Blood on the Wood (34 page)

It would take Fardel half an hour at the very least to forage for his supper, probably much longer. The urge to have a look in the wagon on the faint chance there might be something in there to help was stronger than the childish fear of being found by the beast inside its lair. I switched on the lamp and followed the cone of light in at the front of the wagon, over the driver's seat and into the blackness inside.

*   *   *

My feet landed on soft hay. He'd made himself a nest there backing on to the driver's seat and, from the size of the dip in the middle, slept curled up. There was a warm and musty scent about the place – faintly piggish. The wooden floor of the cart was littered with food oddments: a charred chicken leg, a crust of bread erupting with white and green rosettes of mould, apple cores scored with the tracks of broad teeth. No sign of a weapon unless you counted a rusty shovel blade with a splintered handle or a single hobnailed boot, the kind of thing he might have picked up in a ditch. There was a fragment of tarpaulin too that he might have used as a bedcover, thrown aside in a corner. Cautiously I moved it and saw something glinting underneath it. Something silver. I picked it up, thinking it might be an object he'd stolen. It was a riding crop with a horn handle on one end, a thick silver band round it, not too heavy – the kind of thing a lady might carry.

I played the lamp beam on it, certain I'd seen it before. The lamp beam went zigzagging round the wagon walls, scaring me more until I realised that it was my own hand jolting it. When I last set eyes on the silver-mounted crop, Bobbie Fieldfare had been twirling it. The memory was like a concussion blow that leaves you walking and talking although the conscious mind has given up control. I slithered over the driver's seat, fell to the ground, picked myself up and started running.

*   *   *

The dahlia-fancying constable might as well have existed in a different universe. I didn't think of him or anybody else. My stupidity had brought Bobbie into contact with this man and all I wanted in the world was to get my hands on him and shake out of him what he'd done to her. Nothing ever would or could take away my blame but that was something for the rest of my life. All that existed was the thought that he was out there somewhere, perhaps no more than ten minutes or so ahead of me, half a mile away at the very most.

When I came out of the track by the forge I turned left without thinking. That was the way to the village shop with the hen coop in its garden or, further on, the lane to the old orchard where the poacher set his snares. Animals hunting food go to the places where they've found it before. I ran as far as the shop and looked over the wall into the garden. A dog yapped, sharp and threatening, but there was none of the squawking and clucking there'd have been from the hen coop if somebody had just lifted a chicken out of it. The yapping went on. A voice from inside the cottage called out to ask who was there. I ran on, not wanting to explain, past the school and up the lane by the churchyard. It was steep and rutted. I stumbled and dropped the cycle lamp. It went out and when I found it in the grass and picked it up it made a rattling sound and wouldn't turn on. That bothered me less than it should have done. He was a creature of the darkness so it seemed right to look for him in darkness. After that I made myself slow down. No point in twisting an ankle and having to crawl after him.

After a while the oak trees of the coppice were rustling on my left. He'd had a lair there but it had been days old, probably only used once for cooking the chicken before caution and hunger made him turn to raw meat. The thought of meeting him in the woods scared me more than the open fields. Whether it was that fear or logic that made me ignore the woods and keep moving up the track I don't know. I was gambling on the snares, hoping to find him bending over one of them or standing in the hedge, gnawing on raw rabbit flesh. The woods fell away and there were only hedges right and left. When I looked back down on the village only a few lights glowed and they seemed a long way off. From then on, I counted strides and stopped after every fifty, pressed in against the hedge, to listen to any noises from up the track ahead of me. Nothing but the natural ones – sheep moving around on the other side of the hedge, an owl hooting. A hoarse cough from a few feet away made my heart thump louder, but that was a sheep as well. It took a long time to get to the old orchard where the snares had been. Nothing.

*   *   *

Nothing but miles of dark fields and the knowledge that if I'd got it wrong he could be two miles away by now in another direction altogether. My rage to get him was still as strong, but the uphill walk had left me breathless. That, and fear. Sitting down and waiting was the hardest thing to do, but the right one. If he was going round the snares to find his supper it might be a long business. So I sat on a bank with my feet in a dry ditch and my back to the hazel hedge. Down in the village the church clock struck ten in cracked notes. Wait there till eleven, then, if I'd heard nothing, I'd go back down to the wagon and wait for him to come home. Come home with his mouth wet with rabbit blood. Older blood too, perhaps, on his hands.

The boughs of a twisted apple tree were just visible against the darkness. Not total dark, then. I couldn't see a moon but perhaps it would give oblique light, enough to see him by if he came. The grass in the ditch quivered and went still again. Fieldmouse or frog, too small for a rabbit.

Then the scream.

Chapter Twenty-Two

R
ABBITS IN SNARES SCREAM. MATING FOXES
, injured weasels. But the instant it came, I knew it wasn't one of those. The worst sounds have an instant of silence before them, as if something has punched a hole in the air to let them through. Even before it got into ears or brain I was on my feet in the ditch, wanting to run but not knowing where. It was short, not drawn out or repeated as a trapped animal's would be. Not even loud, perhaps, if you'd heard it by day. Just a second or two of human pain and protest, then the rattle sound of a disturbed pheasant, then silence.

It had come from below me, down between me and the village and probably off to the right, although it had been so short it was hard to tell. The coppice and his lair.

Progress down the track was one long stumble. I fell several times, caught my foot in my skirt and heard a ripping sound from the waistband, gathered up trailing handfuls of material and kilted them round my waist as I went. The trees of the coppice came up as a dark wall on my right. No point in looking for a keeper's stile. I tried a gate vault, head down, over the fence rail, landed on my back in rustling leaves. Dead oak leaves for certain, like the ones that had clung to Daisy's body.

‘Bobbie!'

I shouted it as soon as I'd got some breath back. It came out quavering like the call of a sick owl. No response. When I stood still, the silence on the edge of the wood had a different quality from the open, a swallowing silence. I went slowly through looping brambles and dead branches. Often it was a matter of pushing off from one rough tree trunk and falling in the dark against the next. No point in trying to be cautious now, in fact the more noise the better. He might think there were several people coming at him through the wood. I was trying to work my way uphill to the old quarry but it took an achingly long time. Once when I fell brambles netted themselves round me so tightly that I had to kick and punch my way out, with tearing sounds that might have been clothes, might have been skin, I was past caring. At last the ground levelled out and scraps of dark sky were visible through the more solid dark of tree branches. Then suddenly the face of the old quarry was above me and the smell of old scuffed ash from a bonfire all round.

‘Bobbie?'

More quietly this time. No answer. Cursing the loss of the bicycle lamp I got down on my knees and shuffled around patting the ground, looking for anything that hadn't been there on my last visit. Hopeless. If there were anything I couldn't hear or see it. But at least not what I dreaded. No dark bundle. No smell of blood, only the old fire and rotting leaves.

‘Anybody?'

No answer. I'd been so sure of finding what I was looking for here that I didn't know what to do. Even in my insane mood I realised that searching the rest of the coppice in the dark was beyond me. Besides, there was no guarantee the scream had come from there.

More slowly now, I got myself back to the lane, down past the churchyard to the village. The dahlias in the police constable's garden were grey and black in the starlight, like fires burned out. It took a lot of battering on the door to get a response and then a lamp went on upstairs, a window opened in the thatch and the constable looked out.

I called up, ‘I think somebody's been badly hurt.'

‘Where? What's going on? Who are you?'

Reasonable questions from a man dragged from sleep. I told him who I was, reminded him we'd spoken about the tramp.

‘I found him. My friend's riding crop was there and I'm afraid he's done something terrible. Would you come down, please?'

It took him a long time to get on his uniform and come to the door but perhaps that was just as well because it gave me a chance to calm down and get my story in some sort of order. Even so, when he did open the door at last he seemed so thunderstruck seeing me at close quarters – and I suppose I was a sight with face and arms scratched and rags of clothes hanging off at all angles – that he wouldn't listen. He assumed I was the one who'd been attacked by a tramp and took a lot of convincing otherwise. Eventually, though, I managed to tell him what had happened, from the carter's wagon onwards. He listened, but still didn't look as disturbed as he should have been.

‘This friend of yours, where does she live?'

‘In London, but she's staying with friends in this part of the world.'

‘What friends?'

‘I don't know their name, but they're well-off, not far away and they own horses.'

Hopeless. That could apply to dozens of households. If only I'd taken Bobbie seriously I'd have asked her more questions.

‘So have they reported her missing?'

‘They may not know she's missing. But she was helping me look for the man, it was her crop in his wagon, she's out there somewhere and I heard a scream.' Then, when he started saying something about rabbits and foxes – ‘A human scream. I'm sure of that. He's already killed one woman, now I'm afraid he's killed her too.'

‘One woman?'

‘Daisy Smith. The girl at the Venns' house.'

I should have pitied the man. Thinking about it much later, I did. All he wanted to do was earn a quiet living policing the small crises and criminalities of the village and make war on earwigs. Murders, screams in the dark, half-naked women outside his door at the dead of night weren't part of his scheme of things. Worse, he was a constable on his own, no colleague within miles, no vehicle except possibly a bicycle, no weapon but a truncheon, no telephone and not even – as it turned out – a battery flashlight. I thought about all this much later but at the time I was half mad with frustration, wanting him to summon up men for a search. He did his best, but I didn't appreciate it.

‘Well, miss, the first thing is to get you safe home to Mrs Penny's and—'

‘No. If necessary, I'll steal a horse or a bicycle, ride to Chipping Norton and throw stones at the police station window until somebody does something.'

I meant it, and luckily he saw I did. He sighed, went inside and came out after long minutes carrying his helmet in one hand and a lighted oil lamp in the other.

‘If you say he's been sleeping in Bestley's wagon, chances are he's gone back there.'

After that scream, I doubted it. Still, it was possible. We hurried together down the street, past the forge and the carter's cottage. The inside of the wagon was just as I'd left it, Bobbie's crop included, the nest in the hay undisturbed. At least the evidence that somebody had been sleeping there made the constable more ready to believe me.

‘Tell you what I'll do, miss. I'll wake up a few people and we'll go out and see what we can find.'

So we did, going round the village like a party of carol singers, stopping at the forge first then other places on each side of the street. Probably a routine the village had followed before, looking for lost children or sheep thieves. It took an achingly long time – the knock on the door, the opening of upstairs windows, the constable's long and none too comprehensible explanation about a tramp and a young lady. Then the wait while the man got on his clothes and came sleepy-eyed to the front door, lamp and stick in hand. As the clock struck one there were half a dozen of us standing by the churchyard wall.

‘Right,' the constable said. ‘The lady thinks she heard the scream from somewhere near Church Coppice but it might have been on the other side. Anyhow, it's not as far up as Fowler's piece. Two of us have a look round the churchyard in case, two in the coppice, two on the other side of the lane.

‘He'll be long gone,' someone said. ‘Whatever he's done, he won't wait around.'

I agreed. It was in my mind that somebody should run to the Venns and get the horse and gig out, but that might have to wait until daylight. I followed the main party up the lane. When I looked back, two lamps were moving slowly round the churchyard like ghosts. ‘Give a shout if you find anything,' the constable had said. Nobody shouted. At the first gateway two more men went off to the right. That left three of us for the coppice. Over the keeper's stile this time, by lamplight, the constable and a man I recognised as the shopkeeper's husband carefully turning their heads away from my tattered skirt and exposed knees. All the time we were searching, above the swish of feet in dead leaves, I was listening for a shout from one of the other searchers. After a while the two from the churchyard joined us, so there were four lamps moving through the coppice.