The Valley of the Fox

Twelve

There was someone else in the valley. They were sleeping rough, I assumed, and must have come from outside the estate, since they obviously weren’t down from the Manor. Was it somebody looking particularly for us? Or just some trespasser, a poacher, a lone camper? The following morning we set about finding out. I explained my plans to Clare, stringing the bow and getting the sharpened arrows together as we sat in the tree house. She didn’t say anything. But she was full of repressed excitement at what she obviously looked upon as a coming hunt.

We left the tree-house and, moving high up along the branches and walkways, made our way down towards the foot of the lake, leaving the trees here by the branch over the stream. My plan was to start at the bottom and work our way up to the head of the valley, carefully looking over the whole area in the half mile between.

It was very early dawn when we started, as I hoped we might surprise whoever it was, sleeping out in a tent or in the old pumping-shed perhaps. There was a ground mist in the valley again, lying in long, wispy streaks over the lake and forming heavier milky pools in the reeds by the shore. We stalked from bush to bush, keeping out of sight as much as possible. I remembered the time, two months before, when Ross and I had sought each other out in just the same circumstances. But now I had Clare and there was no vicious Alsatian. Clare, indeed, was my dog, crawling silently through holes in the undergrowth, places where I couldn’t go, a pointer herself, as I followed behind with the recurve bow and the old army binoculars.

We got above the pumping-shed, looking down on it from the side of the valley. Most of the roof was gone, the planks taken for our tree house, so that I could see inside it. There was no one there. I raised the binoculars, training them out over the lake, looking up to the head of the valley more than a hundred yards away, where the mist was clearing, dissolving, as the sun rose. Suddenly a pair of mallard got up as I watched, just where the stream entered the lake, and the air was briefly filled with their craking squawks.

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 playing 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.

They built a fire beneath us in the early evening, a dangerous, unkempt fire built too close to the trees and the dry, brambly undergrowth immediately beyond. They grilled hamburgers here and sausages and ate crisps and drank more beer. And afterwards they chanted football songs and slogans and, circling the fire, their faces livid and drunken in the fading light, shouted obscenities across to the other group on the far side of the stream.

Clare, moving silently on her haunches, restlessly changing position on the branch above, peered down at them intently, with disgust. But she was not being critical of their words or their behaviour, I’m sure. This was not the reason for her frustrated contempt, which was more that of a predatory animal, concealed in the trees above a tempting meal it cannot for the moment procure. Eventually I forced Clare back with me to our tree-house.

I woke in the soft, moonlit darkness a few hours later, the light filtering in marble shafts through the leaves. Something was wrong, missing. A branch creaked in the silence somewhere high up in the trees quite near me. But there were other louder noises coming from the end of the lake now, shouts, laughter, a faint, dangerously excited roar on the air. I turned, looking up at Clare’s hammock. She was gone.

I followed her as fast as I could along the shadowed branches and walkways, for I was sure that she’d headed this way. But she had several minutes start on me and though I was well accustomed to the dark, I had never taken this way before at night. Nor had Clare. But she was smaller than I, and more supple and sure-footed, so that I was unable to catch her before she had reached the end of the line of trees. I found her at last, peering down into the glade, sitting astride the same branch we’d been on several hours before, looking down intently on the same campsite beneath.

But now there was real pandemonium beneath us. Some of the youths, half-naked and far gone in drink, were prancing with their girls round the fire, which had been built up since, with heavy old logs, so that it roared like an ox-roast in the night. But others, we saw, more sober in the company, were coming in and out of the circle of firelight, trying to interrupt the revellers, with something else on their mind. They were worried. Someone was missing. They shouted, sometimes grappling with the fire-dancers, asking for help.

‘You can’t fuckin’ leave Hank and the others out there,’ one of them said. ‘They may have all bloody drowned in the lake. We’ve got to help look for ’em. They’ve been gone bloody hours.’

‘Bugger off, will you?’ a lout replied. ‘What’s it to me? You’ve already got half a dozen blokes out there looking for Johnny. They’ll turn up.’

And they did. Five minutes later.

As we watched, like people in the dark gods of a theatre, looking down through the long clefts in the tree at the firelit glade beneath, a new group arrived in the circle of light. One of the youths here, just in his shirt and pants, was dripping wet, like a drowned but boisterous rat. And with him were half a dozen of his friends, equally rowdy, violent even, obviously the search party who had gone out to look for the stray. But the figure of real interest for all of us, both up in the tree and on the ground, was the man they had brought back with them, in the centre of the group, hands roughly tied behind his back, being threatened now with gleaming flick-knives.

It was the African, tall, stooped, a grave, inky figure in the dancing firelight.

‘You wouldn’t bloody believe it!’ one of the youths shouted. He was taller than the others with lank blond hair. He prodded the African viciously with his knife, so that he fell forward, wounded, writhing, onto the ground by the fire. ‘He bloody tried to kill Johnny here, this bloke did.’

The others, who had been dancing round the flames, stopped now, fascinated by this strange prize from the woods. They crowded round the African, who was trying to get to his feet, but without success, for each time he got to his knees someone kicked him down again.

‘I was just going along by the water there,’ the dripping youth who must have been Johnny said, ‘when I heard this tranny blazing away out of nowhere in the trees. I thought it was one of youse buggers with a bird. But then I saw it behind a shed, and there weren’t no one there. Well, I went to pick it up — and the next thing I were going down this bloody great well in the dark. I’d have bloody drowned if it hadn’t been for Hank and the others right then.’

‘Yeah,’ the tall blond youth called Hank confirmed. ‘We were just coming along the same way, heard the row in the bushes behind this shed, and then we saw this fuckin’ buck nigger standing over a great hole in the ground with Johnny screaming fit to bust in the water beneath him.’ He kicked the African again. ‘We were onto the bugger in a flash. Put up no end of a fight, he did. But we nailed him. Didn’t we? You runt!’ He kicked him again. ‘Well, we got Johnny out, tied our jeans together and heaved ’im out with them. And do you know what this darkie had gone and done? A real boy-scout job: he’d built a bloody man trap over this old well for us, lot of dry sticks and things, and put a tranny on top, so as we’d fall straight in. And old Johnny fell for it. He’d have fuckin’ drowned less we’d come along. What do you think of that?’

Hank looked round, addressing the assembled company, his face shining with drunken indignation in the light. ‘What do you make of that?’ he added, in a tone that suggested he spoke now more in sorrow than in anger. Then he suddenly picked the African up from the ground and shook him viciously by the neck, like a chicken. ‘We’re going to have you, mate,’ he said. ‘You can’t go round trying to kill British blokes like that, you know.’ Then he threw him to the ground again. A friend brought Hank a can of beer, and he tore the top off, drinking deeply.

‘I know what we’ll do with you, mate,’ Hank said at last, gasping with pleasure, his thirst quenched. ‘We’ll give you a taste of your own medicine. Tie him up properly, lads. Then we’ll lash him to a pole.’

‘What you going to do, Hank?’ someone shouted in excitement.

‘What these black buggers used to do to us: roast him alive! Tie him to a stake first. Then we’ll roast him alive, and eat him.’

Hank was joking, I thought. But the African didn’t think so. From what I could see of his face, squirming on the ground by the fire, it was clear that he believed Hank. The African was certainly frightened, in a way he’d never been that morning. By the fire — of course, that was it: here was another fire about to maim him again, at the very least. As for Clare, it was obvious from her pleasurable excitement beside me that she fully endorsed Hank’s plans for the man. A suitable demise for her enemy of the morning.

And I thought: an end to my enemy too? Without my touching him: perhaps Willy’s killer, and Laura’s as well — who had then come after Clare and me with the same evil beam in his eye … Yet I realised I hadn’t the slightest proof for any of this. But surely it wouldn’t matter anyway. Hank was only trying to frighten the man.

He wasn’t. They got a long beech branch from somewhere outside the clearing and dug a hole for it near the fire, pounding in sods of earth round its base with their boots. Then they tied the African to it with bits of twine and some cord from the guy ropes from their tents. They put a lot of dry brambles and sticks around his feet then, building the wood up round his legs, to his knees and then higher as the man struggled vainly, his face deformed all over now, appalled in the light from the fire a few yards away.

Hank spoke, his voice screechy with excitement and drink. He still had his flick-knife in his hand. He went up to the man.

‘Before we toast you,’ he said. ‘Maybe we should cut ourselves a live steak or two from the ribs here.’ And he opened the man’s camouflage jacket and made a cut there and then as he spoke, on the man’s flesh, a delicate slash across his lower chest, like a butcher suggesting a joint, so that the blood ran. ‘That’s what you people do, isn’t it? Out in Africa. Bloody savages. Eat your mother live, you would. Wouldn’t you?’

I still thought Hank was playing some brutal game. But this last action of his made me wonder. I knew I’d have to try and save the African, whoever he was, if this murderous charade went any further. I took Spinks’s bow from my back and unwound the tape from the two arrows strapped to its belly.

Hank, having cut the man’s flesh open, was a vicious Master of Ceremonies now, a shark who had smelt blood. He stood back, surveying his work, and there was silence in the glade for a moment. Was this all? Or would there be more. Surely there was more fun to be had …

Hank, sensing this silence as a vital cue, started an undulating, mocking dance round the pyre then, his blond hair flopping up and down in the light, the tassels on his Nazi jacket flying. By degrees the others joined him, mostly drunk, pleased to take up the chase again.

And together they all danced round the African, in a savage parody of jive and twist and rock-and-roll — gyrating, throwing their backsides about and clapping their hands in the air above their heads as they chanted bloody slogans and racist obscenities, the graffiti of a thousand condemned playgrounds coming to frenzied life.

But there was still time, I thought. They would calm down. Indeed I noticed one or two of the youths on the outskirts who were not taking part in the dance at all. They were trying to restrain the others.

‘All right, Hank,’ one of these said. ‘Give it over. We’ll have the fuzz here. Let the bugger go.’

But Hank took no notice. He left the circle then and went to the fire a few yards away, where he drew a long burning ember out. I knew that, even if he was only fooling, once this even touched the dry brambles round the African’s feet, the man would go up in flames like a rocket. On the other hand, I thought, if I used the bow, if I shot Hank, they would find the arrow afterwards …

But perhaps I’d have no alternative. I was about twenty-five feet above the pyre, looking down at a slight angle on the African. If Hank came to set him ablaze it would be a fairly easy shot. I should be able to wound him, on the backside or leg, and take the consequences of the arrow being found afterwards.

Hank returned then, the torch in his hand, pushing his way back through the circle of dancers. He flourished the burning stick like a metronome in front of the African’s face for half a minute. Then he brushed the man’s good profile with the red-hot branch, from top to bottom, singeing the hair and flesh.

The African screamed.

And I could stand it no more. Hank had his back to me. I drew the string quickly, aimed for his legs, and loosed the arrow. But in my anger I drew too hard. The arrow went high. It must have transfixed Hank, going right through his chest, so that he fell forward onto the pyre, dropping the burning torch which instantly set the brambles alight at the base of the pyre.

The African was struggling now, seeing a chance of escape, Hank’s body lying half across him as he slipped gradually down, smothering the flames. His friends came for him, trying to drag him away, while another, with a knife, moved behind the African and started to cut him loose from his bonds.

The others had all panicked meanwhile, for the flames had taken hold around the base of the pyre and had begun to spread outwards over the glade, along the fuses of drier grass. The whole place was suddenly empty. And the youth who had been trying to free the African had run as well, leaving his job half-done. But it was enough. The African was suddenly free of the burning post and there was only one man left in the glade who couldn’t run: Hank, still sprawled to one side of the pyre.

The African had been slightly burnt about the feet. But he was still perfectly active. He should have run himself, for the flames were spreading quickly now all over the glade. But instead he stayed a moment, turned and, as a last gesture, pulled Hank’s body right over the blazing pyre, so that it would roast there properly, the black leather jacket and the paint of its gold swastika already burning fiercely. Then the African was gone, running between the gathering sheaths of flame, the little firestorm that was engulfing the tents, the motorcycles, everything that was in the glade.

But soon the flames had risen beneath us too, and caught some of the dry beech leaves on the lower branches of the tree we were hiding in. They began to feed on the leaves, moving towards the other trees in the valley, on the very things that had hidden us happily from the world for the past two months, the basis of our security, our existence.

And there was no way of stopping it. The fire raged upwards through the trees around the glade, so that Clare and I were moving quickly back along the branches and walkways towards our tree house, the wood beginning to crackle and roar as the flames lit up the valley behind us. And suddenly we were like hunted animals in the forest, leaping from branch to branch, running from the holocaust.