Fair Game
Page 1
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Contents
Sheila Radley
Dedication
A Father’s Advice to his Son
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
Sheila Radley
Fair Game
Sheila Radley
Sheila Radley was born and brought up in rural Northamptonshire, one of the fortunate means-tested generation whose further education was free. She went from her village school via high school to London University, where she read history.
She served for nine years as an education officer in the Women’s Royal Air Force, then worked variously as a teacher, a clerk in a shoe factory, a civil servant and in advertising. In the 1960s she opted out of conventional work and joined her partner in running a Norfolk village store and post office, where she began writing fiction in her spare time. Her first books, written as Hester Rowan, were three romantic novels; she then took to crime, and wrote ten crime novels as Sheila Radley.
Dedication
For Sue, Rachael and Jessica
A Father’s Advice to his Son
If a sportsman true you’d be,
Listen carefully to me.
Never, never let your gun
Pointed be at anyone;
That it may unloaded be
Matters not the least to me.
If’twixt you and neighbouring gun
Birds may fly or beasts may run,
Let this maxim e’er be thine:
Follow not across the line.
‘Stops’and beaters oft unseen
Lurk behind some leafy screen;
Calm and steady always be:
Never shoot where you can’t see.
You may kill or you may miss,
But at all times think of this:
All the pheasants ever bred
Won’t repay for one man dead.
abridged from verses written in 1909 by Commander Mark Beaufoy
MP for his son Henry on reaching the age of thirteen.
Chapter One
Laura woke with a start, and a sense of foreboding. For a few moments she lay tense, wondering what was wrong, her head turned to the window where the dark oblong of curtain was outlined by the morning’s grey light. All was quiet as usual, in the house and outside. And then, close by, she heard the raucous kurrr-kuk and the wing-flap of a crowing cock pheasant, and she knew at once why she was uneasy.
Today was the first of November. The killing season was about to begin.
She jumped out of bed and pulled on her old tracksuit trousers and the first sweatshirt that came to hand. Its message was SAVE THE WHALES, but her immediate concern was not for marine life or even for wildlife in general. Living as she did in the heart of the Suffolk countryside, on a landowner’s shooting estate, what she was intent on saving from slaughter were the local gamebirds. It horrified her to think that the hundreds of pheasants that strutted so handsomely through the fields and woods, filling the air in spring with their calling, were soon going to be flushed out, panicked into clumsy flight, and driven over a line of guns to be shot in the name of sport.
Pausing only to splash the sleep from her eyes and sweep a brush through her long pale hair, she ran downstairs and along the back corridor. The door to the kitchen was open but her mother was refuelling the Aga and didn’t notice her. In the lobby, where the outdoor clothes were left, she hurriedly pulled on her wellies and her padded jacket. Then she seized the bag of pheasant food and let herself out through the back door into the cold misty air.
Once outside, in what was still called the stable yard although it was where the cars were garaged, she slowed down.
‘Chuck-chuck-chuck,’ she called, crossing the gravelled yard as quietly as possible and walking on over the wide back lawn towards the shrubbery. The cobweb-spangled grass had been drenched by overnight fog and the trees were limply hung about with dripping yellow leaves. As she neared the shrubbery, she tossed out handfuls of grain and peanut kernels. The wary cock pheasants had run for cover as soon as they heard her open the door, but the more trusting hens were peeping eagerly from beneath the evergreens, waiting for her.
‘Chuck-chuck-chuck,’ Laura reassured them, and the drab birds, smaller and with much shorter tails than the cocks, came scurrying out like domestic fowls to feed at her feet.
Her mother was always snapping at her for wasting her pocket money on feeding wild pheasants, but at the moment they mattered more to Laura than anything else. Twice a day throughout the hard weather of the previous winter she had fed a cock and three hens; and in May, at least one of the hens had repaid her by nesting under the bushes and producing a family of chicks.
Soon after they were hatched, Laura had been lucky enough to glimpse them. She was crossing the back lawn when she had heard a hidden bird give an anxious cluck. Stopping abruptly, she had seen a patch of shade-dappled grass at the edge of the trees come magically alive as ten or a dozen little balls of fluff, yellow with dark brown bars, scurried to their mother for protection. And on the following day she had seen the hen pheasant ushering her brood down towards the insect-rich meadows, encouraging them with throaty murmurs as they scrambled and tumbled through the grass, and crouching to shelter them under her wings when they were caught by a heavy shower of rain.
All the pheasants left the shrubbery during the summer in search of good pickings in the fields. They were difficult to see, then, when the hedges were in leaf and the grasses were high; but there were occasional distant calls to be heard, and sometimes a cock’s long neck would rise up out of growing barley like a multicoloured periscope.
Laura had worried about the chicks, though. She knew how vulnerable they were to cold, rain and predators, and she had wondered whether any of them would survive and return to the shrubbery for the winter. To her joy, as the evenings drew in, three cocks – one of them last year’s original – and at least half a dozen hens had begun to make their way back each night to roost. If only, she thought, she could persuade them to remain in or near the shrubbery in the daytime instead of roaming away in their restless search for food, she could save those few, at least, from fear and violent death.
Like most country children, just-fifteen-year-old Laura had grown up taking the wildlife about her for granted. It was there; always had been, always would be. What she had been most concerned for when sh
e was young were the spectacular endangered animals, the whales and tigers and elephants. Then as she grew older and began to understand the importance of the environment, she had been indignant about the destruction of the tropical rain forests. It was only in the past year that she had really appreciated that the English countryside and its wildlife were endangered too.
It seemed that things were not in fact the same as they always had been. There were fewer meadowlands, wildflowers and butterflies; fewer wet places, frogs and newts; fewer old barns and barn owls, hedgerows and birds, woods and wild animals. And unless something was done to save them, there would be fewer still by the time Laura had children of her own.
Living on the Chalcot estate, which had seemed such a paradise when her mother took the job as housekeeper to Mr Glaven four years ago, now burdened Laura’s conscience. She didn’t see how she could stay in a place where wild creatures were killed for people’s pleasure. Not for the first time in her life – her parents had divorced when she was eight and she had been desperately unhappy for years afterwards; still was, whenever she thought of her father – she had contemplated running away from home.
But that would mean abandoning her special pheasants, Fitzroy and Francis and Fred and their plain little wives. She couldn’t just leave them to their fate, not after encouraging them to rely on her for food and safety. Besides, here was a wonderful opportunity to put her beliefs about conservation into practice.
She knew that Mr Glaven was not a wicked or a cruel man. He had always been kind to her, and he seemed very fond of dogs and horses. She couldn’t believe that he would continue to shoot pheasants once he realised how wrong it was. Conceiving it her duty to tell him, she had made the mistake of saying so to her mother one Friday evening when they were preparing supper for his homecoming.
Her mother, nearing fifty, a thin cross woman with gypsy ear-rings, her black-dyed hair cut sharp and short, had been furious.
‘Don’t you dare do any such thing. Don’t be so stupid, girl! Mr Glaven’s a good employer. We’re lucky to live here, and if you go offending him with your righteous notions we shall be jobless and homeless as well. If you don’t like what goes on, just keep your eyes and ears shut. And your mouth.’
But Laura cared about the pheasants more than anything else. As soon as she could find an opportunity to speak to Mr Glaven, she had no intention of keeping her mouth shut.
Chalcot House was a gentleman’s residence of comparatively modest size. It had been built in the classic style, of local grey brick, in the late eighteenth century. There were six principal bedrooms, and three more in the Victorian kitchen wing where the housekeeper, Ann Harbord, lived with her daughter. The wing had been built at a right angle to the back of the main house, at the same time as the stable block that formed the third side of the yard.
The Glaven family had owned the 440-acre Chalcot estate for over a hundred years. William Glaven, a prosperous Yarchester grain merchant, had bought the estate in 1885 as a wedding present for his son Lewis.
Keen sportsmen, the Glavens had remodelled the woodland in defined belts and clumps so that driven shoots could be organised. Good hosts, they had provided winter weekend guests with at least a thousand pheasants to shoot in the intervals between lavish meals. The gun room at the back of the house was lined with photographs of those old shooting parties, the men in tweeds and stiff white collars, the women in vast skirts and amazing hats.
The days of such extravagance were long gone, of course. The Glavens had continued to prosper, and to shoot, but they now entertained on a much smaller scale. The present head of the family, Lewis – the names William and Lewis were passed alternately from father to eldest son – had been a widower for four years. He was chairman of a major insurance group, and lived during the week in a penthouse flat over the headquarters building in the City of London. He came home every Friday to Monday, sometimes with guests, sometimes alone.
Lewis Glaven had two married daughters and five grandchildren, but he rarely saw them. Both families lived near Perth, one in Scotland, the other in Australia. His son and heir, Will, was unmarried; he was in the army, a squadron commander in an armoured regiment, with a social life that kept him away from Chalcot most of the time. When he did come home, often bringing a girl but never the same one twice, he preferred riding to shooting.
Will was thirty-four, and in his father’s opinion it was high time he settled down and set about producing a son and heir of his own. Lewis had always intended to hand over the management of the estate to Will when he left the army, and the ending of the Cold War had brought that event nearer than they’d anticipated.
Lewis looked forward to it. He wanted Chalcot to be properly lived in again. He and his wife had always hoped that Will would marry a childhood friend, the horsy daughter of a neighbouring farming family; but though the girl seemed keen enough, Will was reluctant to come under starter’s orders. Most of his girlfriends seemed to be fashionable and city-smart, and where would be the sense in bringing a wife like that to Chalcot? He needed to marry a practical girl with an unsqueamish country background, someone who would be perfectly happy to muck out her own horse, pluck a brace of well-hung pheasants before cooking them for a dinner party, and of course breed and bring up the next generation of Glavens.
None of the girls Will had brought home came into that category. Not one of them, in Lewis’s opinion, was appropriate as the future mistress of Chalcot, and some were definitely less appropriate than others. On his son’s most recent visit, Lewis had tired of dropping hints.
‘If you can’t find a more suitable wife than that,’ he had said exasperatedly of Will’s latest girlfriend, ‘you’d better not marry at all.’
He should have kept his opinion to himself, of course. Will hadn’t been home since, and Lewis could only hope that he wouldn’t go and marry the girl out of sheer perversity.
Lewis himself, still attractive to women in his vigorous late fifties, had no intention of making a second marriage. He had married early, and though he’d never regretted his choice of wife and had mourned her sincerely, he was frankly enjoying his freedom. He had a number of good-looking women friends – as fashionable and city-smart as Will’s, though rather more mature – but he made a point of keeping them well away from Chalcot. He was essentially an outdoor man, a country sportsman, and his Suffolk estate was his refuge.
Lewis Glaven loved Chalcot. When he was in London he always looked forward to walking his fields in the company of the farm manager, and checking the progress of his prized herd of pedigree beef cattle. Most of all, he enjoyed discussing plans for the shooting season with his gamekeeper.
Shooting had always been Lewis’s favourite sport. It was a disappointment to him that his son was neither a keen shot nor a particularly good one, but he was confident that Will would improve as soon as he returned to Chalcot and applied himself to country living.
The history of the estate was of never-ending interest to Lewis. He particularly enjoyed reading the old game books begun by his great-grandfather in 1885, although he deplored the wholesale slaughter that was recorded in them. The object of those old shooting parties had been to kill as much as possible; anything that flew or ran was, it seemed, fair game.
Lewis’s own principle was quality, not quantity. What he enjoyed about shooting was the skill and excitement involved, the challenge of birds that flew high and fast overhead. That was why, although the pheasant-shooting season begins on the first of October, the season at Chalcot always began at least a month later. Lewis raised fewer than a thousand pheasants a year, and disdained to shoot until the young cock birds were strong enough to go up like rockets, tails streaming.
It was his custom to hold driven shoots five times a year, the first in mid-November. He would sometimes invite business acquaintances to take part, but only if he knew them to be experienced guns. What he liked best was to invite six or seven local friends – neighbouring landowners or farmers who could offer him a day
’s sport on their own land in return.
He was becoming increasingly disenchanted, though, with the quality of the sport provided by driven shoots. The keepering involved in rearing the birds, even when they were bought from game farms at six weeks old, was unjustifiably expensive. The birds themselves, hand-fed and half-tame, were sometimes sluggish and reluctant to fly.
Wild birds were leaner, fitter and wilier, and in Lewis’s opinion they provided much more testing sport. He anticipated killing no more than fifty per cent of the birds he raised each year; the remainder lived wild, often in the hedgerows, and when he wasn’t holding a driven shoot he liked to go out with his gun and his well-trained dogs to walk them up. One good wild pheasant, cleanly shot, gave him far more satisfaction than several half-tame birds.
The keeper had told him, a few weeks ago, that some wild pheasants had taken to roosting in the shrubbery just behind the house. Wily old devils, thinking they could winter safely on his back doorstep! Lewis was looking forward, when he went home for the first weekend in November, to putting ’em up high and taking aim.
‘Chuck-chuck-chuck.’
The hen pheasants were feeding happily, and now one of the cocks found the courage to approach. This was Fred, one of the young birds, his plumage an unusually dark reddish-copper colour, barred with black. He turned his wattled head a little anxiously from side to side as he stepped out of cover, his long tail trailing, but he broke into a scurry as he neared the food that Laura had scattered. He was followed almost immediately by the other young cock, Francis, a handsome fellow with his tail held high, his bronze plumage separated by a narrow white half-ring from the shining bottle green of his neck.
It was only right that Fitzroy, the most splendid and lordly of birds, should make his appearance last of all. Laura thought he was by far the most magnificent cock pheasant on the entire Chalcot estate. Like the others he had scarlet wattles, scarlet rings round his eyes, two eared horns of green feathers on his head, and sharply pointed spurs on his legs. But his head and neck were a deep iridescent blue, like a peacock’s, and at the base of his neck was a perfect ring of white feathers; his body plumage was the colour of burnished copper, each delicately patterned feather laid on like chain mail; and his gracefully narrow tail, as long as his body, was cross-barred with blue and black.