Next he opened the paddles of the upstream gates, allowing water to gush through, knowing that each pair would eventually succumb to rust and rot. At Tring, the highest point on the section between London and the Chilterns, he forced the valves at Marsworth and Wilstone Reservoirs, releasing some fifty million gallons – the equivalent of a thousand lockfuls – straight into the canal.

  The Rivers Bulbourne and Gade, and the lower Chess, all burst their banks and the twelve-mile line of flooded gravel pits from Watford to Uxbridge formed the basis of the marshes. The largest reed-beds spread around Maple Cross and Mill End, where the valley was at its broadest and most rich. The flooded gravel-pit at Harefield, the one overlooked by his house, which had been vast enough before, eventually merged with two others to become a sheet of water over two hundred acres in extent.

  The absence of human influence had already permitted an explosion in the numbers and diversity of every form of indigenous life. Now wildfowl in the valley, their ancestral home, began to flourish with almost supernatural fecundity. Ten years on, some species
were still increasing. In winter, the populations were swollen by visitors from further north and east. According to Suter’s census, last winter tufted duck had been up to about six thousand, pochard not far behind. Mallard had reached fourteen thousand, teal nine. Shoveler had peaked at three thousand five hundred. Pintail and gadwall seemed also to have peaked. Goldeneye, goosander, smew, and most other diving ducks continued to increase.

  In the course of his affairs the previous year, Suter had seen or heard at least two hundred and twelve different species of birds. Glossy ibis had occurred for the first time, together with great snipe. The lagoons of the middle valley held, besides the expected species, breeding bittern, black tern, marsh harrier, spotted crake, bearded tit, and marsh and Cetti’s warblers. A pair of spoonbills had attempted this year and would probably be back the next. Feral pigs dwelt among the reeds. Otters had become a frequent sight.

  Through this paradisal valley the canal flowed from north to south, a canal no longer, but a smooth river, glossy, myrtle-green, swarming with fish.

  At about five-thirty, having left the hospital behind, Suter set himself afloat on it and with desultory rotations of his paddle guided the canoe along. He had just salvaged this vessel, made of fibreglass, at Watford Marina. It had been left lying upside down, with several others, in a covered rack hidden by osiers. The paddle, of aluminium, he had found in the ruins of the Marina building.

  He kept a little dinghy at home and often amused himself by tacking across the lake, sometimes visiting the islands to monitor the progress of otherwise inaccessible scrapes and nests, but he had not navigated the canal itself for many years.

  With dripping blades he steered himself downstream, consumed by visions. His brief foray, his contact with the human race, had ended in the only way possible: in disaster. Enough had happened to feed his nightmares for the rest of his life. His mental state, the calm he had been cultivating so assiduously for the past ten years, had been demolished. For the better part of that period, right up till the moment of finding the body in the river, he had lived so much as part of his valley, had gradually become so absorbed in it, had so much admired and worshipped its beauties and its powers of recovery, that he had thereby, and quite inadvertently, forgotten to be lonely. Until that moment, his solitude had become constant, almost companionable, a small price to pay for the privilege of owning the world.

  Now everything was different. He had learned that other people existed, and not so very far away. He did not, after all, enjoy sole possession of the landscape. In future his life would be circumscribed by fear of discovery. Far worse than this: his loneliness had returned. It had been there all the time, intact, unchanged, just waiting to re-emerge and manifest itself. He equated this intolerable isolation with the insanity that had gripped his first two years after the plague. And it was back. Hiding behind the trunk of the copper beech, that was what he had seen and feared.

  His alga-stained canoe glided under the next railway bridge and turned a rightward bend. The left shore was bedded by a mass of reed sweet-grass of a verdancy and luxuriance which, before the plague, he would have found simply incredible. As he approached it he felt his heart want to lift in the old way: dazzling among the sweet-grass, a snow-white egret, having hesitated for several seconds, hoisted itself aloft. Even after twelve years, its race was still imprinted with fear of the hated form. On incurved wings, black legs outstretched, yellow feet dripping, the bird rose through the canyon of waterside trees and into the glancing sunshine above.

  It silently rose higher. The sky was a watery blue, an October blue, washed with high, thin cloud. The egret slid sideways and disappeared. From its altitude and the direction it had taken, Suter guessed it would come down no more than half a mile to the south.

  An hour of daylight remained. From here it was six miles to his house. The current ran at about four miles an hour. If he paddled more vigorously, and if he met no obstacles on the way, he could be home before nightfall.

  Almost at once, however, he was confronted by a mass of willow branches: two large trees had, since Saturday morning, when he had last walked past this spot, crashed diagonally and almost side by side across the canal. The portage through thick vegetation and past the fallen trees cost him at least fifteen minutes.

  Had these two willows fallen a week earlier, the dead body, Martin, Helen’s husband, would never have got past them in one piece and none of this would have happened. The body would have decayed, nibbled by fish, its bacterial soup carried off by the current. The clothes would have disintegrated too, but more slowly. Over time, the inorganic components – the zips and studs – would have been released and sunk one by one to the bottom. The same with the irreducible contents of the pockets: the chewing gum, the nails and staple. And the figurine. The soapstone homuncule, whose mirthful visage had overseen everything since Thursday, he too would have been released from his enfolding handkerchief and allowed to drift down into the soft, benthic mud, there to lie for ever – or until the next glacier remade the valley.

  As he put the canoe back in the water and reloaded it with his pack and weapons, Suter’s feelings became augmented by a deep-seated sense of unease. The figurine’s smirk was not entirely benign. It was the smirk of someone who knew the futility of giving advice, who was content to see whatever outcome human folly might produce. Suter had been left to exercise his free will. He had seen fit to hand Muriel a nine-millimetre machine pistol: and in so doing had brought the heavens down upon them both.

  He recalled the way he had given her a gratuitous lesson in murder, the Boy’s Own, strong-but-silent vocabulary of his lecture. Can you remember all that?

  ‘I should imagine so,’ she had said.

  Even more affected and grotesque had been his manner when informing her that he had disposed of Martin’s remains. The histrionic way he had passed her the bonze. Give it to his wife when you can.

  The bonze.

  It might have been Martin’s most personal possession. One that, Suter had just realised, Bex could have discovered in Muriel’s pocket.

  He had sent three men to Watford. That had left eight or nine at Shanley. Just how many would be needed to secure the village? Yesterday, Suter had assumed they would all be needed. But, since Bex was holding the head man hostage, he really only wanted three, including himself.

  ‘Three,’ Suter said. ‘Four at most.’ Leaving four or five available.

  Why hadn’t he thought of this before? Why hadn’t he, the doctor of philosophy, with his much-vaunted capacity for analysis, grasped the obvious fact that Bex knew very well that Martin and his bonze must have been washed downstream from Shanley? And that, whoever had found Martin, whoever had handed Muriel the bonze, he too must have been downstream; and that, in all probability, downstream was where he dwelt?

  ‘You imbecile!’

  With strenuous scoops of the paddle, Suter turned sharply to the right and thrust the prow of the canoe among the rushes on the western bank. This was the bank where he had passed and repassed on Friday and Saturday while looking for the origin of the body.

  The old towpath was submerged and overgrown. Soaking his boots, he jumped out and, dragging the canoe higher, splashed ashore.

  Here in the shadows, evening had already arrived. Almost at once he found his two-day-old trail, under the overhang of maturing ash-trees and sycamores. It threaded a way through a tangled, rowetty understorey of holly and slender ash-whips, dwarfed by lack of light: he needed only a glance to satisfy himself that no one had walked this way since. Nonetheless he got down on his knees and examined one of the trodden saplings. The stem had recovered much of its verticality. Phototropic adjustment, by which the deranged laminae of the leaflets were brought back into the optimal plane for light-gathering, had been fully accomplished. He quickly studied a second sapling, together with some broken-off ash foliage which had already begun to wither, and the crushed, white-bloomed remains of flowerless enchanter’s nightshade. With his face an inch from the
ground, he let his eye range across a faint depression left on Saturday by his left boot on its southward journey. The footmark had been rained on since and had swollen back almost into the horizontal. Furthermore, the layers of dead leaves and tiny twigs had been extensively rearranged by litter-dwelling beetles.

  No fresher trail was present.

  He straightened up, the soapstone smirk hanging vaguely in the air.

  Suter cried out in anguish. ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’

  There was no point in looking here! Neither the body nor his pursuers would have come this way at all! They’d have come along the Chess, which joined the canal further south, at Batchworth Lock!

  By the time Suter reached the confluence, he had been delayed yet again, by the wreckage of submerged longboats at Lot Mead. As he tried to read the surface of the road-bridge he was fighting back panic. He had again failed to exercise the requisite foresight and now he was in deep, deep trouble. There might be men with guns inside his house.

  The sun had already dipped behind the valley wall. The light was failing and without the beam of his torch he could no longer tell whether pursuing feet had, yesterday or today, trodden this carpet of humus and leaf-litter.

  ‘Hell and damn! Damn it all to hell!’

  On hands and knees he was scrutinising the concrete ramp, bounded by bryony-grown railings, that led down to the towpath from the old footway at the top of the bridge. No sign of any tracks but his own. They would have had to use this bridge, or swum. Unless they’d crossed further up, at the timber mill. Assuming that bridge was still standing. He took out his notebook, opened it at two blank pages and held them at an angle to the brightest part of the sky, trying to use the white paper as a reflector. It made little difference.