Wish You Were Here

26

JACK HAD EVERY REASON to remember that last Remembrance Day.

November, 1994. Just him and Dad. Almost a year since Tom had gone — his name no longer being mentioned, and Jack himself no longer suffering (though he had for months) any proxy punishment for his brother’s absence. A kind of muddled realignment, as if his father might have said now of Tom, in the way he might have spoken of any reconsidered investment, any shelved bit of farm planning: Well, we did the right thing there, Jack boy, didn’t we, not to press ahead with that. As if Tom’s departure had only revived the fortunes and workability of Jebb Farm. Which it very clearly hadn’t.

But that anniversary had been coming up — the anniversary of Tom’s departure which was also, anyway, his birthday. And before that there was Remembrance Sunday, with its tradition of dogged observance in the Luxton family. And how would they deal with that now — now that Tom had gone off to be a soldier?

Jack had left it to his father, and wouldn’t have been surprised if Michael had said (though it would have been the first such omission, so far as Jack knew, in the annals of the household): ‘In case you’re wondering, we’ll give it a miss this year.’ And even spat.

But his father had said: ‘I hope you’ve got your suit ready for tomorrow.’ And then had said: ‘I got these when I was up at Leke Cross.’ And had handed over one of two paper poppies with their green plastic stalks.

None of this, on the other hand, had been done with much animation, and Jack’s assessment had been that his father couldn’t lose face in front of the village. As Luxtons, they simply couldn’t neglect their annual duty. Michael’s later, unspoken but manifest decision not to enter the Crown for the customary drink — where, of course, he might get drawn into some discussion about his younger son’s whereabouts — seemed to go along with this. He would turn up for the ceremony, but he drew the line at anything else.

Jack didn’t have then in his vocabulary (he doesn’t really now) the word ‘hypocrisy’. It would have sounded then to him like a word a vet might use — something else cows might go down with. As for getting his suit ready, he didn’t know what that could mean other than taking it off the hanger where it had hung all year long.

But there was a seriousness, even a strange conscientiousness, about Michael’s behaviour on that Remembrance Day. He seemed to present himself in the farmhouse that morning more painstakingly, more brushed and scrubbed about his face and hands, than he’d ever done before. He fixed the poppy in his lapel not cursorily, but with a degree of care, as if it might have been a real flower and he was going to a wedding. He’d duly produced the medal and in plain view, like a conjuror beginning some solemn trick, slipped it into his breast pocket so that Jack would note it. On the other hand, after he’d examined Jack’s turnout — rather rigorously, and that too was untypical — he’d given a weird smirking expression, as if to say, ‘Well, this is a bloody joke, isn’t it?’

Outside, the air was clear and still and sharp, the sky a blazing blue. At ten o’clock the frost had barely melted from the fields and the hills lay powdered with white. The woods still had their yellows and browns. On the oak tree in Barton Field you could have counted every motionless, bronze-gold, soon-to-drop leaf.

It was a day as etched and distinct as Jack’s memories of it would be, a day of which you might have said, at its brilliant start, that it was a fine day for something, whatever that thing might be. Even a Remembrance Day ceremony would do. And when this fine day changed — when Michael, after the ceremony, made his evident decision not to hang around, not to enter the Crown and buy his older son a drink and so let his younger son’s name come up in conversation, it wasn’t the simple, if unprecedented, skulking-off it seemed.

It had been for him, Jack, to say? His father was leaving it to him? But he hadn’t said it. Not at first, when the little group round the memorial dispersed, nor after they’d stood by Vera’s grave, nor all the way back, in that sparkling sunshine. They’d halted at the top of the track. Still he might have spoken. But he’d got out to unfasten the gate, then closed it behind his father as he’d driven through, then known it was definitely too late.

He’d pulled back the bolt. He remembers it all now. Two ridiculous men in briefly donned suits, in a worse-for-wear Land Rover, its exhaust pipe juddering and still steaming in the cold air; his father’s uncustomarily combed head not turning as he re-entered Luxton territory, then stopped, with a loud yank on the hand brake, and waited for his son.

He’d swung shut the gate. The throbbing Land Rover was like some stray beast he’d herded back in. The decision had been all his. Maybe. But he’d also thought, his hands on the cold wooden rail and then on the even colder, rasping spring-bolt: You bastard, for leaving it to me, you bastard for not doing the decent thing yourself.

And thought it ever since, gone over it repeatedly in his head. It was somewhere, even, in the terrible dream out of which he surfaced, years later, in a hotel room in Okehampton. The simple opening and closing of a gate. He’d swung it back, perhaps, with extra force. And if he’d grasped that decision as he’d grasped and swung that gate — for God’s sake, if he’d just bought his father a bloody pint — how different the consequences might have been.

That same night — this is what Jack told those he had to tell, and he had to tell it several times and never without great difficulty — Michael left his bedroom and the Luxton farmhouse at some early hour of the morning, possibly around three o’clock. It was another cold, still, frosty night, the sort of night on which no one leaves a house or even the warmth of their bed without a very good reason.

There’s a version of it all that Jack tells only himself, an over-and-over revisited version that allows more room for detail and for speculation, but it’s essentially the same version that he gave others and that for many years he’s, thankfully, had no reason to repeat. Though one of the reasons why he sits now at the window of Lookout Cottage with a loaded gun on the bed behind him is the suddenly renewed and imminent possibility (which he hopes absolutely to avoid) of having to repeat it.

Michael had not been drinking, though drinking is not an uncommon accompaniment to events of this kind, which were themselves, around that time, becoming not so uncommon on small and hard-pressed dairy farms in the region. Not only were the Luxtons not great drinkers, but Michael had not even had a pint or two that lunchtime, which was one of the rare occasions when it might have been expected of him.

Nor has Jack, at his window now, been drinking. He is entirely sober. It’s not a good thing to be drunk when handling a gun, in any circumstance.

Michael left the farmhouse on a freezing November night, long before dawn, and Jack would speculate to himself (though others would speculate too) why his father did everything that he did, not just in the cold but in the dark. It was not like when Tom slipped out that night, needing to do so by stealth. Though perhaps it was. Tom had needed only to find the track and climb up it. Dad’s path was less marked. But Dad knew every inch of the farm and every bit of that field — Barton Field — backwards. He knew it better than Tom. He knew it blindfold.

As Jack knew it too, and still knows it. He is perfectly able, still, without having been there for over ten years, and in the darkness, as it were, of his head, to retrace his father’s movements that night as if they were his own. And right now he has a peculiar and unavoidable interest in doing so.

In any case, it was a clear night. There was starlight and there was a good chunk of moon, almost a full one, Jack had noted, which, by the time he noted it, had come up over the far hills. The question was never how, but why. Why in the cold—on such a night, and in those coldest hours before dawn? Though perhaps the answer to that was simple. It was dark and cold anyway. Michael Luxton was dark and cold inside. It was November. Winter, with the farm in ruins, stretched before them. Jack can see now the logic. Had it been springtime, with the first touch of warmth in the air, it’s conceivable that Michael wouldn’t have done what he did. But perhaps the truth is that if you’re ready, such considerations are irrelevant. You don’t consult, or much mind, the weather.

It’s November now, although far from frosty. A strong, wet, gusting south-westerly.

Perhaps the crucial thing was that it was the night after Remembrance Sunday.

Jack, usually a sound sleeper, would puzzle over what it was that woke him. The shot, of course. But then if the shot had woken him, he later thought, he wouldn’t have heard it, he would have wondered, still, what it was that woke him. In Jack’s recounting of things — understandably confused — there was always a particular confusion about this point. He had heard the shot, yet the shot had woken him — as if in fact he was already awake to hear it, had known somehow beforehand that some dreadful thing was about to happen.

He was sure he hadn’t heard his father leave — though his father must have made some noise and would have put on a light, downstairs at least, when he got the gun from the cabinet. There was a distinctive squeak to that cabinet door.

Then again, with the windows shut, the shot wouldn’t have been so loud, not loud enough, necessarily, to wake a heavy sleeper. It would have carried in the frosty air, it’s true, and been accentuated by the silence of the night, and it would have come from just a little nearer than the shot that had signalled Luke’s death. But Jack had heard that from outside, in the yard, and he’d been expecting it.

Jack has always asserted that he heard the shot. It either woke him or, by some mysterious triggering inside him, he was awake to hear it. But he heard it. And he knew at once both where it had come from and what it meant. It might as well have been, as Jack has sometimes put it, in language unusually expressive for him, the loudest shot in the world.

And he has certainly thought what it might have been like if he hadn’t heard it, if he’d slept through it. And has certainly blamed himself, of course, again and again (a point he also asserted to others that morning), that he was not awake even earlier. If he hadn’t woken at all, he would have made the discovery only gradually. His dad might have been like a block of ice. Though could that have made it any worse?

But Jack has never wondered — at least when sharing his recollection of events — why his father chose the exact spot and position that he did. Among all the possible spots. Or why he, Jack, once awake, knew exactly where to go. He could explain this very easily by saying — though you’d have to be a Luxton to understand, you’d have to have spent your life on that farm — that if he’d ever been pushed to such a thing himself (and here, in some of Jack’s earliest statements, his listeners, who’d included policemen and coroner’s officers, had felt compelled to avert their eyes while they acknowledged a certain force of feeling) he’d probably have chosen exactly the same spot.

That oak, Jack might have added, was reckoned to be over five hundred years old. It had been there before the farmhouse.

Michael had put on the same clothes that he might have put on, a little later that morning, to do the tasks that had to be done about the farm: a check shirt, a thick grey jumper, corduroy trousers, long thick socks to go in Wellington boots — all of this in addition to the long-john underwear which in winter he normally slept in anyway. The suit he’d briefly worn only hours before (this was later noted) was back in the depths of the wardrobe. Then he’d put on his cap and scarf and his donkey jacket with the torn quilt lining, and the olive-green wool mittens that stopped short at the knuckles. So you might have said that he’d certainly felt the cold, given that he’d dressed so thoroughly for it. But all this was the force of habit. These clothes were like his winter hide, which he merely slipped off overnight. And, of course, he did have a task to complete. He even needed to make sure his fingers wouldn’t go numb and useless on him.

He took the gun from the cabinet and took two number-six cartridges and either loaded them straight away, with the kitchen light on to help him, or loaded them at the last minute, in the dark and the cold. At either point it would have been an action of some finality.

The question would arise, which Jack, since he was asleep himself, could never answer, as to how much, if at all, Michael had slept that night: how, in short, he’d arrived at his course of action and its particular timing. He could hardly have set his alarm clock. Jack discovered no note, though he didn’t tell the investigating policemen that he didn’t find this surprising, and when asked by them if he’d noticed anything strange in his father’s behaviour on the preceding day, he’d said only that they’d gone together to attend the short eleven-o’clock remembrance service beside the memorial in Marleston, as they did every year, because of the Luxtons who were on it. One of the two policemen, the local constable, Bob Ireton, would have been able to corroborate this directly, as he’d attended the ceremony himself, in his uniform, in a sort of semi-official capacity. It wasn’t, therefore, a typical Sunday morning — they didn’t put on suits every Sunday morning — but there was nothing strange about it, as PC Ireton would have wholly understood. It would have been strange if they hadn’t gone. The only things that were strange about it, Jack had affirmed, were that Tom wasn’t there (though the whole village knew why this was) and that they hadn’t gone for the usual drink in the Crown afterwards.

And Jack had left it at that.

There were two other peculiarities about that (already highly peculiar) night that he might have remarked on, setting aside the peculiarity of where the act occurred — which Jack, in his fashion, suggested wasn’t peculiar at all. One was that when he’d got up that night, suddenly galvanised into wakefulness and action, having somehow heard the shot and having somehow known what it meant, he’d naturally looked, even before hastily dressing and before (torch in hand) he left the farmhouse, into his father’s bedroom — into what had always been known as the Big Bedroom. And had noticed that the bedclothes, recently pulled back, had an extra blanket — a tartan one — spread over them. There was nothing special about an extra blanket on a cold night, so in that respect it was unworthy of mention. Only Jack knew that he’d never seen that blanket spread over his father’s bed before. Only Jack knew its history.

And Jack never mentioned either — was it relevant? — that there was a dog buried a little further down that field.

The second peculiarity — which Jack did point out, though the police might soon have discovered it for themselves — was that when Michael had dressed that night, he’d slipped a medal into the breast pocket of his frayed-at-the-collar check shirt. It was the same medal, of course, that Jack knew had been earlier that day in the pocket of his suit.

Why, later, the medal was in the pocket of his shirt was anyone’s guess, but it would have meant — though Jack didn’t go into this in his statement — that he must have been conscious of it during the intervening hours, and perhaps never returned it to its silk-lined box. He might have put it, for example, on his bedside table when he went to bed and before he slept, if he did sleep, that night. Perhaps — though this was a thought that would not crystallise in Jack’s mind till many years later — he might even have clutched it in his hand.

These were considerations that Jack felt the police and, later, the coroner need not be interested in. Any more than they need be interested in the fact that Vera had died (and hers wasn’t a quick death) in that same big bed with a tartan blanket now lying on it. Or that he himself had been born and, in all probability, conceived in it.

But the fact was that Michael had died wearing, so to speak, the DCM.

When the police had asked Jack how he’d discovered this so soon — after all, his father had been wearing two layers of thick clothing over his shirt, and anyway Jack was having to confront much else — Jack had said that he’d slipped his hand inside his father’s jacket to feel if his heart was still beating. The policemen had looked at Jack. They might have said, if they’d had no regard for his feelings, something like: ‘He’d just shot his brains out.’ Jack had nonetheless insisted, with a certain dazed defiance, that he’d wanted to feel his father’s heart, he’d wanted to put his hand over it. That had been his reaction. He didn’t say that he’d wanted to feel not so much a beating heart — which would have been highly unlikely — but just if there was any last living warmth left on that cold night, beneath the old grey jumper, in his father’s body.

But he said that he’d felt something hard there. Those were his actual words: he’d felt ‘something hard there’.

When Jack said these things the two policemen — Ireton and a Detective Sergeant Hunt — had looked away. Jack was clearly in a state of great distress and shock. God knows what state he would have been in when he actually came upon the body. Bob Ireton knew Jack Luxton to be a pretty impervious, slow-tempered sort. He was looking now, for Jack, not a little wild-eyed. Bob had been at the same primary and secondary schools as Jack. He’d known, from its beginning, about Jack and Ellie Merrick — but then so did the whole village. Save for Ellie and his recently absconded brother (and Tom, as Bob would later observe, was not to reappear for the funeral), Jack was pretty much alone now in the world.

Bob Ireton was basically anxious — he couldn’t speak for his plainclothes superior — to get this whole dreadful mess cleared up as quickly as possible and spare its solitary survivor any further needless torture. Poor man. Poor men. Both. Bob’s view of the matter — again, he couldn’t speak for his colleague — was as straightforward as it was considerate. Michael Luxton had killed himself with a shotgun. His son had discovered the fact and duly reported it to the authorities. In a little while from now, though there’d be a delay for an inquest, poor Jack would have to stand again in that suit he rarely wore, but had worn, as it happened, only the day before the death, beside his father’s grave.

This was not the first time, in fact, that Constable Ireton had been required to attend the scene after the suicide of a farmer. Following the cattle disease, there had been this gradual, much smaller yet even more dismaying epidemic. One or two hanged themselves from a beam in a barn (sometimes watched by munching cattle), others chose a shotgun. A shotgun was marginally more upsetting. Bob frankly didn’t attach much weight to the odd circumstantial details that sometimes went with a suicide, the strange things that might precede it, the strange things that might (it was not a good word) trigger it. It was a pretty extreme bit of behaviour anyway. Who could say what you (but that was not a good line of thinking and anyway not professional) might do?

But, sadly, he was not unused to the thing itself, no longer even surprised by it. The underlying causes were fairly obvious — look around. He was both glad and a little guilty to be a policeman, drawing his steady policeman’s pay, while farmers all around him were going under. He should really have been like some odd man out within the community — though a policeman, a sort of outlaw — a stay-at-home version of Tom Luxton joining the army. Yet now his services were peculiarly called upon. He’d known that the Luxton farm, especially after Tom had withdrawn his labour, was near the limit. None of it was surprising, and the best thing was to clear it up as tidily as possible.

Had he been told when he became a policeman that he’d one day be officiating over all the wretched consequences of a so-called mad-cow disease, he’d have said that such an idea was itself mad. He hadn’t supposed — though he hadn’t sought a quiet life and there was such a thing as rural crime — that he’d become one day a sort of superintendent of misery. He’d never be (nor would DS Hunt, he reckoned) any other sort of superintendent.

And all this was years before the foot-and-mouth (by which time he was, at least, a sergeant). More dead cattle — great crackling heaps of them. And a few more deaths among the ‘farming fraternity’. Was it Jack Luxton who’d once passed on to him that phrase?

Poor men. Poor beasts. Both.

Michael crossed the yard and, skirting the Small Barn where the pick-up and the Land Rover and the spreader were housed, entered Barton Field by the top gate. Barton Field, only six acres and a roughly shaped strip of land, buckling and widening as it descended, was the nearest field to the farmhouse, its upper, narrow end meeting the shelf in the hillside where the farm buildings stood. Its challenging contours made it the least manageable field at Jebb, but it was the ‘home’ field of the farm and formed its immediate prospect. At the top, at its steepest, it bulged prominently, turning, further down, into a gentler scoop, so that its flat lower end was hidden from even the upper windows of the farmhouse. But this only enhanced the view. From the house you looked, over the fall of the land, to the woods in the valley and to the hills beyond, but principally took in — perfectly placed between foreground and background — the broad top third or so of the big single oak that stood near the middle of the field where its slope levelled off. The oak’s massive trunk could not be seen, nor the immense, spreading roots which had risen above the surrounding soil. But between these roots, where the grass had given up, were small hollows of that reddish earth that Jack would notice on the last stages of a strange, westbound journey. The roots themselves were thick and ridged enough to form little ledges or seats, for a sheep or a man.

The oak was, of course, a great stealer of the surrounding pasture — its only value to provide shade for the livestock — but it was a magnificent tree. It had been there at least as long as Luxtons had owned the land. To have removed it would have been unthinkable (as well as a forbidding practical task). It simply went with the farm. No one taking in that view for the first time could have failed to see that the tree was the immovable, natural companion of the farmhouse, or, to put it another way, that so long as the tree stood, so must the farmhouse. And no mere idle visitor — especially if they came from a city and saw that tree on a summer’s day — could have avoided the simpler thought that it was a perfect spot for a picnic.

None of these thoughts had particularly occurred to Michael or to Jack (or, when he was there, to Tom). They were so used to the tree straddling their view that they could, for most of the time, not really notice it. Nonetheless, it was straight to this tree that Michael walked on an icy November night, carrying a gun. Or as straight as the steep slope allowed.

Exact evidence of his path was left by the tracks in the frost that Jack, only a little later, picked up by the light of his torch. At one spot it was clear that his father had slipped and slid for a yard or more on his arse. It was very strange for Jack to think of this minor mishap at such a moment — of his father perhaps swearing under his breath at it and suffering its jolting indignity. As it was strange to think that this slip might not have been a simple slip at all, given that his father was carrying at the time a possibly already loaded and closed gun. There might have been a much nastier accident.

Had the frost not begun to melt — unlike the previous morning — even before daybreak, it would have left a very clear record of the activity in Barton Field that night: Michael’s tracks, with that slip, going in one direction, and Jack’s going, separately, in both directions (and, despite the great agitation he was in, without a single slip). But all of them converging on the oak tree.

In his statements Jack had voluntarily made the point that when he’d spotted his father’s tracks he’d both followed and avoided them, even carefully skirting round the broad mark where the slip had occurred. He had instinctively not walked through them, not out of forensic considerations, but because, as he failed really to convey clearly but as his listeners may have grasped, they were the last footsteps his father had taken.

Of course, this meant that the descending pair of tracks might have given the appearance that the two men had walked down together. There was certainly only one set of ascending tracks. But all this was neither here nor there, since by dawn and even by the time Jack made his phone call — he’d delayed the call because of the state he was in, but also because he knew not much could practicably be done while it was still dark — a change in the weather occurred. A breeze got up, bringing in cloud cover, and the air warmed appreciably.

By the time the two policemen arrived and descended the field with Jack — who was clearly dreading what he would have to see in daylight — the sharp night had turned into a grey, gusty morning. The top branches of the oak tree made a continual whirring above them, and dislodged leaves spun down. The frost had gone. There was even a touch of drizzle. So the policemen perhaps wondered why Jack had needed to speak about the tracks he’d seen by torchlight that were no longer there — unless, of course, it was simply because he couldn’t help reliving, and reliving again, every detail. Both officers were not unused to this. It was strange how the silent ones could suddenly become the gushers, while the regular gabblers could lose their voices.

But what both officers had mostly thought was: What must it have been like, to shine a torch on that?

The frost was there, anyway, when Jack first walked down, and would have sufficiently reflected the moonlight to make the torch barely necessary. The dark mass of the oak tree, against the ghostly silver of the field and the woods beyond, would have been visible of itself, Jack knew, to his father, who’d carried no torch. Perhaps his father had calculated even this, had waited for the moon to rise and light him. He would have been able to take a final look around. He would have been able, when it came to things closer to hand, to make out the roots under the tree and the gun he was holding: its dull metal glint and his own fingers on it.

Michael sat down at the foot of the oak. There was a sort of bowl in one of the thickest roots, close up to the trunk, which was ideal for this. He took his donkey jacket off first, despite the cold, the better perhaps to manipulate the gun, but also to spread under him before he sat. This precaution was as strange as it was natural: he’d wanted to spare his arse, already damp maybe, from any chilly hardness. It was like that extra blanket on the bed, though Jack didn’t say this. Nor did Jack express to anyone his private view that his father would have removed his jacket so as to be better able to feel, through his remaining layers, the wrinkled bark and supporting, towering, centuries-old solidity of the tree against his back.

Michael had removed his cap as well, as if out of respect for something. He would have pressed the back of his head, too, against the trunk and its slight inward slope. This might have been mechanically necessary, but Jack had no doubt either, though he didn’t say it (wasn’t it plain — why had Michael gone to this spot at all?), that this was out of the same dominant motive. His father had simply wanted to press his head, his skull and his back hard against that oak tree and feel it pushing back. Spine against spine.

Jack knew — he knew it from climbing up the track in winter to get the school bus — that when you shine a torch at night it lights your way but makes the surrounding darkness several times darker. When he arrived beneath the tree he partly wished he hadn’t brought a torch. It made the scene look like something horribly staged just to be lit up and it made everything else, despite the moonlight, pitch-black. Though Jack was technically prepared for what he would find, this had not made the discovery any less shocking, and how to describe what he’d felt at this moment was beyond him. Though he’d walked downhill — perhaps it was more of a scramble — he was panting for breath and his heart was banging inside him. Perhaps it was because of this that he’d reached out to feel for his father’s heart, as if while one heart was beating so violently another could surely not be lifeless. To touch his father’s breast certainly made more sense, in any case, than to touch any part of what was left of his head.

Thus he’d felt the small, hard object in his father’s shirt pocket and known exactly what it was. He didn’t dare remove it. Why should he have removed it? He was overcome by conflicting instincts, to touch and not to touch. In its recoil, the gun had jumped from between his father’s lips and from his fingers so that its double barrel lay now aimed at his waist. Even before stooping to feel his father’s chest, Jack had automatically removed the gun, as if Michael was still in danger.

This was all wrong perhaps, he should have touched nothing, but it was what he did. He hadn’t known if his father had loaded — or used — both barrels or if there was still a cartridge in place. He didn’t know if he should have broken open the gun to check. Or indeed if he should have carried the gun back with him to the safety (though that was a strange idea) of the farmhouse. Normal procedure had been suspended. You didn’t ordinarily leave a gun, especially one that might still be loaded, in the middle of a field, even if it was the small hours of the night. You didn’t normally leave your father in a similar position. In any case, he moved the gun from where it had fallen and placed it to one side in a cleft between the roots. Then, after feeling his father’s inert and medalled chest, he just stood — he couldn’t have said for how long — over the body.

He couldn’t have described his feelings at this time, but anger must have been part of them — a very large part of them — since, though this had no place at all in his subsequent relation of events, what he began to say, aloud and more than once in the middle of a dark field to his dead father, was: ‘You bastard. You bastard.’ Even as he shone a torch on his father’s shattered features: ‘You bastard.’ He would never remember how many times he said it, he wasn’t counting, but he couldn’t stop saying it. ‘You bastard. You bastard.’

It was the wrong word, perhaps, since it’s not a word you use of your father or of any father, it’s a word that works in the other direction, but he kept saying it, and the more he said it, the more it seemed not just an angry word but a useful, even encouraging word in the circumstances — the sort of word you might use to someone who wasn’t dead but just in a precarious situation, to help them pull through it. ‘You bastard.’ It kept coming to his mouth like a chant or some regular convulsion, like the only word he might ever say again.

He was saying it when, after standing for however long it was, he actually sat down beside his father, his own back against the tree — it was easily broad enough — and wondered if he shouldn’t stay there with him, freezing as it was, at least until dawn, or if he should take the donkey jacket from under him and wrap it round him, or — since that would have its problems — if he shouldn’t take off his own jacket and wrap it round him. ‘You bastard. You bastard.’ He was saying it when he wondered whether to pick up the gun or leave it where it was. He was saying it, at intervals, when after deciding to leave the gun — it seemed to belong there — he made the climb back up the steepening field to the farmhouse, his breath coming like the strokes of a saw through his chest: ‘You bastard.’ He was saying it as the farmhouse and the lights he’d left on rose monstrously over the hump of the field above him, and as he passed by the Small Barn into the yard. By now it had become like some hoarsely uttered password. ‘You bastard.’

He continued to say it during the period between regaining the farmhouse and making the call he knew he would have to make, when he had no clear sense of the passage of time and when he continually wavered between the thought of making the call, which would make things final and definite, and the thought that he should go back down to the oak tree, because what had happened perhaps might not really have happened at all. Or because he should just be there with his father. Up here, in the farmhouse, he’d already deserted him. ‘You bastard.’

He said it as he wondered whether he should wash off the muck that had got on his hands or whether he should leave it there for all of time to erase or ingrain. ‘You bastard.’ And he’d got so rhythmically used to saying it, that when he finally made the call and was able to get out that other word, ‘Police’, it’s not inconceivable that he might have said, ‘You bastard,’ too, into the phone.

He didn’t mention his repeated utterance of this phrase to Bob Ireton and his senior companion (or to anyone else), nor did he mention that during the preceding day and evening, following the Remembrance Day gathering, he had also uttered the phrase, if not aloud, but inside himself or perhaps under his breath. But the fact that he’d vented it, one way or the other, so much beforehand somehow enabled Jack to regain a degree of composure — it was his strange way, even, of haranguing himself — and to give the detailed and relatively focussed account of events that he gave. All of which, together with the actual evidence lying there in Barton Field, added up to the overwhelming conclusion, to be endorsed by the inquest, that Michael Luxton had taken his own life.

Neither policeman felt it was his place to comment on the strangenesses, so far as they knew them, of Jack’s behaviour — who wouldn’t behave strangely? — or on his technically inappropriate actions. He shouldn’t have touched the body or even have moved the gun. But this was his own father lying there. Jack was hardly some meddling third party. The poor man had done what he did and could — when, quite possibly, he might have slept through the whole incident. And he was plainly mortified by the fact that, had he been awake just a little earlier, he might have prevented all of it from happening.

One didn’t have to search far for a motive. Michael Luxton was like others. The peculiar circumstances of Remembrance Day seemed tragically to have precipitated something. Michael had either gone to bed with the not quite complete intention of acting, or he’d woken in the dead of night to form that soon-executed intention.

Detective Sergeant Hunt gave permission for the body to be moved by the ambulance men. It was a laborious and upsetting job transporting it up the steep field. The gun and Michael’s donkey jacket and cap were taken separately as evidence, to be returned later. Likewise everything in Michael’s pockets, including the medal.

Thus it would have been possible for the two policemen, out of curiosity as much as anything, to inspect the medal and see what was written on its reverse. It had been one of Michael’s infrequent, sombre-faced, hard to gauge jokes that the medal had been a good one to give a farmer’s boy, since what it said on the back was ‘For Distinguished Conduct in the Field’.

DS Hunt had thought it right, for safety reasons, to examine the gun straight away. It was unlikely that there was a cartridge still in there (why should Michael have done things by halves?) and it was confirmed that both barrels had been recently (and it must have been simultaneously) discharged and that the gun was now unloaded. Sergeant Hunt also asked Bob, after the ambulance had departed, if — while he himself remained with Jack at the farmhouse — he couldn’t find a bucket or two of water and (it would be a grim chore, he knew) carry them down to the oak and give things a slooshing down. It would be a decency. This was technically interfering with evidence too, but DS Hunt felt he had seen and noted carefully all the evidence necessary, and it would be a sort of kindness. PC Ireton felt likewise.

It was unfortunate in one sense, but fortunate in another, that Jack couldn’t help overhearing this, and so offered to drive them all down in the pick-up with a jerry can of water, buckets and even a stiff-bristled yard brush. He appeared in need of things to do, no matter how gruesome. Bob had said that no, that wouldn’t be necessary, but it might help if he could borrow the pick-up and be told where the jerry can was.

Jack was also manifestly and increasingly worried about his livestock and about several regular morning tasks not attended to. He seemed, in fact, to have a gathering sense that the farm was about to disintegrate around him — which had only been Michael’s apparently no longer tolerable situation. But all this was duly taken care of. Both Constable Ireton and DS Hunt had the forethought to appreciate that a farm, even in extraordinary circumstances, cannot simply shut down. So there had been some necessary, discreet communications and a prevailing upon a horrified but quickly rallying community spirit. It wouldn’t have been long anyway before word spread around.

It certainly wasn’t long before a battered Land Rover containing Jimmy and Ellie Merrick, dressed as for a hard-working day on their own farm, pulled up in the Jebb yard. This was the first time Jack had seen such a thing. But then he’d seen other things today he’d never seen before. Jimmy and Ellie had come the short way — by the route with which Jack was very familiar — across the fields, through the boundary gate and over Ridge Field, which adjoined Barton Field. The direct route would then have been along the top of Ridge Field, to enter the Jebb yard close to the Big Barn, but Jimmy hadn’t hesitated to drive along the bottom of Ridge Field and then, despite slipping wheels, slowly up by the low hedge alongside Barton Field, so getting a good view down across the dip to the oak tree. The body was still there, though about to be moved, and mostly and perhaps mercifully hidden behind the tree trunk. Jimmy and Ellie could only really make out two very still Wellington boots.

When the Land Rover arrived in the yard it was impossible, particularly for the two policemen, to read precisely the expression on old Merrick’s face. It had a gnome-like quality that could have meant anything — triumph or shock or perhaps a recent quick but significant intake of alcohol. In any case, he’d stuck his head out of the window and explained to DS Hunt (they knew Bob Ireton) that they were neighbours, they were the Merricks, who were long and good old neighbours of the Luxtons, and they were here to help.

Ellie, in contrast, had been silent and had looked, for a while, rather white. But she soon began to make herself useful. In fact she made her busy presence felt around Jebb Farm that day as if she herself might have owned it. It even looked at one point as though she might have been preparing to stay the night, which would have been another first. Jimmy might actually have conceded it. But just when it had begun to seem a distinct possibility, Mrs Warburton, with cardboard boxes of provisions she thought appropriate, drove over from Leke Hill Cross. She was older now, but she had her memories of Jebb Farmhouse and of when she’d been of vital assistance before. And, like some woman picking over a battlefield, she herself voiced the question that, above that still-insistent chorus of ‘You bastard’, was also tolling through Jack’s head.

‘My God, what would your poor mother have thought?’