by Joseph Hone
I saw the burnished blue and green colours of the drake flash past the lenses. And then, right behind where the birds had risen, there was another movement. I would never have seen it, I think, but for the contrast in the colours: the dark face against the remains of the white mist. I focused the glasses more exactly. It was a man, right down on his haunches by the water as if he’d been drinking there, partly hidden by a clump of reeds, a man turning his head quickly now as he followed the startled flight of the birds. He wasn’t naked. He wore a loose green camouflage jacket and tan trousers. Certainly he wasn’t Ross. This man had a cloche of wiry hair above a thin face. And he was dark-skinned, with a long torso and thighs, almost lanky: an African, I thought.
When I looked again at the clump of reeds there was no one there, just the sun beginning to tip over the head of the lake, melting away the mist. An African? Was I dreaming? Or had it been some trick in the early-morning light, the skin of a white or sunburnt man showing up that way, in some strange refraction coming through the mist or off the water?
Then I remembered the old Army camouflage jacket. That detail had been real enough. It worried me suddenly. Someone, recently, had been wearing just the same thing – and it had worried me, yes. But where and why? Then I had it: the man who’d burst into our cottage and shot Laura. How could I have forgotten his dress? And the same man, a few weeks before Laura had been shot, when we’d been out walking behind our cottage with the Bensons after Sunday lunch: the man I’d seen then, in the distance, hurrying away from us along the hedge, the surprising, lone hiker in the middle of the wolds, a tall figure with a pork-pie hat pulled down so that I hadn’t seen his face. He’d been wearing just the same sort of camouflage jacket; one of Ross’s men, sent down from London to scout the land out before he’d come to shoot me a few weeks later.
The thought of this banished any fear I might have had, standing alone in the woods just then with a defenceless child. And suddenly I was filled once more with an overwhelming anger and bitterness – just as I’d been during my first weeks alone in the woods after Laura’s death. It came to me again now, a keen, fresh sense of violence and retribution.
This man was Laura’s killer, and one of Ross’s men: I was sure of that. But had he found us? Did he know we were here, or had we luckily spotted him first?
I turned to Clare. ‘There!’ I whispered to her, pointing. ‘He was over there. That man. A dark man. But he’s gone.’
Clare nodded. She couldn’t, I thought, have seen anything of him without the binoculars. But it seemed she had, for her body was tense now, alert. She was staring up at the head of the lake, impatient, ready to take chase against something, anything. But I held her back.
If this man had killed Laura and was hoping to do the same for me, he’d be armed. And though we might have the initial advantage in seeing him first, a bow and arrow wouldn’t be much use, in any sudden encounter, against a gun. Besides, I reasoned – my first surge of anger gone – ideally I should try and take this man alive if I was ever to clear myself of Laura’s murder. How else could I safely take him?
Then I realised I was looking down on a possible means: the well behind the old pumping-shed, where I’d dumped Ross’s dog. The two covers were flush with the ground. If I removed them completely and put a weave of small branches over the hole, and some moss and dead leaves on top of that I would have a very serviceable man-trap. In order to get at the extra rafters for our own tree house I’d had to cut away some of the laurel behind the shed and there was a clear pathway round the back there now.
I took Clare down to look at the well, gesturing to her, explaining what I had in mind. Lifting up the two iron covers I peered down into the darkness. It was ideal. The water, in the recent long spell of fine weather, had dropped considerably and the level must have been nearly eight feet below the ground. The four sides of the well were smooth and sheer. Once inside no one could get out again without help. Yet they needn’t drown, I saw, since just below the waterline there were old wooden railway sleepers, forming an original buttress all round the concrete sides of the well, which would serve as a hand-hold just below the waterline. A man could survive down there quite safely for an hour or two at least.
I hid the metal covers and Clare and I quickly started to collect sticks of old wood, placing them in a cross-weave over the hole. Very soon we had a matrix of decayed beech branches which we covered with a garnish of leaves and moss and twigs, so that after twenty minutes all the evidence of a well there had completely disappeared and it seemed as if there was now a continuous path running between the laurels behind the shed. All we needed then was a bait. And the bait, I supposed, could only be me.
The obvious plan was to make the man feel I’d never seen him, give him a false sense of security, to let him see me for a moment: long enough for him to be able to follow me, but without giving him time to shoot at me. I would then try and lead him gradually down the east bank of the lake towards the trap.
To this end I moved parts of a big fallen beech branch out across the real path between the shed and the lake shore, so that anyone coming up or down that way would be tempted to take the easier route behind the shed in their travels. I made a secure hide as well, in a hollow among some brambles about twenty yards directly south of the shed, so that I could make for this and then lie in wait, with a perfect view of the covered man-trap.
I explained everything to Clare as we progressed in the work and finally I told her that she would have to go back to the tree-house and wait. It would be too dangerous for her to come with me.
‘No,’ she said flatly. She could say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ well enough by now, and, as always, she meant it. I’d long ago learnt how there was no point in arguing with her when she was adamant over something. So I had to take her with me.
We walked up towards the head of the lake, moving very carefully, still keeping to the high ground, where we could look safely down into the valley. The sun was up, the mist well gone. But it was a windy day for a change. The trees stirred, the big beech boughs groaned about us, and the dry reeds by the lake shore rustled angrily in the breeze.
And soon we were stopping every half-minute, rooted to the spot, fancying some malign shape or movement in the sunny undergrowth. A sudden splash of dancing leaves or a pattern of windy shadows became a dark coppery head or a moving arm advancing on us out of the sun. As the wind blew more briskly, the placid trees and the smooth beech branches soon held all sorts of imagined danger. And I realised we were making no progress at all. Just the opposite: I felt we were at risk now. We were being followed, more than likely, the hunters hunted.
Two pigeons burst from a tree immediately above us, their wings beating like gunshots and I stumbled, in heart-shaking alarm, crouching down with Clare, looking wildly around. But there was nothing. Just a windy, sunny silence crowding in all round us which suddenly terrified me. I decided to go back to the tree-house, to sit things out until Alice returned. And it was Clare who had the bright idea then of how we might trap our quarry at no risk to ourselves.
‘Put food in the trap,’ she said.
‘Food? But the man isn’t an animal.’
‘Put something.’
And so it was that when we got back to the tree-house I took her advice. I got the transistor out, brought it down, round the lake again, and stood it right in the middle of the layer of branches over the well. Then I turned it on, the morning music programme on Radio 3, the volume slightly up. It wasn’t food, of course. But then we were hoping to attract a human, not an animal curiosity. If the man was still in the valley there was a good chance he would hear the music at some point and come to investigate. And if he trod anywhere near the transistor he would disappear with the music. The batteries were new. It would last a good twelve hours at least. It struck me as an ideal bait and I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t thought of it myself to begin with.
We took up positions then, hidden in the bramble bush, and waited. They were playi
ng a Wagner opera that morning on Radio 3 – Tannhäuser – and the heavy, teutonic music together with the vast guttural voices boomed and clashed out over the sunny glade like an obsessive threat. I was convinced the man would hear it if he was still anywhere up at the top of the lake, for the wind was taking the sound in that direction. But no one came. We waited for nearly two hours, and still there was no one, and we were far too cramped now in the brambles. It was time to leave, to let the man fall into the trap himself, if he would, the music still ticking away like a fuse for him in the undergrowth.
But just as we were about to move from our hide something stirred in the bushes twenty yards beyond the shed. There was a faint sliding sound then – and we were down, completely hidden again, peering out between the brambles. A minute later there was another sound, a stick cracking, louder this time, but this time from another bush, thirty yards away, halfway up the side of the valley. The complete silence. Only the brisk wind agitating the leaves everywhere under the sharp midday sun.
Finally, after another few minutes wait – we felt like fishermen at last seeing their float dip in the water – the man came into view. Very slowly at first and from quite a different direction from the last sound on the side of the hill. He came from right behind the shed itself, moving along the back wall, hugging cover. He was walking towards the transistor. Then he stopped.
And now for the first time we both got a good look at him. He was thin, just as the masked figure who had shot Laura had been. He was older than I’d expected somehow, forty, perhaps fifty. And his face was not typically African; there was no fat, nothing bulbous about it from the angle we were looking at it: an ascetic face, learned even. There was something haunted and infinitely wary about it. Then he suddenly turned towards us, startled by something. And there was the shock.
The other side of his face was brutally disfigured. There were angry scars all down one side, the whole cheek risen unnaturally, the rolls of scar-tissue like a growth leading to a half-closed, leering eye and the wreckage of an ear. There was just a hole in the side of the man’s head. Here he had been hideously burnt, I thought, and the damage badly repaired. It was an unnerving vision: on one side the haunted, saint-like profile; on the other, a dark ogre from a nightmare.
I noticed Clare’s face then: she had seen the man properly for the first time. Instead of expressing any hope, as I had expected, at the successful outcome to this hunt, she was plainly terrified by what she saw, her eyes staring, frozen. She was shaking with fear. She wanted to run away there and then, and I had to hold her down.
The man on the other hand was calm to a degree. He just stood there, right by the side of the shed, without moving for a minute; a calm, camouflaged, black statue. He was only a few yards from the transistor. He was bound to make another step towards it, I thought. I prayed that he would. But he didn’t. He was too wary, too suspicious. He must have sensed something was wrong. He didn’t even move forward a pace, where he might have slipped into the man-trap from the side. Instead he glanced at the radio once more and then retreated the way he’d come, disappearing quickly, silently into the bushes.
Fifteen minutes later Clare and I were safely back in the tree-house. And how I wished Clare had had more speech in her. For of course, in the meantime I’d been thinking; I’d had to face the fact much more clearly: what was an African doing in the middle of England? Could he be one of Ross’s men? An African, certainly, I thought. But would Ross employ hit-men from such parts? Of course not.
At the same time as I wondered about this, another explanation for his presence emerged at the edges of my mind. Was this killer in some way connected with Willy Kindersley? – with his long fossil safaris in East Africa: a friend of his, or an enemy? I thought of Willy’s death, the hit-and-run accident in Nairobi: a coloured man had been seen driving the car. An African? This African? This thin man who had gone on to kill Laura, and who now, for some unfathomable reason, was pursuing his revenge with us, Clare and me? It seemed preposterous.
But then I remembered the long article that Alice had shown me a few weeks before from the Sunday paper, with its gossipy intimations of evil in Willy’s life, some violent unscrupulousness there, murky depths in his East African past. Could this be true? Was the African here evidence of this? I wished that Clare could have spoken more, from her memory of her life out there.
But she couldn’t: or wouldn’t.
‘Fire,’ was all she said, when I asked her.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He must have been burnt. But did you ever see the man before? Did you know him? Or did Mummy? Did your father? Do you remember?’ But there was no coherent reply, except the repetition now and then of the word ‘fire’, and a look on her face when she said it of confusion and fear. And this surprised me, for Clare, more and more in touch with life now, had become so fearless recently. But here was a memory, I felt, evoked again by this man’s burnt face, that brought back an old trauma in her, a fever from her past which affected her now as it had then by closing her up like a clam. And so I wondered again if this African had anything to do with Ross at all – Ross who remained the one person I really had to fear. The African, I thought, must have had some business simply with the Kindersley family, with events that I knew nothing of that had occurred among them all out in East Africa years before.
And if this was so there was a further unpleasant corollary: one person at least would have known about any such unhappy events – Laura, who had never even hinted at them to me. Why not? Because, as the newspaper article had hinted, everyone had covered their tracks, including Laura? And perhaps Clare was now the only silent witness to whatever had happened in the past – along with the African stalking the valley somewhere beneath us. But wait, I thought – there were two others who had been with Willy in those African years: the Bensons. Of course, George and Annabelle Benson, old friends and colleagues of Willy’s, whom I’d seen only three months before at the cottage. The Bensons. They might well know something of all this. But they were in Oxford. And in any case, if Laura had felt the need to cover up on this, the Bensons would surely feel the same urge. But why? What had happened, if anything, in Africa then? Or was it all a ridiculous theory of mine? And was there some perfectly sensible reason for this burnt man lurking somewhere in the woods beneath us? And was Clare’s fear, for example, simply that of any child faced with such disfigurement, seeing a nightmare in the scarred face?
I spent most of the rest of the morning wondering about this uneasily, searching through my past with Laura for any incident that might explain this man’s presence in the valley. But soon other events took over that day, wiping out for the time being any further thoughts.
I had dozed off later that afternoon, tired out in the heat that had come back, when Clare had woken me, shaking me, agitated. She pointed back down towards the south end of the lake.
‘People!’ she said urgently. ‘Come. Now people are. People are!’
Her sentences were incomplete and her voice was a high and unreal falsetto, as it often was now. This was another means she cultivated of avoiding the reality of herself: she spoke as a deaf person might, not hearing herself, so the better to avoid any responsibility for what she said. But I was surprised she spoke at all, given her fears that morning.
‘People? Where?’ I said. ‘The dark man?’
‘No. No. Look. Come!’
I got the arrows and recurve bow out again and followed her silently along the aerial walkways, through the trees down to the big beech at the bottom of the lake. Until at last, twenty feet up, we were able to look down through gaps in the leaves to the ground below where the stream left the lake at its southern end near the road.
A group of campers had somehow broken into the estate through the fence, and had set up rough tents in the glade beneath us. We could only see half a dozen or so of them at that point, leather-jacketed youths and their girls, with several great motorcycles just visible to one side. But from the shouts and squeals coming from
outside this space it was obvious that there were a dozen or more in the party altogether.
It was equally clear that they were no ordinary campers, but a trespassing band of Hell’s Angels in their dark tasselled jackets covered with Nazi insignia. There seemed to be two rival groups of them, a second out of sight across the stream, for the youths that we could see beneath us, finishing cans of beer, would throw the empty missiles at their invisible neighbours, shouting threats and imprecations at them.
We watched their antics in silence for some time, looking down through the deep well of leaves, before Clare, sitting on the branch next me, lifted her arms and mimed an arrow shot at them. I shook my head. That was the last thing we wanted – that they should have any notion of our presence. And it was too late in the day, and too risky, to move anywhere on the ground of the valley now. We would simply stay put, on high, and ignore them. They would probably move on tomorrow.
I whispered and gestured, explaining these prohibitions to Clare, and saw the look of disappointment, even anger, cloud her face. For her, I sensed, these strangers were much more than unwelcome trespassers. They were rivals, an inferior species contesting space, and thus natural enemies. They were savages in her child’s adventure-book mind, silently arrived from beyond the coral reef and camping now outside our desert-island stockade: a deadly threat to her territory, to her security, to this whole new way of life I had given her, which had released her from a clouded, nightmare anonymity.
But why had she not felt the same about the African that morning? Her anger now had certainly not been shown to him; just the opposite: she’d been terrified. And I wondered once more if the African was someone she’d known, or had seen before, in some traumatic circumstances, and who thus represented an intruder, a fearsome, God-like being whom she could not now face. Whereas these Hell’s Angels, in reality and in their numbers probably far more dangerous, seemed to her fair and easy game.