Homeland (44 page)

People were drifting away in twos and threes. An elderly couple turned to speak to him but he kept moving, making another circuit of the hall before looking into the side room once again. The
washing-up squad had dispersed, and he saw on the far side of the sink an outside door he hadn’t noticed before. It was ajar and he pushed it open wider. The light spilled out to illuminate a
strip of grass and a bushy hedge. He peered down the side of the hall towards the road but there was no one there. He was turning back when he caught a muffled sound coming from the darkness behind
the open door. He went to look round the door, but at the last minute stopped short and waited, he couldn’t have said why. After a moment or two he heard a man’s voice speak in a low
insistent tone, the words inaudible. Then came a woman’s voice, anxious, pleading. Annie’s voice.

He shoved his head out and saw them standing four or five yards away. In the darkness only their faces and hands were visible. The man was agitated, his head bowed low over hers, speaking fast
and gesticulating with both hands. Annie was shaking her head slowly and rhythmically. Then she cried in a tone of distress, ‘No, no, please don’t,
please
,’ and reached out
to touch an imploring hand to Lyndon Hanley’s face.

Billy felt something deadly strike at his heart. For an instant he was lost in a hot mist, he could neither see nor hear. He turned away, only to swing straight back and blunder towards them.
Annie spotted him and stared dumbly. Following her gaze, Hanley shot Billy a brief glare before hissing something at Annie in an undertone. His words or the way he spoke them caused her to give a
sharp unhappy gasp and beg, ‘No, wait—’

If Billy hadn’t known what he was going to do when he started towards them, he certainly knew now. But before he could get at Hanley, Annie had stepped between them and grasped his
arm.

‘Billy – no!’ She clung to him doggedly as Hanley walked quickly away into the darkness. ‘Billy – leave him! Leave him!’

He gave up with a shudder of undischarged anger and cried, ‘What the hell was that about?’

‘Nothing.’

Billy drew her towards the light and said thickly, ‘Well, it looked like a hell of a lot to me.’

‘He was just . . . upset, that’s all.’

But it seemed to him that she was the one who was upset, that she was the one feeling – it came to him like another blow – hurt, maybe even – the thought made him sick –
regret.

‘Oh yes?’ he said scornfully. ‘And what was he upset about?’

She shook her head.

‘I’m asking – what was it about?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘Can’t or won’t?’

‘Oh, Billy,’ she sighed heavily.

‘Oh, Billy,
what
?’

‘Don’t be like this.’

‘I’m not being like
anything
. It’s
you
who’s being—’ Unable to find the right word, he snapped, ‘
Stupid
.’

He stepped back from her in an agony of uncertainty, longing for her to tease and cajole him back to her side, desperate for some small sign of reassurance. Instead, she stared at him and said,
‘So little trust, Billy.’

‘Well, what do you expect? You sneak outside with him, you cosy up—’

‘
Cosy up?
’

‘I saw you all right – touching him, pawing his face.’

She shook her head wearily and moved towards the door. ‘Why don’t you go and calm down, Billy? I can’t talk to you like this.’

But his anxiety was running hot and high; he could not leave it alone. He put out a hand as if to hold her back. ‘Was it
him
that was bothering
you
, then? Because if he was,
I’ll make bloody sure he doesn’t do it again.’

‘No, Billy, no.’

‘What, then?
What?
’

‘I’ve told you – it was nothing.’

‘Give me a plain bloody answer!’

‘I already have,’ she declared, and disappeared into the hall.

He walked at a furious pace for many minutes until, coming abreast of her cottage, assailed by vivid memories of their love-making, he halted in a rage of longing. The plunge
from sweet lustful expectation to misery overwhelmed him. He thought of waiting for her, but he was in no mood to endure the jollity of the pub; nor did he relish the ignominy of hanging around on
her doorstep like some lovelorn idiot. In the end the sound of revellers spilling out of the George drove him away. Tucking his head down, he hurried across the road, rounded the bend in the
churchyard wall and headed out of the village. Even then, he didn’t feel safe until he had turned down the lane towards Crick Farm. He was hardly aware of his heels chiming on the stony
surface until, nearing the brow of the last rise, he caught the sound of voices ahead. He trod more cautiously until, making out some high-pitched words in Polack-speak, he speeded up again.
Gaining on them rapidly, he heard the deranged one’s voice rise in a long screech of accusation and injury, followed by Wladyslaw’s steady calming tones. They stopped at his approach
and did not speak again until he was striding past, when Wladyslaw murmured, ‘Hi, Billy.’

At the farm Billy went straight to the larder and, pulling out a jar of cider, took it to the table. He drank the first mugful in three gulps. At some point Wladyslaw came in and muttered
goodnight before climbing the stairs to his room. Billy barely looked up. He was struggling with the image of Annie with Hanley. The scene when her hand reached out to caress his cheek kept
flashing up like a picture on a cinema screen, bold, larger than life. He told himself that in the poor light he might have mistaken the gesture, that she had made it not from affection but pity.
But even as he began to persuade himself of this, he saw again Hanley’s aggressive stance and felt a sickening conviction that something important had happened between them.

When the drink did nothing to calm him, he went out again and walked quickly back to the village.

M
ARJORIE STOOD
by the wardrobe watching Bennett button his cardigan and said anxiously, ‘Please don’t go.’

‘But I must.’

‘You’re not well.’

‘I’ll take an aspirin.’

‘But you should be in bed, you know you should. Please, darling – just tell them you can’t go. It’s only a dead body, after all. It can wait till daylight. It can wait
for another doctor, come to that. Why does it always have to be you?’ Even as she said this, she took another cardigan from the wardrobe and put it on the chair in front of him.

‘It won’t take long,’ he said.

‘These things always take much longer than you think.’

He eyed the second cardigan uncertainly.

‘No – wear both,’ she said. ‘Put it on top of the other one. There’s a terrible wind.’ Then, with a sigh of resignation she went downstairs, and he knew she
would be heating some soup for the Thermos flask.

The man waiting in the hall was someone Bennett knew only by sight. ‘Good morning, Mr – ?’

‘Elkin.’ He was about forty, and dressed in waterproofs and waders.

‘Have the police been notified?’

‘We went and told the constable at North Curry. It was him that said to come and fetch you.’

‘The body was found in the Parrett, was it?’

‘No, the Tone.’

‘Well, if you wouldn’t mind guiding me there, I’ll be with you shortly.’

‘No hurry, Doctor.’

Bennett went to the surgery and checked his bag for his report pad and pencil. He put in a spare pair of spectacles and a small torch to supplement the large torch he would pick up from the hall
table. Then, more to assuage Marjorie than from any real hope of benefit, he swallowed two aspirin washed down with a gulp of the iron tonic he kept for his convalescent patients. When his
bronchitis had flared up three days before, he had begun a course of the new antibiotic M&B, but either the antibiotics were having no effect or he had a viral infection because his head was
pounding, his mouth dry, and he didn’t need a thermometer to tell him he was running a fever.

Back in the hall, he asked, ‘Will I need gumboots or waders, Mr Elkin?’

‘Gumboots should do you, Doctor.’

He took some waterproof trousers as well; there was usually quite a bit of kneeling involved.

It was quarter to five by the time they set off. Bennett drove, with Elkin in the passenger seat, while Elkin’s fishing companion followed in a van. A near-full moon glowed under a thin
veil of racing cloud. It was meant to be the start of spring, but the wind was from the north-east and sharp as a lash.

‘Where are we going?’ Bennett asked.

‘Hook Bridge. And then it’s a short walk along the Curry bank, just on the bend there.’

‘How did you find the body?’

‘Well, we were just sitting there on the bank waiting for the elvers. You know – waiting for the top of the tide. But Walter, he decides to try his luck early. He stands there with
his net, oh, a good half-hour before the tide turns. We keep telling him he’s wasting his time, but he’s a born hoper, is Walter. He don’t take no notice of what anyone says. He
stands there, net out, and all the elvers way out in midstream with not a thought of heading for the banks. So when he shouts that he’s got something, well, we think he’s having us on.
But then he yells to bring the lamps close, and we know something’s up. Whatever he’s got, it’s something heavy. Too heavy to lift without breaking the net, so we take the lamps
closer and we look down into the water and we see what looks like a bunch of rags. Walter says, it’s a person, but I says no, never. And then Brian, he says there’s only one way to find
out, and he wades in with his hook and drags the object into the bank. Well, then we see a hand, o’ course, we see a head, and we realise what we’ve got. We pull him up onto the bank a
ways, we take a look at him, but he was long gone. I’m no expert, Doctor, but I’d’ve said he’d been dead a while. As cold as cold could be.’

‘Did you recognise him?’

‘We all had a look, best we could, but none of us reckoned we’d seen him before. But then we’re from the other side of Curry Moor, Doctor. We’re from West
Lyng.’

Drownings were a feature of the Levels. Bennett was called to at least one a year, sometimes as many as three, while in the county newspaper one read of perhaps four or five more. Some were the
result of drunkenness, a stumble crossing a bridge on the way home from the pub, a wrong turn on the path; some were accidents, men poling their way home across flooded moors on the flimsiest of
craft at night; some were suicides, though where no note was found the coroner was inclined to record the deaths as accidental. For some reason the drunks and suicides always seemed to end up in
the Parrett. In fact Bennett couldn’t remember the last time a body had been found in the Tone. Perhaps this was because the Parrett had a couple of sluices to catch the bodies coming down
from Langport, perhaps because the Tone, in disgorging its waters into the Parrett at Burrowbridge, covertly disgorged its human cargo at the same time.

Elkin directed the doctor off the Athelney road into a lane which quickly gave way to a rutted drove-road. Bennett navigated with increasing caution as the glint of water appeared close on one
side and then the other. They trundled over the boards of Hook Bridge, and Elkin said, ‘Best stop here, Doctor.’ Bennett needed little encouragement. Just a short distance ahead, the
drove-road dipped down and vanished beneath the flood waters of Curry Moor.

Climbing out of the car, Bennett met the full force of the wind. It tore at the tails of his coat and forced him to drag his cap tighter onto his head. On the moor the moonlit flood waters were
corrugated with ripples of black and silver, and a crooked tree gave the look of a boat darkly sailing. Some way down the river a cluster of lights winked and dipped at the water’s edge, and
he guessed it was there they were heading.

They walked along the path in single file, Elkin lighting the way with the big torch, his fishing companion bringing up the rear. Small waves hissed and slapped at the river bank, and in the
aureole of the torch beam Bennett saw that the water was angry and wind-torn.

At one point the flickering lights ahead seemed to dim, almost to retreat, but it was only a trick of the wind, and soon Bennett could make out two, then three figures waiting by the hurricane
lamps.

‘Doctor?’ The local bobby loomed up in uniform and helmet.

‘PC Longman, is it?’

‘That’s right, sir.’

‘Are you ready for me to verify the death, Constable?’ The question was a formality; it was his only function in such cases.

‘If you would, sir.’

The body was lying under a groundsheet just above the water’s edge on a steep bank that glistened blackly with mud. Bennett went down cautiously, testing each step before trusting his
weight to it. PC Longman followed and, drawing back one end of the ground-sheet, shone his torch onto the body, which was lying on its front, the face turned away towards the river, one arm
stretched out as if to touch the water.

Bennett took off a glove and put two fingers to the side of the neck. It was ice cold, with no discernible pulse.

‘I’ll need him rolled over.’