A Rough Shoot (2 page)

It was nine o’clock when I got home, and, as I expected, Cecily was very worried. She had visions of a shooting accident; they were not unreasonable, and, if you think of it, they were correct. My lateness was inexplicable. If I had stopped at a pub or to see a friend on my way home, I should have telephoned. She knew, too, that I wouldn’t willingly disappoint our two boys, who had been promised a long story before bedtime.

I told her that I had stayed very late looking for a dead bird, and that on the way back a tire had been punctured (which was true, for I had driven a pin into it just before reaching home), so I had had to walk. She gave me a silent, doubtful look once or twice in the evening, which meant that she knew there was trouble on my mind, and that she too proud to ask for it. I pretended to be sulky just because I hadn’t shot anything.

The next day I awoke–if it can be called waking after such a night–with an atrocious, evil conscience. To prepare the way for my absence, I told Cecily that I intended to do a round of customers and prospects, and that, as I was going to be in the north of the county, I should call on my opposite number in Salisbury and stay the night. This was a perfectly normal routine; nevertheless she asked me diffidently to call her from Salisbury just to say that I was all right. I tied my bicycle to the roof of the car–on the grounds that I couldn’t be bothered to mend the puncture myself–and surreptitiously threw a spade into the back.

I told my clerk–there were only the two of us in the office–that I was going to do a round of visits, and that I shouldn’t come back. Then I drove twice round the shoot through all the lanes and roads that were near to it. There was no sign at all of anything wrong, no cars of police or strangers parked by the roadside or on the cart tracks.

I dropped in on old Blossom, the farmer from whom I rented the shooting. We had a mug of cider together–he was one of the few men left in the county who still made his own–and talked of local affairs. He evidently hadn’t been disturbed by police or anyone else. He mightn’t have told me, of course, if he had; but I knew him well enough to recognize his manner when he was being heavily discreet. You could always hear him turning on the caution, and forcing his geniality a bit.

As I drove out of Blossom’s gate and over the stream, I passed a man standing on the roadside near the bridge. He looked brisk and important, like a fussy foreman on a job he didn’t understand. In the ordinary way he would never have made me suspicious. Blossom’s farm, the tall elms and the clear chalk stream, made a pretty, if somewhat obvious picture that always attracted the holiday-making townsman. It was a bit late, however, for holidays, and it wasn’t a week end; and then the man was dressed as some minor, pestiferous government employee, yet had no vehicle in sight. I drove very slowly away, and watched him in the mirror. He was looking after my car; he wrote something, presumably its number, in a notebook.

I pulled up a little farther on, and climbed a slope to observe him. He seemed to be making a sort of census of traffic. The vet and the baker both stopped at the farm, and, as if glad of the opportunity, he asked them questions. His self-satisfaction was obvious, even from a distance.

I couldn’t believe this little man was a policeman, or that his questions were police routine. If anyone had approached the Dorset Constabulary with some story, necessarily vague, of a man shot on Blossom’s land, their very first move would be to interview Blossom and inspect the ground. They wouldn’t put a plain-clothes detective on the job before they knew whether there was a word of truth in the yarn.

Somebody else, however, seemed to have acted quickly. My thoughts returned to the imagined gang of game and poultry thieves. Perhaps they had some ingenious method of attracting things wild and edible by light or by some device that needed careful leveling. In any case this was a warning that some sort of investigation was going on. My simple plan had to be scrapped. I couldn’t risk leaving my car anywhere near the shoot, under possible observation, while I dug up the body and carried it back.

I drove on and lunched very late at a remote pub overlooking the Blackmoor Vale, where the landlord, who was a friend of mine, always had something solid to eat which food controllers had never heard of. On this occasion it was a badger ham, and very good it was. I was amazed at my appetite, and ashamed–but then I realized that my mind, all unknown to me, had been making deductions. Somebody was as yet unwilling to call in the police; and that could only mean that my shot was–well, not justified from any legal or moral point of view, but at least the sort of accident that did occur in the world to which the dead man had belonged. The instancy of his companion’s escape bore it out. Why run, unless he had a very guilty conscience or had been prepared to be shot at? Any normal citizen, however timid, would have protested then and there (though keeping, perhaps, carefully under cover) and would have gone to the police that very night.

So my conscience was easier, and my appetite made me realize it. I wasn’t quite in the position of a drunken driver who kills a man on the road and hides the body. I was more like the householder who shoots at a burglar and accidentally kills him. The law would take a serious view of such a crime, but the householder himself would not; and, if he could easily get rid of the body, he might be fool enough, as I was, to try.

I was strongly tempted to leave well enough alone; but then I should be at the mercy of the merest accident all through the winter–Blossom’s inquisitive sheepdogs, the rain or the rabbits themselves. No, the body couldn’t be left where it was. On the other hand it could no longer be removed by road. The only solution was to find a better hiding place on the shoot itself.

That wasn’t going to be easy. Hedges and coverts were thick with all the dying vegetation of summer, and I couldn’t dig in such stuff–apart from the physical difficulty of it–without leaving a patch of beaten ground which would be conspicuous to any determined searcher. Digging in the open and leveling off so that nothing suspicious remained was, at any rate at night, quite impossible. At last, in my after-lunch meditation, it occurred to me that I needn’t do either.

In the northeast corner of the shoot, at the top of the boundary hedge, was a tumble-down piece of dry stone walling which had once surrounded a barn or cottage, and now contained only a clump of beeches and a jungle of brambles. On the south side, just off Blossom’s land, was a field which had been freshly plowed and harrowed. I intended to pull down a short stretch of wall, dig a shallow hole and replace the stones when I had finished. The earth could be scattered on the new-turned earth of the field, and raked over with a branch. The nettles and bramble on the inner side of the wall would be undisturbed, and, if the job were neatly done, the two persons most concerned could rest in peace.

In the afternoon I drove back along the upper road and still saw nothing to disquiet me. I stopped for an instant to hide the spade in a ditch where I could pick it up later. When I reached Dorchester I put my car in the public car park and collected my bicycle at the little shop which had mended the puncture. I kept to the back streets, for I didn’t want to run into Cecily, who might be in town, or any of my friends.

After dusk I approached the shoot, very cautiously and without lights, along the upper road. I was prepared to give up the whole plan if I passed a single stranger, but I didn’t. For three miles, without either village or cottage, this narrow, well-metaled byroad switchbacked up and down across the high ground. There were several ways of scrambling across country from the road to Blossom’s land, but only one regular track–if you can call a couple of ruts in the grass a track.

I carefully reconnoitered the point where the track met the road. The man who ran away had taken this route the previous night. By bending close to the ground I could just make out the print of tires in the mud where his car had been parked. Then I rode on up the road, collected the spade, hid my bicycle and worked my way silently across the fields to the clump of beeches and the wall. There I was fairly close to the pit, but a good half mile from the corner of the hedge where the accident had happened.

It was a gusty night, with thin clouds whose lower edge occasionally touched the top of the downs and enveloped them in mist. The trees within the wall creaked and whispered, and the thorn and holly and elder of the great hedge rattled their branches and dying leaves. There was enough noise to cover any that I might make myself. Even so, before I started to remove the stones I sat still and watched and listened. The clouds were often tenuous enough to show the shape of a half-moon, and then I could see a hundred yards into the milky and uneasy world that surrounded me.

One by one I removed the flat stones of the wall, placing them on the bare earth of the field so that I would know in what order they went back. I hadn’t, of course, taken on the impossible task of replacing a neat wall in position. I wanted only to leave the tumble of stones, the wall-shaped object, looking much as it had before. While I worked I had my back towards the length of the boundary hedge, and I can’t say I liked it. With my back unguarded, with such a beastly task in front of me, and in not too deep a darkness, across which flitted the wisps and wraiths of cloud, I had to keep a tight hold on imagination.

I kept too tight a hold. Any balance was impossible.

Either I had to investigate every cracking branch, every inexplicable sound, or none at all. And so it was that I didn’t pay attention until the final rush of feet.

I ascribe my safety to sheer animal panic, for I am no athlete. All my suppressed fears exploded instantaneously and I jumped sideways and off, like a hare out of her form. As my pursuers stumbled over the stones, I increased a lead of five yards to twenty. I led them towards the road and then dived–literally dived, headfirst–over a gap in the hedge which I knew was closed by five strands of barbed wire. They crashed into it as I picked myself up, and gave tongue loudly in oaths that certainly weren’t those of local men. There were two of them. One had a cultured accent, and a loud and hearty voice. The other was a foreigner. Their speed and energy made me certain that neither was the man I had seen at Blossom’s gate. Dense cloud was moving over the ground, and in that foggy darkness I could get no impression at all of height or build. It was a comforting thought that to them too I must have been nothing but a piece of night which moved.

By the time they got clear of the wire and were able to listen to anything but themselves, I was safe. I dropped to the ground and waited. One of them produced a torch that he hadn’t had time to use before, and flashed it halfheartedly around. I noticed that he held it away from him at the full stretch of his arm. It was obvious that he thought I might fire at the light. This was a cheering reminder that I was not dealing with police, and that my pursuers, whoever they were, expected a more formidable enemy than an innocent and hitherto respectable salesman.

They gave up the search for me and returned to the wall. There of course they found my spade and walked off with it. That was a disaster. There would be some wonderful sets of my fingerprints on that spade. The Englishman said to the other:

“Hold it by the blade, man!”

So that was that, and the end of me if ever they chose to go to the police. I could never produce any convincing story to explain what I was doing with a spade in that corner of the shoot.

They walked away diagonally across the fields, aiming– I had to gamble on it–for the cart track. As soon as I was sure, I ran straight to my bicycle, tore silently up the road and reached the junction a little before them. They had no waiting car. They turned left and walked along the stretch of road I had just covered, one of them carrying the spade over his shoulder and still holding it by the blade. I followed, trailing them by the sound of their footsteps.

When they got over the brow of the hill I decided to take a chance. The road was good and my cycle well oiled. It made no more noise than dead leaves blowing over the tarmac. They were talking together as I swept down behind them, and when they heard me it was too late. I passed them at about fifteen miles an hour, swerved, grabbed at the spade and wobbled twice across the road– but I had it, and the torch was flashed too late. I heard them begin to run, and I put on speed.

Further on I came to a motorcycle and sidecar, parked just off the road without lights. I don’t suppose anyone else would have noticed it, but I was looking for their transport, and I knew all the gates and gaps where it could be. I had about a couple of minutes to deal with it. I caught carburetor and petrol pipe a devastating swipe with the spade f wrenched off the clutch cable, and then saw a handy billet of wood with which I wrecked the spokes of the back wheel. I lost my temper with that motorcycle, and I left it looking as if I had. Then I rode peacefully back to Dorchester, recovered my car, and was home before midnight with a story that I hadn’t had to stay at Salisbury after all.

It is now time to say something of my silent Cecily. She seldom says what she thinks. On the other hand, unless she is talking to fools who expect it of her, she never says what she doesn’t think. This apparent quiescence–a reluctance, one might call it, to disturb the status quo–makes her very easy to live with; too easy, perhaps, for I am inclined to accept her longer silences without inquiring into the cause as closely as I ought.

Such masculine laziness was now useful. I could pretend I didn’t notice her mood. She, on her part, was much too proud to ask me the reason for my odd behavior two nights running. I don’t want to give the impression that I had to explain all my movements to her. Of course I didn’t. I was a hard-working quarry agent, frequently on the road at short notice. No, I mean that ours was as good a marriage as you could find. If I was anxious or excited, she always knew it; if it was she who went through some silent crisis, I usually knew it. But we were both quite capable of feigning to see nothing wrong until the cloud over the other, whatever it was, had passed.