by Joseph Hone
But where was his stupid dog – a police dog, obviously? It must have lagged somewhere behind him for Ross turned and called softly, disappearing back into the cotton wool. I took the chance of moving off as quickly as I could in the opposite direction.
For quite a few minutes then I thought I’d lost him again. I heard the dog whimper, but its excited cries seemed to be disappearing in the distance behind me. What on earth was it doing? My scent must have been clear enough on the ground. I didn’t wait to find out, moving onwards, skirting a clearing, making for the end of the lake.
It was on the far side of this open glade, when I’d gone back into the undergrowth of fern and bramble and thought myself safe, that I heard the sounds of some mild stampede on the still air behind me: bushes crackled, dry sticks broke. The Alsatian was whimpering as it ran, and the hungry sounds were coming towards me this time. The dog had found my trail securely at last and was closing on me quickly.
I ran through the bushes now, my skin thorned as I ran fleetfoot, regardless of noise, intent only on putting as much distance as possible between us. But it would never be enough. The dog had four legs and, despite its earlier tracking errors, its training would tell in the end, I knew.
It gained on me as I ran headlong up the valley. And I thought – it must soon be over: the beast will leap on my back in a moment, or tear at my arm, its dark jaws sinking deep into my flesh.
And it was imagining this bloody hurt, and my subsequent death (for that, of course, had been their intention from the start) that made a charge of anger flood up in me, a tingling, like an electric current that brought the muscles tight together, all over my body in a sense of wild supremacy.
A hunted animal, yes, I’d become just that: naked, earth-grimed, bleeding. But such an animal, at the last, can turn and kill too. There was an arrow for both of them, after all, a chance, at least, before they got me.
I ran up the side of the valley, unstrapping the two arrow shafts as I went, and when I thought I was high enough to command the ground beneath, I turned, stringing the first arrow and waited for the dog.
As soon as it saw me, emerging from some laurel at the bottom of the dell, it left the scent and bounded straight up the slope towards me, head high, going very fast, without any whimpering. Now that it was finally confirmed in its purpose, the animal was like a guided missile that would explode viciously in my face within moments. Ross was nowhere to be seen: the dog had run well ahead of him.
The dacron cord came quickly taut against my cheek. I steadied the sharpened arrow-tip on the animal’s chest. And since it was coming straight up the slope towards me, without any lateral movement, the dog formed an ever-larger target on the same axis. I thought I could make it.
I let it get to within about twenty feet of me – and just before the arrow sang, cutting the air like a whip for an instant, I knew it was going to strike home. There was that sixth sense that sometimes comes in any physical skill when you know you’ve got it right just before you do it, when there is a magic certainty of success.
The arrow, without barbs, drove deep into the dog’s chest, partly transfixing it like a spit through a pig. It came on another yard or so up the hill. But it was only momentum. It wasn’t dead when I picked it up, but there was no bite in it, nor any sound. Only its eyes remained angry. The arrow must have pierced its windpipe or found its heart. I got it out of the open in a moment, cradling it in my arms towards some cover higher up, and when I laid the animal down on the leaf mould, all my shoulder, where the dog’s muzzle had been, ran with foaming blood.
Of course Ross would miss the dog, I knew that. He would look high and low for it now and would surely come back later, with fresh help, to continue the search. But I knew already where I could dispose of the animal, when I had the chance, where it would not betray my presence in the wood and would appear simply to have met with a natural accident. There was a covered well I’d discovered a week before among some bushes, just behind the old pumping shed, with two metal shutters at ground level which opened up, displaying dark water six feet beneath. I would dump the animal there, leaving one of the covers off, so that, if discovered at all, it would be seen as a bloated victim of some woodland error, a town dog fatally unused to country matters.
But I wondered then why Ross hadn’t kept the animal on a lead in the first place? Surely that was how they tracked murderers on the nine o’clock news? Perhaps it was his own dog, a pet, not police trained at all? Ross was just the kind to keep such a dog in London. There was a lot of cruelty in him, in his face at the very least; something of the frustrated hunter there, of someone who’d keep just such a big killer dog in his flat or suburban semi, as a constant reminder of vicious life. Or perhaps, simply, no one else had agreed with him at HQ that I could possibly be anywhere in these woods, which they had so thoroughly combed two weeks before, and he’d had to come down from London on his own, unaided, so that with his shotgun to carry, the dog had to be let run free. But whatever the reason, Ross himself was still there to contend with.
He came into the glade beneath me a moment later, his shotgun at the ready now, perplexed but wary. He called for the dog, a soft call on the morning air that I barely heard.
‘Karen?’ I thought he said. Then he whistled. But only a bird answered in the distance. The sun was rising higher now, beginning to cast long shafts of gold through the cathedral of beech trees round the clearing. The mist had gone. Ross turned apprehensively, as though he felt suddenly exposed in all this brilliant light, and looked up the steep bank towards where I was hidden. I thought – if he comes up I’ll shoot him too. But he didn’t. He moved straight on, following the path he thought the dog had taken, up towards the head of the lake. And so it was the more careless of me to allow myself to be trapped by him ten minutes later behind the ruined pumping shed. For the shed was in the same direction that he had taken, by the northern end of the lake: if I’d stayed put by the dead beast for a little longer, Ross would probably have left the wood altogether.
Instead, after some while crouching uncomfortably on the slope, I became impatient. I was anxious to get rid of the dog and get back to my crow’s nest. So I picked it up again after settling the dead leaves so that no blood was visible, and set off along almost the same path that Ross had taken.
It was when I’d got behind the shed, leaving myself without an exit, and had started to prise up one of the metal shutters with a stick, that I heard something move on the other side of the old brickwork, the faintest sound – but a footfall, I thought, for it was followed almost immediately by another noise, a twig cracking. Peering round the back corner of the building, I saw Ross coming towards me, moving through some saplings, this time with a look of certainty in his eyes, his gun raised.
There was no way out then. The dog was lying in the open, next the well. If Ross came round the corner and saw it, and especially if it had been his dog, I knew he’d shoot me straight away if he got the chance. It was then that I notched the second arrow, drew the bow and waited for him.
One
‘All gone again!’ Laura sang out in a tone of weary optimism, intent as always on putting a good face on things. We’d become used to the child’s intermittent chaos in the cottage long before. But Clare had got so much better lately that this new mayhem, the explosion of moist soil all over the crisp linen Sunday tablecloth, surprised even us. Judy, the postmistress’s elder daughter, was nearly in tears. She’d been looking after Clare while all of us had been out to the Easter Sunday service at the church just beyond my cottage.
‘I was out in the kitchen, just for a minute – putting the roast in …’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Laura comforted her, while Minty, our big, over-loving, wire-haired terrier, pranced around in a frenzy of foolish welcome, as though we’d been away for days and this disaster in the dining-room was a carefully contrived homecoming gift which he and Clare had been working on all morning for us.
George – George Benson, a
Professor of Anthropology now at Oxford and out with his wife Annabelle from the town for the weekend – moved round the circular table, making odd archaeological surveys into the dirt, scraping it up with his hands, but only making it worse. The clayey soil was moist. Laura had watered the half dozen flowering hyacinths that same morning. And now the table was like a desecrated altar: the dark smudges of this grave soil from the end of our garden, just next the churchyard wall, set against the brilliant white linen cloth, with the conical blue and pink flowers, like little fir trees, smashed all over the place and Clare, still crouching on the table deep about her business, seemingly unaware of us, sorting the soil through, discovering the bulbs, inspecting them carefully, smelling them as a gourmet might ponder some exotic dish.
‘Well? What happened?’ Laura asked her daughter, not looking at her directly, no hint of annoyance in her voice. Clare didn’t reply, though of course she could speak now, very reasonably when she wished. She was nearly eleven after all.
‘I expect she wanted to be taken to church,’ I said.
I was no great churchgoer. But Laura liked to go, and Clare too, if for different reasons. That was how I’d first met both of them the summer before, high up on one of Lisbon’s windy hills, in the Anglican church of St George. We’d all become so much happier people since then, that perhaps Clare had come to identify churches with her new-found contentment, where all three of us were in such buildings together, and had felt excluded this morning – threatened – and had thus taken her revenge.
‘But she said she didn’t want to come,’ Laura turned, admitting some of her anguish to me, at least. ‘She’d sooner stay at home with Judy and help with the lunch, she said.’
‘She wanted to be made to come then.’
I disliked hinting, even, at the dry world of psychology, the awful jargon of the child specialists, their arid theories of cause and effect that I knew had done so little for Clare over the years. But even so, we all of us had a need sometimes to be forcibly confirmed in our happiness, to be taken to bed by a woman, or rooted away from the fire by friends for a frosty winter walk.
‘Perhaps,’ Laura said. And then, more abruptly, ‘Though God knows, she’s growing up, isn’t she? She has to learn what she wants, herself.’
‘She wants that as well,’ I said shortly. ‘She wants it both ways. She wants everything.’ I was more upset than Laura, perhaps.
Clare hadn’t heard us. She was still totally absorbed in her gardening. Her fringe of blond hair moved into a shaft of sun just then which touched it like a halo. It was midday with the light at its height over the church roof, angled down straight onto the table by the window, and Clare’s face beamed as she squelched the soil through her fingers. The room was filled with the smell of fresh earth and hyacinths and bathed with an intense spring light, the child a radiant harbinger of this muddy easier apocalypse. We stood there, the four of us round the table, unable to speak.
At last a log fell off the fire in the next room and I remembered the wine I had to open and set by the warmth before lunch. It wasn’t the first time this sort of horticultural explosion had occurred, these wild scents all over the cottage. Clare had a recurrent obsession with nature, with growing things, a thirst for flowers: to touch, to crush, to eat them, a need which died out completely in her at times, like bulbs in winter, only to blaze up again without reason – or none we knew of. She was happy then, so totally involved and happy, all her vacancy gone, that one felt that, lacking appropriate human development, she had instead a perfect bond with nature, alert to all its secret smells and signs, like an animal.
Apart from the hyacinths, Laura always liked to keep a big bowl of lavender on the deep windowsill of the small drawing-room: just the dried stalks in winter, when one could crush their ears at odd moments, gazing at nothing in particular out of the window, kneading them with warm fingers, so that the deep summer smell would live again even on the greyest days. In summer itself the perfume needed no encouragement, the flowers picked fresh from the big clump by the front garden gate.
Clare, on the days when she stayed at home for some reason from the special school near Oxford, found these fresh or dry stalks an almost irresistible source of fascination. This quintessence of English floral life was something new to her, I suppose, something she had not known in London nor, before that, in the desert wadis of East Africa where she had spent the first years of her life.
Sometimes she would take just a single stalk from the bowl and sit with it on the sofa, gazing at it intently for an hour, picking its minute buds out one by one, sniffing it before pushing it up her nose the better to grasp its smell, or turning it round and using the end as a toothpick. Or else she would take the whole bunch out and place the stalks meticulously, lined up in regiments all over the drawing-room floor throughout a morning, before re-arranging them or suddenly stamping on them vigorously, so that even up in the attic study where I worked the odour would rise up the two floors to me, while the drawing-room itself, when I came down to lunch, smelt like an accident in a perfume factory.
Lunch: thinking of our own meals, or those larger weekend occasions with friends: Clare, at ten and a half, nearly two years after her father’s death, had learnt to eat properly again at last. The graft had largely taken between her and the new family created around her. To begin with, when we’d first all come down to the Oxfordshire cottage, and before that when I’d first met Clare with her grandparents out in Cascais, she had eaten, when she ate at all, like a savage four-year-old, punishing the food, grinding it into floor or table; or, on her feet then, treating it like mudballs, clenching it up in her fine hands and slinging it all over the kitchen (or the tiled bathroom where she sometimes had to eat) with unerring accuracy. Like most autistic children she had a superbly developed motor system, the physical co-ordination of a circus juggler: she could almost spin a soup plate on an index finger, while hitting you in the eye with a boiled potato across the whole width of a room was child’s play to her.
George’s wife spoke to her now. How unlike her Christian name she was, the sun-tanned Annabelle, a tall, angular, very plain woman with long bronzed tennis-playing limbs, though I doubt she ever played any game. There was a remote, glazed quality about her, of someone always focusing on a matter far away or deep inside her. ‘Well,’ she said awkwardly to the child. ‘You have made a splendid mess!’
Clare responded at last. ‘Yes.’ She spoke without concern, smiling brightly up at us before leaving the table. She said no more. Clare at such times, having expressed some unknown desire or hurt in this dramatic manner, had no memory of the immediate past, or – for hours or even days afterwards – of any time further back. Her life seemed to start afresh on such occasions. She was continually re-born thus, yet one could never quite decide if this was a tragedy or a miracle.
George came with me into the drawing-room as I tended the fire and opened the bottle.
‘It doesn’t get any easier,’ he said sympathetically.
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ I pulled the cork. ‘It has recently. She’s been a lot better.’
‘There’s no constancy, though, in the improvement. That must be disheartening. Up, up, and then right back again.’
‘Is that surprising? Isn’t that very much the evolutionary process?’
George – a palaeontologist, as Clare’s famous father, Willy Kindersley, had been – had a haunted face shaped like a large wedge: a long thick flush of greying hair ran sideways across his scalp above a broad forehead. But then the skull narrowed dramatically, down a long nose to a very pointed chin. His eyes were grey too. But they were strangely alert, as if the man was still looking for some vital hominid evidence in the desert.
He and Annabelle had no children of their own. They appeared to be colleagues rather than a married couple, a pair devoted exclusively, it seemed, to man’s past; for Annabelle, an ethnologist by profession, worked in almost the same line of country as her husband. Yet George had a longing for a mo
re present life, I felt, where the bones were clothed with flesh, and Clare for him was a living mystery, a deviant hominid species more strange than any skeleton he had found while delving through millions of years in the sub-soil of East Africa.
He saw Clare – as we all did, for it was so obvious – as someone physically supreme: a beautiful, blue-eyed child, peach-skinned, ideally proportioned with marvellous co-ordination, balance, grasp – a body where human development, over aeons, had culminated in a sensational perfection: yet a form where there was some great flaw hidden in the perfect matrix, black holes in the girl’s mind that defied all rational explanation. George regarded Clare with awe, his scientific mind touched, even, with fear. Indeed, I sometimes wondered if, with his evolutionary obsessions, he looked on her as evidence of some new and awful development in humanity; if he saw Clare and the increasingly numerous children like her as precursors of a future race who, though perfectly built, would look into the world with totally vacant eyes.
George had been a colleague of Willy Kindersley’s before his death, and before George had settled down in Oxford. They had worked together three years before, long months beside the dry streams running into Lake Turkana in northern Kenya and before that on other prehistoric fossil sites further afield in the Northern Frontier District and on the Uganda border. For many years out there they had sought man’s origins, found small vital bones casually unearthed by the spring rains, a piece of some early hominid jaw or cranium, picking them out of the petrified old river beds with dental probes, Laura had told me, dusting them with fine paintbrushes before setting these part-men in patterns, jigsaws that gradually displayed proof of some earlier Eden by the lake shore, earlier than a nose bone found near the same site the previous season: earlier by a million years.