by Joseph Hone
I turned to the policeman. ‘He was here. In the kitchen, a tall man with a stocking mask. This is his gun. I don’t have a gun. Don’t you see?’ He didn’t.
I heard the ambulance coming then and other sirens behind it. The constable came towards me, diffidently, but with ice in his eyes. ‘Now, if you’ll just put the child down,’ he said. ‘Take it easy and come with us.’
I found calm then, out of the blue. I stopped shaking. I realised my own fingerprints were all over the gun now, that the man with gloves on had escaped and that Clare couldn’t speak or move. Laura was dead and I had killed her. What else could they think?
On impulse I put Clare into the man’s arms, edging round towards the door as I did so. As he took her I pushed the little frozen weight into his body so that he stumbled a fraction. Then I ran, out through the kitchen and into the deeper twilight that had come up all round now. I was across the back garden, over the wall into the pasture before I heard the first shouts behind me. But I knew my way here, the old Roman road leading four miles across country to the school, where the police, men from the bright lights of the local town, would be lost in the gathering dark.
Why did I run? To begin with, at least, I had doubts. It was an added admission of guilt. Besides, even though the man had gloves on, the police must surely have been able to find some other evidence of his presence in the cottage: the marks of violence on the door, fibres from his clothes, a footprint obviously not mine in the back garden.
It was the look on the policeman’s face at first: I knew he didn’t believe me. And in that moment I saw the whole thing clearly as a set-up, by British Intelligence, against me. I’d been framed by them once before – and that had taken me to four years in Durham Jail. Now it was my death they wanted. I was sure of that. And so, despite Clare, I had to run.
I hated doing it, leaving her – but my years involved with David Marcus and his various hit-men and ‘persuaders’ had told me, even in that shocked state, that unless I went, they would see me dead in any case, one way or another: a ‘scuffle’ in some local police station, or an ‘accident’ later in the cells beneath Scotland Yard. There were half a dozen ways. I’d witnessed one of them myself: a Soviet agent they’d taken in London once, whom they failed to ‘turn’. They had worked on him with black bags and wind machines – leaving him mindless at that point, with vomit marks running down the back of his jacket. Later they had put him completely out of his misery. And so, that night, I’d run to avoid any similar fate.
I hadn’t regretted it for long. The next morning and during the days afterwards up in the tree, I’d heard the news on the transistor: they never caught any tall man in an ex-army anorak. They were after me from then on, a brutal wife-killer, starting out then on a vast manhunt through the Cotswolds.
Of course, as I saw at once, that suited Marcus’s book just as well: they would never find his hit-man, so Marcus could now leave me to the ordinary police, the army, allowing them to think I was no more than the commonest sort of criminal. At best, they would kill me; at worst, Durham Jail would claim me again, but for much longer this time. Either way my ‘memoirs’ would not be continued.
But as I ran that night across the dark countryside I remember thinking: I must tell the truth. I must make these notes, as I have done. Thus, apart from Clare, it’s essential that I survive for the time being, which is the only curb on my anger at the moment. I want to get all these basic facts down before I start looking for Clare and before I see what I can do about Marcus and Ross and the others. ‘What I can do.’ What do I mean by that? I want to do to them what they did to Laura. It’s quite simple.
I made for the school because I knew it would be empty during half-term. I’d decided even then, out on the old Roman road, that this was the best means of survival. I thought of Spinks’s sleeping bag and backpack as I ran; I would lie up in the countryside somehow. I’d friends in London and there were other friends of ours in the immediate neighbourhood. But none of them would be any use. The police would see to that. However, if I moved fast, I thought I could get to the deserted school and then away into the more remote open land on the high wolds beyond, before the police thought of going there. And if I was careful, when they did arrive at the school they wouldn’t find any evidence of my visit there, and might perhaps never know I’d gone to ground in the country further afield. It was Spinks’s backpack after all, which wouldn’t be missed when school started again. And Spinks’s 32-pound fibreglass recurve bow as well. I thought of that, too, as I ran.
But the school wasn’t deserted when I got there, breathless, half an hour later. The housekeeper, seeming now to justify all Spinks’s earlier protests, was entertaining. Lights were on in her rooms down by the garages – and the sports room, next the gym, was just beyond her accommodation. An asphalt driveway led past her windows, which were curtained, but as I tiptoed by I could hear the nature of the party well enough: laughter, music, little shrieks, the tinkle of glass. Of course, it might have been the housekeeper’s sister or her maiden aunt inside, but the smart little Renault by one of the garages suggested otherwise – as did the giggling couple who came towards the sports room when I was inside it ten minutes later, just as I was about to leave with Spinks’s equipment and his bow.
I put my foot sharply against the bottom of the door and the rest of my weight against it – hoping they’d no intention of even trying to open it. Why should they in any case? What could these merrymakers want in the sports room?
They wanted something. A key was thrust into the lock and the handle turned an instant later. I lay against the wood, praying I wouldn’t slip.
A young voice spoke, north country, one I knew. ‘That’s funny. It’s stuck.’ It was Ackland, who took junior science, a vastly bearded, recently qualified, north-country youth who, it was rumoured, actually slept in the lab, so keen was he on his job. But he had some other job in mind now.
‘Won’t be a jiffy. You’ll see.’ He tried the lock again.
‘Come on then! Either in or out. Let’s not hang around.’ The young woman was impatient, bossy, with a slurred, partly cultivated voice I’d not heard before.
‘There’s a sleeping bag in here I’m sure. You could use it,’ Ackland whined, pushing at the door with some desperation now, I felt. One of my feet slipped a fraction. I was damp with sweat.
‘But I’m not staying anyway, I told you,’ the woman said, changing her tune. ‘No more one-night stands, thank you. Let’s go back.’
Ackland, like Spinks, was trying to have it away. I cursed him. If Spinks’s lechery a week before had offered survival, Ackland was now about to ruin me.
‘Come on, Ruthie, I’d break the door down, if you wanted me to. I’m sure there’s a bag inside.’
I held my breath. Ackland was a heavy fellow, a lot of puppy-fat beneath the beard. Luckily virtue, if such it was, prevailed. ‘No,’ the bossy woman’s voice came again. ‘No, not with you, in or out of any bag. You think I’m any Tom, Dick or Harry, don’t you, for your pleasure? Let’s go back.’
‘No, Ruthie, only trying to help …’
‘Only trying it on, you mean …’
Their voices faded as they walked away. I realised they must have been pretty drunk, the two of them, which was what made me risk stealing the transistor radio I saw on the top of the dashboard of the Renault as I passed it a few minutes later. The cock-teasing woman wouldn’t miss it until next morning, and when she did she probably wouldn’t bother reporting it. It was worth the risk anyway. Leaving the world, I knew I needed to keep in touch with it. I was coming back after all, I thought, as I made off fast across the school playing fields into the deep countryside beyond.
There was no moon, but with few clouds and approaching mid-summer, it was never completely dark that night. There was still some light away to the west, a fan of dying colour, and I knew my way in this direction, too, from school walks and cross-country runs I’d been in charge of with the boys the previous winter.
Beyond the beech coppice where the archery range was, at the far side of the playing fields, I took a line north-west moving through open pasture at first along the top of the eastern ridge of the Evenlode valley. Soon there was a farm lane which sank slightly between hedges, making the going easier: part of an old ridgeway, it ran for several miles towards Chipping Norton, with the farm itself half way along, set high on the wolds.
I gave these buildings a wide berth when I came to the first of them, a big dutch barn looming up in the half-light, bearing off to the left down the valley, through sloping pasture, skirting the long dry-stone walls, streaks of crimson right down on the horizon which still just lit my way.
A flock of sheep stirred uneasily somewhere ahead of me. And then I walked right into them, losing my bearings at the same time. The light in the west disappeared completely and I seemed to be in some dell halfway down the valley, enclosed by the land or by trees, I couldn’t see which, as I moved blindly among the sheep, bumping into their great woolly backsides. They started to bleat and then to move; and then they seemed to mass in great phalanxes about me in the dark, going this way and that, as if increasingly hemmed in by something which I couldn’t see. Their own panic was as great as mine now as I thrashed about among them, trying to find the rise in the ground which would take me back up the valley and give me my original vantage-point. Suddenly the animals seemed to rush me in the dark, all together, pushing and butting as they went, and I went with them, thrust along, upwards at last, where the sheep scattered away all round me and I saw the west again, the dying smears of colour on the horizon.
I ran across the great field, keeping north this time, moving away from the dying light, and within minutes I could see the greater lights of Chipping Norton, isolated like a great ship, moored across the valley ahead of me. I was coming to the end of the ridge at last. The parkland I was making for wasn’t far now; I knew that. It lay a few miles to the south-west of Chipping Norton. There was only a small by-road to cross at the bottom of the valley.
I’d seen the great estate many times from this road, some thousands of private acres rising up to a plateau on another hill, run through with great stands of beech and oak, so thickly wooded, indeed, that it was impossible ever to see the house itself which, though on a rise, was shrouded, even in midwinter, by the huge trees.
This Beechwood Manor and the lands had been bought a few years ago, I’d heard, by some American shipping magnate with a great collection of pre-Raphaelite paintings, paintings which the public were never allowed to view. I’d not been there. But I’d noticed these thick woods – and remembered, too, the little eighteenth-century bridge, the balustrades decorated with stone pineapples, which the road crossed as it ran along the borders of the estate. One of the most attractive streams in the Cotswolds rose somewhere in the vast privacy beyond. When the tracker dogs came after me, as they would, I could put the beauty of this brook to an entirely practical use, moving up the water so that the dogs would lose my trail.
A dog barked, several sharp yelps somewhere in the night to my left in the distance as I crouched in the ditch near the bridge. The road was strangely white, an almost luminous ribbon in the last of the light. Water gurgled over stones on the other side of the road, the stream coming from somewhere in the great cavern of trees beyond. Otherwise there was silence. The backpack, with the radio which I’d put inside, had been no trouble; nor had the quiver of arrows on my shoulder. But the long recurve bow, which I’d clutched in my fist all the way, was now an awkward weight in my hand.
I thought: what nonsense – a bow and arrow in this day and age. I saw the innocence of my plan then. England was no wild country now, nor was this Sherwood Forest. I felt the pain of a child suddenly, out too late at night, hopelessly astray, whose dare had failed, who could look forward only to punishment, to foolish disgrace, a loss of innocence.
But another sound came then, behind me from the hills, other dogs faintly calling, the noise hurrying down the still night air towards me.
Without thinking I ran across the road and stumbled into the water on the other side beneath the bridge, and then I was splashing madly up the stream through the canopy of dark trees, my shins bruised and cut once more as I fled. At first I thought it was water from the stream wetting my cheeks. But after a minute, when I’d gone some way into the twilit forest, I realised I was crying. They were tears of anger, though: not regret nor uncertainty any more: anger and annoyance, so that even the tall, closely meshed barbed wire fence that crossed the brook, and which I crashed into twenty yards further on into the woods, didn’t deter me. As soon as I realised it wasn’t electrified, I pushed my way under the lowest strand of wire, ducking right down into the water to do so, soaking myself completely, but wriggling through in the end like a fish escaping up-stream. So much the better for this great fence, I thought. It would deter, if not prevent the police from following me – while tracking away from them, keeping in the water all the time, would kill my scent for the pursuing dogs.
Four
Apart from fear and my soaking clothes, it was cold as well by the middle of the night, so that I barely slept at all, wedged in the branches halfway up a big copper beech that had saved me a few hours before, one of its lowest limbs reaching out horizontally over the stream.
The police with their lights and tracker dogs had passed close beneath me some time before midnight and they were likely to return, I thought, when the dogs found no further scent as they went on up into the woods. I didn’t know about the lake then, or the fact that the little brook which fed it rose several miles beyond it to the north. They must have followed this stream right to its source, perhaps thinking that I’d swum across the lake in the night, for they didn’t return until just after sun-up, when I was well awake and could hear them stomping about almost directly beneath my tree.
The dogs whimpered. I thought they must have smelt or sensed me high up in the leaves above them. In the morning light the police would surely see the branch over the water, put two and two together and would be up after me in a moment.
But they were tired or I was lucky, for after a few minutes they left, the sounds dying away as the men went back down the wooded valley to the road. That was where my scent ended, just by the bridge: finding no trace of me in the forest they would think, for the time being at least, that I’d stopped a car and got a lift out of the area the previous night.
I was safe. Or was I? I couldn’t be certain. So I stayed where I was, halfway up the tree, sitting astride the stem of a big branch, my back wedged into a fork of the smooth trunk. I tried to relax and the first of those nearly silent, very early summer mornings started for me, living in a green world, in a capsule of leaves, where every smallest movement in the air about me was registered by an equally small rustling in the foliage. But this noise seemed strangely loud that first morning, almost alarming, as if some great hand were dusting the tree from outside, shaking it, searching me out.
To begin with the light that filtered through was grey and indeterminate. After ten minutes, as I let my head lie back against the trunk, the leaves above me turned gradually to a lighter shade – faint green at first. But soon they were edged with sunlight at the top, odd bright points dazzling my eyes, as the morning breeze moved them.
Gazing upwards, I wondered again if the whole business was worth it. I could hardly live in this tree for the rest of my life. I’d escaped: I’d proved something. Perhaps that was enough. If I climbed down now and went to the police I could surely explain everything in the calm light of day: my behaviour had all been an aberration, a brainstorm. They would hold me for a week or so. But the presence of the tall masked man in the cottage would inevitably come to light and I would – I paused in my thoughts here: yes, I’d pick up the threads of my life again with Clare. But what life, without Laura?
Her loss struck me then, a series of hammer-blows in the calm morning, a vast shadow over all my future that first was sad but then brought a fury to me which
I felt could only be eased by revenge. Indeed, without this thought of retribution, I couldn’t think of Laura for very long at all. I know now that one of the reasons I decided to stay in the woods was that I felt that, for as long as I remained an outlaw in this manner, I could freely contemplate such violent amends. And in another way, by not returning, I could avoid facing the actual fact of her death, avoid the place, the circumstances, the whole memory. In short, if I stayed outside the real world completely, I could imagine Laura still alive. It was I who had gone absent, was missing somewhere, and so long as I remained free in these woods I could plot her rescue, a return to her, she whom I had temporarily left behind in civilisation.
Or so I persuaded myself. But perhaps there was something else, deep in my character, which made this persuasion an easy matter. At more than forty, with so little behind me other than Laura, I was tempted now, with this forced change in circumstance, to go on and change my life completely: to leave my ruined past where it was, leave the pretentious school, England, too, in effect, with all its squalor, its whining, lazy compromises, to clear out, let it all die and take on some new life. I was tempted by vast change, a leap into the blue, just as a child sees the world simply as a place of limitless opportunity, each new day nothing but a space for adventure.
For me, the mould of my existence was already broken, however I looked at it. I could only die myself, or create some quite new way of life. It was all or nothing. I could return: to prison or at best to a familiar life in the cottage that would soon become unbearable without Laura. Or I could set off in a new direction, self-reliant, master of my fate.
Yes, that last phrase, so redolent of some Victorian adventure yarn, comes easily to me, as an emblem of youth, ambition unachieved when I was young. So that what I really felt that morning was that the chance had perhaps come for me to find my roots again, find that lost way back into real life. Apart from anger, apart from the need to get Clare back, I had a purpose of my own then. Not just to escape but to create: to change everything, to risk everything, to win at last.