Longshot

Chapter 18

Time... unmeasured time... slid away.

I moved in the end from discomfort, from stiffness: made a couple of circling shuffles on my knees, an unthought-out search for a nest to lie in, to die in, maybe.

I looked up and saw again the arrow cut into the tree. It hadn’t been and wasn’t far away, just out of sight behind a group of saplings.

Apathetically, I thought it of little use. The arrow pointed in the right direction, but ten feet past it, without a compass, which way was north?

The arrow on the tree pointed upwards.

I looked slowly in that direction, as if instructed. Looked upwards to the sky: and there, up there, glimpsed now and then between the moving boughs, was the constellation of the great bear... and the pole star.

No doubt from then on my route wasn’t as straight or as accurate as earlier, but at least I was moving. It wasn’t possible after all to curl up and surrender, not with an alternative. Clinging onto things, breathing little, inching a slow way forwards, I achieved again a sort of numbness to my basic state and in looking upwards to the stars at every pause felt lighter and more disembodied than before.

Light-headed, I dare say.

I looked at my watch and found it was after eleven o’clock, which meant nothing really. I couldn’t reach the road by half past midnight. I didn’t know how long I’d wasted looking for the compass or how long I’d knelt in capitulation. I didn’t know at what rate I was now travelling and no longer bothered to work it out. All I was really clear about was that this time I would go on as long as my lungs and muscles would function. Survival or nothing. It was settled.

The face of the archer...

In splinters of thought, unconnectedly, I began to look back over the past three weeks.

I thought of how I must seem to them, the people I’d grown to know.

The writer, a stranger, set down in their midst. A person with odd knowledge, odd skills, physically fit. Someone Tremayne trusted and wanted around. Someone who’d been in the right place a couple of times. Someone who threatened.

I thought of Angela Brickell’s death and of the attacks on Harry and me and it seemed that all three had had one purpose, which was to keep things as they were. They were designed not to achieve but to prevent.

One foot in front of the other...

Faint little star, half hidden, revealed now and then by the wind; flickering pin-point in a whirling galaxy, the prayer of navigators... see me home.

Angela Brickell had probably been killed to close her mouth. Harry was to have died to cement his guilt. I wasn’t to be allowed to do what Fiona and Tremayne had both foretold, that I would find the truth for Doone.

They all expected too much of me.

Because of that expectation, I was half dead.

All guesses, I thought. All inferences. No actual objects that could prove guilt. No statements or admissions to go on, but only probability, only likelihood.

The archer had to be someone who knew I was going to go back for Gareth’s camera. It had to be someone who knew how to find the trail. It had to be someone who could follow instructions to make an effective bow and sharp arrows, who had time to lie in wait, who wanted me gone, who had a universe to lose.

The way information zoomed round Shellerton, anyone theoretically could have heard of the lost camera and the way to find it. On the other hand the boys’ expedition had occurred only yesterday... dear God, only yesterday... and if... when... I got back, I could find out for certain who had told who.

One step and another. There was fluid in my lungs, rattling and wheezing at every breath. People lived a long time with fluid... asthma... emphysema... years. Fluid took up air space... you never saw anyone with emphysema run upstairs.

Angela Brickell had been small and light; a pushover.

Harry and I were tall and strong, not easy to attack at close quarters. Half the racing world had seen me pick up Nolan and knew I could defend myself. So, sharp spikes for Harry and arrows for John, and it was only luck in both cases that had saved us. I’d been there for Harry and the arrow had by-passed my heart.

Luck.

The clear sky was luck.

I didn’t want to see the face of the archer.

The sudden admission was a revelation in itself. Even with his handiwork through me, I thought of the sadness inevitably awaiting the others; yet I would have to pursue him, for someone who had three times seen murder as a solution to problems couldn’t be trusted never to try it again. Murder was habit-forming, so I’d been told.

Endless night. The moon moved in silver stateliness across the sky behind me. Left foot. Right foot. Hold on to branches. Breathe by fractions.

Midnight.

If ever this ended, I thought, I wouldn’t go walking in woodland for a very long time. I would go back to my attic and not be too hard on my characters if they came to pieces on their knees.

I thought of Fringe and the Downs and wondered if I would ever ride in a race, and I thought of Ronnie Curzon and publishers and American rights and of Erica Upton’s reviews and it all seemed as distant as Ursa Major but not one whit as essential to my continued existence.

Grapevine round Shellerton. A mass of common knowledge. Yet this time... this time...

I stopped.

The archer had a face.

Doone would have to juggle with alibis and charts, proving opportunity, searching for footprints. Doone would have to deal with a cunning mind in the best actor of them all.

Perhaps I was wrong. Doone could find out.

I tortoised onwards. A mile was sixty-three thousand three hundred and sixty inches. A mile was roughly one point six kilometres or one hundred and sixty thousand centimetres.

Who cared?

I might have travelled at almost eight thousand inches an hour if it hadn’t been for the stops. Six hundred and sixty feet. Two hundred and twenty yards.

A furlong! Brilliant. One furlong an hour. A record for British racing.

Twinkle twinkle little star...

No one but a bloody fool would try to walk a mile with an arrow through his chest. Meet J. Kendall, bloody fool.

Light-headed.

One o’clock.

The moon, I thought briefly, had come down from the sky and was dancing about in the wood not far ahead. Rubbish, it couldn’t be. It certainly was. I could see it shining.

Lights. I came to sensible awareness; to incredulous understanding. The lights were travelling along the road.

The road was real, was there, was not some lost myth in a witch-cursed forest. I had actually got there. I would have shouted with joy if I could have spared the oxygen.

I reached the last tree and leaned feebly against it, wondering what to do next. The road had for so long been the only goal that I’d given no thought to anything beyond it. It was dark now; no cars.

What to do? Crawl out onto the road and risk getting run over? Hitchhike? Give some poor passing motorist a nightmare?

I felt dreadfully spent. With the trunk’s support I slid down to kneeling, leaning head and left shoulder against the bark. By my reckoning, if I’d steered anything like a true course, the Land Rover was way along the road to the right, but it was pointless and impossible to reach it.

Car lights came round a bend from that direction and seemed not to be travelling too fast. I tried waving an arm to attract attention but only a weak flap of a hand was achieved.

Have to do better.

The car braked suddenly with screeching wheels, then backed rapidly until it was level with me. It was the Land Rover itself. How could it be?

Doors opened. People spilled out. People I knew.

Mackie.

Mackie running, calling, ‘John, John,’ and reaching me and stopping dead and saying, ‘Oh my God.’

Perkin behind her, looking down, his mouth shocked open in speechlessness. Gareth saying, ‘What’s the matter,’ urgently, and then seeing and coming down scared and wide-eyed on his knees beside me.

‘We’ve been looking for you for ages,’ he said. ‘You’ve got an arrow...’ His voice died.

I knew.

‘Run and fetch Tremayne,’ Mackie told him, and he sprang instantly to his feet and sprinted away along the road to the right, his feet impelled as if by demons.

‘Surely we must take that arrow out,’ Perkin said, and put his hand on the shaft and gave it a tug. He hardly moved it in my chest but it felt like liquid fire.

I yelled... it came out as a croak only but it was a yell in my mind... ‘Don’t.’

I tried to move away from him but that made it worse. I shot out a hand and gripped Mackie’s trouser leg and pulled with strength I didn’t know I still had left. Strength of desperation.

Mackie’s face came down to mine, frightened and caring.

‘Don’t... move... the arrow,’ I said with terrible urgency. ‘Don’t let him.’

‘Oh God.’ She stood up. ‘Don’t touch it, Perkin. It’s hurting him dreadfully.’

‘It would hurt less out,’ he said obstinately. The vibrations from his hand travelled through me, inducing terror as well.

‘No. No.’ Mackie pulled at his arm in a panic. ‘You must leave it. You’ll kill him. Darling, you must leave it alone.’

Without her, Perkin would have had his way but he finally took his dangerous hand off the shaft. I wondered if he believed that it would kill me. Wondered if he had any idea what force he would have needed to pull the arrow out, like a wooden skewer out of meat. Wondered if he could imagine the semi-asleep furies he’d already reawakened. The furies had claws and merciless teeth. I tried to breathe even less. I could feel the sweat running down my face.

Mackie leaned down again. ‘Tremayne will get help.’ Her voice was shaky with stress, with the barbarity of things.

I didn’t answer: no breath.

A car pulled up behind the Land Rover and disgorged Gareth and then Tremayne who moved like a tank across the earthy verge and rocked to a halt a yard away.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said blankly. ‘I didn’t believe Gareth.’ He took charge of things then as a natural duty but also, it seemed, with an effort. ‘Right, I’ll call an ambulance on the car phone. Keep still,’ he said to me unnecessarily. ‘We’ll soon have you out of here.’

I didn’t answer him either. He sped away back to the car and we could hear his urgent voice, though not the words. He returned shortly telling me to hang on, it wouldn’t be for long; and the shock had made him breathless too, I noticed.

‘We’ve looked for you for hours,’ he said, anxious, I thought, to prove I hadn’t been forgotten. ‘We telephoned the police and the hospitals and they had no news of a car crash or anything, so then we came out here...’

‘Because of your message,’ Mackie said, ‘on the cork-board.’

Oh, yes.

Gareth’s camera was swinging from Perkin’s hand. Mackie saw me watching it and said, ‘We found the trail, you know.’

Gareth chimed in, ‘The paint by the road had gone but we looked and looked in the woods. I remembered where we’d been.’ He was earnest. ‘I remembered pretty well where it started. And Perkin found it.’

‘He went all the way along it with a torch,’ Mackie said, stroking her husband’s arm, ‘clever thing — and he came back after absolutely ages with Gareth’s camera and said you weren’t there. We didn’t know what to do next.’

‘I wouldn’t let them go home,’ Gareth said. A mixture of stubbornness and pride in his voice. Thank God for him, I thought.

‘What happened exactly?’ Tremayne asked me bluntly. ‘How did you get like this?’

‘Tell you... later.’ It came out not much above a whisper, lost in the sound of their movements around me.

‘Don’t bother him,’ Mackie said. ‘He can hardly speak.’

They waited beside me making worried encouragements until the ambulance arrived from the direction of Reading. Tremayne and Mackie went to meet the men in uniform, to tell them, I supposed, what to expect. Gareth took a step or two after them and I called him in an explosive croak, ‘Gareth,’ and he stopped and turned immediately and came back, bending down.

‘Yes? What? What can I do?’

‘Stay with me,’ I said.

It surprised him but he said, ‘Oh, OK,’ and stayed a pace away looking troubled.

Perkin said irritably, ‘Oh, go on, Gareth.’

I said, ‘No,’ hoarsely. ‘Stay.’

After a pause Perkin put his back towards Gareth and his face down near mine and asked with perfect calmness, ‘Do you know who shot you?’ It sounded like a natural question in the circumstances, but it wasn’t.

I didn’t reply. I looked for the first time straight into his moonlit eyes, and I saw Perkin the son, the husband, the one who worked with wood. I looked deep, but I couldn’t see his soul. Saw the man who thought he’d killed me... saw the archer.

‘Do you really know?’ he asked again.

He showed no feeling, yet my knowledge held the difference between his safety and destruction.

After a long moment, in which he read the answer for himself, I said, ‘Yes.’

Something within him seemed to collapse but he didn’t outwardly fall to pieces or rant or rave or even try to pull out the arrow again or finish me in any other way. He didn’t explain or show remorse or produce justification. He straightened and looked across to where the men from the ambulance were advancing with his father and his wife. Looked at his brother, a pace away, listening.

He said to me, ‘I love Mackie very much.’

He’d said everything, really.

I spent the night thankfully unaware of the marathon needlework going on in my chest and drifted back late in the morning to a mass of tubes and machines and techniques I’d never heard of. It seemed I was going to live: the doctors were cheerful, not cautious.

‘Constitution like a horse,’ one said. ‘We’ll have you back on your feet in no time.’

A nurse told me a policeman wanted to see me, but visitors had been barred until tomorrow.

By tomorrow, which was Wednesday, I was breathing shallowly but without mechanical help, sitting propped up sideways and drinking soup; talking, attached to drainage tubes and feeling sore. Doing just fine, they said.

The first person who came to see me wasn’t Doone after all but Tremayne. He came in the afternoon and he looked white, fatigued and many years older.

He didn’t ask about my health. He went over to the window of the post-operation side-ward I was occupying alone and stood looking out for a while, then he turned and said, ‘Something awful happened yesterday.’

He was trembling, I saw.

‘What?’ I asked apprehensively.

‘Perkin...’ His throat closed. His distress was overwhelming.

‘Sit down,’ I said.

He fumbled his way into the chair provided for visitors and put a hand over his lips so that I shouldn’t see how close he was to tears.

‘Perkin,’ he said after a while. ‘After all these years you’d think he’d be careful.’

‘What happened?’ I asked, when he stopped.

‘He was carving part of a cabinet by hand... and he cut his leg open with the knife. He bled... he tried to reach the door... there was blood all over the floor... pints of it. He’s had cuts sometimes before but this was an artery... Mackie found him.’

‘Oh, no,’ I said in protest.

‘She’s in a terrible state and she won’t let them give her sedatives because of the baby.’

Despite his efforts, tears filled his eyes. He waited for his face to steady, then took out a handkerchief and fiercely blew his nose.

‘Fiona’s with her,’ he said. ‘She’s been marvellous.’ He swallowed. ‘I didn’t want to burden you with this but you’d soon have wondered why Mackie hadn’t come.’

‘That’s the least of things.’

‘I have to go back now, but I wanted to tell you myself.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

‘There’s so much to see to.’ His voice wavered again. ‘I wish you were there. The horses need to go out. I need your help.’

I wanted very much to give it but he could see I couldn’t.

‘In a few days,’ I said, and he nodded.

‘There has to be an inquest,’ he said wretchedly.

He stayed for a while sitting exhaustedly as if loath to take up his burdens again, postponing the moment when he would have to go back to supporting everyone else. Eventually he sighed deeply, pushed himself to his feet and with a wan smile departed.

Admirable man, Tremayne.

Doone arrived very soon after Tremayne had gone and came straight to the point.

‘Who shot you?’

‘Some kid playing Robin Hood,’ I said.

‘Be serious.’

‘Seriously, I didn’t see.’

He sat in the visitors’ chair and looked at me broodingly.

‘I saw Mr Tremayne Vickers in the car park,’ he said. ‘I suppose he told you their bad news?’

‘Yes. Dreadful for them.’

‘You wouldn’t think, would you,’ he added, ‘that this could be another murder?’

He saw my surprise. ‘I hadn’t thought of it,’ I said.

‘It looks like an accident,’ he said with a certain delicacy, ‘but he was experienced with that knife, was young Mr Vickers, and after Angela Brickell, after Mr Goodhaven, after your little bit of trouble...’ He left the thought hanging and I did nothing to bring it to earth. He sighed after a while and asked how I was feeling.

‘Fine.’

‘Hm.’ He bent down and picked up a carrier that he’d lain on the floor. ‘Thought you might like to see this.’ He drew out a sturdy transparent plastic inner bag and held it up to the light to show me the contents.

An arrow, cut into two pieces.

One half was clean and pale, and the other stained and dark, with a long black section sharpened at the tip.

‘We’ve had our lab take a look at this,’ he said in his sing-song way, ‘but they say there are no distinctive tool marks. It could have been sharpened by any straight blade in the kingdom.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘But charring the point, now, that’s in your books.’

‘And in other books besides mine.’

He nodded. ‘Yesterday morning, at Shellerton House, Mr Tremayne Vickers and young Mr and Mrs Perkin Vickers all told me they’d spent three or four hours looking for you on Monday night. Young Gareth didn’t want them to give up, they said, but Mr Vickers senior told him you’d be all right even if you had got lost. You knew how to look after yourself, he said. They were just about to go home when they found you.’

‘Lucky me.’

He nodded. ‘An inch either way and you’d be history, so I hear. I told them all not to worry, I would go on working with you as soon as you were conscious and we would see our way together to a solution of the whole case.’

‘Did you?’ He took away what breath I still had.

‘Mr Tremayne Vickers said he was delighted.’ He paused. ‘Did you follow that trail of paint towards the clearing they talk about?’

‘Mm.’

‘And was it along the trail that someone shot at you?’

‘Mm.’

‘We’ll be taking a look at it ourselves, I shouldn’t wonder.’

I made no comment and he looked disappointed.

‘You should be wanting your assailant brought to justice.’ Text book words again. ‘You don’t seem to care.’

‘I’m tired,’ I said.

‘You wouldn’t be interested then in the glue.’

‘What glue?’ I asked. ‘Oh yes, glue.’

‘For sticking marble to floorboards,’ he said. ‘We had it analysed. Regular impact adhesive. On sale everywhere. Untraceable.’

‘And the alibis?’

‘We’re working on them, but everyone moved about so much except poor young Mr Vickers, who was in his workroom all the time.’

He seemed to be waiting for me to react, rather as if he’d floated a fly in front of a fish.

I smiled at him a little and displayed no interest. His moustache seemed to droop further from the lack of good results. He rose to go and told me to take care. Good advice, though a bit too late. He would proceed, he said, with his enquiries.

I wished him luck.

‘You’re too quiet,’ he said.

When he’d gone I lay and thought for a long time about poor young Mr Vickers, and of what I should have told Doone, and hadn’t.

Perkin, I thought, was one of the very few people who’d known about the camera and the trail. I’d listened to Gareth tell him in detail on Sunday evening.

Mackie had told Sam Yaeger on Monday morning.

Theoretically she could also have told Fiona on the telephone who could have told Nolan or Lewis, but it wasn’t the sort of item one would naturally bother to pass on.

On Monday morning Doone had turned up at Shellerton House with the plank. Perkin knew it was I who had remembered that the floorboards should have floated, and on Monday he’d seen the plank on the dining-room table and heard Doone and me talking in close private consultation. Everything Fiona and Tremayne believed of me must have looked inevitable at that moment. John Kendall would lead Doone to the quarry, who was himself. Any quarry was entitled to take evasive action: to pre-empt discovery by striking first.

By lunchtime Perkin had driven off, going to Newbury for supplies, he’d said. Going to the Quillersedge woods, more like.

Tremayne had gone to Oxford to his tailor. Mackie was out to lunch with Dee-Dee. Gareth was at school. I’d abandoned the empty house and walked joyfully into the woods and only by chance did I know what had hit me.

I imagined Perkin threading along that trail at night, following the paint quite easily as he’d been that way already in daylight, and being secretly pleased with himself because if he had inadvertently left any traces of his passage the first time they could be explained away naturally by the second. That satisfaction would smartly have evaporated when he reached the clearing and found me gone. A nasty shock, one might say. He might have been intending to go back to his family and appear utterly horrified while breaking the news of my death. Instead, he’d looked shocked and utterly horrified at seeing me still alive. Open-mouthed. Speechless. Too bad.

If I’d tried to walk out along the, trail, I would have met Perkin face to face.

I shivered in the warm hospital room. Some things were better unimagined.

For Perkin, making arrows would have been like filing his nails, and he’d had a stove right in his workroom for the charring. He must have constructed a pretty good strong bow too (according to my detailed instructions) which would by now no doubt be broken into unidentifiable pieces in distant undergrowth. Perhaps he’d risked time to practise with a few shots before I got there. Couldn’t tell unless I went back to look for spent arrows, which I wasn’t going to do.

Random thoughts edged slowly into my mind for the rest of the day.

For instance, Perkin thought in wood, like a language. Any trap he made would be wooden.

Nolan had knocked Perkin down at Tremayne’s dinner. I’d picked Nolan up and made a fool of him. Perkin wouldn’t have risked any way to kill me that meant creeping up on me, not after what he’d seen.

Perkin had had to get over the shock of finding my familiar ski-jacket and boots in the boathouse and then the far worse shock of the cataclysmic reversal of his scheme when Harry and I both lived.

The best actor of them all, he had contained those shocks within himself with no screaming crises of nerves. Many a convicted murderer had displayed that sort of control. Maybe it was something to do with a divorce from reality. There were books on the subject. One day I might read them.

Perkin had resented Mackie’s friendly feelings towards me. Not strongly enough to kill me for that, but certainly strongly enough to make killing me satisfying in that respect also.

Never assume...

Perkin had always been presumed to be busy in his workshop, and yet there were hours and days when he might not have been, when Mackie was out of the house seeing to the horses. On the Wednesday of Harry’s trap, Mackie had been saddling Tremayne’s runner in the three-mile chase at Ascot.

Perkin had made none of the classic mistakes. Hadn’t scattered monogrammed handkerchiefs about or faked alibis or carelessly dropped dated train tickets or shown knowledge he shouldn’t have had. Perkin had listened more than he’d talked, and he’d been cunning and careful.

I thought of Angela Brickell and of all the afternoons Perkin had spent alone in the house. She had tried to seduce even Gareth. Not hard to imagine she’d set her sights also on Perkin. Intelligent men in love with their wives weren’t immune to blatantly offered temptations. Sudden arousal. Quick, casual gratification. End of episode.

Except not the end of the episode if there were a failure of a birth control measure and the result was conception. Not the end if the woman asked for money or threatened disclosure. Not the end if she could and would destroy the man’s marriage.

Say Angela Brickell had definitely been pregnant. Say she was sure who the father was; and working in a racing stable with thoroughbreds she would know that proving paternity was increasingly an exact science. The father wouldn’t be able to deny it. Say she enticed him into the woods and became demanding in every way and heavily emotional, piling on pressure.

Perkin had not long before seen Olympia lying dead at Nolan’s feet. He’d heard over and over again how fast she’d died. Say that picture, that certainty, had flashed into his mind. The quick way out of all his troubles lay in his own two strong hands.

I imagined what Perkin might have been feeling. Might have been facing.

Mackie at that time had been unable to conceive and was troubled and unhappy because of it. Angela Brickell however was devastatingly carrying Perkin’s child. Perkin loved Mackie and all too probably couldn’t face her knowing what he’d done. Couldn’t bear to hurt her so abominably. Was perhaps ashamed. Didn’t want his father to find out.

Irresistible solution: a fast death for Angela too. Easy.

Perhaps he, not she, had chosen the woods. Perhaps he’d planned it, perhaps it hadn’t been a lightning urge but the first of his traps.

Impossible to know now if either scenario were right. Possible, likely, probable; no more than one of those.

I wondered if he had gone home feeling anything but relief.

Long before Doone came knocking on the door, Perkin could have decided, in case the girl’s body were ever found, to say he didn’t remember her. No one had thought it odd that he didn’t; he was seldom seen with the horses.

His one catastrophic mistake had been to try to settle the mystery for ever by making Harry disappear.

By his actions shall you know him...

By his arrows.

I thought that Doone might not think of looking in Perkin’s workroom for a match to the arrow’s wood. Perkin hadn’t had much time to hunt elsewhere for anything suitable. He would have used a common wood, not exotic; but all the same there would be more of it to be found, perhaps even in the cabinet he was making of bleached oak.

He hadn’t had any handy feathers, so no flights.

Perkin would have known that a wood match could be made. He knew more about wood than anyone else.

Doone, with his promise of instant detection once I woke up, must have been the end of hope.

He did love Mackie. His universe was lost. One way out remained.

I thought of Tremayne and his pride in Perkin’s work. Thought of Gareth’s vulnerable age. Thought of Mackie, her face alive with the wondrous joy of discovering she was pregnant. Thought of that child growing up, loved and safe.

Nothing could be gained by trying to prove what Perkin had done. Much would be smashed. They all would suffer. The families always suffered most.

No child would become a secure and balanced adult with a known murderer for a father. Without knowledge, Mackie’s grief would heal normally in time. Tremayne and Gareth wouldn’t be crippled by undeserved shame. All of them would live more happily if they and the world remained in ignorance, and to try to achieve that I would give them the one gift I could.

Silence.

At the short uncomplicated inquest on Perkin a week later the coroner found unhesitatingly for ‘Accident’ and expressed sympathy with the family. Tremayne came to collect me from the hospital afterwards and told me on the way to Shellerton that Mackie had got through the court ordeal bravely.

‘The baby?’ I asked.

‘The baby’s fine. It’s what’s giving Mackie strength. She says Perkin is with her, will always be with her that way.’

‘Mm.’

Tremayne glanced briefly across at me and back to the road.

‘Has Doone found out yet who put that arrow through you?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘You don’t know, yourself?’

‘No.’

He drove for a while in silence.

‘I just wondered...’ he said uncertainly.

After a while I said, ‘Doone came to see me twice. I told him I didn’t know who shot me. I told him I had no ideas of any sort any more.’

I certainly hadn’t told him where to look for arrow wood.

Doone had been disgustedly disillusioned with me: I had closed ranks with them, he said. Goodhavens, Everards, Vickers and Kendall. ‘Yes,’ I’d agreed, ‘I’m sorry.’ Doone said there was no way of proving who had killed Angela Brickell. ‘Let her lie,’ I’d said, nodding. After a silence he’d risen greyly to his feet to leave and told me to look after myself. Wryly I’d said, ‘I will.’ He’d gone slowly, regretfully, seeing regret in my face also, an unexpected mutual liking, slipping away into memory.

‘You don’t think,’ Tremayne said painfully, ‘I mean, it had to be someone who knew you would fetch Gareth’s camera, who shot you.’

‘I told Doone it was a kid playing Robin Hood.’

‘I’m... afraid...’

‘Block it out,’ I said. ‘Some kid did it.’

‘John...’

He knew, I thought. He was no fool. He could have worked things out the same way I had, and he’d have had a hellish time believing it all of his own son.

‘About my book,’ he said hesitating, ‘I don’t know that I want to go on with it.’

‘I’m going to write it,’ I said positively. ‘It’s going to be an affirmation of your life and your worth, just as was intended. It’s all the more important now, for you especially, but for Gareth, for Mackie and your new grandchild as well. For you and for them, it’s essential I do it.’

‘You do know,’ he said.

‘It was a kid.’

He drove without speaking the rest of the way.

Fiona and Harry were with Mackie and Gareth in the family room. Perkin’s absence was to me almost a shock, so accustomed had I become to his being there. Mackie looked pale but in charge of things, greeting me with a sisterly kiss.

‘Hi,’ Gareth said, very cool.

‘Hi yourself.’

‘I’ve got the day off from school.’

‘Great.’

Harry said, ‘How are you feeling?’ and Fiona put her arms carefully round me and let her scent drift in my senses.

Harry said his Aunt Erica sent good wishes, his eyes ironic.

I asked Harry how his leg was. All on the surface and polite.

Mackie brought cups of tea for everyone; a very English balm in troubles. I remembered the way Harry had laced the coffee after the ditch, and would have preferred that, on the whole.

It was a month yesterday, I thought, that I came here.

A month in the country...

Harry said, ‘Has anyone found out who shot at you?’

He was asking a simple unloaded question, not like Tremayne. I gave him a simple answer, the one that eventually became officially accepted.

‘Doone is considering it was a child playing out a fantasy,’ I said. ‘Robin Hood, cowboys and Indians. That sort of thing. No hope of ever really knowing.’

‘Awful,’ Mackie said, remembering.

I looked at her with affection and Tremayne patted my shoulder and told them I would be staying on as arranged to write his book.

They all seemed pleased, as if I belonged; but I knew I would leave them again before summer, would walk out of the brightly-lit play, and go back to the shadows and solitude of fiction. It was a compulsion I’d starved for, and even if I never went hungry again I would feel that compulsion for ever. I couldn’t understand it or analyse it, but it was there.

After a while I left the family room and wandered through the great central hall and on into the far side of the house, into Perkin’s workroom.

It smelled aromatically and only of wood. Tools lay neatly as always. The glue-pot was cold on the stove. Everything had been cleaned and tidied and there were no stains on the polished floor to show where his life had pumped out.

I felt no hatred for him. I thought instead of the extinction of his soaring talent. Thought of consequences and seduction. What’s done is done, Tremayne would say, but one couldn’t wipe out an enveloping feeling of pathetic waste.

A copy of Return Safe from the Wilderness lay on a workbench, and I picked it up idly and looked through it.

Traps. Bows and arrows. All the familiar ideas.

I flipped the pages resignedly and they fell open as if from use at the diagram in the first-aid section showing the pressure points for stopping arterial bleeding. I stared blankly at the carefully drawn and accurate illustration of exactly where the main arteries could be found nearest the surface in the arms and wrists... and in the legs.

Dear God, I thought numbly. I taught him that too.