Merely Players (14 page)

‘Yes. Well, perhaps not this weekend. I've already made plans to do other things, this weekend, Jane.' For a moment, his face was a blank in which she could read nothing. Then it brightened abruptly. ‘You should come and see what I've bought!'

He sprang up from the table. After a moment of contemplation, she rose and followed him from the room. He was already disappearing up the stairs when she reached the hall. She was getting used to the distances in this house now, but she still found that everything took a little longer. That gave you more time to think, and you didn't always want that. Adam was throwing aside some sort of packing, caressing the dark wooden handle of a new gun, when she entered the room. The stock, you called it; she remembered that. ‘Isn't she a beauty?' he asked her, transformed by his excitement from a forty-two-year-old man to a child with a new toy.

He was staring down at the bright, dark metal of a new shotgun. She wanted to share the animation which had transformed him. But she found she could say only, ‘It looks very good, yes.' She felt him looking hard into her face, but she could not take her eyes from the thing in his hands. ‘I know nothing about guns. You must remember that.'

‘This is the best you can get, Jane. Purdey, the classic make. It's a thing of beauty!' He broke the barrel and flexed the gun, showing her how the cartridges were automatically ejected. Then he took swift aim and brought down an imaginary woodcock from high on the bedroom wall. ‘Just feel it! Feel the balance of it. Feel how it sits in the crook of your arm!'

She took the weapon, trying to catch some of his boyish pleasure, thrusting away the thought that he had a small daughter he should be cradling in the crook of his arm. ‘It's very heavy, isn't it?' She was suddenly conscious how banal that sounded. ‘I'm no good with guns. They frighten me. You know that.' She raised it dutifully to her shoulder.

He snatched it away from her. ‘Don't do that! You were pointing it at me. You should never, ever, point a weapon at anyone. I'm sure I've told you that before.'

‘It's not loaded, is it?' she stared down dumbly at the cold, smooth steel of the barrel.

‘No, it's not loaded. But that's not the point. You have to get into the right habits. You never, ever, point a gun at anyone.'

‘I'm sorry. I told you, I'm no good with guns. But show me how you fire it.'

‘It's obvious enough, surely.' But he put the Purdey back in her hands, then stood behind her and flexed it open and shut. He lifted it until she stared straight down the barrel with the stock against her shoulder, and pressed her finger gently upon the trigger. ‘There you are, you've brought down a pheasant!'

Jane couldn't repress a shudder. She would never understand why people had to shoot down living things for nothing but the pleasure of killing. She laid the new toy down in its case. She couldn't think of anything to say.

Adam closed the case on the shotgun carefully, almost reverentially, before he spoke again. ‘That's why I won't be around this weekend, you see. I've got the chance of a weekend's shooting in the Scottish borders.'

She said dully, ‘Can't you get out of it? I had plans for us to do things round here.'

‘Not now, darling, I'm afraid. These chances don't come very often, you know.'

Jane Cassidy said nothing more. Her mind still held the feel of her index finger upon that trigger, still felt the smooth click which the tiniest pressure had brought.

NINE

I
n the end, Adam Cassidy left for his weekend's shooting on Friday night. It was the fourteenth of December and the days were the shortest of the year. You needed to be out early to make the most of the light, he told Jane. If you travelled a hundred and fifty miles on Saturday morning, you'd lose most of that day's shooting.

He took the BMW sports car which was his favourite for long distance motoring. He didn't need the extra seating of the Merc or the Jag, because he'd be travelling alone. The rest of the party would already be up there, he explained to Jane. He was only waiting until Friday night so that he could see the children before he went. He would like to collect them from school, but his presence brought so much unwelcome attention from the other parents that he couldn't do that. Much better for the children if they avoided that circus and the nanny Ingrid collected them. Jane wondered uncharitably how long it was since their father had last met them at the school gates.

Adam asked Damon about his day at school, though he didn't seem to give a lot of attention to the six-year-old's account of his reading triumphs and what the teacher had said about them. Kate didn't need to be asked about her day in the nursery class. As usual, she burbled happily about her paintings and how she was now the tallest in her group and was ready for the big school next year. She was very pleased with the doll her father gave her as he left, and Damon seemed almost as happy with his ray-gun. There was no need to worry about all this gender-shaping nonsense when you were buying gifts, Adam assured Jane. She wondered who had been sent out from the studios to buy these things for him.

Damon and Kate were bathed and in their pyjamas when she heard the BMW explode into life in the garage. Jane hurried them down the stairs to wave their daddy off, but by the time they reached the back door he had swung the car rapidly round on the forecourt in front of the garage. He did not hear the children's shrill cries above the throaty roar of the engine as the low car zoomed away into the darkness.

The forecast had said there might be snow showers tonight in this north-eastern part of Lancashire, particularly on high ground. In any event, there would be the sharpest frost of the winter so far. The young men and women of Brunton got on with whatever Friday night activities they had planned for themselves. Most of the middle-aged adults in the town took a swift glance at the rising moon and the clear sky, turned up the heating, and resolved to stay comfortable indoors. There was a busy weekend of Christmas shopping and preparation for the great commercial festival creeping up on them. Best to save themselves for that rather than be out in weather like this.

The weathermen were right: in the ancient argot of the region, it was going to be a cold 'un tonight.

One of the middle-aged men who did go out was Adam Cassidy's elder brother. Luke looked exhausted after a week of intensive work at school, followed each day by at least an hour with his father. When he said he fancied an hour at the pub, his wife was surprised. But she encouraged him to go. In past years, Luke had been a star of the quiz nights, and a popular member of the darts and domino teams whenever they were short. But promotions at school had given him more work, at the same time as his father became more dependent on him and Hazel. Luke had neither the time nor the energy to enjoy himself as he once had.

Tonight, he was out for longer than Hazel expected. But that was surely a good thing. He must be enjoying himself, chattering to people he had not met for months, even years perhaps. It was Friday night and there was no school tomorrow, so it took her longer than usual to persuade the children into bed. They'd be teenagers soon, with all the tiresome arguments and contests that would bring, but they were good kids really, both of them. She was surprised to find it was eleven o'clock. The heating had switched off and the temperature was dropping in the lounge. Hazel went upstairs and got ready for bed. She was glad to creep between the cool sheets and curl herself into a foetal ball of warmth, but she knew she would not sleep until Luke was safely in.

At twenty past eleven, she heard him closing the front door softly and going through the hall. He didn't want to disturb her; she called softly through the open door that it was all right, she was still awake. She meant to ask him whether he had enjoyed himself at the pub, but once he was safely back in the house, she relaxed. She was almost asleep when he came into the room. Luke whispered a goodnight to her, told her that it was bloody cold outside, and went to the bathroom. By the time he returned three minutes later, Hazel was sleeping peacefully.

Luke was right about the cold. There was not a breath of air outside and the temperature dropped steadily beneath a cloudless navy sky. By the time old Harry Cassidy's bladder disturbed him at three o'clock, as it invariably did, it was perishing cold, as he muttered to himself. He relieved himself as he did everything else nowadays, fitfully and arthritically. It took a long time for his old bones to warm up, once he was safely back in the valley of the worn-out mattress. He wished his wife was still in the old bed with him. He had always thought that he would go first. For a moment, he had expected her to be there now when he got back into bed; he must be getting more confused, as people said he was. He hadn't known old age would be like this. Perhaps Adam would come this weekend.

It was as well Harry didn't know where Adam was at that moment. The A666 runs between Blackburn and Bolton, and on beyond that to Manchester. It is a busy road by day, though less so since the M66 offered the speed of motorway travel to those making major journeys north and south. The older road is not very busy during the night, and on this freezing one it was almost deserted. Frost like this clamps itself quickly on to metal, as if it were a living fungus, with a preference for the cool smoothness of steel sheeting. In one of the lay-bys beside the highest part of the A666, Adam Cassidy's BMW hard-top sports car was covered with an ever-thickening layer of white frost.

Sixty yards away from it, Adam's eyes stared unseeingly skywards. The face was handsome still, scarcely touched by what had happened beneath it. But the left half of his chest was blown away completely, scattered around his fallen corpse in bloody fragments of bone and sinew.

The devil's number, some call 666. It had been so for Adam Cassidy. At four o'clock in the morning, tiny flakes of snow began to fall. A shower, no more than that; the weathermen were vindicated. But the snow fell steadily over the frozen face of Cassidy and the awful mess of what had been his torso.

TEN

M
any football matches were postponed on that Saturday. But frozen turf was no problem to Brunton Rovers, who played in the English Premier League, and had under-soil heating to allow them a perfect playing surface.

The Rovers were playing Stoke City. This was a match in which both needed points in the perennial fight against relegation. It was a contest without subtleties, with fierce tackling and several bookings. Brunton were a goal down at half-time, but some forthright words from their manager and a couple of substitutions worked magic. The Rovers conducted a prolonged second-half siege of the Stoke goal, equalized after an hour, and scored the decisive goal with ten minutes left, after the stubborn Stoke defenders had twice blocked the ball on the line. The third goal in injury time was, as the local paper put it, merely icing on the Christmas cake.

Wayne Carter was a Stoke City supporter, had been since his birth. He journeyed the eighty miles to the ground in Brunton with three of his companions in a battered Ford Focus with two hundred thousand miles on the clock. They stayed on the motorway until Preston, then turned on to the A59 and took their time over the ten miles to the ground. There was no hurry; they had an hour to spare before kick-off. They passed a spliff of pot round among themselves as they ran into the suburbs of Brunton, then found some other Potteries men in a pub and downed a couple of swift pints before kick-off.

Thus insulated against the cold, they were happy to strip their upper bodies down to their red and white replica Stoke City shirts in the visitors' enclosure. When City took the lead, Wayne was moved to slip his shirt over his shoulders and whirl it around his head in celebration, displaying the delicate skin and less delicate tattoos of a lilywhite physique to an unimpressed Brunton public.

Wayne and his companions had a good day until about twenty past four, when Brunton Rovers scored their first goal. Things went rapidly downhill after that. The four young men were disappointed but philosophical. They were Stoke City supporters, after all. You were prepared for these things because you had a considerable previous experience of them. They managed a ragged clatter of applause when their captain and a few other members of their team turned briefly and waved to them before trooping disconsolately off the pitch.

At least there was no parking ticket on the Focus when they got back to it in the narrow street near the ground. Wayne proposed that they went back through Bolton and joined the M6 south of Manchester. No doubt they'd be stopping for a pee and a few tinnies on the way home and it was best not to rely on the motorway service stations. They didn't sell booze and they could be thronged with rowdy returning football supporters. You didn't want to meet the Liverpool lot returning from Birmingham – they travelled in much greater numbers than the men of Stoke, and numbers meant strength, if it came to the tribal exchanges of football factions.

The young men stopped in Darwen and picked up a dozen cans of Budweiser in a Co-op supermarket. Enough to dull the pain of defeat until they were back in the sympathetic Potteries. It was ten miles later that Wayne Carter told their driver to pull in to the parking bay beside the road because he needed a leak.

His three companions moaned a little about this early delay in their return journey. But the power of suggestion is strong upon receptive minds and full bladders. Within thirty seconds of their stopping, the other three had followed Wayne out into the low bushes beyond the parking bay, cursing the sudden cold and fumbling urgently with the flies of their jeans.

There was still a thin covering of snow at this height, where it had remained around freezing point all day. It was Wayne who had the torch; there had been ribald comments about the necessity of light to discover his equipment in these temperatures. He moved carefully a little way further away from the car than his fellows; these things demanded a degree of privacy, even from your intimates. He switched off the torch and urinated copiously, examining the stars in the night sky and gasping at the simple pleasure of relief which had been delayed a little too long. He switched the torch on again when he had finished. You had to be careful where you placed your feet in places like this, which had been used by others before you for similar and perhaps worse purposes.